Glory and Glamor

"A millennial who tried van life says it's just 'glorified homelessness'." Put another way, a millennial who attempted to follow in the footsteps of "influencers" learned that part of the work of being an influencer is hiding all of the effort that goes into maintaining their perfect Internet lifestyles. One of the headings in the Fortune article is "Lifestyle content isn’t everything it seems to be when you’re actually living it," something that I, for my part, took for granted. Mainly because I'd always figured it was a given that the messy part of life was rarely shown, because pretty much no-one aspires to it. And aspiration, and supposed shortcuts to achieving it, is the entire point of Internet lifestyle content.

But I suppose that's easy for me to say. After all, I'm 20 years older than the woman in the article. I've had significantly more time to develop media literacy and, having watched how social media came onto the scene, a skepticism that it was any more genuine than television (reality or not) had been.

Lifestyle content, and its predecessors in the media landscape, has always sought to tap into the audience's feelings that they could be living a better life than the one they currently are. And it's an understandable feeling. While I find the constant descriptors of everyday life as a "dystopian hellscape" tiresome and self-important (not to mention clichéd), I completely understand the generalized feeling that things should be better that underlies it. And so when people appear to offer straightforward ways of attaining a better life, it's perfectly reasonable that certain members of the audience would jump at the chance. It's no different than any other form of advertising; offering solutions to problems that require little more than a reasonable monthly payment.

There was a part of me, when I was younger, that believed, because I wanted to believe, that there were people who had found a way to make it without playing the game by the rules that had been set out for everyone to play by. I suspect that if there had been influencer culture when I was in my 20s, that I would have latched on to them as people living the dream, and sought to follow in their footsteps. Now, I know better... or am at least more suspicious of the sorts of quick fixes that the lifestyles of the glamorous seem to offer. (After all, I'm well aware that "glamor" originally meant "a magical spell or illusion.") But that also makes me cynical, and while I've come to enjoy that aspect of my personality, I understand that it isn't for everyone. Some people want to believe that the people they see on Instagram or TikTok are genuinely letting them in on ways to escape parts of their lives that don't work for them. And it's something of a shame that they come to feel that they've been on the wrong end of deliberate deceit. But I suppose that advertising has that effect on a lot of people, eventually.

In Triplicate

Yesterday morning, I went out for breakfast. While I was waiting for the food to be brought to the table I checked the Google app on my phone, to see what the latest news was. In the local news section, there were 15 articles in the carousel. Three of them were devoted to covering the same sexual assault story from the next county over.

And people wonder why the public's perception of crime doesn't match the reality.

There is nothing wrong with crime stories. They're news, just like anything else. And media outlets have settled on "if it bleeds, it leads" for a reason. But it is possible to over-cover a story. In the Google instance, that came in the form of presenting three stories from different media organizations about the same event. The inventive to present stories that will draw people in, so that they'll see whatever advertising messages are placed alongside the story, leads to a shift in the proportion of coverage. And those sorts of shifts shape perceptions, because most people don't have much firsthand knowledge of enough of the world around them to have an independent sense of what's happening in the broader world around them. In other words, even if one understands that the headlines may not paint an accurate picture of the real world, it takes a pretty expansive view things beyond the headlines to understand the ways in which the picture is inaccurate.

Didn't Do It

The news of the day is that Paul Pelosi, husband to Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, was attacked in their home in California by a conspiracy theorist. The political class was quick to offer verbal condemnations of the battery.

GOP Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., reacted to the attack, writing he is "disgusted to hear about the horrific assault on Speaker Pelosi's husband Paul," adding: "Let's be clear: violence has no place in this country."
Home intruder yelled 'Where's Nancy?' before attacking Pelosi's husband, source says

Unfortunately, this view is not as widely held as one might like it to be.

A majority (56 percent) of Republicans support the use of force as a way to arrest the decline of the traditional American way of life. Forty-three percent of Republicans express opposition to this idea. Significantly fewer independents (35 percent) and Democrats (22 percent) say the use of force is necessary to stop the disappearance of traditional American values and way of life.
After the Ballots are Counted: Conspiracies, Political Violence, and American Exceptionalism

And this is, in part, because people for whom violence is the answer when it comes to preserving "traditional American values and way of life" are often (potential) voters, too. Unless, that is, they're currently incarcerated for some impromptu preservation work, or ex-convicts in several states. And while some of the people who support use of force against those they see as enemies of the version of the United States they understand themselves to be entitled to would walk away from that position if the politicians they preferred came out strongly against it, many of them would simply look for new politicians to prefer.

