Debased

One example includes a tweet from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and an interview from Kanye West that baselessly argue the vaccine would be the "Mark of the Beast," or a biblical reference to a societally restrictive scar imposed on people by the Antichrist.
Influencers played outsized role in pushing anti-vax conspiracies

First off, just as a point of accuracy, the mark of the beast is not, in Christian mythology, "societally restrictive." Quite the opposite; it's seen as the ticket to being able to freely trade. In Rome, only official coins could be used for trade, and, one theory puts it, certain Jews saw this as the mark of the beast, as they considered Roman Emperors to be agents of evil. Early Christians continued this, and it made its way into the book of Revelation. In any event, the Axios story literally has it backwards.

But more importantly, what would be a legitimate basis for a story concerning the supernatural? As far as most non-Christians are concerned, of course the arguments from Representative Greene and Kanye West are baseless; non-Christians (more or less by definition) give no credence to the Biblical prophecies in Revelation, or to Christian eschatology more broadly. Not to mention that for non-Christians, the Antichrist is basically irrelevant.

"Baseless" is becoming a go-to criticism, as it implies that something should not be believed, but without needing to go our on a limb and directly label it as either mistaken or deliberately untrue. In that sense, it's become what could be called a "lazy" way of attacking something. But it's also become something of a media buzzword, and, as such, is only trotted out under certain circumstances, more or less independently of the nature of the thing in question. Consider the idea that almost all faith, especially of the religious sort, is technically "baseless." That's part of the definition of faith; if it could be conclusively shown to be true, one wouldn't need to take it on faith. But for a media organization in the United States to openly describe the idea that Biblical prophecy was coming to pass in the world as we know it to be baseless would be regarded as a blunder of the first order. High-level executives would be called to account by religious leaders and politicians alike for the perceived insult to the faithful.

The partisan way in which the term "baseless" has come to be deployed is starting to rob the world of a formal meaning, and replace it with "things people say that we're so feed up with we can't even be bothered to refute it anymore." Which, on its own, is fine. It's just a part of the evolution of language. But it's also part of what makes a lot of the news that's available to the public the domain of political "hobbyists." When media parrots this or that fraction of public opinion back to the people who hold it, no education or enlightenment is part of the process.

A Shot In The Dark

One of the primary reasons why the "debate" on access to guns in the United States never goes anywhere is that it tends to be argued on primarily ideological and mythological grounds. Russia has a quite large, and quite competent, army. An armed Ukrainian public can certainly make a long-term occupation of the country difficult, but that's not the same as making it either impossible, or unfeasible. After all, Russia lies on Ukraine's eastern border, and in Ukraine's eastern provinces, there is quite a bit of support for closer ties with Russia, if not outright annexation. This isn't another Afghanistan.

On the American political Right, there is the idea that the armed citizen, standing up for themselves can take on anyone's soldiers on an equal footing. That's a fantasy. Even the American Revolution, which is often viewed as an example of what patriotic citizens can do, was fought with the open assistance of other rivals of Great Britain. And part of the reason why the Confederate States of America were unable to force the Union to recognize their secession was other nations were reluctant to come to their aid.

In the end, yes, it's not really possible to subdue a population in which every man, woman and child is prepared to die fighting than to live under the rules of an occupying power. But when was the last time that happened? During the Second World War the United States was supplying the French Resistance with weapons, yet the country still required an Allied invasion to liberate it. And the German government supplying weapons to its citizen did nothing to prevent the Allies from invading and partitioning the country between themselves.

The Second Amendment was written at a time when it wasn't presumed that the United States would have a full-time, standing, army. If a nation is calling up citizens to form a military in times of need, it makes sense for those citizens to have regular access to weapons; it allows them to train (since an untrained citizen, armed or otherwise, can be more of a liability than an asset) and it makes it more difficult for an enemy force to capture the local supply of weapons when they aren't all stored in one place.

But the idea that "Russians don't have a prayer" simply because of the distribution of guns to the population of Ukraine is a fallacy. Were it that simple, President Volodymyr Zelensky wouldn't have been looking for more direct military defense assistance. But memes are designed to be punchy, not realistic.

