No Worries

There is a saying to the effect that there are no stupid questions. As much as I understand the sentiment, there are times when I'm inclined to disagree. Mainly, it turns out, when journalists are interviewing someone and they ask, about one or another topic "how worried should we be?"

I understand the impetus behind the question. But I think that it indicates that fear is, in and of itself, an appropriate or useful response to things.

Katherine Wu, over at The Atlantic, summed up my feelings on the matter when she was asked "How much should we be panicking [about the Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variant] right now?" Her answer: "Not at all. It’s never time to panic. It’s counterproductive. Reacting wisely and reacting sensibly and using the tools we have is always the best move." And I'd like to see more journalists take this tack in general. Rather than asking experts how frightened the public should be, they should be asking what actions the public can take, or what actions the public should be pushing their governments to take. And if journalists don't change course, maybe their interview subjects should.

I'm going to admit that I'm not terribly familiar with the genre of news that's been billed "Solutions Journalism," but I suspect that to the degree that it actually focuses on the solutions to societal problems rather than simply flogging what continues to go wrong, that it can't be any worse than the old "if it bleeds it leads" model. Since reactions that are wise and sensible are often in the eye of the beholder, the expectation that Solutions Journalism will focus on things that have been demonstrated to work is welcome. People can, and do, argue with results, but results give more to argue with, and for, than opinions about what should be done.

What will really drive a turn towards Solutions Journalism, or at least away from fear-mongering, is public demand. And, more than likely, the demand just isn't there yet. But if the news influences the public as much as people often say it does, maybe they would do well to lay the groundwork for a better product.

A Narrower Focus

NPR recently ran a story titled: "HBO's 'Black and Missing' offers an antidote to Missing White Woman Syndrome." The HBO series follows the work of The Black and Missing Foundation, Inc., as they attempt to bring more media coverage to the many non-White people who go missing in the United States in any given year.

At the end of the piece, one of the documentary's creators, journalist Soledad O'Brien offers eight ways of changing the media dynamic that leads to "Missing White Woman Syndrome." And they're fine for what they are. But it occurs to me that maybe something else (or something different is needed).

Letting local stories be local stories.

The NPR story lists four cases as representative of the problem: Gabby Petito, Natalee Holloway, Elizabeth Smart and JonBenét Ramsey. These were all national stories. Perhaps it's worth asking "why?" There's an implicit assumption in discussions of Missing White Woman Syndrome, which is the assumption that more news coverage is likely to lead to some sort of better outcome, whether that means someone being found before something serious is done to them or a perpetrator being arrested and tried for the crime.

But I suspect that a lot of what feeds into Missing White Woman Syndrome is the understanding that these are stories that can gather attention (and thus, advertising dollars), but don't really use much in the way of local resources. If the Associated Press or ABC are offering up stories that people in the local news market will want to see, why bother reporting on less-interesting local items. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to look at a number of these stories as the exploitation of people's lives for the sake of easier ratings. I, for example, live just outside of Seattle, Washington. There was no reason at all why I needed to know anything about the Gabby Petito case. No law-enforcement agencies in the area needed to be spurred into action by the fact that she hadn't been found. Her story made international headlines because it was salacious, not because it was useful to an international audience. Violence against women and girls may very well be something that concerns everyone, but many of the individual stories that are trotted out as newsworthy would be just as well served if they only spread beyond their local areas in the aggregate.

When more than six hundred thousand people every year are reported missing, expansive nationwide coverage of even a small fraction of them would take up quite a bit of time. If it doesn't add anything of value, why bother? There's a section of the story headed "Forcing the world to see those long ignored," but there really isn't any way to force that. And if "the world" isn't the right audience, what does forcing them to see random people actually do?

...In One Chart

I don't know that it's as much of a problem as people make it out to be that partisans look to their counterparts on the other side of the political spectrum when they are searching for monsters. What is a problem, I suspect, is their unwillingness to rest until they find one.

