Standing Still

Okay... I know that I'm supposed to be on hiatus, taking a break from the complaining about the world that has tended to make up so much of Nobody In Particular for the past 15 years. But the following question came up as relates to the conviction of former Officer Kim Potter in the death of Duante Wright, and, for better or for worse, here is where I work out my answers to these sorts of questions.

Potter -- I mean, she has to go to prison, but... her story seems credible & if we believe it, should she still be going to prison? Is this progress (in the war against cops killing black people)?

My answer to it is likely overly long, but here it is.

Sometimes, people use the tools of legal process and punishment to push back against the temptation that life offers to deliberately act on the perverse incentives that pervade existence. It provides a counter to the impulse to take by force or deception what would require more effort to obtain within the rules (if it can be obtained licitly at all).

But sometimes, the role of the Rule of Law is simply to be cudgel against those who embarrass the society with their actions, intentional or not, or contribute to a sense of unease.

The "war" should not be seen as one against "cops killing black people," because that is not the point. Progress would be a reduced number of police shootings due to an understanding that people's lives (whether they are Black or not) are valuable enough that they shouldn't be casually ended simply out of an assumption of criminality or so that members of the majority don't have to question the constant fear they profess to feel.

(Note that in the trials of George Zimmerman and Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael and William Bryan, their defenses all more or less came down to "the fact that we confronted a Black person who didn't know us from a hole in the ground with lethal force shouldn't have given them a reason to see us as threatening to them, so their response was a reason for us to fear for our lives.")

Officer Potter does not have to go to prison. Officers have been breezily forgiven of much greater lapses than hers. (A lot of shootings can be traced to officers not following what they were supposed to have been trained to do. Officer Potter had the misfortune of her lapse being close enough to the death that the legal system decided it was deemed relevant in court.) She's being offered up as a sacrifice in the name of bad-faith appeasement: "We gave you Chauvin and Potter (to name two)... what more do you want?" Their convictions will be pointed to a "progress" when it's really little more than scapegoating. Police officers are not the problem; White America regarding the Black population of the country as agents of violence and anarchy is.

Shootings that later turn out to be unjustified are a problem, but they aren't the problem. In the case of Daniel Shaver, he was held at gunpoint by a number of police officers for a quarter of an hour or longer. In all of that time, they were apparently unable to determine whether he posed some sort of threat to them, and they continuously gave him orders, and even as he visible grew increasingly stressed, an officer said to him, and I quote: "Alright, if you make another mistake, there is a very severe possibility you are both going to get shot, do you understand?" There is something broken with a law-enforcement culture that sees lethal force as a rational reaction to a person under duress making what the officers on the scene acknowledged as errors, rather than attacks.

And sure, part of can be laid at the feet of gun culture in the United States. Officers are expected to behave as if any given random citizen they have reason to stop is armed and dangerous.

But officers are often allowed, or even expected, to treat pushback on the part of a person stopped as active disrespect of their authority, and, perhaps more importantly, a threat to their safety. And citizens are at a disadvantage; the Supreme Court of the United States, in Whren v. United States, allows officers to make stops on a pretext; one can be pulled over for a minor traffic infraction so that an officer can attempt to find a greater breach of the law. And in Heien v. North Carolina, the Supreme Court ruled that an stop is legal even when the officer is mistaken about whatever law they cite in creating reasonable suspicion. So if an officer pulls me over based on something that isn't even a crime, to give themselves a reason to attempt to incriminate me for something else they understand to have happened, I'm expected to lump it. And if things escalate and I wind up being shot, the officer can point to multiple precedents in establishing that they've done nothing wrong. A police officer can have a shitty day; citizens need to always be on their best behavior.

That imbalance of power is accepted, and so are its consequences, because of an implied social contract that states that the law is only weaponized against those who have done something egregiously wrong. As Alan Dershowitz puts it: "Criminal law is supposed to apply to bad people consciously making bad decisions, that they know or should know are in violation of the law." There is an assumption that those shot by police deserved what they received; this is mostly character assassination in the service of the belief that if one is "a good person," they won't find themselves on the wrong end of an officer's bullet for what turns out to be a bad reason.

