Feel the Heat

Am I the only person who gets the feeling that restaurants are dark because it makes it harder to get good pictures of the food?

Last week, I went out to dinner. Not for any particular occasion, just because I'd grown weary of my own cooking. I popped into a Thai restaurant not far from the Microsoft campus and ordered a simple noodle dish with beef. (As opposed to my customary chicken.) It was good, but fairly bland. I'd ordered three out of five stars for spiciness, and despite the fact that I could see the spices, I couldn't really taste them.

The standard "five-star" scale that restaurants use tends to be wildly inconsistent. In some venues, "three stars" is noticeably hot, while in others, it's barely there.

I have a hypothesis about this, and it works as follows: Ethnic restaurants that have a larger percentage of customers they understand to have a typical "American" palate tend to make their foods less spicy than those that cater to their "home ethnicity" or people from nearby areas. I've heard rumors that Chinese restaurants, in particular, have both "American" and "Chinese" scales for spicy foods, such that the same rating requested by the Chinese person results in a much spicier dish than one requested by an American.

I grew up in the Midwest, and have really only started to appreciate spice in foods after moving out to Washington. Accordingly, I've been working on acquiring the taste, and the randomness with which restaurants spice their dishes works against that. But I'm getting there. I can comfortably manage three stars at some of the more "authentic" restaurants, and may start working on four soon. I suspect that a genuine five may be forever out of reach. But the experimentation that I've engaged in during the quest has been rewarding on its own.

Either Way Around

There is a concept in economics called "creative destruction." While the original concept arose out of the writings of Karl Marx, and referred to the idea that economic structures (in this case, capitalism) changed from within, eventually leading to their destruction and replacement, current usage tends to operate on a smaller scale, and is roughly analogous to what is meant by the buzzword "disruption."

To take a mundane example, consider the typewriter industry. I'm old enough to remember when a number of companies made typewriters. The IBM Selectric was considered one of the best. They were monsters, to be sure, but they were durable and reliable, and one could change the font quickly. I used one throughout college. Today, typewriters are considered relics, seemingly on a par with stone tools. And this is due entirely to the personal computer (in this context, including Apple machines) and word processing software becoming ubiquitous. With tools like Microsoft Word and Google Docs in the picture, the fact that almost everyone has access to a PC, means that there is no need for anyone to own a typewriter, either for personal or business use. The creation of word processing for person computers destroyed the industrial manufacturing of typewriters.

But can the process be run "in reverse," as it were? Not in the sense of bringing back bygone industries; rather can the order of operations be changed? So if something else had lead to the demise of the typewriter, would that, in and of itself, have spurred the birth of personal computer-based word processing?

There are a number of people who seem to believe that it can. Small-government types claim that shuttering programs that people rely upon would lead to the creation of more efficient private-sector alternatives, while environmental activists insist that societies would immediately create "green" energy infrastructure if fossil fuels were banned.

To degree, this idea, which one might call "destructive creation" makes sense. After all, necessity is said to be the mother of invention. And there's always an alternative. The question is whether the alternatives are always as good or better than what they are meant to replace.

In the process of creative destruction, the alternatives are pretty much always demonstrably better in some way or another. That's what allows them to completely overtake the established incumbents. While the combination of personal computer, word processing software and printer is significantly more expensive than a typewriter was, the increased versatility of the combination more than makes up for it.

With destructive creation, the idea that better alternatives must be out there is much more a matter of faith. That, or ideology, given that such discussions can be driven by understandings of right and wrong as much as anything else. Which why I think that the concept never catches on as much as proponents might like; the advantages are never as "obvious" as they're made out to be. Still, I understand why the idea is so appealing to so many people. But for it to really take root, it needs to be more compelling to those who rely on the status quo.