While I knew a lot of obnoxious people when I was younger, it dawned on me fairly early that they weren't motivated by malice. It took a few years longer, but I learned to extend that understanding of people to broader and broader groups, until my default position was that no-one, or almost no-one, ever acted simply out of some love of evil. And I'll admit that I take a certain amount of flack for that. For some people, there will always be monsters in the world that wear human faces.

As negative partisanship becomes more and more prevalent in the United States, it appears to feed on itself, as partisans not only whip up fear of the other, but take the fact that speakers on the other side are whipping up fear as proof of malevolent intent, and thus, a reason to be afraid.

A politically-engaged acquaintance of mine noted that as Democrats and Republicans grew more convinced of the need to defend themselves from some existential threat posed by the other, the nation was at risk of plunging into open conflict.

"That won't happen because people will be too quick to defend themselves," I replied. "It will happen because someone will decide that the best way to defend themselves is to shoot first." And to the degree that partisans do actually see one another as brainwashed, hateful, racist monsters, they're also likely to see one another as too much of a threat to be allowed to act first.

Keeping Dry

The Seattle area has a pretty significant number of homeless people, and at no point is this more evident than during the rainy season - especially when it actually rains, rather than simply drizzles. Mainly because I don't live in Seattle itself, lot of the homeless people I come across are transient; I'll see them in one spot one day, and maybe see them in another place a week later, or maybe I never see them again. But they don't manage to take up residence somewhere stable, where one might expect to find them week after week. At least, not nearby to where I live. The photograph doesn't really show it, but this was a fairly wet morning; it was terrible weather to be living out of doors without a tent.

I suspect that the man's choice of location was quite deliberate and well thought-out. He wasn't far from a pedestrian underpass that would have done a pretty adequate job of keeping him warm, but it would have also placed him away from the retail area where the people were. The next time I drove by the area, he was, as I expected, gone. I doubt that I'll ever cross paths with him again. But there will be someone else. There always is.

Equal Injustice

Now that Kyle Rittenhouse has been acquitted, the recriminations have begun. Those, and the protests that will follow the verdict, are unlikely to change anything. Part of the problem is that the legal system in the United States isn't really structured in a way that allows it to treat some people unjustly simply because others have been (or will be) treated unjustly.

When someone is on trial for homicide, and their defense is self-defense, the examination of events tends to concern itself with the act and its immediate antecedent. Jack does something threatening, and Jill shoots him, so the focus of the trial is on Jack's action. Jill is more or less automatically assumed to have done nothing that would have warranted Jack seeking to kill, injure or disarm her. The racial history of the United States, however, has demonstrated that this presumption of innocuousness, is not granted equally to all people. And so when people point out that a Jill were Black, she wouldn't be treated as if she'd simply been minding her own business when Jack mounted an unprovoked attack, they're drawing on that history.

But the legal system does not. And it is unlikely to anytime soon. As much as I understand the problems that people have with verdicts like this, and the legal system that produces them, the problem isn't that Kyle Rittenhouse got away with something. It's that the legal system doesn't do enough to ensure that other people in his situation, but who don't happen to be White, are given the same set of supports that he was.

Laws, and I suspect that this is the case everywhere, are not simply about keeping the peace and protecting rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They're also about assuring people that the Good among them will prosper and the Evil among them will be punished. And people's general understandings of Good and Evil are suspect at best and wildly self-serving as a general rule. And this makes the law into a weapon, to be used against those who are different in a way that make the whatever segment of the society that becomes the mainstream uncomfortable.

Kyle Rittenhouse owes a great deal to the fact that he's not considered to be an ongoing threat to mainstream society. Society, therefore did not feel the need to assuage their fears by throwing the book at him. It's a less formal sort of innocence until proven guilty. The problem that activists point out is, in effect, that many Black people have already been "proven guilty," often simply by association, in the eyes of society at large. But putting Kyle Rittenhouse behind bars would not have changed that.

