Unwalkable

I was in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood the other day, and came across a small homeless encampment that's now been there several years. I know that at some point, it wasn't there, but I now can't recall the last time I saw the area devoid of tents.

Normally, the tents are lined up in the parkway between the sidewalk and the street, so that  the sidewalk itself is mostly clear. From time to time, there would be a bicycle or some crates or something taking up some of the sidewalk, but it was generally possible to walk past the tents without needing to walk in the street.

Not this time. The sidewalk is now completely blocked off.

Pedestrians, go elsewhere.

This is the sort of thing that drives resentment of the homeless population of the area, but doesn't actually spark any efforts towards fixing the problem. I will be unsurprised to find that the next time I'm in the area, the sidewalk, if not the entire encampment, has been cleared; this isn't the sort of thing that I expect the local, even in a stereotypically liberal place like Seattle, will suffer gladly. (I'm actually somewhat impressed that the situation was allowed to get to this point, really.)

As housing prices in the greater Puget Sound area continue to rise due to constrained supply (regardless of what some politicians might say), more and more people are going to find themselves living in tents. Last week's brief cold snap and freezing rain notwithstanding, the climate here is generally mild enough that such a lifestyle, if it can be called that, is more workable than in some other places I can think of. (I certainly wouldn't want to be homeless in upstate New York about now.) Which is good, because it's going to be some time before the problem is solved. Allowing for substantial new construction now would likely require at least a decade, if not two, to allow home prices to subside enough that lower-income people could reliably afford them. Failing that, it will take the loss of some of the area's major employers, triggering another "Will the last person leaving SEATTLE - Turn out the lights," moment. Although, unless something happens that makes the area substantially less desirable to live in long-term, this could simply be the opening that housing rental companies and developers need to swoop in.

In any event, homelessness is becoming more and more visible in the city proper. (Not that the suburbs are immune from this; it's common to find tents in out-of-the-way, and therefore not very visible, places.) And that visibility is going to create pressure to do something to move the people elsewhere. It won't be a solution, but as long at it sort of looks like one, that may be enough.

Musty

Okay, sure. But who is going to make them? The United Nations? The people of Afghanistan? A divinity? After all, the situation on the ground in Afghanistan (which people should have seen coming, despite Taliban assurances) can be boiled down to the Taliban structuring their society in the way that they believe that their conceptualization of God wishes it to be structured. And, okay, that's at odds with "Western" understandings of universal human rights and relative gender equality. But it's what works for the Taliban, and they're the ones running the place, because it's not worth it to enough of the populace there to put skin in the game for anyone else to run the place. A state of affairs that the Taliban understand as tacit public approval of their governance.

The various governments that the United States worked to support in Afghanistan all had the basic problem that the Afghan public didn't value them highly enough to stand behind them. And so this is what they have now. The world community can change that, again, but there's little appetite for it. Finger-wagging is unlikely to change that.
 

And That's Terrible

The phenomenon known as "swatting" is a simple one. Someone calls a police department, and says that a serious violent crime and/or hostage situation is occurring at some or another address. The department's SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics) team swings into action, only to find out that a hoax has been perpetrated. If everyone involved is fortunate, no-one is killed prior to the deception being uncovered. Otherwise, as has been case on a few occasions, tragedy ensues.

The practice first entered the public's consciousness (and the lexicon) due to the swatting of individuals. But it also happens to organizations. In the case of the National Public Radio story that aired this morning, parties unknown called police departments to falsely report active shooters in schools.

The practice creates problems for a lot of people, not the least of which being the students, faculty and staff of a swatted school. And so this is something that seems newsworthy. Which made it surprising that the story that National Public Radio ran on the phenomenon this morning seemed completely devoid of information. The story purports to be about the lasting consequences of swatting schools, but other than the one mother saying her daughter was basically freaked out by what happened, it doesn't even live up to that.

The piece is basically a human-interest story speaking to the day's event. Which is marginally interesting, but it feels like something between a filler piece and a missed opportunity. Granted, I'm not a journalist myself, but surely, there is something more informative about the practice that could have been the basis for a story. Part of what's going on, I suspect, is that I'm not really in NPR's target audience, and their target audience is into this human-interest stories. There's also just a greater focus on human-interest stories in the media landscape in general, as they allow for news outlets to present their viewpoints by selecting the people whose stories they tell.

Sliders

Starting perhaps late Thursday night, freezing rain started falling in the Seattle area. By yesterday morning, most of the area was doing a passable interpretation of an ice rink. One neighborhood couple literally had their crampons on to go for a walk, and the slope of the street made standing in one place impossible for good stretches of it.

But the problem with the weather here in the Puget Sound area is almost never actually the weather itself; but in how people (mal)adapt to the conditions it brings about. My primary concern, which was that icy power lines would come down nearby and leave the neighborhood in the dark and cold, never materialized. So true to form, it was the people themselves that took it on themselves to cause problems.

I'd just happened to look out the front window when I saw a white SUV barrelling past. This doesn't end well, I thought, as the car exited my field of view. A moment later, my impromptu prophecy came true, as there was a loud bang from the street, followed by the startled clamor of a car alarm. Sure enough, the SUV had been unable to follow the gentle curvature of the street, and slammed into a car parked in front of the home next door.

What, I wondered, possessed someone to drive down the street at anything faster than a snail's pace? It wasn't as if the ice was difficult to see; it was an opaque sheet that in some places was half an inch thick. But that's one of the weird things about driving in this area when the weather is bad. Everyone knows that Seattlites fare poorly in bad road conditions. But really, it's the sizable minority who think that they're exempted from this who are the hazard.

I think it's because the local understanding is that people in the Seattle area are just bad at driving on anything other than bare (and maybe wet) pavement. But as a native of Chicago, I don't remember people there doing much better on expanses of ice; it's just that, back in Chicagoland, the local municipalities and highway departments have snow-removal equipment, protocols for keeping the street open enough to use it and, perhaps most importantly, stockpiles of salt and sand for slick conditions. That's what prevents the place from being one massive pile-up in the Winter, rather than some remarkable level of skill at driving.

The weather has warmed, and we're back to our usual diet of light rain. This is doing the work of de-icing the streets and making places passable again. And, unfortunately, perhaps allowing people to forget that when it comes to cars and driving, gravity always wins. It's just a matter of having the sense to not fight with it, when it's not on your side.

The Kids These Days

“The people we consider to be ‘adults’ are married with kids, sharing houses, sharing finances,” says [sex educator and therapist Liz] Powell. “Whereas ‘wayward adults’, like myself, who live alone, unmarried, are examples of everything wrong with society.”
Does ‘solo polyamory’ mean having it all?

As someone who lives alone, and is unmarried, I have never heard the term “wayward adult” before. No-one has ever described me, to me, that way, certainly. “Failed human being” in the context of being “childless by choice,” yes, but never “wayward adult.” But I wonder: Who is the “we” that Ms. Powell refers to? Part of the reason why I decided to stop using the word “we” when referring to large groups of people that I might be a part of is specifically because it fails to actually point the finger at anyone. And while I understand that there are still noticeable numbers of relatively conservative (or Conservative) people out there for whom nothing less than a monogamous marriage to one’s first and only sex partner resulting in multiple Christian children is acceptable, attributing that attitude to society at large is overstating things.

There is, I think, a certain narcissism that goes into some persecution complexes, stemming from the supposition that whatever it is that one is doing is so threatening to others that they’re motivated to pull out all the stops to put an end to it. This is not to say that there aren’t people who understand that putting a stop to all “non-biblical” forms of human relationships wouldn’t magically fix everything that ails humanity, but their chances of that wish coming true anytime soon are pretty much zero.

There are always going to be people for whom their chosen way of living is seen as the one true way that everyone should follow. That’s not going away. Being aggrieved about it isn’t useful. Change takes time, and while that time is often frustrating, it’s simply part of the process. It doesn’t need to be a matter of us versus them.

Uncommitted

Twitter users just voted for Elon Musk to step down as head of the company. Before votes were cast, Musk said he'd abide by the result.

