Just Do It

It has become fashionable, in some circles, to point at some or another situation and ask: "Why can't the United States do anything about that?" And there are many such situations, even if the current topic is mass shootings. In my opinion, the answer is simple: many Americans don't see particular problems as theirs to solve, and the people who have to take action and/or commit resources to whatever solutions are put forward aren't interested.

And in many situations, this is understandable. There isn't much that the average citizen can directly do about pollution, inflation or any number of large-scale problems. But I think that it trickles down to a form of learned helplessness that often blinds people to indirect actions they can take. Consider politics. A lot of the things that people complain about in politics are driven by the general voting behavior of the public at large; things like moderate voters tending to skip primaries, or partisans tending to vote for whichever candidate their party puts forth in general elections, or not voting at all. In some places, choices are constrained; here in Washington, a lot of elections work on a "top-two" primary system, where all of the candidates run in a single primary, and the first and second-place finishers face off again in the general election. A setup like this tends to preclude "third parties" (of which their can be several) from making it to the general election; so if the candidate comes down to a single Democrat versus a single Republican, one can understand a partisan's dilemma. But even then, there's no real reason why independent candidates can't have a better showing in the primaries; which one can see resulting in more nuanced platforms from the "mainstream" candidates. (Not to mention a higher quality of independent candidates.) Given this, it doesn't need legislatively-mandated voting reform to change things. A change in people's behavior would suffice. But since many people who are worked up about the need to change the way politics work are also perfectly happy with their own behavior, that change is unlikely to come.

Granted, I'm not usually one for "people power." I find it trite and often used in scenarios that imply that simply showing up or speaking out can result in painless changes. But I do think that people who are willing to work to see changes, rather than simply wishing for change to happen, can have a measurable impact on things.

Assume a Can

There is an saying in philosophy that "ought implies can." It's ascribed to Immanuel Kant, who put it this way:

For if the moral law commands that we ought to be better human beings now, it inescapably follows that we must be capable of being better human beings.

Which is reasonable. After all, it doesn't make much sense for the moral law to command the impossible. (Actually, let me not make that last statement. Christianity, at least as far as I understand it from many people both commands people to always obey the will of the Abrahamic god, yet concedes that everyone will, sooner or later (usually sooner) will fall short of that. And I know a number of Christians for whom this makes perfect sense. Although, there are those who claim the moral law is to aspire to a life without sin; but now we're starting to get into the weeds.) In any event, the formulation of "ought implies can" is a common one because it avoids the trap of a moral imperative to do the impossible.

In practice, however, there is a problem, and that problem can be summed up with a slight change to the formula: "ought implies a belief that one can." Or, to paraphrase Immanuel Kant more completely: For if the moral law commands that we ought to be better human beings now, it inescapably follows that we must believe ourselves be capable of being better human beings. While people do surprise themselves with their ability to do what they'd believed impossible, the tendency of reality to mold itself to perceptions is not to be underestimated.

Which is why I tend to look askance at the stereotypical conservative exhortation to "hard work" as the answer to everything. To wit:

Nevertheless, there have always been Black conservatives who embrace an anti-racialist perspective. For example, when asked if Black Americans should work their way up without special favors the same way the Irish, Italians, and Jews did, a statement that would be considered beyond the pale in many elite media and academic institutions, the 2020 American National Election Survey found that about 20 percent of Black respondents agreed or strongly agreed with that statement; another 20 percent said they neither agreed nor disagreed.
Reihan Salam "America Needs Anti-Racialism"

Which is all fine and good, but what about the remaining 60 percent? It's one thing to tell them that "they should work their way up." (As an aside, this a statement that ignores the reality of social ordering, Not everyone can "work their way up" in a society that exhibits any sort of inequality, because any ranking of some number of people is, by necessity, zero-sum, in order for someone to rise from 100th place to 50th place, someone else {or several someones} must see their rankings decline.) It's another thing for them to believe that it's possible.