And that takes us back to former Officers Potter and Chauvin. The video showed the violations of the social contract. Society looked at the video and decided that Daunte Wright and George Floyd, were,  if not entirely blameless, innocent enough that the power imbalance shouldn't have been used against them.

But the setup that the United States has now more or less guarantees more killings, and, as I noted before, not just by police officers. One of the implicit assumptions of allowing the use of lethal force is that some number of times the wrong people will be killed. That is not, strictly speaking, unjust. It's the nature of the beast. Where the putative injustice comes into play is where the determination of whether someone is the wrong person comes from some feeling about them, rather than a clear-eyed application of the rules. And in this particular instance, Kim Potter was on the wrong side of feeling.

XV

Today marks fifteen years since I started this little project, and to celebrate, I'm going to take a break from it. Mainly to give myself some time to look around and find new things to read, and thus, to write about. Current events have become something of a drag recently, with the same general stories circulating around. So I'm going to find something new, then pick up again. I'll likely have one more post before the end of the year, so that there are the requisite 13, but I don't expect to really come back to this before January. So it won't be a long hiatus, but it will be some time away nonetheless.

In any event, thank you for reading.

Tentcloth

Senator Joe Manchin D (well, depending on who you ask anyway) West Virginia is currently living life in the spotlight for being the man who has derailed President Biden's Build Back Better plan for the United States. And, okay, as a matter of Congressional process, there is some truth in this.

But it might also be worth pointing out that there are an awful lot of voters who don't really care for the Build Back Better plan, and not simply because they're partisan Republicans who would be loath to allow the current President to rescue them from a burning building. One of the really difficult jobs in front of the Democratic Party (and one that I think a lot of people would say that they're bungling) is making the case that the plan that they have is both better for everyone in the long run and sustainable. Again, partisanship plays a factor; once someone's convinced that the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is only s step removed from a force of supernatural Evil, it's hard to get them to consider the benefits of policy proposals.

The Democrats are in the position of having to bow and scrape before Senator Manchin because they were unable to pick up enough seats in the chamber that they could allow their less liberal members to buck the team to shore up their numbers back home. Presumably, Senator Manchin ran for office because he believes that he can do something good for the people of his state, and maybe the entire nation. Sacrificing his political career doesn't help him reach his goals, or he'd have done it already.

If the Democratic Party is going to have any hope of getting things done, they're going to have to attract more voters to their cause. Right now, their coalition may be broader than that of the Republican Party, but it's thinner, and right now, that means that it tears easily. Increasing polarization means that there are fewer people in play who can be convinced to join up. The Democrats are going to have to get out there and find them.

Unthreatening

I have, I will admit, grown weary of the assertion that Donald Trump, and those people who are willing to toady to him, are "threats to democracy."

The central threat to democracy in the United States is the impression that the system hasn't solved people's problems in the past, isn't solving them now and has no intention of solving them in the future.

All Donald Trump had done initially was tell Republican voters that this impression was correct, because the system had been captured by people who were intent on using it to enrich themselves and leave the public (or more specially, the average Republican voter section of the public) holding the bag. And for all that people point to the events of January 6th as evidence that then President Trump is an authoritarian at heart, again, the reason why so many people still back him is that even if they agreed that it marked him as an authoritarian, the authoritarian who has an answer to one's woes seems like a better ally than the democrat who's working on behalf of someone else.

For all that people may be of the opinion the democracy may be the best way to organize a government, democracy is still a means, rather than an end. And like any other means, it has no rights. Donald Trump pulled off two interesting political innovations: he freed himself from the need to appeal to the Republican donor class, through a combination of his own money and prodding the major news media to consistently keep his name in the headlines, and he was able to successfully make a case that his failures were not his fault. This second point is especially important. Despite it being a matter of public record that Republicans in Congress intended to oppose President Obama on pretty much everything they felt they could get away with, his inability to get certain things done was still seen as a failure of his own leadership. President Trump had no such problems. If the Democrats stood in the way of something he wanted he was able to make them into the villains, and plead victimhood (usually on behalf of his supporters) in a way that I don't think that other Presidents have been able to get away with. (Whether they'll be able to get away with it in the future remains to be seen.)