Mr. Musk also said that he wouldn't take action against the ElonJet Twitter account. So who cares what he said about the results of his poll? Including this in headlines seems like a pointless "gotcha" attempt. It's understood that there is an adversarial relationship between Mr. Musk and many members of established media outlets, whom Mr. Musk tends to see as biased and dishonest. If people didn't care that Mr. Musk created a reason to walk away from other public commitments he's made (which is pretty much the entire story of his relationship to Twitter), it's difficult to see why they would care about this.

Elon Musk, and his supporters, and likely the universe of Twitter users more broadly, don't care enough about what members of the media think of him for them to be able to call him on the carpet. People who were going to leave Twitter have already gone; those who remain are indifferent to it all, or understand that they need Twitter more than Twitter (and, by extension, Elon Musk) needs them.

Rootedness

Today I Learned, as the kids these days like to say, about President Trump's 1776 Commission. I think that I'd heard of it before, but this was near the end of the Trump Administration, and I pretty much stopped paying attention to going's on in Washington, D.C., because keeping up with politics had become such an unpleasant way to spend free time.

The 1776 Commission had no real reason for existence than to perpetuate a particular front in the Culture Wars, namely long-simmering "Right vs Left" dispute over whether the founders of the United States were the best people ever, or simply people, with the good and bad that such a status entails.

Perhaps I should re-phrase that. While I will admit that I find the debate utterly trivial, the people on the Right who I know have engaged with it do actually see something important in all of this; namely, the idea that history is (or at least can be) important in the here and now. While the term "American Exceptionalism" is tossed around a lot, I don't know that it has a consistent usage. While there is the idea that specific circumstances of the nation's founding and its specific ideological impulses make the United States both a unique nation and a specifically positive force for overall human well-being and flourishing, there is also the understanding (and this is the one that many of the Conservatives I've talked about it with seem to favor) that the United States is superior to other nations... and that this superiority comes with privileges when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world.

I will admit to not having an understanding of the idea that "because the people who came before us were great and wonderful, we're worthy and valuable." I understand the human propensity to pursue feelings of worth and value; back in the day, being considered unworthy or valueless was a quick ticket to being abandoned by one's community. And humans are social animals because as individuals, it takes a lot of time and effort to get to a point where one has a realistic chance of surviving for any length of time. But that's at the individual level. Once one arrives at the scale of the nation-state, that sort of insecurity seems strange.

After all, much of the ways in which nations project power and show their value has little or nothing to do with the past. If each of the group of men we understand to be the "Founding Fathers" of the United States were proven to have been right jackassess tomorrow, the United States would still have the world's largest economy and the financial power that comes from having a ubiquitous reserve currency. Not to mention a military that can do a number of most of its contemporaries. And those are the things that make the United States the current big man on campus.

A status that, of course, will not last forever. And therein, I think, lies the rub. As I see it, American Exceptionalism is a special pleading the the United States, unique among nations, should be immune to the forces of geopolitical gravity. In part, I think, because if one sees history as what goes around comes around, once the United States starts to slip away from the top spot, there are going to be any number of people with scores to settle. (I notice the same thing in domestic politics. I think that part of the reason why "race relations" in the United States are so touchy, so often, is that there are more White Americans than one credits who are of the opinion that once they no longer have the whip hand, the whip is going to be used on them.) But if the United States is legitimately special, then such worries need not be entertained.

Personally, I think that there are any number of former powers that are doing all right for themselves, despite a certain disgust for their histories. And I think that the United States will one day be a member of that club, and it will become evident that the nation will survive being just like everyone else.

Partly Cloudy

A typical Autumn day here in the Seattle area.

 

Wholly Empty

I stopped by Whole Foods today to pick up a couple of things. And, as one might expect for a Sunday afternoon, the store was fairly busy. Despite this, there were two, or maybe three, checkstands open. So there were lines. Event he self-checkout stand had a line, and it didn't appear that it was being actively managed, with customers needing to be on the lookout for the next available register, and if something went sideways, waiting for a Whole Foods employee to come over to assist.

It was your run-of-the-mill substandard retail experience. Which may be fine for your average chain grocery store, but seemed really broken at a place that's often nicknamed "Whole Paycheck." And I think that this is what tends to drive the perception of inflation for a lot of people; the idea that certain experiences, let alone goods and services, are noticeably cut back from what they were, even though the prices haven't changed.

The point behind "shrinkflation," as it's often called, it that the average person isn't going to notice the difference. Okay, that formerly 20 ounce package of snacks is now 18 ounces for the same price, or the allowable percentage of screws in a box has gone from 2% to 3%. That's intended to be invisible to the public at large. (Whether or not it's as invisible as it's made out to be, I'm not sure.) But service industries have a harder time getting away with this, because the service is most of what they're offering as a value proposition.

Whole Foods has, for the most part, its niche of the grocery business to itself, at least on the nationwide level. So it's not in immediate danger of a competitor swooping in and scooping up large segments of its customer base. Which is too bad. Capitalism doesn't do very well when market players aren't subject to decent levels of competition.

Time Off

I've been hearing a lot recently about the falling labor force participation rate, or the percentage of the population that is either working or looking for work. Generally, speaking, the unemployment rate is the percentage of this segment of the population that is unsuccessful in finding work at any given time.

There seems to be a substantial amount of hand-wringing over the relatively low numbers, but reasons for the hand-wringing are less common. This seems to be born of the idea that the American work ethic ("The average worker in the United States clocks more hours each year than those in Canada, Australia, Western Europe and now even Japan.") is a good thing in and of itself.

But work is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end. And while the current unemployment rate may be low, the fact that one exists at all proves that the American economy doesn't even need all of the people who present themselves to be workers in order for supply the level of goods and services that people wish to buy. (Okay, so that's not entirely true... but it's unlikely that businesses, or their customers, are going to want to pay the wages that would be needed to make cellular telephones in domestic factories.) In other words, no-one is pointing to any shortages that a boost in workers would cure.

And if people are not working because they don't particularly need to work, I don't see why this should be considered a problem. If people have found something that gives a better return for their time and energy than paid employment, more power to them.

Rate of Change

One of the arguments against the idea that humans evolved to their current state is that it denies the innate "special-ness" of humanity. If humans are not so much different from other animals, the thinking goes, how can it claim a privileged place? Whether humanity is "deserving" of a privileged place in the grant scheme of things is open to debate, but it's pretty clear, to me, anyway, that a lot of people understand that humans should operate under their own set of rules, if they don't already. One way that this manifests itself is in the idea that human evolution should be a matter of political will, at the species level, rather than a response to environmental and/or social pressures, like it is for other lifeforms.

There are a number of ways in which "human nature" gets in the way of people's ideas of what the world should be like. A primary one is the fact that humans have a habit of forming themselves into groups of varying sizes and setting themselves against other groups, if not then remainder of humanity, in ways that produce zero-sum outcomes. Politics the world over produces example after example of this, and it has, for pretty much the entirety of human history (and a good stretch of time prior to that).

For someone who wants to see a golden age of human cooperation and prosperity, this is clearly a sub-optimal state of affairs. And it's not rocket science to understand why. The misery and suffering that humans routinely inflict on one another in the name of marginal gains here or there comes across as utterly pointless. (Now, to be sure, that depends on one's understanding on what it means for something to have a point, and that's really what it at issue here.) But still, this is the way that humans tend to be wired, and there was a point in time during which this not only made sense, but was important to the survival of the species.

And for all that people will concede that point, the follow-on tends to be, "Well, it's time for humanity to evolve beyond that." Which is fine, except for the small problem that this isn't how evolution works. And it never has been. For all that, the idea that human beings should simply be different than they are, and so the change should just happen strikes me as a surprisingly common one, especially in left-leaning political and social circles.

To be sure, I think I understand why. It's not like it takes much to get people to concede that there's a lot about humanity that they would like to see done away with (although what exactly the outcome of that would, or should, be tends to be open to debate). It's easy to look at a massacre and say "we should be able to do better than this." But the reason we don't "do better" is that the underlying reasons for human behavior are varied and complex, and wrapped up in a lot of factors that are much more resistant to change than they are often given credit for.

It's entirely possible for evolutionary pressure to do away with the human propensity for intra-group infighting. But it takes more than wishing to bring that pressure about.

What Now?