It's also another thing for people to believe that an apples-to-apples comparison is being made. I'm not sure when one would say that the Black population of the United States was in the same situation as the Irish, Italians or Jews. Mainly because any such date would be a fairly arbitrary comparison of two very different points in history. What point in Black history lines up with the situation of the Irish in 1850? Certainly not 1850; the Irish weren't legally subject to hereditary involuntary labor at that time, or considered less than a full human being for determining the voting population. There may be a time when there was an equivalent of Jim Crow for the Irish, but the lack of widespread coding into law means that there isn't a date of the repeal of those laws that one can point to.

The Black population of the United States tends to skew liberal because they understand themselves to be at a disadvantage relative to White Americans. Sure, the formal legal structures and widely-understood social mores that openly acted in them are largely gone, but that's not really the same thing as saying that the old preferences and prejudices have completely faded away.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
Lyndon Johnson, Howard University Commencement Address (1965)

Where I think that the conservative understanding of freedom of competition falls short is in the belief that a sufficiently motivated person has no need of coaches. Sure, there are many self-taught runners, some who are remarkably good at it. That doesn't make them the rule. They're simply more visible than those who gave up the sport due to injury or the simple realization that they'd never be able to win against people with more formal training.

And a good coach doesn't just push someone to perform to a certain level. They start with making sure that their charge has an understanding that they're capable of doing it. (Of course, this leaves aside those coaches who operate by daring their students to prove them wrong when they say they'll never amount to anything, but they are the exception.)

Coaching, mentoring and support should not be seen as a "special favor." It's what gives people the understanding that they can take risks. Which is important in a nation that has had such a visible history of punishing those who attempted to "rise above their station" and/or stealing the proceeds of those who succeeded.

Hard work, in and of itself, has never been a ticket to success. After all, the slaves worked very hard. There was very little in the way of a payoff for them. And this wasn't because of strangely racially-specific bad luck; it was nationwide policy. Policies that persisted even after emancipation. If conservatives really want to combat anti-racism with anti-racialism, they're going to have to demonstrate that they're invested in the success of everyone around them, not just those people whose exploits appeal to their sense of ideology. It's not enough to tell people that they "should work their way up." There has to be a message that they can, and that it's important to people that they do so.

Here We Go Again

Every time there is a "mass shooting" (which really just means a multiple homicide committed with a firearm that the media takes an interest in), the question of "Will this be the incident that brings about change?" comes up. But what sort of change? The expectation that any given mass shooting will be the straw that breaks the back of pro-gun and second-amendment absolutist "single-issue voters" is a fantasy. The subset of the American public for whom access to firearms is their number one priority aren't frightened that the next mass shooting might be in their neighborhood. They're afraid of crime and/or some version of a police state coming to their neighborhood. And that's fear motivates them to demand that anyone who wants their vote hold to their views.

So will the reaction of the broader public to mass shootings change? I don't have an answer for that, mainly because it would take more study than I have time for. I am, after all, simply a random blogger and not a working social scientist. What I do perceive is that the media coverage doesn't change. It's the same mix of story after story, with personal anecdotes thrown in; here and there someone seeks to make a name for themselves with some sort of political grandstanding. Experts are consulted and officeholders are recorded making solemn proclamations. It all may as well be scripted. The Onion simply runs the same headline every time. It's a habit that others might as well emulate.

For my own part, I think what needs to change is the idea that the nation is entitled to a solution, and therefore, one should be forthcoming. The idea that the arc of history bends towards justice, I suspect, leads people to think that they don't need to put any effort into bending it in the way they want it to curve. The idea that "The United States can do something about this" has to, at some point, actually mean some significant number of the people of the United States working together, rather than simply hoping that politicians will one day get around to imposing a solution on people who are adamantly opposed to it.

Democracies, whether direct or representative, or terrible vehicles for answer questions of right and wrong. They're much better as deciding on an implementation of agreed-upon goals. And the reason why there's no consensus in the United States is that there is no agreed-upon goal. There's just a few days of recriminations.

