Backing In

This caught my eye...

"Social-media companies deny quietly suppressing content, but many users still believe it happens. The result is a lack of trust in the internet."

This isn't the way the world works. The causal chain works like this: Social-media companies deny quietly suppressing content, but there is a lack of trust in the internet. The result is many users still believe it happens.

Of course, I'm being nitpicky here with grammar and the order of things, but I still think that there's something important here. What's really happening is that certain people have an understanding of the way "the Internet," or, more accurately, their social media platform of choice, should operate, and they take deviations from that mental model that disadvantage them to be evidence of deliberate action against them. They don't trust the social media powers that be, suspecting corporate executives of collaborating with the enemy, as it were, and the result is that they believe that any part of the internet not run by a known ally can be turned against them.

Distrust comes from a violation of expectations. And a lot of people expect that not only will "the Internet" just work, but that they never do anything that may legitimately be considered over some or another line drawn in the content-moderation code. Because it's always someone else's fault.

Now it's true that many web services are opaque. I've had Blogger/Alphabet take down pictures that I've posted here without telling me... had I not had occasion to look at some old posts now and again, I might never had discovered the removal. Had I broken some rule, and Alphabet simply didn't bother to tell me? Or were they stored on some server that was disconnected along the way? Who knows? And even if I were given an explanation, how would I validate it? I can't read code.

In my case, it's not a big deal. I don't real on whatever pictures I happen to post to my blog for my livelihood, or to get out some message of dire importance. But there are a lot of people who have put themselves in a position that they rely on Twitter or TikTok or what have you. And to the degree that this reliance gives them the feeling that they are owed something, their sense of grievance when they don't receive it will fuel their self-important narrative that someone's gunning for them.

Telltale Cart

I was on a business trip earlier this week, and took the chance to duck out of a team-building activity to get in some exercise and take in the local scenery by walking back to the hotel. About three blocks from my destination, I was coming up on a Roku building and saw a trio of shopping carts standing by the corner. They were piled with stuff, mostly clothes, but also some other odds and ends; the sort of things that were only saved from being garbage by the fact that they'd been collected in the carts.

There was a stand of trees nearby, with a rather conspicuous trail that meandered from a gap in the foliage to about 10 feet away from where the carts stood. There was a small clearing visible, with some milk crates and an overturned plastic chair. And just the hint of a tent. It wasn't exactly concealed, but it had been placed such that it was only partially visible from the sidewalk, and even then only for a short time. At any sort of speed, it was effectively invisible; I hadn't seen it when I was being dropped off the previous night.

Whomever it was that had come to call the place their home, I felt for them. Thunderstorms had rolled through the previous day and it had rained for seven or eight straight hours. Spending that time in a tent struck me as unpleasant, at best.

I turned the corner. A slight gap in the leaves revealed that there were two tents erected in the space; the standard dome-like camping tents that can be had from any half-way decent sporting goods store. A blonde woman looked up from what she was eating to look back at me. She appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties (not that I'm a good judge of age), clad in in a light sweatshirt. She regarded me suspiciously as I walked past. Perhaps she thought that I might call the police to roust her from the encampment.

I had no such intent. Her life was already likely more than hard enough without someone like me looking to make things even more difficult for her. As I completed the walk to the hotel, I idly speculated about the circumstances that had brought her, and whomever else shared the little clearing with her, to that place. It was an exercise in futility; possible reasons ran from horizon to horizon.

Left Behind

I was looking for the office supplies in the local "hypermarket" (really just a small department store that also sells groceries and hardware) when I walked past this. On its face, it's not all that interesting, but it reminded me of the toy industry of days past. Back in the 1970s and '80s one might expect to see the same thing; the young boys who were interested in these sorts of toys (or their parents) would take all of the figures of men and dragons and leave the female figures behind. Maybe someone would buy one or two, but for the most part, they'd languish on store shelves until someone decided that they needed to be moved to the bargain bin.

Manufacturers responded to this fact by making adjustments to the assortments of toys to a case (and thus, their manufacturing) to favor the toys that the target audience seemed most interested in, and with fewer of the ones that sold fewer units. Which makes sense, when one thinks about it. The side effect of this was that the female figures, which were generally less popular, tended to be less common.

