Sunny Side Up

Dreaming

There are, I suspect, any number of definitions of The American Dream. Many of them seem to boil down to living a life of relative ease; having enough wealth to not need to worry about day-to-day expenses and providing a respectable standard of living for one's family, but not necessarily so much wealth that working becomes entirely optional. A job leaves time - time during the day to relax, regular time where one doesn't have to work that day, time to enjoy the fruits of years of working, and time to get away from it all, at least for a while.

But as time has worn on, it's becoming clear that many understandings of The American Dream are, put simply, unsustainable. From before the United States was a nation until perhaps sixty or seventy years ago, The American Dream was built on the ability to exploit places, and people, without anyone really having to be concerned with taking long-term care of them. There was always more land to push into, or more people whose wealth could be taken in order to provide the mainstream with a standard of living that was noticeably, if not spectacularly, better than the generation prior.

And now that engine is exhausted. There are no more virgin lands to claim, and no more large populations to be left in poverty. At least not domestically.

One of the problems the United States faces is the idea that it is grasping and rapacious isn't really in dispute. While critics may see the nation as constantly looking for wealth to steal from others, people who understand themselves as the country's defenders often argue that other people around the world don't deserve the wealth they have. Neither, when viewed neutrally, is particularly flattering.

As an American, I've found it interesting to watch the nation turn on itself. At least, more openly than had been the norm. Although the nation's past has certainly had its moments, and that fact leads me to believe that the warnings that this time may be the last are somewhat overblown.

Nothing, however, lasts forever. Especially not things that are built on a foundation of their always being more just within reach. It's a pattern that, although I have only a limited grasp of world history, appears to be repeated over and over again. One part of American Exceptionalism may be the belief that the factors that have played out throughout recorded history don't apply. The calamities that have befallen other nations in the world were the result of their own lack of foresight and wisdom. And therefore, It Could Never Happen Here.

If humanity does not scale well, perhaps the reason is that a group of people may only grow so large before people lose the ability to see one another as just as intelligent, hardworking and thoughtful as themselves. But it's remarkable the degree to which a species, or a nation, can succeed, even without that trait.

Debate Delayed

The Quick and Dirty: The problem with the debate over political violence in the United States is that it comes years, if not decades, later than it should, and addresses symptoms, not causes. Because the competing narratives have incentives to cast those who disagree as being deliberately unreasonable, the underlying problems that people are responding to aren't being addressed, let alone fixed, in a way that they likely would be if the debating parties viewed each other as rational actors, responding to something that they genuinely consider dangerous. It's not difficult to find an "extreme" position that people would oppose, even if it won an election, or a position that, were it to win an election, would cause people to suspect that something was afoot. The problem is that a lot of people seem to believe that only positions odious to them would fall into such categories.

The Long Form: As the Left and Right of American politics develop larger constituencies that are mutually hostile to one another (and increasingly hostile to those whose support they find lacking), conversations concerning political violence in the United States has become more and more common.

Generally speaking, the media outlets I read/listen to tend to be "center-left." Genuinely centrist media is pretty thin on the ground, in part because politically-loaded commentary tends to drive audience share, and centrism isn't known for its strident partisan attacks on the political wings. I have no real interest in more straightforwardly Leftist ideals and commentary, and the center-right media in the United States that strikes me as actually worth reading, is not so much so that it's worth paying for; media that both leans right and is supported by something other than direct subscriptions tends to quickly devolve into, at best, a somewhat mild version of "own the libs," which is still too negative, and too personal, for my tastes. (The more more stereotypical "right-wing media" is, of course, right out.)

Center-left commentary on political violence tends to be worried, with a slight tinge of hysteria. I suspect that this is because the American Left also tends to be the most worried about (certain forms of) gun violence and perceives the outbreak of political violence in the United States as being a steady stream of Columbines, Route 91 Harvests and Pulse nightclubs, as armed White sexists, ethno-nationalists and other forms of bigot undertake one shooting spree after another, with the lobbying arm of the American firearms industry running interference for them.

The article and podcasts that I have read and heard recently tend to have a focus on the expending range of actions that the presumed armed and dangerous are now understood to be worthy of a violent response. But missing from this aspect of the discussion is a worldview that sees threats all around itself.

The partisan nature of the debate asserts itself in the usual way; there is an assumption of what the underlying reality of everything is, and that assumption is never really questioned. And right now, one of the assumptions being made is that people are either "committed to democracy" or they aren't and the American Right's commitment to democracy is fading, while it's still alive and well on the Left.