It's that threat of lost votes, and lost offices, that mean that while people like Representative Scalise can be quick to stand up and speak out against violence directed at fellow House members, for a lot of Republicans (and likely some Democrats, too) tend to avoid talking about it unless there's been an incident that they feel the need to distance themselves from. (Like this one.)

But once one moves away from the political side of things, it's a different story. I know someone who a fairly devout follower of Donald Trump's brand of Republican party, and I mentioned to him that this was something of a bad thing for the Republican brand. Because even though people like this tend to be a bit too mentally ill to really described as partisan, the overly political nature of the attack would reflect badly on the party as a whole. He was having none of it, insisting that David DePape, rather than being someone who had gone off the rails, was actually a Liberal operative, who attacked Mr. Pelosi as a "false flag" operation to make Republicans look bad.

It's this sense, of being a member of a group that is on the correct side, and therefore incapable of any sort of wrongdoing, that grinds the conversation about political violence to a halt. Rolling Stone reported that Fox News sought to blame the attack on the Biden Administration and Speaker Pelosi herself, pointing to Democratic divisiveness and being "soft on crime." While seemingly absurd, it's a rational strategy for a media outlet that's built its brand on a certain level of partisan loyalty, and is expected to display that loyalty regularly.

It remains to be seen if this something that weighs down the low-propensity voters that Republicans are going to need, especially if they plan to retake the White House. But it offers and interesting view into the workings of the American political ecosystem nevertheless.

No, Not Like That

Rather than give up on the couple unit in favour of nothing at all, we should have been finding new units - units of friends and siblings and wasters who couldn't get a mortgage on their own. We should have used the opportunities presented by the breakdown of the traditional couple to create new and ever larger households, not smaller ones.

And we've still got time to buck the trend, but only once we stop being so sensitive to one another - only once we stop feeling sorry for singles, and start berating and hassling them.

Singletons are selfish

Because there's no better way to get someone to do what you think is best for them than by berating and hassling them. As someone who lives alone, I do so because I have the resources to do so. And I do, on occasion, meet people who give me a hard time about that, although, now that I am well past any reasonable age for first marriage, not as many as I used to.

And I would ask Zoe Williams (presuming that, after all this time, she still holds to her opinion) the same thing I've asked some more recent critics: "What's in it for me?" I understand that many can live more cheaply than one, given that I understand basic math, so clearly the financial savings are not a motivator. Getting people to form large households as some people seem to want, is a matter of no longer feeling sorry for single people. But it does require some sensitivity; after all, if you can't be bothered to get to know someone well enough to understand what they value, how do you give them a rational reason to go along with your desires for them?

While this example is both old and trivial, I think that it illustrates something that American (and apparently British) society could use some work on; understanding that when people don't need what one wants to sell them, just beating them about the head and shoulders is a poor substitute for a good sales pitch.

Wishful

The short-lived tenure of Liz Truss as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has drawn comparisons with the United States. Namely how quickly the Conservative Party in the UK decided that Ms. Truss was a disaster and had to go, versus the Republican Party's unwillingness to consign former President Donald Trump to the political wilderness.

The comparison is perhaps understandable, but it still inapt. Mainly due to one major difference. Britain's Conservative Party basically came to the conclusion that their interests were not served by Ms. Truss remaining Prime Minister. The Republican Party here in the United States, however, still believes that Donald Trump has their interests at heart, and will pursue them if he's returned to the White House. Note that in neither case did I say anything about the interests of the nation at large.

And that's because people don't generally see their interests as separate from, let alone at cross purposes to, those of their nation. And while a lot of left-leaning media types may see Donald Trump's policy desires as being just as bad for the United States as Liz Truss' were for the United Kingdom, Republicans don't agree with that assessment. And, as near as I can tell, there's no real reason for them to agree with that assessment. They're getting what they want, and they understand that what they want is what is in the best interests of the nation as a whole. The people who are hurt by it, or otherwise have problems with it, want, at least in the minds of many Republicans, something other than what's best for the United States. (Remember, the two parties tend to see the other as more extreme than is the reality of the situation.)