But in the 1990s, there was something of a breakout in the secondary market for action figures and the like, especially in complete sets. This meant that the once-overlooked female members of a set of toys were now in high demand. And as collectors rushed to stores to pick up the new toys that were being produced, manufacturers responded by keeping the female figures rare. This practice, called "short-packing" squeezed retailers; in order to be able to meet the demand from collectors, they needed to buy more cases of toys than they otherwise would. This left them with a surplus of the more common figures, which often went unsold, because kids were often less interested in them, due to the market chasing adult collectors; people who had full-time jobs and a willingness to speculate that a set of plastic people and animals would appreciate in value at a rapid clip.

Eventually, the toy collector/resale market crashed, replaced by another fad, and toy manufacturers stopped tailoring their business models to the secondary market. And eventually, more balanced assortments became the norm again. But gender-role stereotyping in children's play is still a thing, and perhaps that explains why a squad of neglected Daenerys figures were hanging out in a box, wondering where everyone else had gone. Whether history will repeat itself, I can't say. But I did detect the hint of a rhyme.
 

Flat File

I was listening to some or another talking head go on about income inequality in the United States when a question came to me: How much would a day-care worker have to make in order to be able to afford day care for their own child?

I understand that it's something of a silly question, so bear with me. Most jobs that pay well in the United States have large customer bases, such that each beneficiary of a good and/or service need only put in a fairly small amount towards the worker's wages. Think about someone who makes automobiles. They put in a little work on a large number of vehicles in a year. If all of those vehicles are sold over the course of the year, they can get by on a relatively small amount from each sale. Of course, in reality the economics are more complicated, and there isn't a direct connection between how much automotive manufacturing workers' salaries and the number of vehicles sold. But consider a day-care worker. They interact with only a relatively small number of children over the course of a year. And so each family represents a bigger slice of their final wage. And so for them to make a relatively high salary, each of those families would have to pay a fairly large amount.

Of course, there are some exceptions to this, as there always are. Individual craftsmen who produce goods and services primarily or exclusively for the very wealthy can live well from the patronage of a small handful, or even one, customer, and certain low-wage jobs pull in so little from each individual customer that there simply isn't time to provide services to enough people to make a good living. In the end, however, if a business can create an economy of scale, it needn't charge customers as much money as a business that's unable to reach very far.

And this creates the catch-22 that many people who have low-wage, labor-intensive service jobs find themselves in. Unless the people they're working for are wealthy themselves, those employers aren't going to feel that they have money to be insensitive to prices. And as long as they're employed by people who are watching their budgets, they're unlikely to be able to make enough money to take advantage of services similar to the ones they offer.

The only real way out of this would be for a third party to subsidize the whole affair. Which, in effect, broadens the pool of paying clients without adding as much to the workload. Otherwise, the inequality between the parties is baked into the system.

Feeling the Heat

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released it's most recent reports.. Cue calls for action from people the world over who are concerned about the impacts on Earth's climate, and, in theory, its capacity to support human life. It's pretty much a given that there's no chance of humanity managing to avoid at least 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. Even 2 degrees is looking pretty dicey at this point. And there's nothing surprising about this. I recall learning about the Greenhouse Effect in the 1980s. (Popular Mechanics noted the Greenhouse Effect, and the fact that burning coal contributed to it, in 1912.) As Bill Maher pointed out, our generation has pretty much done nothing to address the problem. People have had other priorities.

And this isn't likely to change anytime soon. Because as Bill Maher also pointed out, the younger generation has much bigger idols than climate activists. The people they want to emulate, and the lives they want to lead are at odds with working to preserve the temperature status quo, just as it was when I was a young person. Hectoring messages from climate hawks are not going to change this. Finding a way to align incentives might. And this, to my way of thinking, is really the only way that humanity doesn't find itself attempting to bail its way out of the boat that it managed to drill a hole in the bottom of. The message of "pay for climate stabilization now, or pay to remediate the effects later" may be spot on, but it doesn't make the costs any more palatable, or reduce the feelings of poverty that make people so reluctant to pay anything.

Unless climate activism finds a way to make paying for a transition away from cheap, but damaging, fossil fuels seem like a clear benefit, rather than a burdensome tax, their message will continue to fall on deaf ears.