There is quite a bit to be said for legal proceedings taking a more expansive view of the events leading up to a homicide that is then claimed to be in self-defense. The current habit allows for too much thoughtless, if not downright aggressive, behavior. But that's a different concern than whether the United States, as a nation, can do enough about the deep-seated fears and prejudices that so many people harbor, and can't simply be made into felonies.

Predictable

I am not an entrepreneur. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that I have a generally low tolerance for acknowledged risks. The second is that I have a poor track record for being able to predict what the future might hold. And, given that these are the two traits that appear to best predict success as an entrepreneur, I've concluded that it is a path that I should stay away from.

But like any blind squirrel, I do, on occasion, find a nut. Last May, I was opining about the restrictions put in place to combat the growing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. And I noted that there was a high inflation risk associated with adding money to the economy when the overall basket of goods and services wasn't able to grow at a rate to match it. Now, a year and a half later, there's a certain amount of public heartburn over higher than normal rates of inflation. Now, I'm not going to take credit for being a seer or anything. Predicting that jacking up the money supply when output of goods and services is depressed may lead to inflation isn't exactly a difficult call to make. And I wasn't betting on the ongoing supply-chain problems that contribute to the current situation.

So instead, where I'm going with this is that I suspect that for many people, their conceptualization of money is what stands in the way of their understanding of how economics actually works. If I may be allowed to repeat myself, I'm unsure of the degree to which people understand that while modern economies work on the exchange of money for goods and services, money is not itself a viable substitute for those goods and services. And I think that the inflation worries that are driving economic unease (and perhaps worsening approval numbers for the Biden Administration) are an outgrowth of this lack of understanding.

Part of this may be the simplistic way in which people talk about inflation. National Public Radio's Greg Rosalsky, for instance, puts it this way: "We all know what inflation is. It's when prices go up. You know, companies charge you more for stuff." And while that's an easy explanation, I don't think that it really gets at the underlying mechanics of how inflation actually works, and it leads people to think that the choices that drive it are in the hands of a different group of people than they may actually be.

Given that the Trump Administration was still in office back in May of 2020, I don't know that a better understanding of what the government was seeking to do, and the potential aftereffects of those choices, would have been a reasonable expectation. Governments in general tend to be leery of openly noting the trade-offs that they make when setting policy, and the Trump Administration seemed to be downright allergic to it. And I suppose that they may have been right to have been. The general consensus is that the Biden Administration is taking the brunt of the blame for the current levels of inflation, despite the fact that very little of the causes are the Administration's doing.

I don't know that a better understanding of the causes of and contributors to inflation would have made the public more prepared for this. That seems to run counter to human nature. But even with my very shallow understanding of the economics of inflation, this wasn't a surprise to me. Perhaps people being better educated on what money is and how it functions in an economy could have made things better. But, more likely, it's just another item on the list of things that people are often too busy to think about.

Advantaged

 

Meant To Do That

Speaking from Sweden, [Greta Thunberg] said some "small steps forward" may have been made but the Glasgow Climate Pact was very vague and open to differing interpretations.
Greta Thunberg: ‘COP26 even watered down the blah, blah, blah’

Young Ms. Thunberg is 18 now, and that means that she likely has a few more years in her before she's going to to be expected to understand how the world really works. I don't really remember the death of my own childhood idealism. I've been a practicing cynic for a very long time now (long enough to have become quite good at it), and it's enough to cloud my memory of what I may have been like prior to that.

But I'm pretty sure I was young once, and so there would have been a time when it wouldn't have occurred to me that international agreements for things that no-one actually wants to do were quite intentionally vague and open to differing interpretations.