If you've read this far, you're likely aware that I'm going to posit that this view is overly simplistic and self-serving. When I speak to people who I understand to be Left-learning (and who often self-identify that way) they tend to be less than 100% committed to democracy (however they happen to define it). They, too, believe that it's sometimes proper, or even necessary, to fight for what one understands to be right when it is threatened by others, even if that threat comes in the form of a lawfully-held election.

After all, the American Revolution was simply a form of political violence. And while it's true that Great Britain had a monarch at the time, Parliament existed. It's taken for granted that the colonists had legitimate grievances with the English Crown and that the rebellion and subsequent war were legitimate ways to act on those grievances. What tends to be lost in all of this is the idea that this understanding of legitimacy wasn't universal, let alone objective and self-evident.

As the United States devolves into political camps that see each other as hostile, and, more importantly, deliberately malicious, those camps are going to make threat assessments that come back as dire and existential. Okay, so the American Left sees the Right as having devolved into outraged hysteria over trivialities, manipulated by self-interested political actors who should know better. This is different from the Loyalist position (which is now regarded as obviously wrong) during the Revolution precisely how?

See No Evil

Perhaps it's simply a natural state of affairs, but as one who doesn't believe in supernatural Evil, I eventually stopped believing in human evil. I'm one of those sorts who sees more or less everyone as attempting to bring about a world that they understand will be better for everyone involved. It may not be perfect, and it may be an omelet that requires breaking more than a few eggs, but people are, as far as I'm concerned, looking to make the world an objectively better place. (Of course, as someone who doesn't believe that there's any sort of objective "better" in matters like this, I consider that to be a taller order than people give it credit for...)

It's not a perception that squares with most people's perceptions of the world and/or human motivation. I think that this stems from the fact that Thomas Nagel is right about most people; they understand their interest and harms as something that should carry moral weight with others. Injuries aren't just bad for them as individuals, they are objectively bad, period. And this extends to those people whom they like and care about. And so they don't see any real reason why others would seek to harm them outside of intentional wrongdoing. The idea that people act out of the best of intentions doesn't carry much weight in situations like this, because they can't see any way in which the harms caused by others could lead to what they consider a better world.

But if there isn't an object, self-evident standard for what makes a better world (and, again, I'm one of those people who believes that there isn't) then perhaps it's easier to see how something that seems pretty heinous could strike someone as a good idea. Or, perhaps more to the point, it's easier to see how something that seems pretty innocuous could strike people as egregiously wrong.

I have, throughout the years, met any number of people whose conception of God comes across to me as little more than a violent control freak. Sometimes one with poor aim and a curiously high tolerance for collateral damage. But if this is one's idea of the very embodiment of a universal intellect, it makes sense that one would be highly sensitive to perceived violations. And if one further believes that the divine law is somehow self-evident to all, behaviors, even common ones, that strike one as immoral can come across as grave sins that put more than just the sinner at risk.

And that's a concept that I often find difficult to convey to people. If someone considers what would otherwise be private activity to place themselves and those they care about at risk, they're likely to stop seeing it as something that they should regard as private, or as acceptable. But religion isn't the only venue in which people come to these sorts of conclusions. There are any number of secular viewpoints that view what non-adherents to be acceptable actions as threats to individuals or communities, and thus worthy of being suppressed, by force, if necessary.

Once groups with mutually-exclusive outlooks find themselves in proximity to one another, conflict is going to ensue, with both sides seeing themselves as on the defensive against and aggressive enemy. But to an outsider who isn't motivated to take sides, it can appear to be simply a tragedy all around, one brought about by mutual distrust and misunderstanding.

Teachable

From time to time, I find myself going back through old posts. Usually because I'm going to talk about something that I've spoken of before, and either want to link to an older post, or find a quote or something that I included in one. A habit of mine in such situations is to correct typographical errors that I'd made in the initial writing. Spelling tends not to be a problem. My browser has a spell-checker built in, and so errors are flagged as I make them (and sometimes, due to the limitations of the built-in dictionary, when I don't).

I tend to think of the posts of this blog in the present-tense; that is to say, my initial impulse, on finding an error is not to remind myself that I made it years ago, but to be disappointed in the fact that writing this blog has not, in fact, turned the me of today into the more capable and rapid writer that I wanted to be.