How It's Made

The U.N.’s rules were explicitly designed to prevent a repeat of the second world war’s horrors, from genocidal nationalism to might-makes-right acts of aggression.
China goes on the offensive over human rights

I've always been dubious about the idea that might does not, in fact, make right. Mainly because I have yet to see a system that successfully counters it without appearing to rely simply on greater might. This, of course, is guided by the nihilistic idea that ethics and morality are human constructions, rather than being some sort of transcendent Universal property of existence. (I am a nihilist, not in the sense that I believe that "nothing matters," but because I believe that things matter because they have been chosen, by some subset of humanity, to matter.)

The reason why the United Nations has been unable to prevent repeats of genocidal nationalism and might-makes-right acts of aggression is that its rules, explicit or otherwise, are not self-enforcing, so someone has to be willing to deploy force in order to uphold its mandates. And there are nations, like Russia and China, to name the ones that "the West" tends to be stereotypically concerned with, that have the ability to say, "I'll see your intervention force, and raise you nuclear missiles." Additionally, Russia exports crucial energy supplies to European nations and China does much of the world's low-cost manufacturing. This gives them the ability to engage in a certain level of military adventurism (much as the United States is often accused of doing), should they so choose, without needing to worry too much about the consequences. Similarly, when it comes to "respecting human rights," the powerful nations of the world (again, including the United States) have always been able to respond to "demands" from other nations for compliance with "who's going to make me?"

Whether one believes that intervention in the actions of other nations, whether they cross borders or not, are driven by principles or interests, either way, the general pattern is that some sort of coercion tends to be brought to bear. Whether that's economic sanctions or something more heated, it's considered a deployment of national might. Even if a nation consistently acts in accordance with some definable set of principles, without the ability to project force, they would be unable to effect change on the international stage. So whether or not might makes right, might is often the only real means of enforcement. And to the degree that nations are inconsistent in the applications of their stated principles, to all appearances, the world operates on nations using might to further their interests... and then complaining when other nations do the same. Not that I'm a believer in whataboutism or only the perfect being able to criticize. After all, a drinker can hold forth on the perils of alcohol just as easily as a teetotaler. Referencing principles without seeming to act on them, however, simply paints the target on one's own forehead.

Wandering Thoughts

Instead of having a defined beginning, middle, and end, the pandemic has taken on a different shape, one resembling the cyclical structure of pagan religions more than the linear unfolding of Christian eschatology.
Damon Linker "Philly's mask mandate is back, but it's got little to do with COVID"

I had to re-read that statement when I first came across it, because I found it bizarre. Not because the analogy was necessarily inapt, but it simply seemed out of place. It was an inauspicious start to the article. And while I understood the basic point, it never really improved from there. To be sure, I'm not really fan of public health theater or when organizations act because they perceive the need to be seen taking action. But sometimes, the criticism of same seems to be put forward simply so that one can be seen to be critical.

So, people in an affluent suburb get to decide for themselves whether to don a mask when entering a store or other interior space, but those in Philly will be forced by government fiat to do this because … redlining used to be practiced in the city? I honestly can't parse the statement or construct a coherent line of argument to justify it. (Your freedom was once restricted, so your freedom must be restricted now?)

The boneheaded comparison between redlining and mask mandates aside, I have to wonder if Mr. Linker has actually ever been to a low-income urban neighborhood. Lots of people in close quarters, generally low-level service jobs and multi-generational households seems like a recipe for an outbreak. And while his later point about widespread vaccination being something that would head off the need for ubiquitous masking, getting to a state in which "every person in Philadelphia were vaccinated" would likely require much more intrusive government action than a mask mandate. After all, the United States doesn't have large numbers of people who lack access to the vaccines. People are either hesitant, or face obstacles due to their jobs or the like. Getting shots into every arm is more work than it's sometimes made out to be.

For all that I found the article odd and its arguments off-kilter, reading it get me to think about the situation in a way that I haven't for a while. One of the things about partisanship in the United States and the Culture Wars that have become attached to that partisanship is that different groups of people tend to worry about different things, and the general pattern is to seek to impose restrictions on everyone, rather than make specific changes themselves. And the rationale behind this is some danger to the public.