Democracy does not mean that people are gifted with an arbitrary level of enlightenment. It simply means that the franchise is broadly available. The ousting of Liz Truss is not a victory for British democracy; likewise, the continued popularity of Donald Trump in Republican circles is not a failure for American democracy. Both outcomes are merely a manifestation of how people see their own interests in the world.

Ghost Ship

The air in Seattle has been remarkably smokey recently. So much so, that for a couple of days, the air here was supposedly the worst in the world. What should be visible in this photograph is Alki Point, given that it's only a little over two miles away. But the smoke hides everything, save for a lone sailboat plying the waters of Elliot Bay.
 

Punitive

A lot of what appears to be hypocrisy in comparing how the law treats one person as opposed to another is born of the fact that many people understand the law to be a means by which society punishes bad people, rather a means by which it attempts to discourage bad actions. And to the degree that people make determinations of whether another person is good or bad based on factors other than said person's relationship to the particular law at hand, they appear, if not hypocritical, at least incoherent.

Artistry

Some remarkably good graffiti art on the side of a rail car. Someone could make a career out of this sort of thing.
 

And Stay Away

"Surveillance capitalism," as defined in Wikipedia, "is an economic system centered around the capture and commodification of personal data for the core purpose of profit-making." Or, pretty much exactly what you would expect from businesses that find themselves awash in personally identifiable information (known as "PII" in privacy circles) that can be used to help them to understand which of the tens or hundreds of millions of people in their markets may be prospective customers.

In any event, I was recently reading an article on one woman's attempt to escape the notice of the capitalists whom, if they found out that she was pregnant, would deluge her with advertisements for all of the things that she might need to purchase before, during and after the delivery. She, however, cognizant that there was a high risk that the baby might not survive long enough to be delivered, wanted to prevent the onslaught of solicitations. She eventually failed in this, and at about the same time she lost the pregnancy, the surveillance system, not being well-tuned enough to know better, tipped off its clients, and members of the baby-industrial complex, each hoping to be the recipients of her purchasing, swung into action. And since the surveillance system wasn't set up to understand that the attention was unwanted, the advertisements kept coming.

The article was a call for greater government oversight of how companies use personal information and make it difficult for people to avoid sharing it. And I, as a Certified Information Privacy Professional, get it. People's computing devices, whether those are dedicated computing devices or cellular phones, are designed to leak massive amounts of information about their owners and their habits. Cellular phones are the worst offenders, as even in households with a number of people, they tend to have single users, and companies that have finagled their way into being allowed to track the device's location can pretty much always tell precisely who that single user is.

But what prompted me to remember this piece was the author's contention that business finding out that she had been pregnant, and, not realizing that it was in the past tense, marketing to her was more than a simple invasion of privacy. [And here, I'm going to take a moment to define a term. "Privacy," in this context, refers to the ability to control when, how and under what circumstances a person reveals information about themselves to others. What makes the practice of "surveillance capitalism" a problem in this regard is that businesses are sifting through information that was not meant for them, often by granting themselves expansive rights to any information they can find about a person, and then treating that information as property of theirs.] She described the experience as one of "emotional harm."

It is, perhaps, a flaw in our legal system that many rules and regulations operate under a philosophy of "no harm, no foul." Because it prompts people to see the discomforts caused by the actions of others as harmful, in order to give themselves a cause for action. It shouldn't need to be that way. But the problem with capitalism, especially as it's practiced in the United States, isn't that it's necessarily rapacious. Oftentimes, it's simply needy. While diapers, for instance, are more or less a must-have for new parents, they're not exactly difficult to source. Any number of companies make them, and each of them is desperate to add whatever they can to the bottom line, under the watchful eyes of investors and stock markets. Companies compete to be top-of-mind for potential customers, and in a society that tends to deny that there is any such thing as bad publicity, the risk of a negative reaction may often be seen as worthwhile.

There is a strong case to be made that people shouldn't have to claim the emotional harm of being reminded that they've lost a pregnancy to be able to say: "Hey, knock it off." Of course, companies want to make it difficult. A term that I remember being bandied around during the debate over the "Do Not Call" list was "external willpower." Companies, believing that they can influence people, if only they have access to them, bristle at suggestions that they should be blocked from that access. There is, however, something to be said for "Don't call me, I'll call you," whether or not businesses want to hear it.