Unstrange

And bizarrely, the speaker — who has long been reviled by House Republicans, and used extensively as a villain in their campaign commercials — is getting GOP backing for the trip. "Speaker Pelosi should go to Taiwan and President Biden should make it abundantly clear to Chairman Xi that there's not a damn thing the Chinese Communist Party can do about it," Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said on Monday. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) also backed Pelosi's trip.
The controversy over Nancy Pelosi's Taiwan trip, explained

I don't see what's so bizarre about it. For Republicans, it's a no-lose situation. If Speaker Pelosi backs down, it become ammunition for Republicans to call out the Biden Administration as weak, due to being unable or unwilling to stand up to what clearly appears to be an attempt by the Chinese to bully the United States (especially because it's likely, in the current climate, that China would claim to have cowed the United States into submission). If the Speaker does go, and tensions are ratcheted up to a dangerous point, Republicans can then blame the Democrats for botching the trip. The nature of partisan politics means that Republicans will avoid any blame from their own voters for encouraging the trip. The attack ads write themselves.

It seems like fairly bog-standard partisan politics, with the Republicans taking advantage of situation that it's unlikely the Biden Administration will be able to turn to its advantage. In that sense, it's par for the course, not bizarre. It's possible that Mr. Mathis sees a clearer path to a Biden Administration foreign policy win if the trip goes forward than he lets on, but if so, more explanation was in order.

And so I'm curious as to what audience this article is aimed at. Perhaps there is a fairly large constituency that would find any apparent cheerleading for the other side to be out-of-character, regardless of the potential benefits, but I wouldn't have thought that those people made up the typical readership of a publication like The Week.

Outreach Insights

The following notice appears on ballots in Washington State:

READ: Each candidate for partisan office may state a political party that he or she prefers. A candidate's preference does not imply that the candidate is nominated or endorsed by the party, or that the party approves of or associates with that candidate.

To be sure, I already knew this. When the top two primary system was implemented, a fairly big deal was made of it. But I never really put much thought into what it meant in practice outside of a few odd cases, like Republican candidates stating a preference for GOP Party when the Republican brand was suffering in public opinion.

But as I noted previously, this year, I spent more time reading through the Voters' Pamphlets that the state sends out than I usually do, mainly because I was looking at races that I'm not actually going to be voting in. And I realized something. While one can't assume any sort of formal party affiliation from the preferences that candidates state, one can tell quite a bit about what those people motivated to run for public office think about the priorities of the party, at least as expressed by its voters.

The Washington Republican Party's endorsed candidate for United States Senate has a candidate statement that reads as if it was focus-grouped to within an inch of its life. It's a story of personal perseverance and overcoming hardship while being of service to others; designed to be vaguely inspirational and even more vague on actual policy ideas, waiting until the final paragraph to briefly touch on inflation, homelessness, law enforcement and schools. There wasn't a single word about the Culture Wars or Trumpist priorities.

In contrast, consider this excerpt from the statement of another would-be Republican Senator:

I will fight crime by ensuring judges don't allow dangerous individuals out on bail. I will ensure Prosecutors file on dangerous individuals. I will fund the police, and will stop tent cities in city limits. I will be involved locally.

With education, focus on the basics, bring up test scores, why are poor and minority schools always the worst? We need to look at vouchers, teach sex ed at home, and end [Critical Race Theory].

And this from a person who claimed to be presenting themselves as appealing to Republicans, Democrats and independent voters alike. About the only stereotypically Republican talking point that wasn't touched on was "election integrity." Partisan strategists may refer to voters as having "a broad set of ambiguous anxieties," but this guy was very specifically checking off boxes one by one, no ambiguity in sight. Fear of "crime," distrust of the homeless and attacking public education (at least as practiced in more Liberal areas of the nation) were clearly being appealed to.

Likewise, the Progressive challenger to Senator Murray also gave a candidate statement that was a virtual walkthrough of the issues that were important to the younger and farther Left-leaning section of the Democratic electorate, touching Q-Anon, Russian President Vladimir Putin, lobbyist influence and auditing the defense budget with an eye towards cuts to fund healthcare and other services for the population at large. Again, no endorsement from the state, or even county-level party, but a clear idea of the constituency that they wanted to pursue. How much confidence they had in the idea that this constituency being large enough to propel them to victory (or at least to the general election), I have no idea. But they presented as making a serious appeal to that voting block.