In more liberal parts of the nation, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is considered the primary threat that people have to deal with, and so things like mask mandates and other restrictions are favored. In more conservative parts of the nation, non-traditional expressions of gender or discussions about the role of race in American history are considered threats, and so lawmakers are seeking to put broad public restrictions in place. And, of course, neither side sees the other side's fears as rational. Granted, as an observer, not all arguments are created equal. I'm somewhat impressed by the fact that someone can look at a worldwide pandemic and feel that precautions are overblown, and then turn around and tell people that their children reading a Toni Morrison book is some sort of intolerable harm. But I suppose that it doesn't have to make sense to me. My identity isn't caught up in any of this.

Thinking back on the comparison between responses to the pandemic and religion, I think it's more apt than I was inclined to give it credit for. Not that it makes any more sens to me than it did when I first read it, but because it's a reminder that much of what's going on is a matter of faith. Yes, in the case of the pandemic, there's a lot of medical knowledge in play, but the most recent wide-scale event of this nature was literally a century ago; there's a lot of extrapolation going on, and the resumption that we can take what's been learned from other events and apply it to this one. The somewhat random nature of a SARS-CoV-2 infection has already upended that somewhat. For most of the general public, belief is what they have to work with, regardless of the situation. And belief is hardly consistent. After all, people making the case that laws against public nudity constitute an imposition on personal freedom are considered crackpots. But requiring that one's face, along with one's genitals, remain covered is government overreach? To each their own, I guess.

Cookie Time

I kid you not...

"I do not like gay cookies": Conservatives vow to boycott Oreo over new ad

Anyway, who wants cookies?

There are plenty to go around...

The Culture Wars in the United States have always been, as far as I'm concerned, an exercise in inanity. Okay, so Mondelēz/Nabisco made a (fairly saccharine) video about supporting family members who are in the process of coming out as homosexual, and in the piece someone eats an Oreo. I don't know that I understand the fuss.

To be sure, while the Culture Wars have, for the most part, been waged from the American Right, this sort of thing is fairly common in American politics more broadly, as the socially reactionary and socially progressive factions of the public demand that corporations only speak out in ways that show support for the "correct" side. Both sides have cultivated an attitude of "if you're not with us, you're against us," and portray themselves as fighting back against the oppression of the overwhelmingly powerful Other. Given that the Right appears to be attempting to turn back the clock to the way things had been for hundreds of years, their claims that they're suddenly an oppressed minority come across as ludicrous on their face, but I'm not really the target audience for such protestations. Likewise, I don't know if the gains that gay people have made are quite as fragile as they're sometimes made out to be.

Either way, it illustrates the primary problem with looking to force organizations, especially profit-focused ones like corporations, into making these sorts of choices. They tend to side with the people who are likely to spend the most money. And not that conservatives don't eat Oreos, but I suspect that Mondelēz makes more money in urban and dense suburban areas than they do out in the sticks. Likewise, with it's headquarters in Chicago, it's a safe bet that most of the company's office employees are drawn from urban areas, and are thus setting the agenda. So it's unlikely that Mr. Shapiro's little crusade will ever amount to much of anything.

It may not have ever been intended to, though. And that's the other thing about the Culture Wars that makes them tiresome to non-combatants like myself. A good portion of it is grandstanding, and nothing more. There's no rational reason to assume that this boycott would catch on well enough to prompt the company to reconsider its stance. So what we're left with is a war of virtue signalling, where the supposed combatants are performing for their supporters, as opposed to trying to actually accomplish something.

Switchboard

Code switching — or changing behavior and speech for others’ comfort — is often used by Black people and other racial groups in majority-white spaces.
"Professionals are done code switching" LinkedIn News

I must not have gotten the memo on this one, because that's not what I thought "code switching" meant. When the term was first coined in linguistics, some 70 years ago, it referred to a sort of blending of language in a single conversation; the sort of thing that multi-lingual people might do when speaking with other multi-lingual people. In popular usage, it's had a number of meanings, from the informal (but stable) blending of different languages generally spoken by people within immigrant communities to the habit of "when in Rome, speak as the Romans do," so to speak.