The idea that there is some sort of obligation to democracy has to be discarded. As much as salespeople often get on my nerves, I understand that many of them are good at their jobs, and I've come to understand a lot about politics through the lens of what I understand makes a good salesperson. And I have yet to be in a situation in which a salesperson attempted to sell something to me by making the point that I had an obligation to the item being sold.

As a matter of history, democracy in the United States would likely be regarded as an abject failure by many modern standards. From the outset, where it was designed with the idea that high-status minority (landowning White men) could be trusted to actively look out for the welfare of the rest of the stakeholder community, to today, where it's plagued by structural problems and the inability/unwillingness of the public to wield effective oversight, if one were to design a system from the ground up, it's unlikely that any incarnation of the one we currently have in the United States  would be the first choice. And something that's so clearly a kludge when things are working in its favor can hardly be expected to hold up well in the face of the social distrust that has come to dominate so much of the United States.

Even many of the defenders of democracy don't laud its affirmative benefits; rather they point to examples such as Russia and China as examples of what the authoritarianism they perceive will make things worse. But to the same degree that one man's trash is another man's treasure, one person's oppression is another person's law and order. People have often shown themselves willing to trade another person's interests in order to advance their own.

Democracy is not an effective way of mutually hostile groups deciding who will obtain spoils at the other's expense; otherwise, there would be no need for wars. American democracy has, at some point, to start clearly and openly bringing benefits to a broad swath of the overall public on their own terms. In the past, this has been accomplished by shifting the costs of those benefits to others. That's not going to remain tenable forever. But one way or another, it should be understood that if people don't feel that the current system of democracy is what best advances their interests, then they'll look for, and support something that will. Blaming the person that sells them on it is unlikely to change that.

Niche Humor

The tabletop gamer in me found this uproariously funny. While I have nothing against stick figure families (other than they've become a bit of a cliché), I do find the various ways in which they meet their ends to be amusing. The inroads that geek culture have made into modern society are also interesting. I suspect that many more people than one might initially think will get this joke, if for no other reason than Critical Role and other gaming-related media have become so popular.
 

Who's Keeping Score

Last week, I met with a few friends for a birthday dinner. One of the attendees didn't have a mask with him; he tends to keep them in his car, and this time, he didn't drive himself. I keep a few of the blue surgical-style masks in my car, so we walked over to pick some up. It was about two blocks there, and two blocks back. When we made it back to the restaurant, he put the mask on just outside the door. We then entered, walked the maybe thirty feet to the table, and then both proceeded to take off our masks to drink from the water glasses at our seats. Appetizers were ordered, and eaten, then the main course arrived, drinks were served and refilled, and then dessert came. Then, after the bill had been settled, everyone put their masks on, and we walked the thirty feet or so back to the door, and once out in the street, everyone took their masks off again.

I want to say "while I completely understand the reasons for all of this," I'm starting to realize that I don't. And so the feeling that the current iterations of the non-pharmaceutical interventions that governments have put in place to slow (I want to say "manage" here, but it all comes across as too haphazard for that) the progress of the infection through the population comes across as theatrical, in the sense that it's designed to project that something is being done, rather than to be strictly effective.

And it's not that I believe that all of the measures that have been put in place are ineffective. I have no way of knowing how effective they are or are not. So I suspect that they're doing something. I just can't tell you what that something is. And I can't tell you that it's worthwhile. While discussions of the Reproduction Rate for SARS-CoV-2 in a given location have long gone out of fashion what that number might reasonable be is still useful to know. It's understood that if the Reproduction Rate drops below 1, the disease will peter out at some point; not enough new people are being infected before the people already infected recover, presumably after having purged their bodies of the pathogen. So if measures can push the rate for a disease down to below 1, can keep it there for a sufficient time, they can effectively eradicate the disease in a given population. And for a disease of a given serious, the cost-benefit analysis of those measures will pencil out at some point, and a decision can be made.

On the other hand, there is a Reproduction Rate for a sufficiently serious disease such that the number of people ill enough to require some sort of high-quality care to avoid death or other serious consequences will outstrip the availability of such care, and this place serious strain on the persons tasked with providing such care, especially given that the level of training needed to provide such care makes the supply relatively inelastic. Since that number, whatever it is, doesn't have a set value, we'll just call it x. Again, it's understood that if non-pharmaceutical interventions can bring the local Reproduction Rate down below x, then the overwork of care providers can be avoided. But with this calculation, the idea is that at some point, some other factor, either time or pharmaceutical interventions will come along and push the local Reproduction Rate down even further, or at least stabilize it.