It has been, thus far, a typical late Fall/early Winter in the Seattle area; dreary and overcast much of the time. But there's been snow on the ground for about a week now, and that's been something of a twist. There's something of a peculiar phenomenon I've noticed in the past year or so, and that is that deviations from the typical weather and temperature patterns have routinely started to last longer than the initial forecasts say they will. What was originally forecast to be just a couple days' worth of colder-than-average temperatures has stretched into a week, and it may drag on for a couple more days at that.

It brings home the difficulties of making these sorts of predictions, even in a fairly boring climate like that of the Puget Sound area, once things start to change here and there. Once the old patterns begin to suffer disruptions, it can be difficult to determine what the new pattern will be.

I suppose that a lot of things are like that. And I understand a bit more why people can become so bent out of shape when things shift beneath their feet. Predictability can be dull, but it can also be very comforting. It's one less thing to worry about. And although many people seem to be quite good at worrying about things, it's still true that too much of it is not healthy for most. And predictability, or at least the appearance of predictability, can give people a break from that.

Of course, there is more to it than that. A good portion of the local built environment was put in place with the understanding that it would rarely, if ever, be snow-covered. And local services tended to make the same assumption. That prediction no longer being reliably true will mean some significant changes may have to be made. We'll see how the area adapts to it all. In the meantime, I'm learning to live with a bit more uncertainty in what each day will bring. It's been interesting.

Oh, Deer

I hadn't really thought all that much about the shipping involved for holiday items until I came across this box in the aisle at Costco. But this is one of the many items that didn't survive the trip across the Pacific intact. I wonder what happens to all of them.
 

Cleanup on Track 8

Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, has kept his name at the top of papers by making an appearance on Alex Jones' Infowars show and making comments like "I like Hitler," and "They did good things, too. We've got to stop dissing Nazis all the time."

I won't belabor the point, given that I brought this up a month ago, but I think it's somewhat irrational to expect someone with known mental illness to be completely, well, rational; even when in front of an audience.

But the train wreck that Ye's life is becoming is going to generate a lot of clicks, and a lot of airtime for random people to denounce him, or hold forth about how harmful his words are. Because people are fascinated to watch him destroy his life in slow-motion and on full public display. It's the dark side of being a celebrity; it's not generally considered exploitative to watch someone go head-to-head with mental illness and have their head handed to them when that someone is already famous.

Of course, there is also the fear factor; the idea, hovering in the background that someone like Ye is, for all of his obvious problems, popular and respectable enough to bring the ethno-nationalist chauvinism of 1930s National Socialism back into vogue and kick off a round of modern pogroms against the Jewish population of the United States. I understand it; there is a similar suspicion in the Black community of the United States that all it takes are a few charismatic people in the right (or wrong) places to bring back Jim Crow, if not all-out slavery again. That said, it still doesn't strike me as a realistic possibility anytime soon. Treating everyone who expresses support (regardless of their mental health) for the atrocities of the past as an open invitation for those atrocities to repeat themselves overdoes it. Those times are gone. They can, of course, return. But it will take more than the flameout of an ill celebrity to restore them.

The Path

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to success in modern life is a sense of futility. If one is going to put a lot of time and effort into doing something, it helps to trust that it will pay off. (This is something that I find to be missing from a lot of talk about "grit." "Grit" in the face of certain failure is viewed as quixotic, rather than determination.)

One area where I see a sense of futility consistently at play is in left-leaning politics here in the United States. Broadly speaking, the American Left has, among its policy priorities, maintaining or restoring access to legal abortion (and contraception more broadly) and reducing (if not eliminating) the access to personal firearms. These are areas in which they've faced opposition from the American Right, and, broadly speaking, the Right has been winning this contest. It's likely that, despite rhetoric about allowing states to decide their own abortion policies, that when Republicans take control of the House of Representatives, someone will float a bill to criminalize abortion nationwide, and some of the very people who claimed that it should be a matter for the states will vote in favor of that. (They'll have their perfunctory responses to the knee-jerk accusations of hypocrisy at the ready, of course.) And it doesn't even require having paid any attention at all to the "debate" concerning gun control in the United States to realize that it's going nowhere.

The general reason for this is the phenomenon of the "single-issue voter." While these groups of people are minorities of the overall public, they have the ability to make it difficult or impossible for people who don't toe their lines on their favorite causes to be elected. Make them unhappy, and they walk away. And there's always someone who will rush in to tell them whatever it takes to obtain those votes. And if they want to stay in office, they're forced to walk the walk, at least enough to avoid leaving room for someone to challenge them on the basis of greater adherence to the party line.

The American Left has no such groups of consistently motivated voters on its side. And I think that they've mostly given up on attempting to cultivate them. Which I will admit that I find to be strange. Because the current strategy of appeals to majoritarianism (when it suits them, anyway) and the ideals of democracy aren't getting them anywhere. So, for instance, while there are a number of people on the Left who object the idea of billionaires in concept, as a matter of both ethics and economic justice, the chances of altering the business regulatory environment to eliminate the economic incentives that create the consolidation of wealth are functionally zero. There's something telling about the fact that it was considered more likely that disaffected right-leaning voters in the United States would manage to install a government that would dismantle America's republican form of government during the most recent election cycle.

The question of why the Left tends to be more focused on the idea that "somebody needs to do something," and holding street protests to that effect, rather than coming together as a block of voters and emulating the tactics that the Right has successfully deployed again and again is "above my pay grade," as they say. I suspect that it's another facet of the broader coalitions that make up the American Left. It's hard to get half a dozen people to all agree to what they want on a pizza. Getting a few million people to all agree on political priorities is no easier. And I think that this is the part that's become lost to a sense of futility: the idea that a set of priorities can be created, and the boxes ticked off one after the next. The American Left has the population needed (although there may need to be some shuffling of where people are actually located) to push through legislation on guns, abortion, billionaires or what have you. They need to trust one another to go down the list, rather then people bailing out once their pet project has concluded. This, perhaps, would give them a greater sense of the power they could wield.

In Their Corner

The Economist Asks: How could Ukraine win the war?

Which is a good question, if one that I wouldn't expect a podcast to give a workable answer to. Not because it's the sort of thing that would be beyond a podcast, but because the answer would constitute at least somewhat valuable information. In other words, if the answer was "the Ukrainians could win by doing X, Y and Z," it's a pretty safe bet that the Russians would obtain that information, and, if they found it credible, move to close of the possibility of Ukraine doing X, Y and Z.

As a result, Anne McElvoy's conversation with the former commander of the United States Army in Europe, Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, comes across as more of a cheerleading session than a layperson's introduction to the strategy and tactics of repelling an invasion.

General Hodges saw a lot of factors working in Ukraine's favor, one of which was that people in the United States wanted to see Ukraine win, and this was likely to mean that support for military aid in Congress would continue. This, I think, may be a bit of wishful thinking. (But then again, there is a remarkable amount of wishful thinking when it comes to foreign policy, I've learned.) Not because the public of the United States doesn't, for the most part (after all, there are a few Russia boosters, here in the States, for various reasons), wish Ukraine well, but wishing someone well, and working to ensure they are well are not the same thing. The question is not whether the people of the United States have a favorite of the two warring sides, but how much in the way of both resources and risk that they're willing to put on the line.

Just Like the Rest of Them

In the wake of the rather spectacular collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX (an abbreviation, it turns out, of "Futures Exchange") I suddenly started hearing a lot more about the philosophical concept of "effective altruism." I'd heard of effective altruism mainly through having heard excerpts of philosopher Peter Singer making the case for it on various radio shows and podcasts. Having a passing interest in philosophy, I'd also read a few articles on the topic here and there. For me, the main things that I understood about effective altruism were the concepts that everyone's well-being is of equal value and that giving should be cost-effective. The stereotypical example of this would be if I could alleviate the hunger of three families in the United States by giving $100 over some period of time, but that same $100 could alleviate hunger for 10 families of equal size in Bangladesh, I should give my money to a charity that alleviates hunger in Bangladesh. Likewise, if charity A can feed 5 people for set time with a given amount of money donated, while charity B can feed 6, then I should donate to charity B. By making these sorts of calculations, driven by whatever data is available, one can be most effective with one's charitable giving.