It's possible that, as a society, the United States has allowed the issue to become too partisan. Where someone stands on the question of "gun control" is a fairly good indicator or political identity, which is never a good thing. Partisans have a difficult time in ever seeing themselves as unreasonable, let alone wrong, and tend to see their opposite numbers as openly evil. Which is, generally, a poor basis on which to attempt compromise.

American culture when it comes to guns, or, more broadly, violence as a solution to problems, can absolutely be changed. But it's at the end of a long road of other changes, rather than the beginning.

Blooming

One of the interesting side effects of my owning a camera (or several) has been an appreciation of flowers. Before I owned a camera, I paid no attention to flowers. They were just kind of there, like sidewalks or mailboxes. But now, I find them intensely interesting. Enough so that while stopping to smell the flowers still isn't my thing, stopping to snap a photo or two of them is. I keep telling myself that I'm going to buckle down and learn how to properly take pictures one day, and maybe I should just start with flowers. They're common, they're colorful and they don't move around that much unless it's windy. But I suspect that I'll be content for some time to just take a snapshot here or there when something catches my attention. It's served well enough thus far.
 

The Blind Spy

I've encountered a decent number of  people who come across as afraid of surveillance capitalism. And I understand the sentiment; if one sees advertising as being highly persuasive, the idea that marketers with large amounts of personalized data could get almost to the point of mind control is rational.

But I've never really seen the problem. Mainly because in my own experience, even with information, the sorts of things that are suggested seem unconvincing. Even leaving aside the idea that targeted advertising can't tell when a purchase has been made, and so continues to pitch things even after one had bought what they need, what the algorithms seem to think people are about can be nonsensical.

Back in the Google+ days (and it seems remarkable that the service shut down only three years ago), the network would suggest things to me based on what it knew of the people in my circles, as if the idea that I could communicate with people who had different interests than my own was a new concept. And recently, Google podcasts has started adding  suggestions like Gaana Music, Jokes in Hindi and Evergreen Hits of Bollywood to my suggested podcasts, along with Voice of America's Learning English podcast. Where they came up with the idea that these things were the least bit relevant to me is a mystery.

I'm completely on board with the idea that a corporate-owned surveillance system designed to come up with a constant stream of reasons to spend money isn't an ideal situation. But I think the idea that it's already here is a little premature.

Buried Deep

Somehow, I doubt that I am the only person who hears about concepts like "replacement theory" and White fears of being an oppressed minority and sees those as manifestations of fear that what European settlers and their American descendants visited upon the Native Americans and the Africans they imported as slave labor will be visited upon them. In the same way that "setting of accounts" is often used to refer to a working out of grudges and hostilities, there is a fear that a racial reckoning in the United States is going to be, first and foremost, about payback. And so there is a mindset that history can be prevented from repeating itself, only with the shoe being on the other foot.

I'd like to be surprised that we don't talk much about it, but I'm not. Airing the fear that non-White Americans are capable of holding intense grudges is seen as akin to an insult, since the holding of intense grudges is considered a culpable moral failing. The "ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained" (to recall part of my favorite Thomas Jefferson quote) are considered ten thousand failures of a Christian duty to forgive and forget. Ten thousand failures to be better people than those who injured them.

And I suspect that this is part, if not nearly all, of the problem. If you take much of American history, from the attempts to exterminate the Native Americans, to the restrictions on immigration for people who were not from Western and Northern Europe, to the internment of the Japanese (and the subsequent looting of many of their possessions), to Jim Crow, and think of these things as little more than unfortunate results of human nature; then the world can easily devolve into two broad camps. Those who are strong enough to victimize others, and those who are going to be victimized. In this model, enlightenment is a fantasy that withers in the face of people looking out for their own interests, regardless of the costs to others. It creates a world in which power, and the ability to use it to dominate others, is the only thing that passes for safety.