But if broadly applied non-pharmaceutical interventions aren't making the difference between being above a given threshold or below it, are they worth the costs? With the understanding that SARS-CoV-2 and influenza aren't the same thing, I'm going to enlist the flu as my example here. Once the Flu Pandemic of 1918 was a thing of the past, the annual flu season wasn't really seen as a reason to enforce interventions. Even in years where 50,000 or so people died from the disease and its complications, it was understood that the Reproduction Rate wasn't going to rise to x, and it would only be a few months before warming weather pushed it down below 1. Given that understanding, it wasn't seen as worthwhile to pay the costs of mandated interventions, even though it was understood, at least in some circles, that lives would be saved.

I don't know that anyone has ever considered a scenario like the world has at this point, where the lowering of the Reproduction Rate to 1 isn't happening anytime soon, and it's x that's worth looking at. I presume that there are people out there, likely in the public health field, who know what x is. I, for my part have no idea.

What I also don't know are a) what the current Reproduction Rate in my local area is, b) what the circumstances that create that rate are, and c) how much the current batch of interventions, pharmaceutical or not, are doing to it. Something tells me that I'm not alone in that, because a lot of people I know have come to treat a SARS-CoV-2 infection as some sort of roaming death warrant, just looking for someone to serve itself on. This viewpoint, I think, leads to an understanding that every individual instance of illness is something of an avoidable tragedy and unacceptable outcome; another in a host of frightening trees that completely obscures the forest and give things like mask mandates and a need to show proof of vaccination to eat in a fast-food place an air of being ends in themselves.

With the understanding that a certain amount of consistency and predictability are important, does it really make sense to require people who have to be demonstrably shown to be vaccinated to eat wear a mask for the walk from the door to the table and back again? A sick person in a relatively small area can easily exhale enough virus-laden air to reliably infect a number of people around them over the course of a moderate meal (Something I learned the hard way not long out of college.), so is really worthwhile? Or have things, at least in Blue America, where I happen to live, settled into a need to be seen doing something, and that's what's important?

Unlawful

"In his book ‘Mere Christianity’, C. S. Lewis speaks about the ‘Law of Right and Wrong’ or the ‘Law of Nature’."
C. S. Lewis and the Law of Nature

I first encountered this idea from Mr. Lewis when a co-worker posted a link to a YouTube video about the topic.

Just because we use the same word, "Law" for two different concepts does not mean that those concepts have anything in common. Language is capable of expressing analogy, as well as factual similarities. It is nonsensical to refer to gravity as a law that can be disobeyed, because in this context "Law" operates as such an analogy.

I'm not convinced that C. S. Lewis has managed to go from an "Is" to an "Ought" with the reasoning presented in this video, or, for that matter in his book. The overall goal appears to be to go from observed human behavior, through a "sensus divinitatis"-type mechanism, to the idea that morality is a objective facet of reality. But what's missing in the analysis as presented is how people respond to the reactions of other people. The person who never plans to speak to someone again doesn't always bother to make excuses to that person; how can one be sure that people always feel guilt and shame when they don't have to confront anyone? My rationalizing something to a person because I feel it's in my interests to maintain some sort of relationship with them is different than my rationalizing to myself over violating a rule that I've internalized. I think the latter, which Mr. Lewis does not really address, is more important to his argument (such as it is) than the former.

Personally, I think that moral rules tend to look similar across societies because human beings are social animals, and generally speaking, moral rules on the societal level are about allowing societies to stay together. I could imagine a morality that praised fleeing from battles (that one is easy, in fact) and double-crossing others. In the latter case, I would image people who are much better equipped to survive on their own than most of are today. Freed from the need to trust others to assist them, they could do as they chose. Myth, legend and superhero comic books have explored this in depth, I believe.

Thomas Nagel has made the case that mentally sound people will perceive harms against them to be wrong, period, and not just bad outcomes for them as individuals. I disagree with him on that, just as I disagree with Mr. Lewis. I am a believer in rules, but I do not presume that rules come from anywhere other than people. I keep promises to others because I understand the rules of the game, and I expect other people to understand them, too. But I do not believe that other people are required to follow them. They make a cost/benefit analysis that I am not privy to, and if they perceive dealing with me in the spirit of our agreement to be in their best interests as they define them, they will do so.