There was a radio story, noting the fact that activists had complained about nations and businesses with interests in the fossil fuel economy being at the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. In the story, an executive of Russia's Gazprom noted that meeting climate goals was not going to be painless, with all of the costs borne by big businesses. It would mean less comfortable indoor temperatures, fewer vacations and alterations to people's diets. Of course, everyone knows this. It's just that the Gazprom executive was willing to say it out load. Everyone else simply signed on to a vague document, secure in the understanding that when they inevitably blew off their supposed commitments in the face of a recalcitrant public, they could fall back on an interpretation that would let them off the hook.

Because at the bottom of it all, Bill Maher is likely right.

I wish your generation was better than mine. I really do. The sad truth is, we’re completely the same. Lots of talk, and at the end of the day, hopelessly seduced and addicted to pigging out on convenience, luxury and consumption.

And I'll own some of this. I remember when my generation was freaking out about the National Debt and convinced that if the adults didn't start doing things differently, it was curtains for all of us. Then us Generation Xers became adults, and, on the whole, we didn't do anything differently. There was no push to either scale back government expenditures or set taxes at a rate that would pay for them. And when the tech bubble fell into our collective laps and showed us a path to actually having the economy generate enough revenue for the government to retire its debts, no-one acted to preserve that. Rather, the big companies that grew out of the internet revolution are now making sure that some upstarts don't do to them what they did to IBM, Sears and Eastman Kodak. And in the process, they're stifling the engine of innovation that brought about the late 1990s boom. And now, the Gen Xers in politics, on both sides of the aisle, have pretty much given up on the idea that borrowing can't last forever. They'll just force the other party's voters to bear the brunt of paying it back. Someday.

So the watering down isn't anything new. Because for all that people say that human beings are ruining the planet, human beings haven't managed to extract enough from it to feel comfortable with what they have. And so the convenience, luxury and consumption train rolls on. Not because "leaders" want it that way. But because "leaders" are beholden to their constituencies, and those constituencies don't want decarbonization enough to proactively take steps to bring it about. And I'll be honest, it's not a big deal to me, either. After all, I'm unlikely to see 2050 for myself. So I'm not out there, making sure that I vote for the greenest candidate, and pushing my friends to do so.

One day, today's young climate activists will have to make the choice; to become adult climate activists or decide that they would rather do other things. When I became an adult, I decided that I had more pressing concerns than the national debt, the greenhouse effect or the rights of humankind. And to be honest, I still do. The problem is that I'm not alone in that.

Arc

One of the nice things about the Puget Sound area is that rainbows are a fairly common occurrence here. They're rarely as bright, or as sharp, as one often sees them on television or in magazines, but the fact that the Sun seems to pop up at random even on rainy days means that there's always a chance that one will suddenly appear, right where you've come to expect them. It doesn't take long to develop a sense for them; an understanding of whether the Sun is in the right position and if the air has the correct amount of moisture. And for all that my Rainbow Sense has become fairly reliable in the years that I've lived here, I still enjoy the little tingle that it gives me to tell me that its time to go outside for a moment, and see something wonderful.
 

Unawarding

I suppose that it’s become somewhat clear that I have a fondness for both teapot tempests, and for coming up with other ways of describing same that carry the same connotation of people being worked up over (what I consider to be) trivialities. But part of what makes such coffeecup conflagrations interesting is what they say about the people involved in them, and sometimes by extension, the broader society around me.

Back in August, Nation Public Radio reported the story of a controversy surrounding the Vivian Awards, given out by the Romance Writers of America. To be sure, I have absolutely no interest in romance novels. I’ve understood myself to be Notoriously Unromantic since I was a pre-teen, and find absolutely nothing about the overall genre the least bit interesting. So this caught my attention because it struck me as classic case of people finding a reason to be outraged over something trivial. But, there is something deeper beneath that, and that’s what held my interest (albeit not long enough for me to work out an entire weblog post at the time.