And a fairly large section of the Voters' Pamphlet had similar takes on things. Not being a political analyst of any sort, I don't know what's actually important to people, but it was clear what a number of would-be officeholders thought was important to people. And while some of them may have been out of the loop, the overall picture that was painted of the priorities of various groups of Washington voters was fairly clear.

Critical Condition

It's odd how the United States is supposed to be exceptional, a bastion of what is good and right in the world; a shining city on a hill. But being secure enough in that sense of the nation that one doesn't feel the need to repeat it at every opportunity is nearly akin to treason in some circles. It's like the trope of the person to goes to great lengths to describe something worthy or enviable about themselves to another person, only for that other person to respond "Are you trying to convince me, or yourself?"

The campaign against [Critical race theory] has turned out to be remarkably sticky. “It is putting a name or acronym on a broad set of ambiguous anxieties around changing conversations on race, gender, woke,” says [Sarah] Longwell, [a Republican strategist,] drawing conclusions from her focus groups. “CRT has become a catch-all for that.”
“Critical race theory” is being weaponised. What’s the fuss about?

The central irony of the United States is that its runaway success has created tens of millions of people who can only feel secure in themselves so long as nothing can challenge them. Confidence has been replaced with a sort of incoherent bluster that papers over a continuous need for affirmation.

And that's the problem with Critical race theory. Or at least what many political Conservatives label as Critical race theory. At its core, CRT refuses to affirm the heroic narrative that many people in the United States have 1) built up around themselves and 2) demand that others uncritically accept as true. Because what is CRT, if not critical?

Of course, the United States is not alone in this, although to say so comes at the risk of denying that the nation is somehow an exception to the factors that display themselves throughout the remainder of the species. But the anxieties and worries of Americans are the ones most evident to me on a day-to-day basis, because I am, well, Just Another Random American, and these are the people I most often encounter in the course of my life. Like most of my countrymen, I'm not particularly well traveled, having been to Europe twice and Asia once. So most of what I "know" about the rest of world comes from books, television and the Internet.

Millions of Americans led the lives they did, not because it was somehow an objectively better way to live, but simply because it worked for them. And for much of American history, most people didn't care if it worked for them mainly because others were bearing the costs, or had borne the costs in the past. It simply wasn't a concern for them. But just as importantly, it conflicted with their sense of who they were. I'm just old enough to remember a time when open racial discrimination was acceptable. Whether it was legal was a different story; but something with enough public support (even if only by looking the other way) is difficult to prosecute. The people who benefited from others being locked out of the labor market didn't see themselves as having been unjustly freed from having to compete for the jobs that sustained their standards of living; they saw themselves as reaping the rewards of their own hard work and ethical living. The early settlers of North America who decided that forcing others into slave labor was legitimate didn't see themselves as valuing inexpensive labor above human freedom. They saw themselves as objectively chosen to lord over lesser peoples. Generations of Americans did not see themselves as thieves. Because for that, they would have needed to see the lands and resources they took as being someone else's rightful property. And that would have cast them in a light that they found unfriendly.

Critical race theory, says, in effect, that Americans have been more interested in protecting a status quo that benefited them than they were in their stated ideals, which were always matters of convenience. And that many people in the modern United States still benefit from rules that are designed to protect and buttress social hierarchies than to promote equality and justice. But what I think that many people hear from it is "You don't deserve what you have, as it rightfully belongs to others." And if there is one thing that the insecurely affluent feel most keenly, it's fear of loss.

Being recognized as a victim carries with it a certain level of privilege. The wronged are entitled to redress at the expense of others; and not always simply those who wronged them. CRT declares that wrongs have been done; and the implication that follows from that is not, for many, an opportunity, but a threat. Because with all of the things that people have, few of them ever feel they have enough.