In the end, I believe that Mr. Lewis mistakes the biological fact of human interdependence for an indicator of some universal law of moral behavior rather than a simple trait of the species. Bats can fly, not because of some universal rule that grants all bats the power to "defy" gravity, but because, as an order, Chiroptera are set up in such a way that allows for this and they thrive in doing so. Likewise, it is not somehow "wrong" for bats to swim; they simply aren't set up to live well (or for very long, perhaps) if they attempt it.

While I think that Mr. Lewis isn't far off the mark when he notes: "We have failed to practice the kind of behavior we expect from other people," I would point out that this works both ways. It doesn't take a particularly astute observer of humanity to note all of the ways in which people use each other as means to ends, rather than, as Immanuel Kant demands, ends in themselves. And even though people are aware of this, they don't always reciprocate the "bad" behavior. I fully expect, for instance, people to be inattentive on the roads. But I still pay attention. The video's implied contention that our expectations are only in line with others supporting our interests is as false as it is one-sided.

I am not sure if the maker of the video is aware of what it called the Fundamental Attribution Error, but they are incorrect in their assertion that all of us invariably make it. Some of us are more than willing to understand the reasons why others place their immediate interests above our own to be the same reasons why we place our immediate interests above theirs, and we realize that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. The presumption that all of humanity is populated by hypocrites is tempting, and understandable, but also, I think, false.

When I first read, "The world owes you nothing. It was here first," attributed to Mark Twain/Samuel Clements, it resonated with me. When I understood that it also applied to everyone else in the world, it was liberating. The idea that there is some objective standard of behavior that people should be held accountable to has its benefits. But so does the understanding that there is no such standard. The benefits are simply different, and people choose which set suit them better.

He's Everywhere

Santa Claus, putting in an appearance at a local shopping center. I don't remember ever believing in Santa Claus as a child, so the fact that he was everywhere during the holidays never phased me; I understood the concept of acting. But I do sometimes wonder how children who do believe than Santa Claus is a real and singular person deal with his sudden ubiquity during this time of year.
 

Sense of Loss

Normally, when I come up with something for "The Short Form," I create it as an image, and share it that way. I don't really know why I started doing that, other than it seemed like a good, or at least interesting, idea at the time.

But the original idea behind "The Short Form" was that sometimes, what started out as a long and involved post (and some of these can be very long and very involved - if only they were as informative) can be boiled down to a sentence or two. Presenting them as large images really just makes them take up space. So today, I'm going to dispense with it, and just go for the simple bit.

It is a measure of how well off we actually are that certain things foregone due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic are counted as serious losses, rather than trivialities.

As I've pointed out before, I've become fond of the saying from the older episodes of Doctor Who that "I didn't know when I was well-off," and I am reminded of that often by the way people speak of the things given up due to the pandemic. I don't mean to write these things off as "first-world problems," because for many people, they are legitimate problems. But I wonder if the focus on them blinds people to what life needed to have been like previously, for them to have become problems in the first place.

Underdeserved

Eric Deggans' NPR review of the new HBO mini-series "Landscapers" ends with the following: "But [Landscapers'] quality also encourages viewers to identify with a couple who may not deserve the empathy this show will likely generate."

What makes someone undeserving of empathy? Just what do people understand empathy to be for? Is there a shortage of it, such that it should be doled out judiciously? The main characters of Landscapers, Christopher and Susan Edwards, are murderers and thieves. And their targets were Susan's own parents, no less. It's pretty much a given that they are, as people often put these days "terrible people." And while people may always be the heroes of their own stories, the Edwards are not the heroes of this one.

Mr. Deggans points out that the HBO series does soft-pedal some of the details of the crimes; by not showing the Edwards actually performing all of the acts that they perpetrated in the service of stealing from the estate of Susan's parents. There seems to be a concern that the Edwards are portrayed as simply broken, when more attention should be paid to the fact that they were bad. But since, as the saying goes, mistreating bad people is still mistreating people, perhaps it's worth being cautious about the idea that empathy should be given out sparingly because it erodes our capacity to see others being mistreated.