The Vivian Awards are, like a number of such things, broken down into several categories, like “Best First Book” or “Historical Romance.” And what triggered the controversy earlier in the year was the award for “Romance with Religious or Spiritual Elements.” The basic plot of Karen Witemeyer’s At Love’s Command is simple. An officer of the 7th Cavalry Regiment (the same 7th Cavalry Regiment once commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer) is involved in the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek is what it now the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. After asking for God’s forgiveness and seeking redemption, he gets the girl, as they say, and the two of them have their happily ever after.

Ms. Witemeyer wins a Vivian for her book, cue the outrage.

But outrage, in and of itself, tends to be uninteresting. What stood out for me as NPR relating that author Jenny Hartwell had posted her letter to the Romance Writers of America to Twitter, including the following:

Romances have flawed heroes and heroines who find redemption through the transformative power of love. However, aren’t there some people who shouldn’t be redeemed?

Ms. Hartwell then goes on to list the Usual Suspects for being irredeemable, “Nazis. Slave owners. Soldiers who commit genocide.”

But my answer to her question is an unequivocal “no.” There are, as far as I’m concerned, no people who should not be redeemed. And in this, I’m going to invoke the director of the Equal Justice Initiative, Professor Bryan Stevenson: “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” And, I would add to that, “no matter how many times we’ve done them.”

I understand the impulse to divide the world into Good and Evil. But, to (screw it) appropriate the language of social justice, calling someone evil is simply a means of “othering” them. And it’s something that people do, in my understanding, as a way of describing themselves. In other words, people call out others as evil, especially irredeemably evil, as a means of marking those people as different from themselves, and not simply as less (or un-) deserving of empathy, understanding or, for that matter, love/being loved. The phenomenon of Whataboutism can be seen as a direct result of this sort of thinking. “If we Soviets are bad actors for the way in which we treat dissidents,” the logic went “are not you in the United States just as evil for the way that Negros are treated?” And to the degree that Cold War criticisms of the Soviets’ human rights record was intended as a means of casting said Soviets as bad people, they had a point. The United States couldn’t claim to be a nation uniquely interested in the rights of all people with Jim Crow being so obviously practiced throughout the South, and all sorts of racially unjust policies (such as redlining) liberally scattered around the rest of the nation. As a defense against the specific charges leveled, Whataboutism is patently pointless. But as a defense against the charge of unique moral deficiency, it’s spot on.

The point behind casting people as irredeemable for the choices of their past is to preclude them from being considered worthy for the choices they may make in their present or their future in a way that most people want for themselves. And that’s different from understanding culpability. While I personally don’t understand the zeal for tracking down and bringing to trial nonagenarians who worked in the prison camps and death houses of Nazi Germany, I understand the idea that as a legal matter, there is no recognized Statute of Limitations on their involvement. But attempting to justify their punishments by claiming them to be perpetually stained by actions that took place so long ago that people have been able to live full lives from end to end in the interim strikes me as attempting to make vengefulness seem like a form of righteousness. (Not that I have a problem with vengefulness, in and of itself. But when people won’t own up to it, then I become dubious.)

But maybe that’s just me. I’m an old man, and maybe I’ve simply aged out of the idea that perpetual grudges are a form of power, rather than simply a millstone around one’s neck.

Cookie Jar

One of the aspects of democracy that I often see people at odds with is the idea that representative government is not designed to produce policies in the best interests of the general public; it's designed to produce those policies that a majority of voters believe to be in their interests or at least will otherwise support.

When the populace tends to be disengaged (mainly because they are busy with things of more immediate importance to themselves), they tend to follow the lead of people that they understand (correctly or not) to have their interests at heart. This means that in order for politicians to retain their offices, they have to appeal to that smaller segment of the overall public. It's true that a politician can decide to ignore this more engaged group of voters and activists, and pursue different policies, but unless something turns out to be wildly popular, the next officeholder can always simply undo it. For all that the political class is perceived to hold the reins of power, persistent changes are more difficult to effect than is often given credit for.