Part of this, of course, is simply one of the pitfalls of being a writer through trial an error. And so maybe I should stop doing that. Blogging has Caught On, and that means that one can take classes on how to do it better. So maybe I should take one. Or three. Other than the cash outlay, it can't hurt. And maybe it will move me towards the sense of mastery of the subject that I seek. In the meantime, I'm going to keep at it; it's become something of a compulsion, I think. But I do enjoy it, even if I don't devote as much time to it as I used to.

As I've grown older, and mellowed, I've found that I devote less time to exploring the world around me, and maybe that's the problem. When I first had this idea, some 20+ years ago, I'd originally thought of doing an advice column, or something similar. I'd also toyed with making the space a general Explainer on the United States (hence the subtitle "just another random American"). But a lot of these posts are simply my observations of the world around me. So maybe I need to be a better observer, to be a better writer.

Idealized

For someone who has no problem identifying as openly cynical, I'm actually pretty bad at it. If, as Wikipedia says, "Cynicism is an attitude characterized by a general distrust of the motives of 'others.' A cynic may have a general lack of faith or hope in people motivated by ambition, desire, greed, gratification, materialism, goals, and opinions that a cynic perceives as vain, unobtainable, or ultimately meaningless and therefore deserving of ridicule or admonishment," I'm not particularly good about maintaining said attitude.

Not that I'm a trusting sort, or have a lot of faith in people, or even deal much in hope, but I don't find the motivations of others to be worthy of ridicule or admonishment. Regardless of what they're doing, people do them for reasons that strike them as worthwhile and "meaningful." (In accordance with whatever a person finds meaningful.) I think I started falling down as a cynic when it occurred to me that my perceptions of people's motivations are irrelevant. This is part of why I retired the label "Rampant Idiocy" for posts a few years back. Who am I to call people out as stupid?

About the only way I really qualify as "cynical" is in a lack of belief in people's statements of high-minded ideals as day-to-day practice, rather than as luxury goods that are nice when people can get them. There are social norms that dictate what reason are, and are not, appropriate for actions, and

In any event, Hank Green, one of YouTube's Vlogbrothers. posted a video entitled "What if a lot of the Cynicism is Unjustified???" In it, he opens with the following:

What if people are all pretty good, and they're just trying to make things better for themselves and the people they love in a world that has a whole lot of directional inertia?

And a bit later he asks:

And what if, this might be a stretch, those people are mostly big bags of well-meaning worry, trying to do the right thing, when it's never clear what the right thing to do is?"

Not being the sort of nasty cynic who has nothing nice to say about those they disagree with, or avoiding a perception of people as consistently deserving ridicule or admonishment for their greediness, grasping, vanity or power-hunger, requires making peace with that last bit; the idea that it's never clear what the right thing to do is. I would go further and say that it needs the understanding that there is no such thing as the right thing. Faced with an endless set of choices, the idea that one of them is clearly the one correct choice may feel true, but the world simply isn't that black and white of a place. Why would it be?

I waded into the comments of Mr. Green's video, just to have a look around, and it was immediately evident who was okay with that premise, and who was not. And it makes sense that many people weren't. I've mentioned Thomas Nagel before, he of the opinion that "I think that most people, unless they're crazy, would think that their own interests and harms matter, not only to themselves, but in a way that gives other people a reason to care about them too." And for Hank Green, I suspect that cynicism is the understanding that other people know they have a reason to care, but willfully decide not to.

What's right, or what's wrong, to do in a situation tends to be a matter of faith, because the world is bad about providing unambiguous feedback. And sometimes, people believe that what's right is worth bad outcomes in the short term for a promised better outcome later that may or may not materialize. One of my takeaways of being raised Roman Catholic was that God had a penchant for collective punishments. And a lot of Christians see the world through this lens, which posits that God judges places, nations or even humanity as a whole on the basis of certain, specific, actions of individuals. That leads to a very different understanding of what the right thing to do is, when compared against a Moslem, or a Hindu or an atheist.

And while I disagree with a lot of people on their understanding of what a good course of action might be in a given situation, I understand the sincerity of their beliefs. I understand that they are attempting to make things better, and are not intentionally indulging in injustice. I'm told that this means I'm not paying attention, or that I'm ignoring obvious harms. But to the contrary; the only thing is that little voice that seeks to tell me that I can know what's in another's mind, simply based on how their actions land in the world around me.