American history has created a society in which it is somewhere between difficult and simply inconceivable for many people to feel safe. And I don't mean safe in the utopian sense that nothing bad ever happens to a person. I mean safe in the sense that it's possible to lower one's guard without leaving oneself open to atrocities at the hands of one's supposed countrymen. And the political system, primed as it is to find fears that can be deployed in get-out-the-vote efforts, maintains that sense of constant threat. Because it's almost always campaign season somewhere. And they are abetted in this by a media ecosystem that seeks to cater to people with a combination of mercurial attention spans and miserly financial instincts. And conflicts, especially those where sympathetic people come to unfortunate ends, draw people in.

I don't know what exactly President Franklin Roosevelt had in mind when he said that Americans had nothing to fear but fear itself. Maybe it's the precise situation that the nation has today, where the fears and anxieties of different groups of people feed on one another in a vicious cycle. Fear is more than a simple emotion. It's also a matter of how one views the world, and the people, around oneself. That gives it deeper roots than one might be inclined to credit it with.

A Streetcar, By Any Other Name

I'm not much of a fan of the philosophical construct commonly called "The Trolley Problem." Mainly because it fails at its primary task of getting people to understand how they make difficult choices. Instead it tends to divide people into those who think that difficult choices are real, in the sense that they're a natural part of the world around us, and those who think that they're contrived, in the sense that in a properly functioning world, there would be no need for difficult choices.

Which, when I think about it, actually is a valuable distinction to make, because it appears in so many facets of life. Whether there are actually solutions to the problems that people face, or only trade-offs, is perhaps a more important choice than it's given credit for, because it shapes so much of the way that people see the world.

I am a firm supporter of Team Trade-Offs. In the world as I understand it, everything has a price, the only question is which prices is one willing to pay. Some are easier for most people to stomach than others, and having an understanding of which ones those are for a particular person goes a long way into offering useful (and even actionable) insight into their behavior.

And so even though, when confronted with the actual Trolley Problem, I tend to say "throw the switch," I understand a certain shared worldview with the people who would say "allow the trolley to drive on." Because even though moral sentiments push us to make different choices, we still agree on the need, at least in this hypothetical instance, to actually make one or the other choice. But in the end, I realize that my belief in the reality of difficult choices is a matter of faith, like most other things that I might purport to "know." And so maybe it's just a matter of the way in which people gravitate towards those who share spirituality. There are worse reasons to pal around with people.

This Way And That

I was listening to a podcast yesterday, and Elon Musk was a guest panelist. During his talk, he noted that both the Democratic and Republican Parties have different forces that push them to be unresponsive to the needs of the public at large (or, "the people," as Mr. Musk put it). On the Democratic side of the house he called out labor unions and the trial lawyers (who are something of an old bugbear when people speak of "special interests"). On the Republican side, Mr. Musk called out "corporate evil" and religious zealotry.

It was a nice, succinct encapsulation of the of the activist class of both of the United States major political parties. But I wasn't sure that it was an accurate one, mainly on the Democratic side. I'm not sure that trial lawyers, as much as they're commonly blamed for making the United States into the overly litigious place that it's often seen as being, are that partisan of a problem.

Thinking about it a bit more, it seemed that if one was going to come up with two groups on either side of the partisan divide, it might be possible to place them into categories of proactive and reactive; that is one partisan interest group actively pushes for policies and the like that worry the other side, and the other interest group that is mainly responding to said pushing from opposing partisans.

And, using that overly simplistic model, perhaps one could structure the interest groups this way:

Proactive Interests:

• Republican - Rapacious Capitalists: The problem with capitalism, it could be said, is the capitalists. There are a fair number of people in the United States who view the goal of capitalism to be one of running up the score on everyone else, and to that end, using the vulnerability of others as an asset. They prod the Republican party to ignore the degree to which the current American practice of capitalism not only creates rampant inequality, but comes across as deliberately designed to not work well, if at all, for the majority of Americans.
• Democratic - Social Engineers: There is no problem that can't be solved by using whatever crisis may be at hand to attempt to reshape the United States into something that more closely resembles the social democracies of Western Europe. Never mind that the United States is much larger than Europe, less densely populated than Europe and significantly less homogeneous than most European nations. If that pesky individualism and religiosity can be stamped out and the right technocrats placed into offices, the United States can actually become a legitimate First (or Second, depending on where one starts counting) World nation.