All in all, I hadn't put much thought into effective altruism, and so was somewhat surprised to find that news outlets were running story after story on it, based mainly on the fact that FTX co-founder and CEO Samuel Bankman-Fried was a committed effective altruist. Despite the inference being about as logically fallacious as they come, there seemed to be a rather intense questioning of whether effective altruism was all that it was cracked up to be, given that Mr. Bankman-Fried was a) a backer and b) apparently wildly dishonest and/or unethical in his business dealings. It all struck me as more than a little suspect. Republican operatives seeking to link Mr. Bankman-Fried to Democrats, and framing the entirety of the Democratic Party as dishonest on that basis, was also a straight-up logical fallacy, but an expected one; American partisan politics more or less demands that the political parties claim that any malpractice by anyone even tenuously associated with the opposing party be held up as evidence that the whole party is run by criminals and fraudsters.

And recognizing that partisan aspect to things allowed me to better understand the interest in effective altruism. There are three major schools of thought when it comes to normative ethics: deontology, utilitarianism/consequentialism and virtue ethics. Virtue ethics, because it doesn't tend to deal directly with determining how a person should act in the moment, is often shunted to the side in any number of discussions, leaving a perhaps more familiar deontology versus utilitarianism divide. A divide, it turns out, that can be just as partisan as Republicans versus Democrats. Effective altruism is generally seen as a utilitarian/consequentialist viewpoint, focused as it is on basically doing the most good for the most people, and therefore leaving certain people with a valid claim to be "moral patients" out in the cold. To use the example I cited above, the three families in the United States. If I chose to give $100 to charity B in Bangladesh, and feed perhaps 12 families there, the Americans go hungry, for no other reason than they live in a nation where it's more expensive to feed them. They might argue that there are valid reasons for casting aside equal consideration of interests, and there are a good number of philosophers who agree with them.

Overall, I am under the impression that utilitarianism is the subject of quite a high degree of distrust from people who are not themselves utilitarians. At least, here in the "industrialized West," where incomes and standards of living are fairly high, relative to the rest of the world. And I think that this distrust is playing out here, as critics of effective utilitarianism seek to undermine the idea by linking it to someone now widely understood to be a bad person. Philosophy is subject to human nature, too, I suppose.

No Trace

[A.J. Jones, Starbucks' executive vice president of communications] also claims that the union's stipulation of wanting to observe proceedings violates the National Labor Relations Act, which prohibits the recording of bargaining sessions.

The union has refuted this claim, saying that it wants union members to sit in on the [Zoom] call, not record it.
Why are Starbucks workers striking?

And how would the Starbucks Workers Union propose that members be prohibited from recording the proceedings? There are any number of ways to make a video of what's happening on a computer screen. Sure, the Union could expel anyone who released a recording, but that's closing the barn door after the horse has gone off and founded a cryptocurrency start up. For the Union to claim that members observing the call would be stopped from recording it is either hopelessly naive or openly disingenuous. Just because someone lacks access to the Record function built into Zoom does not mean that they have no ability to make a viable recording of the call.

While I understand that unions are meant to advocate for their members, the assumption that all approximately 7,000 people in the Starbucks Workers Union are either too ethical, or too tech-illiterate, to figure out a way to record a Zoom call without anyone knowing that they've done so goes beyond simple advocacy. It's possible that the Union's leadership are themselves lacking in the sort of technological savvy that would give them an understanding of how a call might be recorded, so, for the sake of argument, let's give them the benefit of that doubt. In that case, why not ask Starbucks why they determined that members observing the call carries a risk? (Personally, I suspect that Starbucks hasn't granted the Union the benefit of the doubt, and I'm not at all surprised by that...)

The adversarial nature of the relationship between the people who work for companies and the people who own and manage them is tailor-made for this sort of thing. The Union has no incentive to believe that it would be trivially easy for any participant or observer on a Zoom call to record it, and Starbucks management has no incentive to believe that the leadership of the Union is dealing in good faith. And once neither side has an incentive to see the other as being an honest partner, things quickly fall apart.

Law of Rules

It's a stereotype that Conservatives care more about rules, law and order than Liberals do, at least here in the United States. This stereotype is mostly one of branding; the Rule of Law tends to be employed as a punishment for being frightening and/or unpopular as, if not more, often then it is used in response to misbehavior. And people of all political persuasions tend to have a greater interest in rules that protect their interests than they do in rules as a general concept.

And so it was that left-leaning media outlets spent a lot of time openly fretting and clutching their metaphorical pearls in the run-up to the recent mid-term elections, when it looked like devotees of former President Donald Trump and the "Stop the Steal" mythology might carry the day and install themselves as Secretaries of State and other elections officials in jurisdictions dotted around the nation. The clear concern was that such people would actively interfere in elections, pushing the nation towards "autocracy" and away from "the rule of law."

But I think that human nature is something of a constant, and so it was that National Public Radio published an article with the headline "The U.S. moves to shield Saudi crown prince in journalist killing." The article, sourced from the Associated Press is basically a litany of activist complaints about the fact that the Biden Administration has concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is entitled to the same sovereign immunity for lawsuits in American courts that any other head of state or head of government would be. The end of the article points out speaks about some of the details of sovereign immunity, but, for the most part, the article comes across as outrage mining.

I'm not sure, however, what there is to be outraged about. Sovereign immunity is not a new concept, nor is it a particularly contentious one. The fact that it gets in the way of Crown Prince bin Salman being hauled into an American court does not change that. People being of the opinion that the Crown Prince is an oppressor and tyrant is not a valid reason for the current Administration (or any other, really) to decide that the precedent of sovereign immunity should be thrown out, or even that an exception be made in this particular case.

This is the primary driver of "threats to the rule of law;" the idea that sometimes, the letter and/or the spirit of the law come between someone and the outcome that they understand themselves to be entitled to. Whether that is considered a good a bad thing often rests not on an understanding of the law and its purposes, but on who a particular party is more sympathetic to, or which interests are being served. It does little good to wring one's hands about the decline of lawfulness, when one is only concerned with the laws that are found to be to one's benefit.

Reward if Found

A poem, masquerading as a notice of loss. Spotted while walking through Seattle's International District.

Hung Up

Construction has been halted on the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago after a noose was found at the site.

This isn't the first time that this has happened.

Amazon temporarily halted construction of a new US warehouse again after an eighth noose was found at the site.

Construction stoppages seem to be a really expensive response to someone being a jackass.

And statements like "It is a heart-stopping reminder of the violence and terror inflicted on black Americans for centuries," and "This repeated behavior is calculated, and clearly meant to stoke fear and encourage racism and bigotry. What we have been seeing at this facility is wrong, and we condemn these actions in the strongest of terms," do little but make the Black community as a whole seem brittle and thin-skinned.

Having put up with a decent amount of trash like this when I was in high-school (lo, these many eons past) I came to understand that sometimes, people do this sort of thing because they're seeking to send a message of hate. But sometimes, the goal is simply to get a rise out of someone. And when businesses and politicians take the bait, the tactic works. Of course, that alone isn't necessarily a good reason to always remain stoic in the face of such events, so I also offer this consideration: what do these responses actually change?

When the finding of multiple nooses at the Amazon facility in Connecticut halted construction there, an investigation was launched, but there doesn't appear to have been a resolution of the case. No-one came forward to identify the perpetrator (even with $100,000 on the line), and the news reporting didn't change the mood around "race relations" anywhere. And they don't create more resiliency in the Black community. If anything, they simply reinforce the idea that the United States is, and always will be, a racist place; only the outward manifestations of bigotry change over time.

Some random yahoo who feels powerful in their ability to shut down a construction site by surfacing people's fears of a return to an America gone by is unlikely to escalate things if their actions are ignored. Mainly because the sort of people who do escalate these sorts of things are generally looking for more than the sort of fleeting news coverage that comes from incidents like this. Accordingly, moving on with life (and construction) is a better path that a lot of sound and fury that in the end, signifies nothing.

Mix and Match

When certain activities, places and institutions are segregated, such as men's (or boys') and women's (or girls') sports, men's and women's bathrooms or men's and women's jails, what is the criteria for segregation? Biological sex, or gender identity?