Sloped

Afghanistan withdrawal began Biden's political slide

This has been a generally accepted tenet of American politics. Why, I'm not sure, given that President Biden's approval numbers started to slide almost immediately after his inauguration.

This chart from Axios shows as much:

The general downward trend is fairly evident from the beginning, and there are no steep dips that start immediately after the withdrawal.

It's tempting, I think, to chalk the story up to the stereotypical media outlet's "love of narrative," but I'm not sure that's the reason. Granted, the media is always on the lookout for a good story, and this one seems to be fairly straightforward, but it doesn't appear to be supported by the evidence. Evidence that, in this case, comes with the story itself. I'm not sure that someone looked at this chart and the first thing that occurred to them was that there was some singular event that triggered a fall in the President's popularity.

Not that the Presidential approval rating is worth all that much. Were it up to me, I'd use it as more of a gauge of public sentiment overall - do people perceive that things are going well for themselves and/or the nation as a whole or are likely to in the near future. Or simply scrap it entirely. In recent years, the poll has become mainly a measure of partisanship. Although, to be sure, that ties into the public sentiment piece. Voters that identify with Democrats have more negative views of the economy and the like when Republicans are running Washington, D. C., and vice versa.

But people simply not getting what they want, and then blaming the President (either directly, or as a proxy for their political party) doesn't make for a particularly compelling political story. Because, I think, we all know that already.

President Biden won the office most by virtue of the fact that his name was not Donald Trump. In the eyes of Republicans, that already made him the wrong man for the job. And given that simply not being Donald Trump isn't the same as having the political leverage to undo the aftereffects of President Trump's time in office, Democrats and independent voters who wanted sweeping changes and repudiation of the old order didn't get that, and their enthusiasm for President Biden started waning pretty much from the beginning of his term, as reality set in.

That's not a single event, but many of them. But while that reality may be suitable for short-form journalism, the details of it; the narrative, if you will, is not.

Waterfront

San Francisco, taken from a boat on the water.

I have something of a strange relationship with water. I like to be out on it, as one can often see things that are invisible from the shore, and have a new angle on things that are. But I'm a poor swimmer, and so being out on the water for too long leaves me antsy to be back on solid ground.
 

Wordy

I've been out of town for a bit (hence the recent gap in posts) and so spent some time catching up on LinkedIn this morning. One of my contacts reposted a link to a YouTube video about four ways to find meaning in life, drawing on the life experience of Doctor Viktor Frankl. The video never defined "meaning." An old manager of mine linked to a New York Post article decrying Woke movie reviews. I was pretty sure that the author had no idea of what "Woke" meant (or rather, was intended to mean), other than people whose politics they found to be too liberal/not patriotic enough.

The lack of a clear definition for "meaning" in articles that talk about how to find it is something I've gone on about before, so I won't bore you with it again.

What I'm really interested in is how people consistently use language in a way that implies that whatever definition they're using (or expect) for a term is universally held. Part of this is simply the way that language evolves; a given usage of a word makes it into everyday language and it crowds out previous usage in an informal process of substitution. While it can be alleged that the bastardization of the term "Woke" by Right-leaning commentators is part of a broader campaign to discredit their political opponents through linking their slogans to negative ideas (after all, Christopher Rufo has been quite open about wanting to link the term "Critical Race Theory" to policies that the general public would find frightening), the fact of the matter is that most people don't learn how language is used from reading dictionaries. Rather, they copy the usages that they encounter other people using when dealing with unfamiliar terms.

And this creates a phenomenon that can be described as definition without definition. The video on Viktor Frankl and meaning was vaguely inspirational and uplifting, the sort of mishmash of carefully selected anecdotes from a person's life that are trotted out when a certain image of the person is to be put forward. So while it never defines "meaning," it's inaccurate to say that to doesn't attempt to get across an idea of what "meaning" is, at least as far as the video's narration is concerned. It's the same thing with the complaining about Woke movie reviews. The article, rather than define Woke and then show how the reviews fit into that framework, makes attributions about people the author considers Woke, and leaves the audience to infer the contours of a Woke mindset from that.

But in either case, it leaves the audience without a clear understanding of any actual definition. When I ask people what is meant by "meaning," they tend to have a hard time coming up with anything other than the word itself. It leans towards the famous "I know it when I see it" standard.