Reactive Interests:

• Republican - Culture Warriors: A mix of nationalistic would-be theocrats and racial-superiority supporters, this is a group that seems to want nothing more than another bite at the apple that was the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When women were meant to be seen but not heard, the only value of minorities was cheap (or even simply stolen) labor, and freedom of religion really meant the right to be the proper sort of Christian. This movement strikes me as mainly acting in response to their caricatures (and sometimes the reality) of the Social Engineers, perceiving them as Godless heathens who don't realize that "all men are created equal" wasn't actually intended to apply to humanity as a whole.
• Democratic - Counter-Capitalists: Encompasses organized labor, sure, but also brings in a wide variety of people who have no use for labor unions, but still see American style capitalism as a crass, and deliberate, means of victimizing people. Generally unable to distinguish Capitalism from Corporatocracy, this is a group that tends towards dreams of a utopian future in which the only reason for wealth to exist is to free the population at large to pursue their dreams.

Three out of the four groups that Mr. Musk identified are still present; only the trial lawyers have been swapped out and replaced with the Social Engineers. The other groups are more or less the same. On the whole, I suspect that it's a bit too neat, and I've left out some important details. It is worth noting that both the Culture Warriors and the Counter-Capitalists have strong economic identities; both are acutely aware of their own feelings of poverty, and have convenient villains to blame for it, corporate managers and billionaires on the left and socialists and globalists on the right.

And there is a fifth group that should likely bear some of the blame; the passive voters (and non-voters) who may care enough to complain, but not enough to search out people who may change things for the better. While they may not actively seek to enact policies that advantage themselves to the detriment of others, their general lack of engagement reduces the penalties for politicians who chase particular interest groups to the exclusion of all else. To drive politics one way or another, one's vote has to be seen as being in play; the voter who can be relied upon to find an extremist of their own party to always be a better bet than a moderate from the other, or the person who simply never shows up to the polls, narrows the number of people that office seekers have to appeal to. This is what drives the hollowing out of the political center.

I don't know what remedy there might be for all of this. One is likely needed at some point; democracy is not meant to be the means by which mutually-antagonistic groups decide which off them will be run over by the other, nor is it a means of deciding between competing visions of right and wrong. Something needs to take the place of the broad sets of warring interest groups outlined above. And maybe it will. Whether it happens anytime soon is anyone's guess.

Shrouded

I spent a bit of time this morning looking for the "manifesto" that Buffalo, New York supermarket shooter Payton Gendron is said to have posted online. No luck.

The Google Document that contained Gendron’s manifesto remained online for several hours.

It was later taken down after Google said its contents had violated the web giant’s terms of service.
Buffalo supermarket shooter's chilling 180-page manifesto said 'great replacement theory' of whites being outnumbered drove him to kill - and New Zealand mosque shooter Brenton Tarrant was his inspiration

And after Google/Alphabet decided to remove the document, no one else has posted it, at least not in an easily-accessible place. It's out there. That much is a given. Several news stories I've read reference the document's contents. This doesn't mean, of course, that most of the journalists involved have actually read it; a lot of the verbiage in the news stories is similar enough that it seems clear that the same sources are being referenced. But there's enough detail that someone's read at least part of it.

But, at least for now, tracking down the manifesto would require more work than I'm willing to put into it, generally in the name of keeping other aspiring spree-murderers to seek to rack up body counts of their own from having any inspiration to do so. (Given that Payton Gendron supposedly saw Brenton Tarrant, Dylan Roof and Anders Breivik as people to emulate, I suspect that this particular horse my have long fled the barn.) Which I understand, to a degree, but it makes an assumption that I'm not sure I agree with; namely that there is no real value in having these documents readily available to the public.