And Baby Makes Two

Well, this escalated quickly...

Texas woman argues unborn baby counts as passenger after fine

Part of me hopes that the judge says "okay," and then slaps her with the fine for not having the child in a car seat. Absurdity in, absurdity out.

While its tempting to think that the only reason why this is a story is the Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et al. v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Et al. decision, this sort of thing happens all the time. It's part and parcel of living in a country where there are a) lots and lots of laws and b) lots and lots of people who are of the opinion that they only have to obey the laws that they agree with or when it doesn't cause them any inconvenience.

This isn't to say that everyone should follow every law, all of the time. That's pretty much been determined to be impossible; even if, by some mischance, someone happens to actually know all of them. Between municipal, county, state and federal laws, no-one could commit all of them to memory. And there are some pointless, or even counterproductive, laws out there. But there should be an understanding that in a system where it's possible (even though it may take a lot of work) to change the laws, that being caught flouting them should come with a penalty, and one should accept that, and move on. Ms. Bottone is having her moment in the sun, and she'll likely continue to raise a stink if the judge rules against her and makes her pay the ticket, and for what? Principle?

But then again, when this sort of behavior is par for the course for the people making the rules, it's unsurprising that other people jump on the bandwagon.

Watching

I went to see Thor: Love and Thunder yesterday. It's a serviceable movie, even if it's one that leans a bit too hard into its tropes, tired though said tropes are. The theater was in a new shopping center and apartment/condominium complex that's not very far from my home. Not being a movie person, however, I'd never even known it was there until the friend I saw the movie with suggested we go there.

While the entrance is on the ground floor, the actual auditoriums (auditoria?) are up a couple of long elevators; at the top of which there's something of a lounge area where one can look down onto the plaza below.

Standing there, watching the people pass through and/or use the area, I was reminded of how long it had been since I'd just gone people watching. Not to take pictures (even though I did snap the one above) but just to observe. And learn. People are fascinating in their diversity... even in the overwhelmingly White suburb that I live in, and there is always some little detail about humanity that can be gleaned simply from watching them for a while.

And so, I watched them. For about ten minutes, as I waited for my friend to arrive, I watched people and their interactions in the carefully constructed artificiality of the outdoor plaza. In full view, yet more or less completely out of sight. It was interesting, and relaxing, and a bit illuminating. I shall have to do it again, sometime.

Unsigned

One thing that I've noticed about this year's primary season is that while the Democratic candidates have their party affiliations on their campaign signs. The Republican candidates, on the other hand, are bit more coy... at least here in the bluer neighborhoods. Now, to be sure, it's unlikely that Mr. Heines' signs are going to keep people in the dark as to his partisan affiliation, "Fix America first," is a pretty clear signal. But it's still an unstated one. The top two primary system was intended to move candidates to the center by requiring them to run to a broader constituency than party activists. But it seems that some candidates are hoping that where moderation is unpalatable, that obfuscation may give them something of an edge.
 

Primary Season

Well, the 2022 election season is starting, and so my Voters' Pamphlet arrived in the mail today. Being something of a glutton for punishment, I read through them when they come. Not that they're particularly illuminating; most of the entries read like standard campaign-speak, spending for more words than needed to purchase the scant information they contain.

On the ballot this time around is the primary for one of Washington State's Senate seats, and it's a crowded field. 17 people are running to challenge Senator Patty Murray (who has certainly aged while in office) for her position. Primary elections are Top Two, so all of the contenders from any and all parties run against each other in something of a free-for all. As the name implies, the two candidates with the highest vote totals advance to the general election. Another quirk of the system is that candidates don't actually have party affiliations on the ballot - they have party preferences. This means that a candidate can run for any party they'd like, at least in theory. Several years ago, several Republican candidates chose to tell the state they preferred the "GOP" party, hoping that voters wouldn't immediately make the connection that the Grand Old Party and the Republicans were one in the same.