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart

And from there, people's confidence in the objectivity of their own perceptions and worldviews takes over. But, as philosophers are often quick to point out, there's no way of knowing what is in other people's minds. And this leaves open the possibility that even if we all know meaning or Wokeness when we see it, that we don't all see the same things.

Wasn't Me

Mariya Karimjee: Even when I was in high school and I was reading this prompt, I remember being very aware of the fact that that question was not meant for me. Every time I read it, I had to think like, who on Earth am I going to write about? Who is different from me? I just can't get around the idea that the question is only for white people.

It says, "With your future growth in mind, describe a potential classmate that you believe you could learn from." When it's saying, "Your future growth in mind," who is the "your" in that context? In my opinion, it's white people. Who else needs to learn and grow from people different from them? It's like the prompt is saying that college is for white people and everyone else is here for the benefit of white people.
This American Life "Essay B"

Okay. This has become beyond stupid. Why would there be any reason for non-White students in the United States not to need to learn and grow from people different than themselves? There is a charitable reading of this, which is basically that non-White students have no choice but to learn and grow from people who are different than themselves, because White people are, basically, everywhere. But even this, it must be said, only really applies to non-White students in predominantly White schools. And that isn't everyone.

One of the nice things about having a blog with a small audience, as I do here, is that I can say things that would cause a scandal if put before a decently sized audience. And I'm going to take advantage of that to say the idea of "Whiteness" as some sort of malignancy has been taken to it's logical extreme and tends to fall off into the abyss. For the record, here is the full text of the prompt that Ms. Karimjee was referring to:

Many students expand their view of the world during their time in college. Such growth often results from encounters between students who have lived different cultural, economic, or academic experiences. With your future growth in mind, describe a potential classmate that you believe you could learn from, either within or outside a formal classroom environment.

Now, to be sure, I took a pass on this effect. Having grown up in the distant suburbs of Chicago, in an overwhelmingly White suburb, I was at pains to avoid any expansion of my view of the world during the one year I spent at a Historically Black University in Virginia. Most of the other students were uneducated Neanderthals, as far as I was concerned, and I had no problem with conveying this to them every time they sought to challenge me for not engaging in performative Blackness. And the last three years of college were spent hanging out with people, White, Black or otherwise, who shared my general circumstances and specific interests. At another school. My disinterest in dating made me the odd man out at times, but otherwise, I was simply one of the crowd.

But even though my first encounters in college with people who had "lived different cultural, economic, or academic experiences" were unmitigated disasters, it wasn't because, as a Black person, I couldn't understand how anyone could possibly be different from me, or had already done all of the learning and growing that carried any benefit. It was because I encountered circumstances that I perceived as mostly hostile and responded with open hostility of my own.

And that, I think, was a loss on my part. Too caught up in a need to punish the people around me for their apparent dislike of me, rather than attempting to understand it, I missed my earliest opportunity to understand a rather large group of people that I "looked like" superficially, but had almost nothing else in common with. As a result, I didn't really start learning about, and understanding, people whose lives differed significantly from my own until I moved to the Seattle area.

The point here isn't that White people can't be self-centered and self-important. That has been, after all, par for the course for most of American history, and despite what many White Americans might tell you, the habit hasn't died anywhere nearly as quickly as might have been hoped. But the idea that only White people have anything to learn from people different than themselves is to presume a uniqueness to White culture in one of the areas in which it is quite emphatically not unique. And therefore the logical leap that says that non-White people universally understand that everyone else in the world is there for their benefit is nonsensical.

To be sure, White people can suck. At times, out loud. But so can the rest of us. Yes, White America has yet to own up to the consequences that hundreds of years of history, both before and after the founding of the nation, have had on the various people that have been considered out-group., both inside and outside of the nation's borders. But that's because "White America" is nothing more than an arbitrary grouping of people based roughly on some combination of skin tone and perceived pre-American nationality. It's not any sort of organization or institution that can take responsibility for anything.

There was a part of the story of this that really stood out for me:

Mariya Karimjee: During the conversation, there was one moment where Jenna asked me something.
    Jenna: Did you literally think that this is how I saw you?
    Mariya Karimjee: After the essay, a little bit, yes. There was a brief, two-year period in which I did.
    Jenna: That's not very brief.
    Mariya Karimjee: But now I don't.