I mention this because I was reading yet another litany of complaints about Texas Governor Greg Abbott. While Texas is often held up as an example (although sometimes, only one of many) of Republican partisanship run amok, I'm not sure that Governor Abbott is as much in control of things there as he is often painted. Whether it's Governor Abbott issuing an executive order that bans any entity within the state, government or private from requiring employees to be vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, or the legislature's "anyone can sue anyone else who helps women obtain abortion care after 6 weeks" law, the fact of the matter remains that these measures appeal to a certain constituency that the Governor and Republican state legislators feel they need to have support them if they are going to stay in office. And so even if they personally thought that these things were bad ideas, they push them. Because otherwise, they won't have the ability to enact any good ideas.

And I understand that I'm coming down on the side of "well, if the public decides that they want cookies for dinner, then they can have cookies for dinner." And that's because while democracy is a form of government, enlightenment is not. And while enlightenment may mean that people consistently make the "correct" choices on matters of justice or injustice and right or wrong, democracy operates, as one author put it, on sentiment. And so policymakers have to work within what they understand the current public sentiment to be. Columnists, pundits and journalists can claim that as members of "the élite," that politicians have a certain amount of power to dictate to people what their sentiments should be, but I suspect that if this power were as strong as it's made out to be, much of the world would look very different than it does.

Disinterest

I've never been a fan of the trope of "People voting against their economic interests." There are just so many things wrong with it, that it strikes me as patently thoughtless. For starters, economic interests are not everyone's end-all and be-all. Declaring groups of citizens non-people and allowing others to simply take their homes and possessions is certainly in the best interests of people outside the groups voted out; this is basically what happened to the Japanese in the United States during World War Two, and it's now considered a blot on America's record, rather than a rationally self-interested action on the part of those persons not of Japanese ancestry. And American history is full of such examples where, looking back, modern Americans see placing economic interests above legal and/or ethical ones as failings.

But, perhaps more salient to the current American electorate is the fact that turning to other people for one's economic interests requires trust. And this bring up another circumstance in which people are, on the surface, constantly acting against their economic interests, and no-one bats an eyelash. There is a common confidence trick called "money flipping." The basic gist of it is this, some person offers another person, generally a stranger on social media, the chance to invest some amount of money for a short period of time, and, at the end of that time, they'll be returned some multiple of the amount invested. Anyone who understands anything about how investing actually works doesn't even entertain the thought that these sorts of schemes might be legitimate, even though, technically, they aren't outside the realm of possibility. But one is considered gullible, if not simply stupid, for going along with something like this, because invariably, the person who the money was invested with simply vanishes without a trace.

And that brings me to politics. Here in the United States, the Culture Wars are never very far away, and I think that I'm starting to understand a reason for this. The Culture Wars have the effect of divorcing politics and policy. Two politicians can espouse roughly the same policy, and decent-sized groups of the public will embrace or dismiss them based on perceived positions in the Culture Wars, rather than on the substance of policy. Mainly by making other people out to be liars and confidence artists. While its common for people to decry a lack of support for some policy or another as "people voting against their economic interests," that assessment presupposes that a certain level of trust exists. People trust that a jobs plan proposed by a member of the opposing party will raise their own standards of living about as much as they trust a money flipper to actually come through with a supposed investment. And since, in a time of partisan-induced government gridlock, policies are unlikely to produce widespread and unambiguous benefits that don't have costs for anyone, it's hard to point to the evidence of success as a means of swaying people.

And since the Culture Wars (at least as they exist in the United States) are there to be fought, rather than to actually be won, there's never any real expectation of victory, or, it seems, even measurable progress. The fight is the end in itself.

It's rather clever, really. It nearly removes any and all expectation from politics, by changing the interest calculation from one of tangible benefit to one of an endless conflict with people whose only defining characteristic is that they are not be trusted.