But what's really interesting about allowing candidates to pick their parties is that their platforms and policy statements can range far and wide from those of the parties they claim to represent. One of the Democratic contenders, for instance, believes that switching to Bitcoin would "provide relief from the failing US Dollar." Likewise one of the Republican candidates openly says that his goal isn't to win, "but to use the Voters' Pamphlet to attract viewers to posts on my blog."

Speaking of the Republicans, the state party endorsed someone who comes across as a typical American Conservative of years past. She plays up her "wife of a veteran and mother" credentials, and there is nary a word about Donald Trump or Trump-like politics in her candidate statement (which is the only one written in the third person), which instead focuses on her advocacy for veterans' issues. No "dog-whistles," no open pandering to the MAGA crowd, nothing openly divisive. In this political environment, that almost seems like a risk; I have to give them credit for that much. I find myself genuinely curious as to how well she'll do, given that she comes across as the one serious candidate running as a Republican.

I'd like for this to be an interesting race. If the Republican does well, the state party can be expected to continue to avoid running would-be Trump clones. If they're able to make things even somewhat competitive with that strategy, it will be better for everyone involved.

Games People Play

Of all of the things I tend to talk about here, my personal interests and hobbies are only rarely among them. That's mainly because I'm boring... there isn't much about me worth talking about, and I'm not into my hobbies to a degree that makes me, or them, all that interesting.

That said, I was poking around in some old files and found this quote.

A good role-playing game provides the framework for a unique kind of narrative, a collaborative thought experiment crossed with improvisational theater.

I first encountered it, if I remember correctly, in a Slate article after Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax died. The article is something of a hit piece, blaming the late Mr. Gygax for the fact that so many Dungeons and Dragons games descend so easily into what it commonly called murder-hoboism within the hobby.

In any event, I call BS. Not simply because Eric Sofge chose to throw stones at a man who was no longer there to defend himself, but because the basic premise of his article, as articulated above, is false.

That is, in my opinion, not the hallmark of a good role-playing game (as in rules system), but rather the hallmark of a good role-playing campaign. Most game systems rely on probabilities to resolve outcomes, which, left to its own devices, creates a scenario about as theatrical as a game of Vegas craps.

But more importantly, the collaborative thought experiment and improvisational theatrics are the hallmarks of a certain type of sophisticated PLAYER, and not all players are capable of that. (To this day, I dislike the improvisational acting aspect of many role-playing sessions, preferring to narrate my characters in the third person.) When I first started playing, I was eleven years old, and if you'd told me that I was embarking on a "collaborative thought experiment," I wouldn't have had the first idea of what you were talking about, and "improvisational theater" would have sent me searching for a dictionary. I just barely had a grasp of the idea that these odd dice and arcane books would somehow allow me to pretend to be a Hobbit and/or a Knight better than I could without them, and that's really all that I was after at the time.

There is nothing wrong with wanting a hobby to be an avenue for some sort of self-improvement. And, truth be told, Dungeons and Dragons does not force its players down this path. But neither do GURPS or Runequest, games made by Steve Jackson and Greg Stafford, whom Mr. Sofge idolized in his article. Having played both, I can speak from firsthand experience that one can just as easily play a murderhobo in those games as in any other.

A good role-plying game provides what any other game provides. Fun. And, okay, in the eyes of Mr. Sofge, Dungeons and Dragons provides for what gamers term "badwrongfun," but it's fun never the less.

For me, what makes a tabletop role-playing game fun is the puzzle aspect of it. There is a goal (sometimes of my own devising, sometimes not), and at the start of the game, I don't know how to attain that goal. And through some combination of trial and error, observation and experimentation, I figure it out. And I find that process to be enjoyable. If a good story (one that's worth telling to other people) comes out of it, awesome. But that's the gravy. Am I a bad person for not seeking to rise above the simplistic man-versus-monster dichotomy that Dungeons and Dragons often rests on? Perhaps Mr. Sofge would have thought so. But the myriad of universes that people have created to play in have room enough for both of us. And that was the innovation of Dungeons and Dragons, and why it's lasted so long. It can be whatever someone wants to make of it. Few other things in life are that pliable.