It's this last meaning that's become caught up in the Culture Wars. When I first encountered the term, it referred simply to tailoring one's speech to the audience that one was speaking to; within the context of culture or language. So the simple fact that most of us likely speak differently to family or friends than we do at work wouldn't qualify, but a person who spoke Hopi at home speaking English at work would. My initial understand of the term centered around commonality; people adopting the common language and speech patterns of a group to which they belonged, but did not spend all of their time with. And it made sense; as someone who lacked the ability to code switch when moving between the suburban world of my upbringing and the urban and rural worlds that most of my extended family inhabited, I feld the deficiency when it came to being understood. Conversations often featured a lot of "what?" and "say that again." When I first went to college, I attended a Historically Black University, and my lack of familiarity with the way many the other students spoke resulted in my having difficulty understanding people for about the first month. And since I was the odd person out, it was on me to learn to understand them, and not the other way around. Enough facility with their language patterns and specific syntax and vocabulary to be able to code switch would have been remarkably helpful that year, and so I immediately saw the utility of the concept.

But language is always in flux, and the meaning of words, especially in popular usage changes over time. So I don't doubt that code switching has taken on the meaning that LinkedIn News ascribes to it. I suspect it started in circles far outside of my own, however, and so I'm just now learning about the shift.

What's also interesting about it is the social aspect of the new definition. Because it's generally understood that everyone is the hero of their own story, what makes things interesting is who the villains are. Having grown up on the edges of suburban Chicagoland, I spoke in much the same way my peers did. And with a teacher for a mother, there was a strong emphasis on getting thinks right, as defined by my schoolwork. And so to a lot of people, I "sound White." While in family settings, it simply made me sound strange, when I went to college, it marked me as deliberately "inauthentic."  For many of the people I encountered the differing speech patterns of White and Black people were the result of nature, rather than nurture, and so for me to speak and behave as I did was considered an affectation, performed to benefit myself within White society. It marked me as "fraternizing with the enemy" as it were; a sign that I valued being thought of well by others over being true to myself. I suppose that I should have realized that this idea would have lingered long enough for it to find its way into conceptualizations of social justice; but, to be honest, while I find the evolution of language and the movement of concepts to be fascinating, I don't normally pay that close attention.

The idea that code switching is carried out "for others’ comfort" is a logical one, given the current social milieu. But it also has the effect of vilifying those "others," who are presented as too fragile and brittle to work with the idea that there are people different from them in the world. Here I find irony; isn't everyone after their own comfort? As a freshman at the Historically Black University that I mentioned earlier, the discomfort that my speech and mannerisms created was palpable. As was my discomfort at their response. That mutual discomfort quickly became mutual hostility. Looking back on it, going to war with my classmates over it seems fairly extreme. In my defense, I was 17; the philosophical side of me had yet to be conceived at that point. Now that I'm an old man, however, I see the neediness that both sides brought to the conflict, and the anger that arose when those needs were unmet.

LinkedIn News is tapping into an idea that Black people need to be accepted by the broader society around for them for who they are, as they are; Whites should be secure enough in their power and resources to tolerate harmless differences such as how people speak and relate to others. But even if I believed in "should," it's still a very different thing than "is." The thing that I learned from that first year of college is that power and security are not tied together. One may have one and lack the other. I was a lone student from a nameless suburb of Chicago, yet a substantial subset the other students I met treated me as a threat. Whether it was to the legitimacy of the way they spoke and acted, or to their chances of success in their post-college lives, I don't know. I didn't have the presence of mind at the time to ask. At the same time, I saw them as a threat. Despite the fact that my father had chosen the school for me, and I knew almost nothing about it prior to arriving, the idea of being around other Black people seemed like a welcome respite from the constant undercurrent of racial resentment that I'd been aware of since the second grade. When it turned out that I'd simply traded one sort of resentment for another, a need to be seen as valuable, at least in my own eyes, asserted itself, and I fought (because that's all I knew how to do at the time) to defend it. But eventually I leaned that the world owes me nothing; if I wanted to be valued, I had to do it myself, and not ask anyone else's permission, or for external markers. But that's a hard enough task as an individual. Cultures and populations, I think, have a much harder time of it.

Businessy

Someone posted a picture of a sign on LinkedIn that read: "Skilled labor isn't cheap; cheap labor isn't skilled." I was immediately reminded of a man I'd encountered panhandling near an expressway off-ramp who was offering his decades of experience in construction for what seemed like a pittance. Years of experience and consummate skill do not, by themselves, repeal the laws of economics. While it may require years to create a skilled worker, that doesn't mean that those skills are also rare, in comparison to the demand for them.