When these segregations were conceived, their wasn't a widespread idea of gender as an identity, if the concept existed at all. "Sex" and "gender" were considered synonymous terms, more or less universally. But now that there is, at least in some quarters, the understanding that "male" refers to sex and "woman" refers to gender, when we speak of the various segregations drawn along those lines, how are people being categorized?

National Public Radio has decided that it's self-evident that since we speak of "men's" versus "women's" that gender identity is the divide. "A transgender beauty influencer was put in a men's jail after her arrest in Miami" is written with an assumption that the Miami-Dade County corrections department has done something obviously wrong. Independent evidence, however, is not presented. Now. it's possible that the arresting officers and jail staff knew who Nikita Dragun was, and deliberately placed her in a men's unit, but no evidence is given for that. Likewise, the statement that Ms. Dragun is "legally female" came from a public relations representative, not from any sort of document. So I'm given to believe that when Ms. Dragun was arrested, someone had some reason to understand that while Nikita Dragun identifies as a woman, her original (and maybe current) sex is male.

And that takes us back to the question of who "men's" jails are for: biological males, people who identify as men or some combination of the two. (I suppose that one could ask the same question of women's jails, but a cursory Google search did not reveal any cases of transgender men going to jail...) It's worth a broader social conversation, rather than one driven simply by activists, because as more and more people decide that the way out of narrow gender-role expectations is to change their gender identity, it's going to become more of a concern; although likely still quite rare in the grand scheme of things. Still, given that it's the corner cases where things tend to fall apart, clarity on the topic couldn't hurt.

The media conversation about these sorts of things tends to be driven by the audience of a given media outlet. NPR tends to attract a young, and left-leaning audience, for whom the transgender community are another set of victims to be embraced and championed. I'm sure that Fox News, for example, leans in the other direction. But the mediated conversation between these outlets and their audiences is only part of the conversation that can happen. Society, writ large, is unlikely to become particularly involved. Most people simply don't care enough about the topic, as neither side holds any real terror for them. But still, voices a little less invested in one outcome or another can provide useful input into areas of contention.

The Last Word

Today is Election Day in the United States for the midterms, and that means an end to voter outreach. I wound up on the radar of Republican Tiffany Smiley's campaign to challenge Patty Murray for her seat in the United States Senate, and that meant a steady stream of text messages. As one of those text messages helpfully pointed out, whether or not one votes in any given election is a matter of public record. So, presumably, the Smiley campaign recognized that I am what many political types refer to as a "likely voter." Presumably this, and the fact that I live in a very White suburb of Seattle, prompted the campaign outreach, given that conversations with acquaintances didn't reveal a universal outreach effort.

The messages were generally pretty simple, basically doing little more than implying that Senator Murray was helping the wealthy and "special interests" and wasn't interested in helping "families." It was the typical appeal to an unspecified "change" that challengers to incumbents often put forward. For me, the overall effect was a resounding "meh." The fact that Mrs. Smiley's plan lacked any affirmative agenda or details of note meant that there was nothing there to potentially take issue with (because who's against fighting for families), but it made her main qualification seem to be the fact that she wasn't Senator Murray. And if that's the only criteria, then I qualify to be a United States Senator.

Someone running a longshot campaign needs to bring a little more to the table, in my opinion. I could be proven wrong, but I don't think that Senator Murray is in any real danger. If the current Republican establishment felt that there was a significant chance of Mrs. Smiley winning, former President Trump would have likely given her an endorsement, seeking to pad his win rate. The fact that he couldn't be bothered betrays a lack of faith in her prospects.

This is the downside of partisanship, when it comes to elections like this. Given that Washington is considered a solidly Blue state, Mrs. Smiley's campaign could likely be considered somewhat quixotic. But this in in part because she likely couldn't really tailor her message, policy ideas or tactics to the audience that she needed to reach, as doing so would have meant putting a remarkable amount of distance between herself and the broader Republican Party.

For now, I suspect, the nearly 20 text messages I've received over the last four weeks are likely to be the sum total that I'll hear from the Smiley campaign. And while I'll be happy that the campaign isn't blowing up my phone, I think that outreach could have had potential, had it not been so scattershot and last-minute.

One Of Us

I read part of an essay on Aeon, titled "The lethal act." The subtitle lays out the premise: "The Buddha taught not to kill, yet his followers have at times disobeyed him. Can murderers still be Buddhists?"

I have to admit that I lost interest and didn't finish reading the piece. Mainly because, I think, I'd already arrived at an answer: Of course they can. There are any number of rules-based philosophies in the world. Rarely, if ever, it is considered the case that violating even important rules is a complete disqualification from considering oneself an adherent of said philosophy. And in those cases were it is disqualifying, it tends to be because the the number of rules is very, very, small, such that they define the philosophy in and of itself. For example, one cannot both be a vegan and regularly choose to eat chicken sandwiches.

Of course, I'm not a Buddhist myself, and am not particularly well-versed in it. Perhaps the prohibition against killing is central enough to Buddhism that it does become the de-facto defining characteristic of the faith. But I've always understood Buddhism to be much broader than a particular stance on the value of life. I've always understood most religions to be rather complex in the way they look at, and interact with, the world, and defying attempts to boil them down into two or three things (let alone one) that people must always strive for. This may be a side effect of the fact that for a lot of philosophical viewpoints, religious and otherwise, the central tenet of the practice is fundamentally impossible. To use the example that I'm most familiar with, there is a general sense in the Abrahamic religions that one is called upon to be like God. But God is omniscient and omnipotent, two characteristics that human beings cannot realistically aspire to; and the remainder of God's divine attributes flow from those facts about it. So any quest to be like God is more or less immediately doomed to failure; this is not seen as being an impediment to being appropriately or properly Jewish, Christian, Molsem, Baháʼí or what have you. So I don't see why a failure to be like the Buddha should be considered much of an impediment, either.

But beyond the philosophical aspects of it all, a lot of these things are as much communities as anything else. I know a lot of people who are political partisans, and, as anything who has studied partisanship in the United States can tell you, consistency is not a requirement. Considering that even knowing and understanding a party platform falls, for most people, somewhere between entirely optional and a complete waste of time, adhering to a set of rules clearly isn't very important: so long as the group accepts how one behaves, that is. And I think it's the same with Buddhism. They're a community as much or more as they are followers of a religion. And as long as they have the support, or even simply the understanding, of that community, I'm not sure the rest of it matters.

Irregular

I was getting caught up on my podcasts, and was  listening to "Checks and Balance: Donkey years" from the Economist.

Charlotte Howard: Idrees [Kahloon], you've written a cover for us over the summer about the way Democrats talk about social issues; so beyond abortion, this sort of broader "wokeness" within the Democratic party. Have Republicans been successful in painting Democrats as culturally "out of touch" or focused on the wrong things; issues that regular voters don't really worry about? Or has the center of gravity in political debate really shifted from anything related to wokeness and cultural stuff back to the economy.

Mr. Kahloon's response was interesting. He talked about Democratic candidates who described themselves as Socialists, "Defund the police," what James Carville calls "faculty lounge talk" and gender inclusivity as things that Republicans were keen to talk about. But of those topics, only "Defund the Police" has anything to do with "being woke." Not that people understand "Defund the Police," either.

Because later, I was listening to "The Issues Worth $9 Billion In Ad Spending" from the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst, said that attacks against Mandela Barnes for supporting "Defund the Police" were inaccurate. Host Galen Druke pointed out that Mr. Barnes was in favor of moving funding from police to social workers and other services, such as crisis intervention/violence interruption. Which is pretty much the definition of "Defund the Police," regardless of whether Mandela Barnes has used the term directly.

Mr. Rakich noted that the popularity or unpopularity of the policies behind "Defund the Police" depend on how pollsters ask the question. Which is reasonable, but if people don't actually understand what the original policy description was, does that really make a difference.

My takeaway from all of this, as a Black American is that a major part of the problem that "Black America," as a population of people, has with advocating for its interests is a fundamental inability to shape and communicate perceptions around those interests. Staying woke, Defund the Police and Black Lives Matter all have this problem, in the fact that they have become cudgels for Conservative Whites to beat up Liberal Whites, rather than language for Black people to tell one another to remain aware of racial prejudices/biases, to advocate for reducing the law-enforcement response to disordered (rather than illegal) behavior and to hold themselves up as deserving better than to be treated as expendable props in public safety theater.