Show and Tell

I was reading through the NPR homepage this morning when I came across this story: "A girl was rescued by police after she used a distress signal popularized on TikTok." It's pretty much what it says on the tin: A teenaged girl was rescued by police after she was able to signal another motorist with a hand signal shown in videos posted by the Canadian Women's Foundation. It's not, as the headline hints, just a TikTok thing; it's just that TikTok is the current name synonymous with "social media" these days, and as such is a handy journalistic shortcut.

In any event, after a quick run-through of NPR's headlines, I figured I would see what had caught the BBC's attention, and, lo and behold: "Missing girl found after using viral TikTok sign." Of course, by this point, I knew how the story went, but I read it anyway; it's interesting to see how differing new outlets cover the same story.

But what caught my attention in the coverage was the imagery. Both stories lead off with a stock image of a smartphone with the TikTok logo on it. There must be a rule or something. It's an image for the sake of having an image, and it adds nothing to the story. And for the NPR story, that was that, what folowed was the text of the story, and that was it. The BBC, however, went further. They devoted some page space to the Laurel County (Kentucky) Sheriff's Department's Facebook post on the arrest, but they also showed a diagram of the hand signal the girl used.

Both stories describe it, and it's fairly simple. One holds up their hand, palm facing the camera, tucks in the thumb and then traps the thumb by curling their fingers over it. But the diagram makes clearer what one would be looking for without needing to demonstrate it oneself.

It's the age-old idea of a picture being worth a thousand words. Like I noted, it's pretty easy to describe; after all, it's only two steps. But I suspect that even after having read it, had I seen someone make the sign on a video call (which is what it was first design for) or from a car window, it wouldn't have been clear to me what I was looking at. The illustration makes it very clear.

The BBC then goes on to show a video from the Canadian Women's Foundation of how the sign might be used in action. Again, very helpful. And I started wondering why NPR hadn't presented a graphic of the same sort. It's not like NPR is allergic to illustrating its stories. They went to the trouble of having someone draw a picture of someone freaking out at a karaoke bar that the singer might infect them with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, so it's not like they didn't have the resources.

What the NPR story did instead was links. There were five links in the story: to the Laurel County Sheriff's department, to the Signal for Help campaign, to a story about the spread of the campaign on TikTok, to the Canadian Women's Foundation and finally to another NPR story about the surge in domestic violence that lead to the Signal for Help campaign in the first place. A number of NPR stories are like this, with the potential to lead one off into a rabbit hole of other stories. The BBC story felt, in that sense, much more self contained, bringing into itself the context that a reader would want to see. I suppose that it could easily be a matter of policy or of audience tastes, but in this case it came across as better journalism. But I'll have to be on the lookout for more stories like this on both sites, to see if a pattern emerges.

Right Speech

I was listening to the podcast "Right Mind - What does the Republican Party stand for?" from The Economist. Part of the podcast was an interview with one Patrick Deneen, a conservative political philosopher. When talking about how he thought that conservatism might create new coalitions, he mentioned that he thought that conservatism would be less about dictating to people how they should live (an odd understanding of what a movement lead by social conservatives would prioritize, in my view) and more about providing incentives and government support for the traditional ways of living that social conservatives favor. During this section, the following stood out for me:

What can we do to make up for the loss of the one-person income; enough income for one parent to be able to stay at home if they wish. Uh, he or she wishes, sorry.

Emphasis in original - seriously. I found myself asking, what's wrong with using "they" as the singular gender-indeterminate; a formulation that a lot of us had been using long before it became a pronoun for people who found themselves uncomfortable with the standard binary? It epitomizes part of the problem with the Culture Wars in the United States; the idea that one or the other side will cede some silly point, and then cast that as a victory for the other side that represents an existential threat.

There is no valid reason to believe that the term "they" must only refer to those persons who chose it as an alternative to he or she. "I see a person over there, but do not know what they are doing," has not suddenly become grammatically incorrect over the past few years. If a person with a strong gender identity wants to stay home with their children, let them. English has not demanded that one list out all the possibilities in the past, and it doesn't demand it now.