But as LinkedIn has drifted towards becoming a more general-purpose social-media site, as opposed to strictly business networking, these sorts of vaguely affirming postings have become more common. Posts exhorting people to stand up and hold out until they find someone who "sees their true worth" are so common as to be clichés. But I guess they count as "engagement" these days, and that's what matters to the site.

It's interesting to watch people who should understand enough about business to know better reduced to posting bland aphorisms to farm reactions from the site's general audience. It's a side-effect of modern society, I suppose, but for all of that it's still an interesting phenomenon to observe the process of wringing the complexity out of life. I understand the world to be a complex place, and therefore I tend to credit complex answers to questions as being more likely to be accurate than simple ones. I also understand, however, that this puts me at odds with a lot of the people around me, who may be looking for a less complicated worldview. In this sense, the shift in LinkedIn was perhaps inevitable, as people began to spend more time on the site and methods and styles honed in other parts of the Internet were imported. If nothing else, it's allowed the site to remain relevant.

Bulletproof

There's a story on National Public Radio's website that uses the young daughter of reporter Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD, as the entry point to an exploration of why some children may have managed to ward off being infected with SARS-CoV-2. The story explores the effects of being exposed to other coronaviruses, the protections that the retinoic acid-inducible gene I (RIG-I) receptors offer in children and makes passing mention of the fact that children, for all that they tend to come across to adults as self-propelled bio-warfare agents, are fairly good at dealing with diseases (otherwise, there likely wouldn't be very many of them, with predictable results for the species as a whole).

But the whole thing started from the premise that given the young Miss Doucleff had been in a room with someone who was later found to be infectious on more than one occasion, she should have contracted the virus and become ill at some point. While this is taken for granted however, it's never really backed up.

It's understood that the many variants of SARS-CoV-2 have varying levels of virulence and some of them are quite transmissible. But even the Omicron variant, which was considered highly contagious, didn't manage to infect everyone that a carrier might come into contact with. R0, which, remember, presumes no precautions and a completely naïve population, never rises to infinity. An estimated R0 for the Omicron BA.2 variant of about 12 is pretty high, but measles still beats it out at 16. And it's understood that not everyone who comes into contact with someone who has the measles will contract the disease.

So why treat a child managing to avoid becoming sick as if it were some sort of unique event? I suspect that part of the answer is that this is an NPR story, and the political dimension to the coverage of, and public reaction to, the disease outbreak has to be taken into account. NPR's audience, like most of the American Left seems to have a heightened perception of risk from the virus, and NPR's coverage both reflects and validates that risk. Who has the greater influence on whom is open to debate, but I think of it as something of a symbiotic relationship, with NPR both reacting to, and calibrating, the expectations of the audience. It's the nature of the news business, and news is, after all, a business.

The idea that people are poor at evaluating risk has become a cliché. And while the idea that "perception is reality" is also something of a cliché, it's also very (if not perhaps completely) true. And so coverage of events, including the pandemic, generally has to start somewhere that is recognizable to the audience. And to the degree that left-leaning audiences view the threat of SARS-CoV-2 as ever-present, the story needed to present it that way.

The Knowledge

I think, therefore I am.

Beyond that, it's all subject to debate. While I don't think that I'm seriously mentally ill, I am aware of the fact that I don't have much of a genuine means of proving, or falsifying, what I believe that I know about the world. After all, the vast majority of it is secondhand.

I understand the general knock against that form of skepticism. It does, after all, call into question the idea of absolute knowledge, and absolute truth, and, as such plays into the hands of people who would cynically claim that neither exists. But for me, the fact of the matter is that most knowledge comes down to trust, either in sources or in one's senses. After all, I recently developed a mild, if ongoing, case of tinnitus. The near-constant tone that sounds in my ear is not "real" in the sense that it has an external cause... there are no sound waves involved. Rather, it's closer to a form of auditory hallucination. I understand this, and have learned to discount the noise. At least, I think that I understand it. After all, were you to ask me to prove that there was no noisemaker, I couldn't... at least, not without doing quite a bit of research into how sound works, and is detected, and putting together (or otherwise sourcing) a machine to search for (and presumably not find) the sound. But then, how would I know the machine were operating properly? At some point, I would simply have to trust that what I thought to be true was, in fact, true, and would have to ask that you do the same.