As much as I disliked "woke" as a term, and felt that "Defund the Police" was more or less asking to be misinterpreted, opening these up as fronts in the Culture Wars does a disservice. And the fact that the people for whom these issues are important were completely unable to prevent that demonstrates the degree to which Black Americans are sidelined in political discourse. Because aren't Black Americans who understand (correctly or not) that they live in a culture pervaded by racism "regular voters" too?

Hollowed

I was reading yet another article where the author focused on what they called an "empty promise." The term "empty promise" is a common one, referring not simply to a commitment (real or implied) that someone does not believe will be kept, but one that should, as a matter of morality or ethics, be kept. Of course, there is also a matter of relative importance. Most divorces, after all, render the vows the couple took "empty promises," yet that generally doesn't rise to the level of the common usage of the term.

The definition creates a contrast with a fulfilled promise, and that's the way many people typically understand it. A "promise" becomes "empty" once it becomes clear to someone that the perceived commitment that underlies it will not be kept.

But maybe it's more accurate to see all promises as empty at the start. Fulfilling a commitment is never as simple as making it. After all, talk is cheap, right? Rather than starting from a presumption that every promise made can be carried out, it may be better to evaluate what it would realistically take to do so; and therefore if people are being requested to make commitments that it's unreasonable to believe will be carried out.

A lot of promises remain "empty" simply by virtue of the fact that the party making the promise is not the party responsible, or empowered, to fulfill the promise. And it's easy to sign others up for things that it's unrealistic to ask of them.

Treating all promises as empty at the start, as something to to be filled, may help to drive an understanding of just what it being committed to, and who is being called upon to make that commitment. Which may not result in more promises being honored, but it might result in people counting on fewer of them. Which is useful enough, in its own way.

Off With Their Heads

The Google app that comes with Android phones is basically a portal to click-bait, celebrity gossip and low-end lifestyle content. It's rumored that there are ways to train it to serve up items that one finds useful and interesting, but I suspect that they would take more time than I am willing to devote to the project, given my results thus far.

In any event, I was attempting to sift through the banal flotsam that it had presented me, when I came across the "headline" that "Miss Argentina and Miss Puerto Rico reveal they secretly got married." Given the source, I immediately suspected that the headline wasn't all it was cracked up to be; while the implication was that the two beauty pageant contestants had married one another, I figured the actual situation was that they were simply married, and thus had been ineligible for the "Miss" appellation that these pageants require. Something of a scandal in pageant circles, sure, but not really a big deal.

For once, my reflexive cynicism led me astray, and it turned out that Mariana Varela and Fabiola Valentin had married one another. The headline had been genuine celebrity gossip click-bait. The internet was abuzz with stories of the two women. And one of those stories featured this photograph:

Who shows photos of a married couple from the neck down?

Hmm... I wonder who the target audience was?

I don't consider myself a feminist by any stretch of the imagination, but even I found this to be beyond simply poor taste. Sure, Mesdames Varela and Valentin are attractive women. They were, after all, at one point selected by some or another panel of judges to be among the most beautiful women in their home nation/territory. And there are certainly legions of "thirsty" men (and likely more than a few women) who are desperate for anything they can get of their bodies. But catering to that desperation in this way; by literally reducing the two to their bodies, feeds into an idea that considering their bodies to be the only thing worth valuing about them is legitimate.

To a degree, of course, this is kind of the whole point of the beauty pageant business; holding up a standard of femininity that pretty much begins and ends, with physical attractiveness. But at least the women are allowed to show their faces.

It's the common problem with any sort of attempt to drive social change on behalf of a group of people; self-advocacy is almost always necessary, yet almost never sufficient to bring about the desired end goal. Action needs to be broader than that.

To be sure, the whole story is, in a lot of ways, simply a chance for people to ogle two attractive women, and be titillated by the fact that they're less than entirely heterosexual. Former beauty queens marry all the time; winning national, or international, pageants doesn't come with a contractual obligation to remain single (and thus available for people's fantasies). I don't recall the last time I heard about such an event, let alone having Google decide that it was important enough for one of the very limited slots in their phone app.

Unhealed

The Week has "A complete timeline of Kanye West's antisemitism fallout." It's pretty much a recap of the past month of West/Yeezus/St. Pablo/Yeezy/Ye's (or whatever it happens to be now) railings against the Jewish population of the world and the scramble of various large companies and well-known brands to put some distance between themselves and Ye (which is apparently his legal name now), so as to avoid being tainted by him. If you didn't find any of this interesting enough to follow in real time, there's nothing really of interest in the article.

What's most interesting about it is what isn't present; any mention of his mental health. Although like any number of other people with mental disorders, he doesn't see himself as sick, and often says so. Apparently this is enough for people to treat him as if he's simply being a jackass, as opposed to someone who's suffering from a genuine disorder.

In general, there appears to be a dislike of acknowledging people as mentally ill. I think it's because it makes them less culpable for their actions. But it strikes me that there's something off about ignoring mental disease or defect because it's viewed as an impediment to pointing fingers, or punishing someone. If, as is seems the case, Ye is actually sick, simply telling him to knock it off isn't going to help. He shouldn't have the be shuffling down the street, drooling on himself or think that he's literally the Messiah for people to understand that.

Glory and Glamor

"A millennial who tried van life says it's just 'glorified homelessness'." Put another way, a millennial who attempted to follow in the footsteps of "influencers" learned that part of the work of being an influencer is hiding all of the effort that goes into maintaining their perfect Internet lifestyles. One of the headings in the Fortune article is "Lifestyle content isn’t everything it seems to be when you’re actually living it," something that I, for my part, took for granted. Mainly because I'd always figured it was a given that the messy part of life was rarely shown, because pretty much no-one aspires to it. And aspiration, and supposed shortcuts to achieving it, is the entire point of Internet lifestyle content.

But I suppose that's easy for me to say. After all, I'm 20 years older than the woman in the article. I've had significantly more time to develop media literacy and, having watched how social media came onto the scene, a skepticism that it was any more genuine than television (reality or not) had been.

Lifestyle content, and its predecessors in the media landscape, has always sought to tap into the audience's feelings that they could be living a better life than the one they currently are. And it's an understandable feeling. While I find the constant descriptors of everyday life as a "dystopian hellscape" tiresome and self-important (not to mention clichéd), I completely understand the generalized feeling that things should be better that underlies it. And so when people appear to offer straightforward ways of attaining a better life, it's perfectly reasonable that certain members of the audience would jump at the chance. It's no different than any other form of advertising; offering solutions to problems that require little more than a reasonable monthly payment.

There was a part of me, when I was younger, that believed, because I wanted to believe, that there were people who had found a way to make it without playing the game by the rules that had been set out for everyone to play by. I suspect that if there had been influencer culture when I was in my 20s, that I would have latched on to them as people living the dream, and sought to follow in their footsteps. Now, I know better... or am at least more suspicious of the sorts of quick fixes that the lifestyles of the glamorous seem to offer. (After all, I'm well aware that "glamor" originally meant "a magical spell or illusion.") But that also makes me cynical, and while I've come to enjoy that aspect of my personality, I understand that it isn't for everyone. Some people want to believe that the people they see on Instagram or TikTok are genuinely letting them in on ways to escape parts of their lives that don't work for them. And it's something of a shame that they come to feel that they've been on the wrong end of deliberate deceit. But I suppose that advertising has that effect on a lot of people, eventually.

In Triplicate

Yesterday morning, I went out for breakfast. While I was waiting for the food to be brought to the table I checked the Google app on my phone, to see what the latest news was. In the local news section, there were 15 articles in the carousel. Three of them were devoted to covering the same sexual assault story from the next county over.

And people wonder why the public's perception of crime doesn't match the reality.

There is nothing wrong with crime stories. They're news, just like anything else. And media outlets have settled on "if it bleeds, it leads" for a reason. But it is possible to over-cover a story. In the Google instance, that came in the form of presenting three stories from different media organizations about the same event. The inventive to present stories that will draw people in, so that they'll see whatever advertising messages are placed alongside the story, leads to a shift in the proportion of coverage. And those sorts of shifts shape perceptions, because most people don't have much firsthand knowledge of enough of the world around them to have an independent sense of what's happening in the broader world around them. In other words, even if one understands that the headlines may not paint an accurate picture of the real world, it takes a pretty expansive view things beyond the headlines to understand the ways in which the picture is inaccurate.