Tentative

I was in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood yesterday, doing a little Saturday shopping. Between the parking lot and the store is a stretch of sidewalk that's become a persistent homeless encampment.

There's been at least one tent here for at least the past few years. The encampment ebbs and flows, almost is if it respires in the local atmosphere. Sometimes, it nearly disappears; other times it stretches into the next block.

Normally, the residents, if that's the correct term for them, are careful to avoid blocking off the sidewalk with their possessions. What actually piqued my interest this time out was that it was the first time that I'd ever encountered the path not being clear for people to walk through.

Conservative Americans like to point to scenes like this as some sort of proof of the mismanagement of liberal cities by Progressive Democrats in public office, but scenes like this are older than the current iteration of the culture wars. When I first arrived in the area, some 25 years ago, I was impressed at the number of homeless people to be found here. At the time, I had a ready explanation, unlike Chicago, the weather here doesn't present as being intent on punishing those who are forced (or choose) to live out of doors. Last year's nasty Heat Dome notwithstanding, the Seattle area has relatively clement weather. Even the rain that so many people love to complain about isn't as bad as it's made out to be; the thundering storms that would dump buckets of water (and likely wreck a shabby tent) back in the Midwest are vanishingly rare here.

Still, it's clear that homelessness has become cloaked in a Somebody Else's Problem field, and a durable one at that. To the degree that a fix would of necessity mean lowering housing values in the city and suburbs, solutions are politically unpalatable. Which is why even people like Seattle city councilwoman Kshama Sawant, who made a name for herself through constantly drawing attention to the homeless and their conditions, targets her fire at the technology companies, rather than the current owners of housing stock. Using a property as a regular VRBO rental gets her attention; seeking to keep the value of one's home high by lobbying against nearby apartments does not.

In any event, I have full confidence that the next time I pass through the area, there will still be tents there. It's only a question of how many, and what's piled up around them.

Birding

These guys came to hang out with me during lunch yesterday.

It was interesting to watch them. Both had clearly come to understand that humans eating outside carried the potential for easy calories... but only to the first bird that could claim them. The seagull had started out standing on the rocks, until growing discouraged and flying up to the nearby rooftop. But when the crow decided that it would take up that perch, the seagull rushed back, and took up the spot at the end of the row of tables. And their they stayed, for about ten minutes, watching me eat, and ready to pounce should I drop something or walk away from my meal for a moment.

Typically, I don't mind feeding the birds; but since I was at work, no morsels were forthcoming for these two. I'm well aware that birds that come to see humans as direct sources of food can become pests, and seagulls have been known to swoop in on people carrying food in an attempt to startle them into dropping some. So they went hungry, at least for the time being.

Once I was done eating, A walked a short way from the table, and then turned back to watch what would happen next. The seagull, complaining loudly, flew back to the rooftop to scan for any other meals that it might be able to secure (likely any crabs foolish enough to allow themselves to be seen on the nearby beach). The crow, on the other hand, flapped over to the spot I'd just vacated, and absolutely scoured it for any hint of leftovers. I was impressed by how thorough its search was.

I suspect I'll see more of these two throughout the summer, as they keep a lookout during lunchtimes for any abandoned people food. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that they'll see more of me... I've heard that crows, at least, can recognized individual people.

Unconcerned

A lot of people outside of the United States wonder why Americans seem willing to tolerate so many mass shootings. A simple answer is that while mass shootings generate loads of scary headlines (especially in new outlets that cater to liberal, urban audiences) the actual number of people killed in the events is fairly limited.

Consider the following chart, which came in an e-mail from The Economist.

In 2017, the single worst year on the chart by a pretty good margin, somewhat fewer than 120 people were killed in mass shootings in the country. And a bit more than half of that number came from a single event, the Route 91 Harvest music festival shooting in Las Vegas.