Easy Answer

You may have seen this picture before. Or one like it. Someone posted this sign a couple of miles from where I live back in 2009. There was another sign like it, which read "Cut Spending," just down the street from me. And as someone who always carries a camera around with them, I took some pictures. After I posted some of them online, they popped up all over the place. Every so often, I look around for them. One was even used by The Atlantic. Or at least a crop of it was.

Turns out there's a thriving industry of businesses that take photos from the internet, modify them in some way, then sell the modified photo as their own work. It's a hazard of posting photos on Flickr. Or anywhere online, really.

But that's beside the point.

The point that I wanted to make here is that being anti-taxes is easy. Normally because most people who are anti-taxes are really anti-money-going-to-people-they-don't-like. People advocating for cutbacks in services that they actually use and value is fairly rare. Or, as the saying goes: "There's government spending, and then there's my government spending." And so people fight over whose ox is going to be gored.

There is an easy way to lower tax burdens, and most politicians have figured out what it is; simply borrow the money. Citizens receive the services they want and avoid taxes they don't want. At least for a time. Although, to be sure, it might be quite a long time. And it may turn out to be sustainable. A change in the economy might generate enough revenue to retire debts that previously lacked the funding sources to properly service them. It's a gamble, but gambles sometimes do pay off. The question here is how many people understand that they're rolling the dice?

Think Positive

I was listening to an episode of the "Checks and Balance" podcast from The Economist where the topic was Affirmative Action in the United States.

My general opinion is that Affirmative Action is something of a bad policy. Not because it can't do as it's intended to do, but because the intention itself is off-kilter. The answer to one group of people hoarding opportunities is not to break their stranglehold on it in favor of allowing members of other groups to hoard opportunities, too. And the reason is because that becomes a matter of redistributing wealth. And it's not possible to redistribute wealth without, at the same time, redistributing poverty. And the newfound recipients of poverty (and those who fear that they will be) will start fighting to not have to accept it.

So the answer to hoarding opportunities is to grow the available pool of opportunity rapidly enough that it outstrips the would-be hoarders' ability to lock it away from others. The problem that the United States has is that it ignores opportunity hoarding, because of a pervasive narrative that opportunities can be created at-will by anyone who is willing to work hard enough. In this understanding, rags-to-riches stories are treated as the sort of thing that everyone can aspire to and the systemic barriers that locked certain people out of them are things of the past. But at the same time, actively assisting people in making these sorts of things happen for them is viewed as suspect. The person who needs help to be successful proves themselves unworthy of success. And it is in that gap in the system that opportunity hoarding thrives. Most Americans are not invested in each others success, seeing it, I believe, as a threat to their own.

But being invested in the success of others is the way out of the Affirmative Action dilemma. And it may require a reworking of the definition of success, from something that benefits the successful person at the expense to those around them to something that benefits everyone, and thus, is worth sharing. (Too many people posit that their success benefits those around them primarily as a way of arguing that it makes up for their unwillingness to pay taxes.) Once the United States is at a point of collaborative, rather than competitive individualism, it becomes more likely that the opportunity hoarding that drives the need for current Affirmative Action policies will lessen.

Invaluable

Because someone must die for a transplantable heart to be made available, there is rightfully an ethical imperative to ensure that the ‘right’ person receives the organ.
Richard Gibson “The Heartless Matter of Organ Transplantation and COVID Vaccination”

The “right” person, huh? And how on Earth is that determined? Mr. Gibson suggests that “it is simply a matter of maximizing outcomes and minimizing risks,” and “getting the best ‘value-for-money’.” But then he goes on to suggest that some failures to minimize risk are less salient than others. Not being vaccinated against the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a legitimate reason to be denied an organ. But putting oneself at risk by engaging in extreme sports is not. But if it makes sense to say that a person who is vaccinated against the virus is a much less risky investment than an unvaccinated person, why shouldn’t the hobbies of the extreme sportsperson be taken into account?