Coming Out

"We are just shocked by this result and it is so unjust," Lynn Chen, a cousin of Parkland victim Peter Wang, said. "How can he live another day?"
Parkland school shooting: Why the gunman was spared the death penalty

Aside from the fact that even a sentence of death by execution does not result in the sentence being carried out immediately, in the end, it is because three jurors voted against execution. But prior to that, because this is the way the system is set up. And the goals of the justice system are not to provide those who feel they have been wronged by a criminal, no matter how severely, with some sort of sense that someone is acting on their direct behalf.

According to Benjamin Thomas, the jury foreman: "That's how the jury system works. Some of the jurors just felt [life in prison without the possibility of parole] was the appropriate sentence." And Mr. Thomas is right. There's nothing about what happened that lies outside of Florida law. But that's procedural justice. What many people are looking for is what is called substantive justice, or the idea that the outcome lines up with certain ideas of fairness; generally their own.

From my imperfect vantage point, it appears that a lot of people are expecting what the philosopher John Rawls termed "perfect procedural justice;" in other words, a legal process, that when followed correctly, results in the expected substantive justice. This, of course, goes beyond criminal courts. Many people (many members of Congress among them) expect that a properly decided Supreme Court case will result in the outcome that they (despite not being Supreme Court Justices themselves) have determined to be the correct one. Or that if an election is truly free and fair, then their chosen candidate will be the winner. And in this, the machine can be run both forward and backward. Since perfect procedural justice always results in a substantively just outcome, any outcome that deviates from a given standard becomes proof that the correct procedure was not followed. And at the end of that line of reasoning is the idea that one need not understand the machinery itself, since the outcome tells one all one needs to know.

(I think that this is part of what drives a certain dislike of expertise; attempting to explain that Florida law makes the sentencing phase of a trial into a form of "pure procedural justice" is taken as a complex, and false-hearted, argument against genuine justice, rather than simply laying out how the system works, and perhaps why it works that way.)

The disconnect between procedural and substantive justice can be difficult to accept, especially in situations where one is on the wrong side of said disconnect, because people generally understand genuine substantive justice as mirroring their personal understanding of what is fair. And so a procedure of justice that produces the "wrong" answer is obviously unfair. But the reason why societies must fall back on procedural justice is that fairness is personal, accordingly, there are few, if any circumstances, in which any given outcome will be seen as fair, and thus conforming to the rules of substantive justice, for any and all people. And given the general propensity of people to be inconsistent in their understandings of fairness, an observer might well conclude that a system that perfectly aligned with any one person's  understanding of substantive justice was, in fact, wildly arbitrary, having no predictable rules at all other than giving the individual whatever they wanted the outcome to be.

But such is the way of things, given that people tend to believe that their own conceptualization of justice exactly aligns with whatever the objective ideal of justice is. But in a society of hundreds of millions, the lack of a clearly objective ideal means that any number of people are set up to be disappointed.

No Wrong Moves

During a Trump rally on Saturday in Minden, Nevada, [Alabama Senator Tommy] Tuberville, a retired college football coach, claimed that Democrats are "pro-crime" because "they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparation because they think the people that do the crime are owed that. Bullshit. They are not owed that."
NAACP president: Sen. Tommy Tuberville's comments about reparations are 'flat out racist'

As you may have guessed from the headline, cue the "outrage." NAACP President Derrick Johnson might as well have reached into his deck, pulled out a strongly worded form letter address: "To Whom It May Concern" and simply had someone put the address to Senator Tuberville's office on it. It was a rally for Donald Trump with a Senator from Alabama in attendance. What else was anyone expecting?

While it's difficult to believe that there were people who didn't get the memo after the 2016 election, "deplorables" cast votes, too. And they charge the same thing for their votes that everyone else does; having politicians parrot their viewpoints back to them in public. And in a nation where negative partisanship is as strong as it is now, those Republicans who disagree with Senator Tuberville are just going to pretend that he never said anything, because there's no benefit in placing themselves on the wrong side of people who would otherwise vote for them by denouncing him.