Of course, we don't have the whole of the conversation, but from the bit played in the episode, one piece is conspicuously absent; an acknowledgement from Ms. Karimjee that she'd misjudged her friend. Ira Glass, as host, doesn't bring it up, either. And this, I think, is what angers so many conservative Whites about this sort of thing. The idea that it's somehow self-evident that if there has been any error or wrongdoing, they are the ones at fault. Ms. Karimjee put thoughts in her friend Jenna's mind, and then held her accountable for those attributions for two years. And Ira Glass takes it as a given that this was the appropriate response. Because Ms. Karimjee is a Pakistani Moslem woman living in the United States. It clearly can't be her who made an error.

Is this how Ms. Karimjee actually sees the world, and the circumstances of that high-school essay? I have no idea. I wouldn't know Ms. Karimjee if I were to run into her on the street. But the This America Life story, which is all about how White people see others as means to their collective ends, presents her that way, and holds her up as righteous in being so. And there's an irony in that, in the sense that Ms. Karimjee becomes a prop in a story being told by someone else, in the service of an insignificant skirmish in the Culture Wars. Not, I think, because it was intended to be that way, but because that's how this cultural conflict works. Everyone is simply a means to an end of a conflict that, as an inanimate object, it's capable of caring about the lives of the people drafted to fight in it. It's not a good example to emulate.

The Right Partner

The sister of Trump's ex-press secretary is launching a conservatives-only dating app

Hmm. I guess even with the FBI searching Mar-a-Lago for mishandled documents, Salman Rushdie being stabbed and the Inflation Reduction Act making it through the House of Representatives, it's a slow news week. Although I suppose a little click-bait never goes amiss in the news business.

Not that there isn't the kernel of an interesting news story here. While I don't find the involvement of Ryann McEnany (or the color of her jacket) in an announcement video for yet another niche dating site at all newsworthy, the idea that "The Right Stuff" is leaning into culture war issues could be something worth following up on. Granted, it seems that this is pet project of staff members of the former Trump Administration, and the money comes from Peter Thiel, so it's possible that this is more about politics than business. (After all, there is already a dating site called The Right Stuff - aimed at Ivy League and medical school students, graduates and faculty {because that could never go sideways...}.) But still, people are putting money, time and effort into the idea that single Conservative Americans care about having a site they can visit to perhaps meet people who firmly believe that there should only be two gender identities and that the pronouns used to refer to someone should be obvious. I don't know how many dating sites and/or mobile applications are out there. Forbes estimated some 8,000 back in 2013, 2,500 of those operating in the United States. Granted, a lot can change, and has changed, in 10 years. I'd be surprised to find that the 2,500 market participants in the United States holds true today, but even if the number has dropped to 1,500 as some newer estimates claim, that's still a lot of competition. So there's a fair chance that once the breathless coverage of this tenuously Trump-aligned site dies down, that the site itself dies with it.

But in the meantime, the idea that the conservative echo chamber needs another dating site (I refuse to believe that there aren't several already.) strikes me as something worth following up on. Because that, if anything, is the news story here. Granted, Peter Thiel seems to enjoy bankrolling Conservative causes, but a gay man putting money into an app that's "currently focused on heterosexual relationships" seems like it bears some discussion. Not out of the idea that Mr. Thiel is some sort of hypocrite, but in the sense that this exclusion is somehow important enough to the project to be necessary. After all, homosexual Republicans are nothing new, so it seems strange that they'd be so clearly sidelined in something like this. It speaks to who the American Right finds to be important to their chances, moving forward. It also speaks to the Right's embrace of a technology that it seems they'd have little time for. Are Conservative single people so thin on the ground that the traditional ways that people have met and courted over the years are now simply unworkable? That strikes me as unlikely. Daniel Huff, a staffer in the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Trump Administration, said that Conservatives are "an important, underserved market." But it's not like people have been ignoring the idea that there's a market there.

And maybe that's why it's the click-baity celebrity-adjacent part of the story that's driving the coverage. The idea that some Conservatives are loudly complaining about how put upon and discriminated against they are is old news. So it doesn't drive coverage any more. But if that's not really worth taking note of, I'm not sure what part of this story is.

Unwilling

Trumpism is not a creation. It is a consequence. It is a consequence of the fact that while a government of the people, by the people and for the people may be accountable to the people, the people, writ large, are not accountable to anyone. If the people perceive that a given member of the political class has made this or that error, that person can be voted out of office at the next election. It may even be possible to recall them from office or force them to resign.

But a large enough group of the public at large is more or less beyond all accountability in a representative government because it's impossible to shelter all of the rules that run the government from them. Or to enforce them in the face of enough opposition. This has been the story of the United States from its inception.