Didn't Do It

The news of the day is that Paul Pelosi, husband to Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, was attacked in their home in California by a conspiracy theorist. The political class was quick to offer verbal condemnations of the battery.

GOP Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., reacted to the attack, writing he is "disgusted to hear about the horrific assault on Speaker Pelosi's husband Paul," adding: "Let's be clear: violence has no place in this country."
Home intruder yelled 'Where's Nancy?' before attacking Pelosi's husband, source says

Unfortunately, this view is not as widely held as one might like it to be.

A majority (56 percent) of Republicans support the use of force as a way to arrest the decline of the traditional American way of life. Forty-three percent of Republicans express opposition to this idea. Significantly fewer independents (35 percent) and Democrats (22 percent) say the use of force is necessary to stop the disappearance of traditional American values and way of life.
After the Ballots are Counted: Conspiracies, Political Violence, and American Exceptionalism

And this is, in part, because people for whom violence is the answer when it comes to preserving "traditional American values and way of life" are often (potential) voters, too. Unless, that is, they're currently incarcerated for some impromptu preservation work, or ex-convicts in several states. And while some of the people who support use of force against those they see as enemies of the version of the United States they understand themselves to be entitled to would walk away from that position if the politicians they preferred came out strongly against it, many of them would simply look for new politicians to prefer.

It's that threat of lost votes, and lost offices, that mean that while people like Representative Scalise can be quick to stand up and speak out against violence directed at fellow House members, for a lot of Republicans (and likely some Democrats, too) tend to avoid talking about it unless there's been an incident that they feel the need to distance themselves from. (Like this one.)

But once one moves away from the political side of things, it's a different story. I know someone who a fairly devout follower of Donald Trump's brand of Republican party, and I mentioned to him that this was something of a bad thing for the Republican brand. Because even though people like this tend to be a bit too mentally ill to really described as partisan, the overly political nature of the attack would reflect badly on the party as a whole. He was having none of it, insisting that David DePape, rather than being someone who had gone off the rails, was actually a Liberal operative, who attacked Mr. Pelosi as a "false flag" operation to make Republicans look bad.

It's this sense, of being a member of a group that is on the correct side, and therefore incapable of any sort of wrongdoing, that grinds the conversation about political violence to a halt. Rolling Stone reported that Fox News sought to blame the attack on the Biden Administration and Speaker Pelosi herself, pointing to Democratic divisiveness and being "soft on crime." While seemingly absurd, it's a rational strategy for a media outlet that's built its brand on a certain level of partisan loyalty, and is expected to display that loyalty regularly.

It remains to be seen if this something that weighs down the low-propensity voters that Republicans are going to need, especially if they plan to retake the White House. But it offers and interesting view into the workings of the American political ecosystem nevertheless.

No, Not Like That

Rather than give up on the couple unit in favour of nothing at all, we should have been finding new units - units of friends and siblings and wasters who couldn't get a mortgage on their own. We should have used the opportunities presented by the breakdown of the traditional couple to create new and ever larger households, not smaller ones.

And we've still got time to buck the trend, but only once we stop being so sensitive to one another - only once we stop feeling sorry for singles, and start berating and hassling them.

Singletons are selfish

Because there's no better way to get someone to do what you think is best for them than by berating and hassling them. As someone who lives alone, I do so because I have the resources to do so. And I do, on occasion, meet people who give me a hard time about that, although, now that I am well past any reasonable age for first marriage, not as many as I used to.

And I would ask Zoe Williams (presuming that, after all this time, she still holds to her opinion) the same thing I've asked some more recent critics: "What's in it for me?" I understand that many can live more cheaply than one, given that I understand basic math, so clearly the financial savings are not a motivator. Getting people to form large households as some people seem to want, is a matter of no longer feeling sorry for single people. But it does require some sensitivity; after all, if you can't be bothered to get to know someone well enough to understand what they value, how do you give them a rational reason to go along with your desires for them?

While this example is both old and trivial, I think that it illustrates something that American (and apparently British) society could use some work on; understanding that when people don't need what one wants to sell them, just beating them about the head and shoulders is a poor substitute for a good sales pitch.

Wishful

The short-lived tenure of Liz Truss as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has drawn comparisons with the United States. Namely how quickly the Conservative Party in the UK decided that Ms. Truss was a disaster and had to go, versus the Republican Party's unwillingness to consign former President Donald Trump to the political wilderness.

The comparison is perhaps understandable, but it still inapt. Mainly due to one major difference. Britain's Conservative Party basically came to the conclusion that their interests were not served by Ms. Truss remaining Prime Minister. The Republican Party here in the United States, however, still believes that Donald Trump has their interests at heart, and will pursue them if he's returned to the White House. Note that in neither case did I say anything about the interests of the nation at large.

And that's because people don't generally see their interests as separate from, let alone at cross purposes to, those of their nation. And while a lot of left-leaning media types may see Donald Trump's policy desires as being just as bad for the United States as Liz Truss' were for the United Kingdom, Republicans don't agree with that assessment. And, as near as I can tell, there's no real reason for them to agree with that assessment. They're getting what they want, and they understand that what they want is what is in the best interests of the nation as a whole. The people who are hurt by it, or otherwise have problems with it, want, at least in the minds of many Republicans, something other than what's best for the United States. (Remember, the two parties tend to see the other as more extreme than is the reality of the situation.)

Democracy does not mean that people are gifted with an arbitrary level of enlightenment. It simply means that the franchise is broadly available. The ousting of Liz Truss is not a victory for British democracy; likewise, the continued popularity of Donald Trump in Republican circles is not a failure for American democracy. Both outcomes are merely a manifestation of how people see their own interests in the world.

Ghost Ship

The air in Seattle has been remarkably smokey recently. So much so, that for a couple of days, the air here was supposedly the worst in the world. What should be visible in this photograph is Alki Point, given that it's only a little over two miles away. But the smoke hides everything, save for a lone sailboat plying the waters of Elliot Bay.
 

Punitive

A lot of what appears to be hypocrisy in comparing how the law treats one person as opposed to another is born of the fact that many people understand the law to be a means by which society punishes bad people, rather a means by which it attempts to discourage bad actions. And to the degree that people make determinations of whether another person is good or bad based on factors other than said person's relationship to the particular law at hand, they appear, if not hypocritical, at least incoherent.

Artistry

Some remarkably good graffiti art on the side of a rail car. Someone could make a career out of this sort of thing.
 

And Stay Away

"Surveillance capitalism," as defined in Wikipedia, "is an economic system centered around the capture and commodification of personal data for the core purpose of profit-making." Or, pretty much exactly what you would expect from businesses that find themselves awash in personally identifiable information (known as "PII" in privacy circles) that can be used to help them to understand which of the tens or hundreds of millions of people in their markets may be prospective customers.

In any event, I was recently reading an article on one woman's attempt to escape the notice of the capitalists whom, if they found out that she was pregnant, would deluge her with advertisements for all of the things that she might need to purchase before, during and after the delivery. She, however, cognizant that there was a high risk that the baby might not survive long enough to be delivered, wanted to prevent the onslaught of solicitations. She eventually failed in this, and at about the same time she lost the pregnancy, the surveillance system, not being well-tuned enough to know better, tipped off its clients, and members of the baby-industrial complex, each hoping to be the recipients of her purchasing, swung into action. And since the surveillance system wasn't set up to understand that the attention was unwanted, the advertisements kept coming.

The article was a call for greater government oversight of how companies use personal information and make it difficult for people to avoid sharing it. And I, as a Certified Information Privacy Professional, get it. People's computing devices, whether those are dedicated computing devices or cellular phones, are designed to leak massive amounts of information about their owners and their habits. Cellular phones are the worst offenders, as even in households with a number of people, they tend to have single users, and companies that have finagled their way into being allowed to track the device's location can pretty much always tell precisely who that single user is.