But empathy should have more uses than just a wish to see people punished less harshly. (And haven't people learned yet that harsh punishments don't seem to deter the people that it's hoped they would deter?) Empathy is not about allowing people to opt out of consequences. It's about seeing them as something other than deliberately perverse. Granted, viewing people as deliberately perverse is often a useful justification for salving injured feelings by doling out an eye (and then some) for an eye. But even then, the punishments that people call for speak more to them, and what they want out of life, than they do to the person being punished.

Empathy is not a naturally scarce resource. It can be created from literally nothing, just from the will to do so. So there is no reason to only dole it out based on what we understand that people should deserve.

 

Shocked Squared

Dr. Ifeanyi Nsofor, the Human Health Education and Research Foundation's senior vice president for Africa and senior New Voices fellow at the Aspen Institute, has an opinion piece on the NPR website today: "I'm shocked by the racist cartoons and travel bans sparked by omicron."

Firstly, one should always repeat "shocked." If it's good enough for Claude Rains' Captain Renault in Casablanca, it's good enough for anyone. Secondly, I'd like to formally propose that people stop using the word shocked to describe how they feel after events that should be perfectly predictable and expected. A newspaper in Spain published a cartoon showing the omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus as Black people, curly hair, gigantic lips and all? You don't say...

There's something worthwhile in hoping that people will routine act in a way that one understands to be the best they have to offer, or even the median. Being surprised or upset when they don't, however, is pointless. While I understand why Director-General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom tweeted that "It pains me that shows of racism like this still plague the challenges facing the world today," I don't understand what good it does. Surely the Director-General could have made the point that the cartoon was, at best, in poor taste, with less emotional language.

One of the things that my father taught me was that one of the side-effects of public displays of emotion at the actions of others demonstrates that one is not really in control of their emotions... the person acting is. And while there are times when this is a perfectly reasonable or expected (and sometimes even socially demanded) way to go about things, it's also become a go-to reaction for items that are fairly trivial.

Dr. Nsofor also takes aim at the travel bans that have been enacted by several nations in a vain attempt to keep the new SARS-CoV-2 variant outside of their borders. Unless a nation plans to completely close itself off from international travel, that horse has likely long left the barn. But what else does one expect from governments? While it's been said that the Congress of the United States only does two things well, ignore problems or overreact, they're far from the only government body for whom that is an apt description. Panic about SARS-CoV-2 had been the norm for nearly all of the past 24 months. Why would anyone expect that governments, especially those which have relied on fear to justify the restrictions and other headaches they've pushed upon their citizens, would suddenly show poise and thoughtfulness in the face of yet another unknown? There's always been more upside for false positives in the game of detecting "existential threats" than there has been for calmly taking the time to assess the situation, especially if that risks resulting in some short-term pain.

I've often been termed a nihilist or been described as "beaten down" for the habit of understanding that the world doesn't care what I think of it, so I may as well deal with it on its terms, but it's spared me a lot of headaches and stress. And when something or other isn't directed at me personally, there's almost always been a way to make the point that it was somehow sub-optimal without needing to engage in what would strike a lot of people as affected histrionics.

There is no group of people large enough to have entered the public consciousness that's also too small to have no jackasses in it. And the world press corps surely fits that description. Rather than playing whack-a-mole with a handful of depictions of people that are, frankly, little more than fear-mongering, why not focus on the people who are being the change that one wants to see in the world, and rewarding them for the service that they are doing for everyone? (Another nugget of wisdom from my father, by the way.) The governments of the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada are unlikely to simply be shamed into reopening their borders by people wagging their fingers. Pointing out that the nations who haven't enacted such bans are doing better, however, just might change something.

If all it took to make people courageous and wise was to begrudge them their fears and foibles, we have solved all of the world's problems already. That alone should be enough to encourage people to hold up those who exemplify the better parts of humanity higher than they do those they are disappointed in.

And Justices For All

After oral arguments in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, it's been considered pretty much a given that the judicial precedent set in Roe v Wade will be overturned. Whether this is a good or a bad thing seems to largely depend on what one thinks about abortion rights. Which is fair, given that this case is about the state of Mississippi wanting to either substantially limit or do away with the practice within its territory.