There is, in my opinion, nothing wrong with creating some sort of risk criteria when deciding how to distribute a scarce resource, especially one that some group of people need to ensure their continued survival for a time. By the same token, there’s nothing wrong with deciding, as the person or persons in control of a scarce resource, that it will go to people whose values best align with one’s own. But using one as a cover for the other strikes me as disingenuous. I tend to be of the opinion that people are generally partisan and arbitrary; they make decisions based on what they understand their interests to be, and then attempt to slot them into a greater framework. Not out of dishonesty, but out of culture and upbringing. I don’t believe that I’ve ever encountered a person who adopted an ethical viewpoint under which the decisions that they were accustomed to making on a day-to-day basis were considered wrongful without some explicit desire to change those decisions.

While there is something of an understanding that all human lives are precious beyond measure, in the everyday world lives are worth the resources that people are willing to marshal to protect and extend them. Mr. Gibson hints at this when he notes that the people who die while waiting for organs to become available to transplant are “deemed less worthy” than those who are given organs. A bit earlier in the article, he was more direct: “Some people are more deserving of organs than others.”

But what makes one person deserving and another not, at the end of the day, are the triage decisions of the people in control of the procedure. Those they prioritize to save become more deserving. Those that must be deprioritzed become less worthy. So why not own those decisions? If not being vaccinated is automatically too risky to be allowed to receive a transplant, but endangering one’s life out of a sense of sportsmanship doesn’t upset the ‘value-for-money’ calculation, why not just own up to the idea that the final decision has more (or less) to do with factors other than a “simple” years-of-life determination?

There is no way to distribute a scarce resource in such a way that those who receive less than they feel they need (or nothing at all) will be forced to concede that the distribution was “fair.” When it comes down to it, “fair” often simply stops having any meaning to the person being told that they’re going to die due to being the 11th in line for 10 life-saving transplants.

The idea that “there is rightfully an ethical imperative to ensure that the ‘right’ person receives the organ” presupposes that there is one “right” person every time there is an organ to be received. That there is some calculus that can be done that consistently places one person on top of the heap. But people have never worked this way. It has never been possible, as near as I can tell, to boil ethics down into a form of mathematics. The difference between 2³ = 8 and prioritizing one set of patients over others is that 2³ = 8 is always free of any value judgments.

Of course, the thing that I’ve realized while writing this is that even the expression of values is driven by values. People hide their value judgments because they understand that being seen as free of them is valued. I value openness, so I prefer people to wear their values on their sleeves. I wonder how well that irony is appreciated.

Cheap-Cheap

I was reading a story on Axios, about gender differences in "the Great Resignation," and how those were tied to the accessibility of child care. Near the end of the story is this sentence: "And the availability of affordable, high-quality child care remains a growing problem."

I'm not really a fan of the way that "affordable" is typically used. Mainly because affordability is a relative term. What is affordable to one person may be out of reach for another. But it's become a way of describing something as inexpensive that isn't meant to evoke poverty.

Taken this way, if one talks about the availability of inexpensive, high-quality child care, at least one problem becomes evident. For something to be both high-quality and inexpensive, the resources needed to attain the requisite level of quality need to be fairly plentiful. And is that true of the resources that go into child care? Now, I haven't worked with children in a very long time, but I remember it as a very labor-intensive industry. And while people are most certainly not a scarce resource in the scheme of things, well-educated people who are good with children and willing to spend long periods of time with them just might be. Especially if they can find other work that pays better. When I stopped working with children, I started doing quality-control work for video game software. For the same hourly wage. The benefits weren't quite the same, but given that it was a much lower-stress role, I didn't feel the need to take time off as often as I had before.

By the time I'd worked my may into testing productivity software, I was making double what I had been as a child and youth care worker. And the benefits were better. That's a hard thing for working parents to compete with.

It's also only part of the equation. There's the physical space that a child-care business needs to occupy and the materials needed to keep it operation. And there are likely other personnel requirements. Sometimes people can do double-duty, but if they aren't be paid for the other work, it just lessens the effective salary of the role.

In this sense, the use of the word "affordable," rather than "inexpensive," hides some of the constraints that are built into the system. Maybe making those constraints more apparent will create room to better understand, and perhaps then solve, the problem that people perceive.