If case you hadn't guessed where I was going with all of this, the same idea is at work with the reports of Russian atrocities in the war in Ukraine. Ukrainian and other outlets show pictures, and the Kremlin, along with some segment of people within Russia, claim that it's all fakery. What's the truth of the matter? Technically, I have no idea. I am, after all, on the other side of the planet, more or less, from the events in question. I have seen none of the evidence for myself; I have to take the word of people who claim to have been there. Could they, as the Russian government claims, be lying? Yes. Hoaxes are a thing. And in this sense the question is less about what to believe than it is about who to believe. And from where I sit, it's a low-stakes proposition. No matter who I choose to credit with the truth, I still have to go to work tomorrow, as I still have bills to pay. A certain degree of allegiance to one side or the other is about all that's really at issue for me.

For many Russian citizens, there is a certain level of pride in their home nation at stake, but overall, the consequences are minimal for them, too. So I'm unclear on the utility of looking for them to make a different choice, outside of the faint hope that some sort of popular uprising would depose President Putin. Accordingly, I think that news coverage would be better served being less incredulous that Russians would be so quick to believe their government and dismiss the evidence that sways others. A greater focus on and understanding of how people deal with information that can't personally validate might be a more useful journalistic tack. 

Business as Usual

Ukrainian President Zelensky spoke to the United Nations Security Council today, and from what I understand from what I've read, basically told them to either change the rules of how they operate, or pack it in.

Grandstanding, even when people agree with one's cause, is still grandstanding. The United Nations is incapable of holding the major powers of the world, and those they choose to shield, accountable, because that was a primary condition of it existing in the first place. Smaller nations could be forced to surrender some sovereignty to an international body; the major international players could not, and without them, their would be no effective United Nations in the first place. And so the decision was made that half a loaf was better than none, and the relatively toothless and ineffective body we have today was created.

Because this is the nature of accountability. Accountability always requires power to enforce it, and there is always a source of that power that is, therefore, more or less above accountability when it chooses to be so. The exact nature of how this works varies depending on the circumstances, but it's a nearly invariable constant.

I've always been of the opinion that sanctions are, generally speaking, somewhere between shouting "Stop! Or I'll shout 'Stop!' again" and a way of pressuring smaller nations that aren't in a position to really be either independent of global trade or severely impact it by their absence. The Russian government is not a position that it is forced to care what the rest of the world thinks of it. Once the threat of force to maintain the status quo was off the table, it seems likely that President Putin and his advisors felt that once they could change the facts on the ground (a.k.a., the borders and/or government of Ukraine) that the rest of the world would learn to live with the fait accompli. While the war doesn't seem to be going as well as the Russian government (and a lot of other people, for that matter) thought that it would, the fact remains that it's highly unlikely that the war ends before the Kremlin decides that it will end.

And it's likely that when the initial plan for the United Nations was drawn up, that the authors of that document understood that there would be days like this. They may have even intended it to be the case. Such is the nature of compromise, and the United Nations is a creation of compromise. President Zelensky can attempt to shame member nations with that understanding all he wants, but if such a tactic were viable, it likely wouldn't have been needed in the first place.

Missed Out

Well, it's that time of the year again, when some yahoo puts up sketchy signs all around the local area, advertising an auction of high-end items for sale. Generally speaking, the items are either unavailable by the time the auction rolls around or are reproductions. The reproductions aren't explicitly claimed to be the real thing, it's just that one has to actual buy the item before the paperwork explaining it is handed over.

What's interesting about these is that the supposed auctioneer has been moving around the country now for several years, hosting these things. Boston, Washington D.C., Tulsa, Chicago; the list goes on. The signs change every so often, but the method of operation remains the same. The dishonest preying on the hopeful is nothing new; there is a long list of shady dealings that depend to one degree or another on people's hopes that someone will part with something valuable for a fraction of it's value, and offer a stepping stone to a more affluent appearance or a quick buck via arbitrage.

I find these signs interesting when they appear, but I had better things to do today than go and investigate what the supposed auction was actually selling this time. I suppose, however, that I'll have other opportunities. I suspect the signs will be back next year.