But, of course, the Supreme Court of the United States is capable, within limits, of enacting much broader changes than this in the legal framework of the nation. And given that, maybe being clear-eyed about the role of the court in the nations government is in order.

While many people, Supreme Court Justices included, would argue that the role of the court is to be a non-political arbiter of whether specific laws and regulations fit within the limits that the Constitution and other laws set for them, the idea of a non-political Court doesn't really make much sense, given that the people who select the members of the court and ultimately empanel them are themselves politicians. The fight over whether President Obama should have been allowed to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Antonin Scalia and, subsequently, whether President Trump should have been allowed to fill Ruth Bader Ginsberg's seat after her death, and indeed, the whole fact that people talk about filling vacancies on the Supreme Court when speaking of the importance of both presidential and congressional elections should have made clear that many people have, for some time, believed that the role of a Supreme Court Justice is to interpret the Constitution and the laws of the United States in accordance with the wishes of those who place them on the bench. So why not own up to that?

There is no such thing as a non-political branch in an inherently political institution. And pretending otherwise doesn't serve anything, other than, perhaps, people's desire to see their wants and needs as being in line with some higher standard than their own interests.

It's easy to see Supreme Court precedents going the way of Executive orders; a particular incarnation of the Court rules one way, and as soon as the Court's partisan makeup swings back the other way, activists and politicians create pretexts to push lawsuits to the Court in order to have that ruling overturned. Until the Court swings back the other way and the cycle continues. While a number of commentators that I've heard recently propose that such goings-on would lead to the Supreme Court becoming illegitimate in the eyes of the public, I think that such presumes that "the public" is somehow completely incapable of understanding what time it is.

As long as there is an understanding that part of the role of the United States government, of whatever branch, is to mediate between mutually hostile groups with an eye towards determining which of them will have their interests gutted in favor of the other(s), the institutions that make up that government are going to be seen as legitimate only to the degree that they appear to side with any individual's chosen group. There is no reason for the Supreme Court to be above this dynamic. So it's not really where the focus should be.

Surfaces

An acquaintance of mine asked me, not too long ago, if I'd grown tired of feeling that I "represented" Black people to the many White people that I encountered on a regular basis. It was an interesting question, and it gave me a moment to think about something that hadn't occurred to me in quite some time. My answer was that as far as most White people I encountered were concerned, I didn't represent Black people; rather I was an anomaly, and so was regarded as a somewhere between different, and the exception that proves the rule.

And that created an opening to talk about how people tend to see the people around them. I've related before how, back when I was still in my twenties, I regarded people who lived up to the stereotype of the casually criminal urban Black man as the enemy, people's whose wanton disregard for the rules of society threatened to make it impossible for me to build a life free from that selfsame stereotype. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that what other people think of me is, if not completely none of my business, far beyond my control, and learned to let it go. But I don't think that I'd ever put much effort into asking why, if someone observed both him, and me, that I should be tainted by said someone observing his bad acts, but he wouldn't be considered to have whatever non-stereotypical qualities that may have been seen in me.

Confirmation bias, it turns out, may very well result in nothing being actually seen at all. Instead stereotypes layer themselves over everything viewed, and become deeper and more comforting every time something can be considered to align with them. A person who is going to brazenly steal a necklace from a woman in broad daylight on a municipal light rail system is likely not all that concerned about how onlookers might take his actions and project them onto millions of people. The only reason I had that concern was that I'd been brought up to understand that the approval of the greater White society was important to have, yet difficult to obtain due to a combination of White prejudice and shiftless Black people who openly played into those selfsame prejudices. But those worries distracted me from what I should have been doing: understanding who I could interact with who was willing to see me for "who I really was" and shaping that into something that was of value to them. In other words, the best way to be seen as an individual is to find those people who see others as individuals, and hang around with them.

But that would have required me to do what I didn't expect others to be capable of. The central concept of the idea that I "represent" Black people to the White people I meet is that those White people are unwilling or unable to look past the surface traits of those they encounter. And my immediate answer, even though I had a couple of specific individuals in mind, betrayed that same thought process. Even after all this time, I've still bad at seeing beyond the surface. I suspect, then, that I shouldn't be so critical of others who have the same difficulty.