There is a point to be made that people like Payton Gendron have nothing of any value to say. Which is fair enough. But how many of us do have anything of value to say? If much of the random blathering and nonsense that make up broad swaths of the World Wide Web (including Nobody in Particular) were to suddenly vanish, never to be seen again, would anyone really be worse off? Being old enough to remember when the public had no inkling of what blogs, subreddits or podcasts were, I'm pretty sure that people would find ways to fill their time.

I think that there is some value in understanding the resentment, anxiety, ignorance and distrust that drives people to drive three hours just to walk into a grocery store and start shooting people. Or, for that matter, the sense of romanticism that drives someone to help a multiple-time felon escape prison in the hopes of starting a new life with them. And the best way to understand these things is to have access to the words that these people have put down describing them. Even in a case like this, where it seems that much of the "manifesto" was cribbed from the internet or copied from others' diatribes. Sure, there are likely to be news stories, documentaries and/or made-for-television (or streaming) movies that purport to explain people to the public, but those are always filtered through the lens of the people who write and produce them, and they tend to have a specific audience in mind. And while the differences between how Fox News and MSNBC cover these sorts of things can be enlightening on their own, something is always lost in the filtering.

People of dubious mental stability who are of the impression that they and their semi-automatic rifles can hold off the fears that have been drummed into them are becoming an occupational hazard of living in the United States. And despite the outsized news coverage that they generate, they are still a very minor hazard. As a nation, the United States has made a pastime of ignoring much more serious problems. But that's not really a reason to force people into ignoring the concern by deciding that if such people are simply hidden in deep enough holes, they'll eventually go away. So perhaps it's time to set aside the fear of contagion, and allow the public a bit more access into the lives of the people who have strayed so far from the mainstream.

Foggy

If all one knows about a particular person or group of people is what one has been told by that person's or group's critics, then one likely knows very little about that person or group, regardless of how much information one has been given.

This was driven home to me recently in a conversation with a Christian who was convinced that they understood exactly what I thought about certain issues and what my ethical lines (or lack thereof) were, because the atheist worldview had been explained to them in detail by their pastor.

"Have I met your pastor?" I eventually asked, in an effort to create an opening for the idea that it's exceedingly difficult to create an accurate description of a complete stranger. But my interlocutor was having none of it. Either the pastor's depiction of me was correct, or I was calling the pastor a liar. Rather than call the man deceitful (which part of me feels that I should have done), I simply walked away from the conversation.

This disinterest in understanding how other people understand themselves, in favor of falling back on what is best described as secondhand information, strikes me as a commonplace reaction these days. Perhaps it's a reaction to the idea that "To understand all is to forgive all." Back when I was in school an acquaintance told me that the upshot of that aphorism was that those who should not be forgiven should not be understood. (Personally, this strikes me as being born of the idea that forgiveness is a gift that a wrong party gives the transgressor. Being of the mind that forgiveness of others is a gift that one gives to oneself, I have no problem with understanding.) But it's more likely simply an expression of faith in the people who tell one things. The Christian I was conversing with had much more faith in his pastor than they had in me, even when the topic was me. The idea that I was either in denial or deliberately lying was more palatable to them than the idea that their faith may have been displaced.

Into the Void

I was listening to a podcast about the leak of one of the Supreme Court's draft opinions in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization, and it was suggested that the next goals of the anti-abortion movement would be to lobby for restrictions or bans in Blue states and to lobby Congress to pass a nationwide law against the procedure.

Personally, I suspect that they'll have better luck in attempting to convince a Republican Congress to enact a nationwide ban. But I also think that it will have to wait for a while, the Republicans are unlikely to win enough seats in the Senate to force cloture votes (needed to end a filibuster) anytime soon, and I doubt that they'd seek to change Senate rules simply for a Culture War concern. (By the way, I'd also heard that some people think that their may even be enough momentum to pass a Constitutional amendment. Those people are deep in wishful thinking.) My skepticism that voters in Democratic and Democratic-leaning states could be convinced to back greater restrictions on abortion aside, I have noticed that pro-life groups regularly pay for billboards in and around Seattle to make their point.