I pretty much tune out people who speak about "political will." It's a tired phrase that people bandy about as a criticism of people who failed (assuming they even attempted) to push the populace at large into something that said populace is completely uninterested in doing. Today, I happened to hear on the radio some or another activist holding forth about how "the United States needs political will." But the reason why the United States has no political will is simple. The United States is, effectively, an inanimate object.

Institutions, even nation-states, are not hive-minds. They have no will of their own. It's their citizens that have will, and who act upon it. Every lack of political will is really simply the lack of effective advocacy. And effective advocacy is difficult.

Donald Trump is a remarkably successful politician because, whatever else one might say about him, he is adept at finding people's anxieties and insecurities and offering those people solutions, even if otherwise ephemeral or unworkable, that align with their views of themselves.

No-one with any realistic view of the world believes that Donald Trump could return manufacturing to the United States. Because the people of the United States are, for the most part, too price-sensitive to buy manufactured goods at a price that would support the wages they're willing to work for, and too committed to affluence to work for wages that would allow for the prices they'd be willing to pay. And the vague hope that people have that someone else would eat the costs is simply never going to come to pass. Donald Trump simply spoke to, and speaks to, those issues better than pretty much anyone else.

Because no-one else has managed to find a way to advocate for their solutions in a way that people feel is advocacy for them. Donald Trump's border wall had little to do with the border itself, or the people coming over it. There are more effective ways to deter people from coming to the United States than attempting to wall off the southern border. But Donald Trump's advocacy for that specific solution felt, to people who'd come to understand that the political system ignored them, like he cared for them more than he cared for the people who sought to enter the country.

And that is where "political will" comes from; the idea that whatever policy is being enacted is being done specifically because it's good for people. People supported Donald Trump's vapid border wall idea because they felt that it was being done out of concern for them. And Mr. Trump's advantage is that he is a skilled enough communicator to convince people that he cares for them without first needing to prove it materially.

Donald Trump understands that he is accountable to his supporters, and that they, in turn, are accountable to no-one, because they are the body that legitimizes accountability. The Democrats may find someone who is capable of accomplishing the same feat. Although it strikes me as unlikely any time soon. Which is kind of too bad. Because if the Democrats, too, had someone who understood how to communicate with the public in a way that allowed masses of people to feel acknowledged and cared for, they could compete better. And the resulting engagement might be a good thing all around.

No False Christian

Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary: Don't worry. A Christian politician cannot be racist. So we should never hesitate to heavily challenge our opponents on these issues. Be sure Christian values protect us from going too far.

David Folkenflik, Media Correspondent, NPR News: It was as though he was dismissing the idea that he could be criticized on such grounds simply because he professed to be, and may well be, a practicing Christian.
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Sigh. And people on the Left wonder why conservative Christians see them as hostile.

Prime Minister Orbán's comment is quite simple, really. Christian values don't allow for racism. Therefore, a Christian cannot be racist. The Prime Minister is a Christian. Accordingly, he is not racist. And the same goes for any other Christian politician. QED.

I've spoken with any number of Christians over the years who have deployed this sort of reasoning in a debate. It's simple self-righteousness, although it looks a lot like a No True Scotsman argument. While No True Scotsman is considered a logical fallacy, for many Christians, holding to certain virtues is seen as a requirement for being Christ-like. So the problem isn't the No True Scotsman's problem of assigning (or denying) a trait that is unrelated to being a Scotsman (or in this case, a Christian), but rather the assumption of the right to determine for oneself that they (or another person) are a proper Christian, and therefore free of vices that only attach to non-Christians. In other words, rather than defining a set of behaviors, and then using adherence to said behaviors to determine one's practice of their faith, Christians like Prime Minister Orbán declare that those whom they believe appropriately are necessarily adhering to certain behaviors.

This isn't a particularly rare outlook on the world. It's common for (conservative) Christians to believe that they're competent to determine whether another person is or is not being correctly Christian, and therefore what they are, or are not ready, willing and able to do. It's something that comes up often in conversations where the topic of Christian moral or ethical superiority is at issue. And that's why I'm surprised that David Folkenflik seems to be unfamiliar with this particular train of thought. Has he genuinely never had this sort of conversation with someone before? That's unexpected, from such an experienced journalist.