Conservatives love to deride Liberalism as demanding fealty to trivialities in speech and expression. Pot, kettle, black, fellas.

Prepare For Liftoff

A kite surfer, starting their run out on Puget Sound.

 

One Of Us Is Crazy...

Am I the only person who has the feeling that some of these conspiracy theories are actually carefully choreographed trolling operations? John F. Kennedy Jr. revealing that he faked his death and becoming Donald Trump's running mate in 2024? Seriously? This definitely falls into the category of "you can't make this stuff up."

But I suppose that it's a sign of how desperate people have become that things like this make sense to them. After all, people who have a sense that they've mastered their world don't tend to fall for tales that a secretive cabal of Satanist politicians have wrecked the place and need to be stopped at all costs. As much as I tend to find people's supernatural fears to be bizarre, I understand the sense of order and predictability that they bring, and the feeling of control, or at least understanding, that comes from that. It's like the idea that if one simply checks around their car for plastic bottles stuck in the wheel wells, one will be safe from carjacking. Still, I'm glad that I don't life in a world so chaotic that Robin Williams and Michael Jackson need to be the ones to set things right.

Naptime

I am not a fan of "Woke." Mainly because I have no facility with African-American Vernacular English (also known as "Ebonics") and grew tired of being hassled about that when I was in college. So I will admit to a contrarian streak that will happily claim to be sleeping for no other reason than it annoys people who annoy me.

But I've found the rather heated hostility to "Woke" culture on the part of many American conservatives to be more than a little mystifying. Mainly because I have no Earthly idea of what they actually understand "Woke" to mean, and what they have attributed to it that makes it such a threat. It's like watching a person desperately climb a tree to avoid someone teacup dog. It's pretty clear that they're deathly afraid of the animal, but one wonders what they could possibly see in it that would justify such a reaction.

As near as I can tell, to be "Woke," is to be little more than constantly aware of prejudice, discrimination and whichever of the myriad forms of social inequality that humans are capable of visiting upon one another. Personally, it's never really appealed to me because there is a sense of looking under each and every stone to find yet more injustice. And if a given stone doesn't have any injustice underneath it, then one hasn't looked hard enough. It plays into a sense that, more than the world simply being an unjust place (and I, for my part, expect nothing different from it), everyone who isn't one's ally is an active agent of injustice. And that sort of "if you're not with me, you're against me" logic has never really been attractive to me: I'm perfectly fine with a world in which being neutral in a conflict of mine is not aiding and abetting the forces of injustice.

But maybe that's why there is such a strong "counter-Woke" culture. After all, "if you're not with me, you're against me" logic is pretty common on the American Right, too, and many people see pernicious evil in nothing more sinister than not seeing them in the way they wish to be seen (or, for that matter, see themselves). Most people, it is said, are the heroes of their own stories. Wokeness, with its propensity for finding villains, can be understood to be a challenge to that ideal. But I think that there's another piece to the puzzle, namely the way Americans tend to deal with history. Generally speaking, Americans have short memories, historically speaking. The difference between 50 years ago and literal ancient history is often perceived as purely academic. But in its focus on how current patterns of injustice have their roots in history, Wokeness can often look like holding a very long grudge. And in a culture that sees intentional wrongdoing in not allowing bygones to be bygones, one can see how mutual hostility would come out of that. As an aside, I also think that American Christianity plays a role in this, in presenting forgiveness as something that one does for the benefit of the people who have wrong one, rather than for the self. And to the degree that Americans expect to be forgiven for past transgressions, and those transgressions forgotten, constant vigilance feels like a violation of a social contract.

In any event, it all strikes me as yet another symptom of a society that has lost (or discarded) the ability to empathize and trust. It's a function of neediness, I think, and Americans of all stripes are very good at seeing themselves as needy.