But what prompted me to remember this piece was the author's contention that business finding out that she had been pregnant, and, not realizing that it was in the past tense, marketing to her was more than a simple invasion of privacy. [And here, I'm going to take a moment to define a term. "Privacy," in this context, refers to the ability to control when, how and under what circumstances a person reveals information about themselves to others. What makes the practice of "surveillance capitalism" a problem in this regard is that businesses are sifting through information that was not meant for them, often by granting themselves expansive rights to any information they can find about a person, and then treating that information as property of theirs.] She described the experience as one of "emotional harm."

It is, perhaps, a flaw in our legal system that many rules and regulations operate under a philosophy of "no harm, no foul." Because it prompts people to see the discomforts caused by the actions of others as harmful, in order to give themselves a cause for action. It shouldn't need to be that way. But the problem with capitalism, especially as it's practiced in the United States, isn't that it's necessarily rapacious. Oftentimes, it's simply needy. While diapers, for instance, are more or less a must-have for new parents, they're not exactly difficult to source. Any number of companies make them, and each of them is desperate to add whatever they can to the bottom line, under the watchful eyes of investors and stock markets. Companies compete to be top-of-mind for potential customers, and in a society that tends to deny that there is any such thing as bad publicity, the risk of a negative reaction may often be seen as worthwhile.

There is a strong case to be made that people shouldn't have to claim the emotional harm of being reminded that they've lost a pregnancy to be able to say: "Hey, knock it off." Of course, companies want to make it difficult. A term that I remember being bandied around during the debate over the "Do Not Call" list was "external willpower." Companies, believing that they can influence people, if only they have access to them, bristle at suggestions that they should be blocked from that access. There is, however, something to be said for "Don't call me, I'll call you," whether or not businesses want to hear it.

Coming Out

"We are just shocked by this result and it is so unjust," Lynn Chen, a cousin of Parkland victim Peter Wang, said. "How can he live another day?"
Parkland school shooting: Why the gunman was spared the death penalty

Aside from the fact that even a sentence of death by execution does not result in the sentence being carried out immediately, in the end, it is because three jurors voted against execution. But prior to that, because this is the way the system is set up. And the goals of the justice system are not to provide those who feel they have been wronged by a criminal, no matter how severely, with some sort of sense that someone is acting on their direct behalf.

According to Benjamin Thomas, the jury foreman: "That's how the jury system works. Some of the jurors just felt [life in prison without the possibility of parole] was the appropriate sentence." And Mr. Thomas is right. There's nothing about what happened that lies outside of Florida law. But that's procedural justice. What many people are looking for is what is called substantive justice, or the idea that the outcome lines up with certain ideas of fairness; generally their own.

From my imperfect vantage point, it appears that a lot of people are expecting what the philosopher John Rawls termed "perfect procedural justice;" in other words, a legal process, that when followed correctly, results in the expected substantive justice. This, of course, goes beyond criminal courts. Many people (many members of Congress among them) expect that a properly decided Supreme Court case will result in the outcome that they (despite not being Supreme Court Justices themselves) have determined to be the correct one. Or that if an election is truly free and fair, then their chosen candidate will be the winner. And in this, the machine can be run both forward and backward. Since perfect procedural justice always results in a substantively just outcome, any outcome that deviates from a given standard becomes proof that the correct procedure was not followed. And at the end of that line of reasoning is the idea that one need not understand the machinery itself, since the outcome tells one all one needs to know.

(I think that this is part of what drives a certain dislike of expertise; attempting to explain that Florida law makes the sentencing phase of a trial into a form of "pure procedural justice" is taken as a complex, and false-hearted, argument against genuine justice, rather than simply laying out how the system works, and perhaps why it works that way.)

The disconnect between procedural and substantive justice can be difficult to accept, especially in situations where one is on the wrong side of said disconnect, because people generally understand genuine substantive justice as mirroring their personal understanding of what is fair. And so a procedure of justice that produces the "wrong" answer is obviously unfair. But the reason why societies must fall back on procedural justice is that fairness is personal, accordingly, there are few, if any circumstances, in which any given outcome will be seen as fair, and thus conforming to the rules of substantive justice, for any and all people. And given the general propensity of people to be inconsistent in their understandings of fairness, an observer might well conclude that a system that perfectly aligned with any one person's  understanding of substantive justice was, in fact, wildly arbitrary, having no predictable rules at all other than giving the individual whatever they wanted the outcome to be.

But such is the way of things, given that people tend to believe that their own conceptualization of justice exactly aligns with whatever the objective ideal of justice is. But in a society of hundreds of millions, the lack of a clearly objective ideal means that any number of people are set up to be disappointed.

No Wrong Moves

During a Trump rally on Saturday in Minden, Nevada, [Alabama Senator Tommy] Tuberville, a retired college football coach, claimed that Democrats are "pro-crime" because "they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparation because they think the people that do the crime are owed that. Bullshit. They are not owed that."
NAACP president: Sen. Tommy Tuberville's comments about reparations are 'flat out racist'

As you may have guessed from the headline, cue the "outrage." NAACP President Derrick Johnson might as well have reached into his deck, pulled out a strongly worded form letter address: "To Whom It May Concern" and simply had someone put the address to Senator Tuberville's office on it. It was a rally for Donald Trump with a Senator from Alabama in attendance. What else was anyone expecting?

While it's difficult to believe that there were people who didn't get the memo after the 2016 election, "deplorables" cast votes, too. And they charge the same thing for their votes that everyone else does; having politicians parrot their viewpoints back to them in public. And in a nation where negative partisanship is as strong as it is now, those Republicans who disagree with Senator Tuberville are just going to pretend that he never said anything, because there's no benefit in placing themselves on the wrong side of people who would otherwise vote for them by denouncing him.

While I'm not a political junkie by any means, I'm not completely uniformed. Yet, I'd never heard of Senator Tuberville before media outlets started reporting on the coffeepot conflagration that his rally performance provoked. Now, his name is everywhere. And for what?

Alabama is already synonymous with backwardness, intolerance and racism. Anyone who hasn't made their peace with that is very behind the times. So it's not like this is going to have any political fallout for the Senator. And for Donald Trump? he knows which side his bread is buttered on. For him, it's a twofer... "the libs" sputter in apoplexy and the former President takes their attacks on him and uses them show his supporters that he, and by extension they, are persecuted. And for Black Republicans, well, they're not going to do anything that any other Republican wouldn't do... it's not like any of them have managed to carve out a position such that denouncing the apparent racism of their fellows is a path to electoral victory.

And yes, I said "apparent." It's not at all clear to me that Senator Tuberville was doing anything other than whipping up the crowd in a way that he knew would work to his political benefit. Sometimes, people use racist language because they're actually racists, and sometimes, they use racist language because it gets a rise out of people they don't like. Here, I genuinely suspect the latter, and people are lining up to take the bait.

National Public Radio went with the headline: "Alabama Sen. Tuberville equates descendants of enslaved people to criminals." Which may be true, but it requires making a link between the Black population in America today and the former chattel slaves of more than a century ago. And honestly, I don't think that many of the people at that rally bothered to make that connection. What they heard was yet another take on the same old idea: That the Democratic Party wants to give money to people who were lazy, shiftless and had no respect for the law at their expense. And even for those audience members who made the connection, as far as many of them are concerned, slavery is just an excuse that Black people give for being lazy, shiftless and having no respect for the law. Again, this isn't anything new. Anyone who's been within 500 miles of the Mason-Dixon line (or a Conservative think-tank) in the past half-century should be well aware of this line of reasoning. This horse is so dead that it's practically fossilized. Why are people still pointing out that it's being beaten?

The outrage machine no longer has any reason for existing than to produce less and less effective outrage. And so it's now at the point that it simply spirals. Politicians make comments that spark "outrage" so that their supporters can be "outraged" at the supposed outrage. I'd be surprised if Senator Tuberville doesn't already have fundraising e-mails calling on voters to donate to him that feature all of the people who have lined up to call him a racist.

But I guess that's really the point. It's not that American society never learns; it's that it learns quickly, and well. Outrage, though its ability to motivate people to give money and give votes, grants power. Once a person has a loyal following, there is no punishment that can be meted out that will deter those followers from seeing the object of their adoration as unfairly martyred for standing up for what's right. The idea that what's right generates opposition becomes a positive incentive to incite opposition as proof of one's own righteousness. And the only people who lose at this game are the ones who won't play.