PSA

I was doing some reading the other day and I came across a long-form article on one man's experience with treatment-resistant depression and suicidal ideation. And it started like so many other articles that deal with suicide do: with a statement urging people who may be considering suicide not to act on their feelings, but to contact organizations that would help. Something like this:

Dial 911 in an emergency. Or call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, or use the Lifeline Chat at the Lifeline website. The Lifeline is free, confidential, and available to everyone.

In all honesty, these messages barely register with me anymore. They're like the side-effects part of pharmaceutical advertising; if I haven't checked out by the time I get to that point, I'm certainly no longer paying attention once it starts. I think the only reason why I noticed anything this time out was that it opened the article, rather than being tacked on to the end. Still, I think I would have simply blown it off were it not for the fact that I'd been reading other articles that dealt with potentially self-harmful behavior, and there had been no such message.

So why aren't articles about, say, excessive drinking or violent crime prefaced with the same sorts of public service announcements? If it's understood that it's possible to connect to a person who may be considering killing themselves (or their families/acquaintances) via a message like this, why not other people who may be considering behavior that society would like to prevent? It's not like such messaging doesn't exist. Anti-drug messages are scattered around the landscape like so many fallen leaves in the Autumn. But particular messages about how to receive help with a drug or alcohol problem aren't a ubiquitous feature of articles about people attempting to deal with such problems. Likewise, articles about people seeking to avoid, or end, entanglement in criminal activities don't always come with pointers to resources that may help.

Which lead me to wonder: Are the anti-suicide messages at the beginning or end of articles about depression for a depressed depressed person who may be reading, or for the rest of us? The downside of being unable to understand what happens in other people's minds is that it leaves us without a solid way of judging the effectiveness of such messaging on what I would think is the intended audience. Sure one can ask people who present (or are in) treatment or the like if they've seen such messages and what part they've played in those people's thinking, but for people who've killed themselves, there is no such avenue for understanding. From my limited understanding of depression, it seems that such messaging is unlikely to make a difference. Not to be snide, but were it that easy, there wouldn't be as large of a problem. Part of it, I think, is a general difficulty in relating to people suffering from mental illness, mainly because they don't always see themselves as ill. Plenty of people, however, speak to those suffering from mental illness as if they were instead suffering from a physical malady, and one they should wish to  be rid of. I've been guilty of the same. An uncle succumbed to Schizophrenia and it was intensely difficult for me to speak to him appropriately. Of course, my simply telling him that he wasn't the Messiah wasn't going to suddenly cure him and restore him to the person I remembered. But to listen to me, one would have concluded that I sincerely believed that I might somehow convince him.

Part of me suspects that such messages are legally mandated, but my Google-fu was not up to the task of tracking down any such regulation. And besides, it's not like this would be the only journalistic convention that had attained broad adoption across the industry.

Me being me, I suspect that a lot of what's happening is that I'm simply overthinking things. For all that there may be a general understanding that hopelessness and despair are overly common in American society, reactions to them are often based on a combination of the perceived outcomes and the level of sympathy towards the sufferer (two factors that may themselves be intertwined). While there are religious strictures in some faiths that hold that despair is a sin, and suicide along with it, for many people, a loss of hope leading to self-harm is basically a tragedy, and the story ends there. Despair that leads to injury to others, or to the risk thereof, tends to be brushed aside, in favor of explanations that cast the actor as morally culpable. So a young person who turns to burglary out of a sense that they have no other way to a workable standard of living is cast as lazy and/or greedy, because to see them as despairing seems to foreclose salving feelings of injury by punishing them. Likewise, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, there is still a widespread understanding that addiction comes from a lack of willpower or other personal moral/ethical failing, rather than being a means of coping with difficulties in life.

My personal conclusion is that suicide is something that people care about. The belief that stories about suicide and suicidal ideation encourage the same (as if people would never think of such things on their own) dies hard, and journalistic outlets understand that they may be blamed if someone kills themselves and it's found that they read an article without an attendant anti-suicide message. And I don't begrudge people their caring, or their choices of what to care about, and what not to. I do wonder, however, if a greater show of caring for other matters may be effective in blunting their impacts on society.

Over the Sea

Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Lake Champlain kicking it in Seattle.

The annual event known as Seafair is happening this weekend, and that means that the Navy has come to town. Which I find to be cool. I have always had a child's enthusiasm for military hardware, and this is the first time that I've ever seen a warship up close. So, unsurprisingly, I hauled out my camera and snapped away.