Love to Love

Why people still believe in the 'soulmate myth'. Perhaps because the single actual couple that is interviewed for the story first met when they were aged 8 and 10, were married before 21, and now have been happily married for 23 years?

Despite featuring multiple marriage experts and counselors, the story is bookended by the Hannah and Sam story, and the couple absolutely believes that they're soulmates. If even a story that purports that soulmates are a myth apparently buys into the idea that soulmates are a thing, and they make for effortless long-term relationships, why shouldn't people believe?

Hannah and Sam are presented as precisely what the article claims does not exist; people who were made for one another. There's nothing about them having to learn to work through problems in their relationship, or needing to understand that maintaining a lasting relationship involves effort. It's just two middle-aged people who met as children and are still the perfect couple. They're held up as, effectively, proof that soulmates can happen. So why should other people give up on the idea that the perfect person for them will simply fall into their lap? Why should people believe that soulmates are a myth when here are two of them right there?

Of course, given that today is Valentine's day, a story on the heartache and stress that relationships can bring, and than many people overcome, wouldn't likely have proven as popular as a half-hearted debunking of the idea of perfect and effortless love. But I suspect that a full-throated approval of the alleged "myth" would have been just as engaging. And more honest.

Risky Business

One of the central topics of discussion concerning the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been people's tolerance for risk. But one item that could perhaps use more discussion is how people determine who is a risk.

I was chatting with an old acquaintance who was somewhat put out by a tendency to treat the unvaccinated as modern-day lepers.

"Well, doesn't it stand to reason that a person is more likely to have an infectious disease if they are unvaccinated than if they are vaccinated?" I asked.

My acquaintance agreed that it did, but that this was no reason to treat all unvaccinated people as infected.

At which point I reminded them of an earlier conversation, in which they had agreed with the premise that it was appropriate for White people in the United States to treat Black people as agents of violence and anarchy, because Black people were over-represented in crime statistics. And that this was true even if they didn't know whether the Black person in question had a criminal record.

I pointed out to my acquaintance that they didn't have hard numbers on things like the number of people who were currently infected with SARS-CoV-2 or the number of Black people who had committed crimes in the past year or whatever. But absent those numbers, they considered it appropriate to conclude that one group of people was a threat and another was not, even though the same general criterion, more likely to X, was being employed.

It wasn't mean to be a gotcha, but rather to point out that for many people, these sorts of considerations aren't about the hard numbers, but about in-group versus out-group identification. Because "biased" has become such a dirty word in American English, I think that a lot of people have difficulty owning up to the idea that they may, in fact, be biased, especially when it comes to whether or not certain other people should be seen as embodying some sort of risk. Because, of course, the situation works both ways. I know people who would bristle at the idea that Black people represent some sort of generalized risk, but not at the idea that the unvaccinated do.

Thinking on it, I suspect the reason that this particular failure of risk analysis doesn't receive more attention is the simple fact it's already understood that people are poor at assessing risks and why. Simply pointing out to people that they tend to think of out-groups as more risky than other people likely doesn't really add anything to the discussion.

Unhoused

A man, and his dog.

Seattle has a fairly substantial population of homeless persons, and that number seems to have grown recently despite the eviction moratorium that was put in place during the pandemic. To be sure, the moratorium has ended, but the homeless population was already rising.

What's to be done about reveals a classic case of people wanting solutions, but not wanting to pay for them themselves. Many people in the area have done fairly well for themselves in terms of increasing the equity in their homes, and there really isn't much of anything to be done about homelessness that doesn't reduce the values of people's homes, given that, when it's all said and done, what we're dealing with is a matter of supply and demand.
 

Up A Notch

[Oxfam] believe[s] that this growing economic divide is leading to death – from starvation, from lack of health care, from climate disasters, from gender-based violence exacerbated by financial pressures.

To describe these consequences, they use the term "economic violence," a term used in academic circles to describe the harm caused by, for example, taking away someone's income or damaging their property.
Oxfam says the rich got richer in the pandemic, and the wealth gap is killing the poor

It would have been nice for National Public Radio to state which "academic circles" they were referring to, but I know better than to expect that by now. In any event, I decided to look up "economic violence," because the term is new to me, and I've learned that when punchy new language comes on the scene, it's not always being used in the spirit in which it was coined. I found a definition in the European Institute for Gender Equality's "Glossary of definitions of rape, femicide and intimate partner violence," and that lends it more context than the NPR mention did.