Generally, I consider it a waste of time. Mainly because, like a lot of amateur political advertising, it preaches to the choir. Repeating for the umpteenth time the point in a pregnancy at which a heartbeat can be detected or comparing a small fetus to a diamond and asking which is the more valuable does nothing to address the concerns of voters who see abortion bans as promoting forced pregnancies or another form of attack on women and their rights. It's simply virtue signalling. But then again, billboards aren't really all that expensive to rent.

This public posturing is a symptom of the current phase of the American public sorting itself into two mutually hostile camps to either side of a mostly disinterested middle. Partisan actors have too little respect for anyone who doesn't already agree with them to bother actually attempting to address them. Which is a shame. Not that I would like to see abortion here in Washington come to look like what Texas or Mississippi have in mind, but an actual discussion of the interests on both sides might actually result an a more adult way of going about things than is currently the norm.

Charging Along

I went to a small Electric Vehicle show that a couple of friends were attending, just to hang out with them. While most of the cars were modern, purpose-built EVs, Teslas and the like, there were also a few that had been converted from internal combustion.

EVs are interesting, but conversations with the owners revealed that the United States is going to be a while in fully adopting them, and not simply because of the oil industry. The United States is a big place, and cities of note can be pretty spread out. None of the vehicles on display today could get one from Seattle to Portland, or Seattle to Spokane, without stopping to recharge. My car can easily do Seattle to Portland without stopping. I've never tried to make the round trip without filling up, but I suspect that in the absence of any traffic snarls, I could make it... or the one-way try to Spokane. But even if I needed to stop, it only adds several minutes to the overall drive time.

Since EVs are unlikely to ever match the range and ease of refueling of gasoline vehicles, they'll likely need a boost from other modes of transportation, such as trains, to really meet their potential. Which means that the EV world will likely look very different from the current one. I'm curious to see how it shapes up. 

Leftovers

A pair of relics from my youth; a package of Empire pencils and a yellow plastic pencil box, also produced by Empire. Both made in the United States.

These days, few pencils are made in the United States and I'd be surprised to find that many pencil boxes are made domestically. Which, to be sure, strikes me as odd. According to the Wikipedia article for Musgrave Pencil Company (which, incidentally, helped Empire set up ship in Shelbyville, Tennessee after the company relocated from New York), most pencils made in the United States are made from American wood that is shipped to China, cut into slats, and then shipped back for final assembly into pencils. Am I the only person who finds it strange that it's apparently less expensive to ship wood across the largest body of water on Earth twice than it is to simply cut it on this side of the Pacific?

I understand that labor costs are much lower in China, but how much direct human labor actually goes into making pencils? Somehow, I'm suspicious of the idea that pencils are hand-cut and painted. And the pencil boxes are also simply rectangular plastic boxes. While I get that it takes a certain level of skill to run modern fabrication machines, again, I wouldn't have guessed that it takes enough direct labor for the lower cost of workers in China to drive the business overseas. But then, I'm not in the manufacturing business.

Still, I understand why people were so receptive to Donald Trump's message that China was cheating at international trade, with the help of unpatriotic businesses. To the layperson, the idea that the American labor isn't productive enough to offset the expense of transoceanic shipping likely seems off. So the idea that the government of China was engaging in subsidies isn't that much of a stretch. I certainly wouldn't be surprised to find that it was true.

But by this point, I think that a lot of it is simply atrophy. Businesses have closed up shop, or sent jobs overseas, and the expertise and equipment to produce these things has simply become scarce. The expense involved in restarting industries that had been allowed to wind down simply doesn't seem worth it. The recent global supply chain shocks might change that line of thinking, but recent history argues strongly against that.

It's easy to become caught up in nostalgia for the age when American manufacturing dominated inexpensive products like pencils and pencil boxes. More difficult is understanding the economics that allowed for that time, and the changes to those economics that resulted in it ending. Political sloganeering and appeals to nationalism are simpler. Which is too bad. Understanding the economics of a resilient economy would be a good idea.