The total tally of firearms related deaths that year was 39,773. Most of those weren't of the sorts that make headlines. The largest portion of them were suicides. The rest, the sort of person-on-person homicide that has become so commonplace, that no-one bothers to talk about it. Sure, it's fodder for political grandstanding when murder rates climb to the point that middle-class suburbanites start to worry about it. But tens of thousands of "deaths of despair" and gang killings every year don't really break through the noise to the public consciousness on anything approaching a regular basis.

An as much as magazine capacity limits and and "assault weapon" bans strike many people as "common sense" (i.e., obvious to them) ways of curbing the violence, their actual impact on anything other than the news cycle would barely be noticeable if nothing else changed. For all that much has been said about the fact that there are more guns than people in the United States, the fact of the matter is that many of those are in the hands of collectors. And they sit around in cabinets and gun safes. Maybe the owner goes hunting with them or takes them to a range for target practice or shoots bottles from the top of a fence. But most of them are never used to shoot people. If every gun-related death were carried out with a different weapon, only about 1 in every 10,000 firearms would be used to kill someone.

And so what we wind up with are headlines that frighten a certain class of people; the suburban and urban well-to-do who have come to think of guns as synonymous with the human, or American, really, capacity for violence. But even they have a hard time remaining focused on the problem for long enough to really lobby other people effectively. And their concentration in America's cities works against them in a nation where the legislature is organized not around the individual voters, but the states in which they live.

The exurban and rural voters who have an outsized voice in the way government works at the national level don't spend their time worrying about whether some disaffected young adult with a grudge and a credit card is going to buy a rifle and shoot up some event in their small town. They aren't even all that worried that a friend or neighbor will shoot themselves, or their family members; even though more than half of all of the mass shootings that result in 4 or more deaths stem from domestic violence.

It's said that Congress tends to have two ways of responding to a problem: doing nothing, or overreacting. And the reason why Congress does nothing here is that there is a sizeable constituency of people for whom this simply isn't that big a problem. For all that headlines may paint of picture of a nation in which the streets run red with blood on a daily basis, for most people, that's simply not their reality, and they have no real concern that it ever will be. I spent 20 years as part of a demographic where the leading cause of death is homicide. For a time, it concerned me. But then, I came to understand what the actual risk factors were, and realized that I had pretty much none of them.

It's difficult to get people to agree to pay a price to solve what they've come to regard as someone else's problem. Telling people that if we don't all hang together we may all bleed out separately is easy. Getting people to really see this as something worth giving something up for is difficult. More so than people are willing to credit, I suspect.

Line Up

I don't claim to be the most observant person in the world. Which is likely why I never connected the dots between the sales of camp chairs that I'd been seeing in local stores to today's holiday until I was downtown a couple of days ago. The local Fourth of July parade hasn't been held for a couple of years, but now that it's back on, the practice of setting out chairs to reserve a spot to sit and watch from is back in force. I haven't ever actually gone to see it, despite living in the area for a decade and a half now... it's not really my thing, and I don't have kids.

I was tempted to go take a walk around before things actually kick off, to see if the crowds would be as big as they were prior to the pandemic. The Seattle area is left-leaning as a whole, and that tends to correspond with more concerns about becoming sick and a greater tendency to take precautions (whether they make sense under the circumstances or not). But today's a day off, and I have more relaxing things to do.
 

How Scary Is it?

I like listening to podcasts when driving. I find commercial radio to be vapid and news radio to be overly sensationalized. And while I understand that obtaining information from podcasts creates something of an information bubble (since I can pick and chose which podcasts I listen to), the ability to always have something I'm actually interested to listen to is helpful. One of the side effects of listening to several episodes of different podcasts in succession on days when I wind up being in the car for an extended period is that the similarities in them become more noticeable.

And one similarity that a number of news and commentary podcasts have is a tendency to ask the question "how frightened should we/people be?" It comes up in a number of contexts; it's something of a opener, I think. The person fielding the question understands it as an invitation to expound on the topic being discussed at length, and is usually obliging.