Proposed definition of economic violence
Any act or behaviour which causes economic harm to the partner. Economic violence can take the form of, among others, property damage, restricting access to financial resources, education or the labour market, or not complying with economic responsibilities, such as alimony.

Personally, it strikes me as an over-broad definition of "violence," but I can understand the viewpoint, as the document seeks to catalog the ways that people do injury to one another in the service of gender-based violence.

I wonder, however, about the escalation in rhetoric. While definitions of violence have expanded to encompass fairly minor acts, such as "a verbal insult," I don't think that the common conceptualization of violence had caught up to it yet. That is, the mental picture that people have of violence is narrower, and more severe, than the conceptual space that many definitions of the term have sought to fill. At least here in the United States, anyway. Perhaps people in Europe have a broader understanding that takes into account that anything from skipping a child support payment to outright warfare all count as violence, and so there's a need for greater nuance than the word alone can provide.

I'm somewhat bummed that I came to a fascination with the way language evolves so recently. I wish that I'd paid more attention to linguistics when I was in high school and college. But, latecomer or not, here I am and one of the nice things about watching the evolution of language is that there isn't a bad seat in the house.

I don't know how long this will be top-of-mind for me, but I think I should keep an eye on terms like "economic violence," and see how they propagate through societies. I suspect that its inclusion in the NPR piece will lead to it popping up in other areas, especially if NPR's audience starts to expect to see it in other outlets they frequent. And given the partisan nature of discourse in the United States, it's likely to be enlisted in the Culture Wars. But only time will tell.

Not This Again

I wanted to write something today, but couldn't think of anything interesting. Not that there aren't interesting things going on in the world, but I couldn't think of anything insightful or interesting or thoughtful to say about them. Everything I thought of was something that I'd said before.

And I wonder if there isn't a larger insight into the world in that. That, as individuals, maintaining the level of personal change and evolution to consistently see the world with fresh eyes is difficult. I know, or at least I think I know, how I see the world, and what I understand its fundamental nature to be. Whether I'm correct in my perceptions is another thing, entirely. And I suspect that in order to test my theories, I'll need a better sounding board than my own thoughts.

But perhaps this is where all of the posts and things that I've written in the past could come in handy. I know that I tend to repeat myself; making points that I've made before or quoting old statements when they seem useful. But maybe the time has come to revisit some of the things that I've written in the past, and use those as challenges to myself in the present.

I know, for instance, and I no longer use the Label: "Rampant Idiocy" for posts, because I've decided that I should stop calling other people stupid. Perhaps it's time to look back at those posts and explore those topics without the sneering and snark that I first approached them with. There are worse ideas, I suppose.

It's one of the pitfalls of attempting to be a long-term blogger without really understanding the art and the science of being a writer. Granted, the point behind this blog was to help with that understanding, but maybe this isn't the sort of thing that one becomes proficient in from being self-taught.

Das Jerk

For University of California Philosophy Professor Eric Schwitzgebel, some people's actions concerning the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic earn them the label of "jerk."

I have a theory: Jerks are people who culpably fail to appreciate the intellectual and emotional perspectives of others around them. Let me unpack this a bit.

Jerks fail to appreciate others’ intellectual perspectives. Those who disagree, they see as idiots. They don’t recognize that their preferred opinions might be mistaken. They have no interest in exploring alternative views. Conversation aims at winning, or embarrassing another, or simply announcing the truth they know. Listening with an open mind is for other people.

Fair enough. I suspect that many people know the type and would agree with the good Professor that the label of jerk applies here.

And in the interest of helping readers to stay within their ethical responsibilities to their fellow people, Professor Schwitzgebel offers four guidelines on how not to be a jerk:

• Be open.
• Adhere to rule and custom.
• Be willing to compromise.
• Don’t inflict unusual risks or costs on others without their consent.