Push and Pull

I picked up a new mirrorless camera recently, and took it with me to the waterfront one day before work. I don't have a long telephoto lens for it yet (and wouldn't normally carry one of those around with me anyway), so I've been learning to live without the tight framing that I'm accustomed to. Yes, I know that I could simply crop the photo down, but I think there's something to be said for letting things seem small because they're far away.

In any event, these are two grain carriers. The one in the foreground (such as it is) is being maneuvered into position to dock at the terminal by the tugboats. The one in the background (with the blue hull) had just left said terminal, and was starting to head up Puget Sound. Given that it's name was written in Chinese on the rear of the hull, I'm presuming that it's headed off to Asia.

It's interesting to watch the ships come in riding high in the water, their red belts clearly visible, only to leave a few days later with a good 20 or so feet of their hulls now below the waterline. For all the fact that I've lived in the Seattle area for more than two decades, I'm just now really understanding that Seattle is a working port. I suppose that it's just never really been a part of town I spent much time in until now.
 

Talking Points Illustrated

What makes political cartooning interesting, in my opinion, is the distilling down of an engaging observation or worldview into a visual. A picture being worth a thousand well-spoken words, as it were. That, unfortunately, seems to be becoming something of a rare bird.

The following takes on Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter, with the intention of taking the company private, are little more than partisan talking points rendered as illustrations. Neither Gary Varvel nor David Horsey offer anything in the way of insight or nuance; Mr. Musk will either "own the libs," or allow Twitter to descend into a cesspool of hate speech and harassment. 

But the two cartoons do raise an interesting question: Who is interested in these takes, but can't be bothered to either read or listen to someone making the points directly? Between partisan voices in formal media outlets and the world of podcasting and blogs, people are falling over themselves to tell their respective echo chambers the news.

I suppose that maybe a pithy picture is easier to share on Facebook or (perhaps ironically) Twitter. It's visual media as a means of virtue signalling; people sharing cartoons with friends, family and/or coworkers who are already intimately familiar with the sentiments being expressed simply as a means of reminding those acquaintances of where they stand on the topic. I suppose that it's not that much different than what I do here. I like to think that I'm offering some form of useful commentary, but perhaps I'm simply reminding everyone who stops by that I'm a curmudgeon who thinks people should do something more useful with their time.

Because, of course, there is a market for this sort of thing. While I doubt that anyone's striking it rich on this sort of thing, it likely drives enough clicks to generate steady paychecks. And, to be sure, the above are not Messrs. Varvel and Horsey's best work. They're capable of much better material. Sometimes, offering up a bit of partisan filler is a good way to meet a deadline. (And no criticism of that from this quarter. I've posted more than my share of filler material in the name of keeping to the arbitrary cadence I decided on back in February of 2007.)

And a lot of political commentary, verbal, print or visual, is about trafficking in grievances. It's a popular form of entertainment. Like most of the rest of the news these days.

You Gonna Eat That?

Hopefully, opening the photograph at full size will make some of the bit players easier to see.

Normally, I shrink pictures down prior to posting them, just so they don't require as much storage space or bandwidth. But in this case, I made an exception. A little above and to the right of the Bald Eagle in the picture is one of the local troublemakers, a Stellar's Jay. A jay that is clearly plotting some mischief. I suspect that it wanted a bite of whatever it was that the eagle had taken up into the tree to eat. Nearly hidden in the foliage to the right of the Jay is one of the several crows that were also likely looking to score some calories that someone else had done the work for. But none of them, in the end, had the nerve to take on the eagle, which was able to eat in peace, presuming that birds are self-conscious when being closely watched.

Unfortunately, even with a good-quality compact camera, nature photography is difficult. The small sensor and narrow aperture at the end of the zoom range mean that even in broad daylight, the camera isn't really capable of getting the level of light it needs for a sharp, crisp picture. And with cellular photography having gutted the compact camera market, better offerings are unlikely to come along. Still, as the saying goes, the best camera is the one you have with you, so one makes do as one must.