But I've come to wonder how audiences take it. Whether the actual incidence has gone up, or it's simply more acceptable to talk about, I don't know, but there seems to be more and more anxiety in American society, compared to when I was a young adult just out of college. And part of me wonders if framing things in terms of whether one should be worried about them contributes to that. It seems logical to me that it would, but that doesn't really count for anything. There are any number of things that seem logical to me that are at odds with the way the world actually works.

Part of me suspects that it's simply a matter of the medium itself. Not that asking the question is unique to podcasting, but the ability to listen to podcasts while doing something else, in my case, driving, means that I can listen to a lot of them. It's possible that print and television interviews asked the same question when I was younger, and I simply never encountered them, due to the infrequency with which I read print journalism and watched interviews on television. On the other hand, perhaps I have the causality backwards. Maybe the question has arisen with the perception that people have become more and more anxious.

It's times like this that I think I missed a bet by not following up on my undergraduate degree by becoming a social sciences researcher. (Although even at the time, I suspect that I'd be that guy who was always in trouble for ethics violations, and I'd likely still be that guy now.) Because it's a fascinating question, and suspect that there's a lot of insight to be gained from the answer.

Summer Bloom

Okay, okay, flowers again. But not having been one to keep careful track of flowers for most of my life, I'm always stumbling across ones that are new to me.
 

So Long As They

Like most people in the United States, I was raised to be Christian; Roman Catholic, to be more precise. It didn't really take; by the time I was 8, I harbored serious doubts in the existence of a deity, in junior high school, I had come to regard gods as imaginary friends for grown-ups and when I graduated from high school (and a Roman Catholic high school at that) I was completely convinced that religion was little more than a faerie tale that had been the beneficiary of a grandfather clause granting believers the right to not be laughed at. (Depending, of course, on the local prevalence of one's religion.)

I'd also come to understand that many people didn't really make a distinction between genuine faith and mandated lip-service; so long as people did as the faith required, what they might actually believe was secondary. As I grew older, I came to understand that this wasn't just a trait of the religious; the ability to deploy some sort of force or coercion to demand that people behave in some or another fashion was often seen as obviating the need to make the case for the specific system of behavior desired.

Any voluntary agreement between some number of parties, generally speaking, only lasts so long as all of the parties involved understand that it is in their interests to abide by the provisions of the agreement. Once the cost-benefit analysis of compliance no longer pencils out, one can expect, at the very least, a request to renegotiate their terms. And this is generally fine, so long as all of the parties involved, are on a roughly equal footing relative to one another, and attach roughly the same importance to the agreement holding. But give one or more parties the ability to exact unanswered consequences if others don't abide by the terms that are preferred and the sense that those terms are of outsized importance, and they'll generally seek to remove the options of either non-compliance or renegotiation.

And so I've been seeing a back-and-forth playing out in American politics for some time now, as various parties, having come to believe that various parts of the social contract are too important to be left to voluntarism (and, in any event, despairing of their ability to convince people to volunteer) have sought gain the power to enforce them without the need to offer any concessions other than refraining from punishment.

What's interesting about it, at least to me, anyway, is that fact that this all seems to go unsaid, except on the fringes, because of a cherished ideal that says that politics isn't about the use of power. Again, it reminds me of what I'd come to understand about religion when I was young; people would often warn that disbelief and disobedience would lead to an afterlife of eternal torment, yet insist that there was no threat involved. Rather than the exercise of the ability to reward and punish, concern was at work.

Or rather, people didn't understand how the way they presented things came off to others, and I came to see this as a conflict between how people wanted to see themselves, and how another person might perceive them. It's interesting to observe all of the various scales that this sort of thing plays out on. From the individual to the broad political coalitions that dominate the political scene, the desire for the power to ignore dissent, and the apparent ignorance of that exercise of power create a fascinating, if not particularly hidden, view into how the conditions people (and institutions) place on their self-regard play out in daily life.