So far, so good. But there is also this:

And some perspectives are too foolish or noxious to deserve appreciation—for example, the perspective of a neo-Nazi. Sympathetically understanding Richard Spencer’s politics is optional.

Sigh. And it all looked so promising...

Not that I'm of the opinion that neo-Nazis are great people. But the carve out, that intentionally failing to appreciate the intellectual and emotional perspectives of another person ceases to be culpable when that other person is bad, opens a yawning chasm of a loophole in Professor Schwitzgebel's theory of jerks, and as is common with Nazi comparisons, nothing is done to close it.

It is, generally speaking, a given that neo-Nazis are foolish and/or noxious in the extreme. That's why they're so commonly held up as the example of How Not To Be A Good Person. But they aren't the only foolish or noxious people in the world.

Professor Schwitzgebel makes the point that:

If someone thinks—however falsely, in your opinion—that your breathing maskless puts their life at risk, you can pull up your mask out of politeness and in acknowledgement that you might be wrong.

But what if I consider that opinion to be so false that it lands squarely in the category of foolish? Am I then entitled to blow them off without being culpable? I mean, if I decide that someone is just being unintelligent or is secretly a control freak who enjoys bossing others around, aren't recognizing that my opinion may be wrong or listening with an open mind optional?

My point here isn't to make a slippery slope argument that one starts with being rude to Nazis, and the next thing one knows, they're rude to any and everyone. It's that no-one understands themselves to be a jerk, and the loophole explains why. When people refuse to be open, adhere to rules and customs, enter into compromises or avoid saddling others with unusual risks or costs. they do so secure in the understanding that they're on the right side of things.

What makes someone a jerk is the subjective determination that the people they were being jerks to shouldn't have been lumped in with the foolish or noxious. But when those aren't objective determinations, whose opinion holds sway? Using Nazis as the point of comparison doesn't answer that question. It simply avoids the conflict. But if there is going to be an understanding that certain people don't warrant the respect that others are due, the understanding of how to draw that line needs to be shared. And therefore it needs to be discussed. And references to Nazis, either neo- or original, are seldom conversation starters.

Noncommittal

The Week's Damon Linker asks: "Are Republicans the only ones abandoning democracy?" He then references a Ross Douthat column in the New York Times that points fingers at everyone.

I have trouble understanding how this is news.

There is a degree to which one can understand that in a Democracy, the populace determines what they will do, or not do, by a majority vote. But one can take that a step further and say that the populace determines what, for them, is right or wrong, ethical or unethical, by that same vote. I can think of very few people, regardless of their political leanings, with whom this sits well.

And to the degree that any given person believes that some outcomes are simply off-limits, no matter how many people vote for them, they are skeptical of mass democracy. The primary factor that drives the current debate about the topic now is that Democrats believe, with some justification, that in a nation that lacked the tools of gerrymandering and restrictive rules concerning voting, they'd be better placed within the halls of power than they currently are. Former President Trump's protestations that the 2020 election was rightfully his come across as somewhere between sour grapes and the scheming of a thwarted thief.

But I generally find that it isn't particularly difficult, for any given person, to find some electoral outcome that they believe is both plausible and unacceptable. Mr. Douthat's observation, as related by Mr. Linker, that liberal and progressive America believes that some areas of governance should be handed over to experts and the public kept out of it likely occurred years ago to anyone who has been paying the least bit of attention.

In practice, I suspect that fewer people are committed to democracy than they are convinced that, left to it's own devices, the public will generally agree with them on those things they understand to be important. And so they will never be forced to choose between following the expression popular will and their living their convictions in daily life.

What threatens democracy in the modern United States, more than anything else perhaps, are the monstrous caricatures that partisans draw of one another. The more that political opponents view each other as willfully perverse to the point of deliberate evil, the less likely they are going to see the prospect of an electoral victory by them as something with low enough stakes to be allowed to stand. And democracy demands that the losers in any election see that defeat as having less-than-existential stakes for them. When a commitment to democracy is seen as anywhere between a vow of continuing poverty and signing one's own death warrant, defections are going to become more commonplace. I would have thought it was understood that there's nothing particularly partisan about that outlook.