While I'm not a political junkie by any means, I'm not completely uniformed. Yet, I'd never heard of Senator Tuberville before media outlets started reporting on the coffeepot conflagration that his rally performance provoked. Now, his name is everywhere. And for what?

Alabama is already synonymous with backwardness, intolerance and racism. Anyone who hasn't made their peace with that is very behind the times. So it's not like this is going to have any political fallout for the Senator. And for Donald Trump? he knows which side his bread is buttered on. For him, it's a twofer... "the libs" sputter in apoplexy and the former President takes their attacks on him and uses them show his supporters that he, and by extension they, are persecuted. And for Black Republicans, well, they're not going to do anything that any other Republican wouldn't do... it's not like any of them have managed to carve out a position such that denouncing the apparent racism of their fellows is a path to electoral victory.

And yes, I said "apparent." It's not at all clear to me that Senator Tuberville was doing anything other than whipping up the crowd in a way that he knew would work to his political benefit. Sometimes, people use racist language because they're actually racists, and sometimes, they use racist language because it gets a rise out of people they don't like. Here, I genuinely suspect the latter, and people are lining up to take the bait.

National Public Radio went with the headline: "Alabama Sen. Tuberville equates descendants of enslaved people to criminals." Which may be true, but it requires making a link between the Black population in America today and the former chattel slaves of more than a century ago. And honestly, I don't think that many of the people at that rally bothered to make that connection. What they heard was yet another take on the same old idea: That the Democratic Party wants to give money to people who were lazy, shiftless and had no respect for the law at their expense. And even for those audience members who made the connection, as far as many of them are concerned, slavery is just an excuse that Black people give for being lazy, shiftless and having no respect for the law. Again, this isn't anything new. Anyone who's been within 500 miles of the Mason-Dixon line (or a Conservative think-tank) in the past half-century should be well aware of this line of reasoning. This horse is so dead that it's practically fossilized. Why are people still pointing out that it's being beaten?

The outrage machine no longer has any reason for existing than to produce less and less effective outrage. And so it's now at the point that it simply spirals. Politicians make comments that spark "outrage" so that their supporters can be "outraged" at the supposed outrage. I'd be surprised if Senator Tuberville doesn't already have fundraising e-mails calling on voters to donate to him that feature all of the people who have lined up to call him a racist.

But I guess that's really the point. It's not that American society never learns; it's that it learns quickly, and well. Outrage, though its ability to motivate people to give money and give votes, grants power. Once a person has a loyal following, there is no punishment that can be meted out that will deter those followers from seeing the object of their adoration as unfairly martyred for standing up for what's right. The idea that what's right generates opposition becomes a positive incentive to incite opposition as proof of one's own righteousness. And the only people who lose at this game are the ones who won't play.

Pointed

The 2022 general election is about a month away. Accordingly, the new Voters' Pamphlet arrived in the mail yesterday, and I spent some time looking through it. Washington is a Blue state, and so I started out by looking at the entries for Republican candidates around the state.

For the most part, it was a litany of Republican talking points; taxes are too high, crime is out of control, families (specifically, it seems) can't afford their needs due to inflation, the pandemic response was mishandled, illegal immigration threatens everyone, and the like. "Make America Great Again" rhetoric was mostly avoided, although House of Representatives candidate Matt Larkin tossed in "Make Crime Illegal Again." There was also quite a bit of "I'll fight for you" rhetoric, which always strikes me as strange; but I get it, people lap that stuff up. There weren't quite as many first-time candidates for elected office as I had expected, but there were a handful. (Interestingly, there were no political novices on the Democratic side.) Only one of the candidates made reference to the Republican article of faith that there was electoral cheating going on, and references to the new Republican boogeyman of "CRT" were mostly indirect references to things like "parents' rights."

Abortion wasn't quite absent from the pamphlet, but only one of the Republican candidates had anything to say directly about it, noting that "Newborn Washington babies can be murdered as they are being born." Another of the Republicans' perhaps understanding a need to better "read the room" in a Democratic-leaning state, noted "I will defend women's reproductive rights." Interestingly, this was one of the small group of female Republicans in the pamphlet, and, judging from their photographs, possibly the only non-White of the group. (Although another of the four Republican women may also have been non-White.) She was also the only candidate who made an explicit pitch for the "middle."

Senate Candidate Tiffany Smiley, at the top of the ticket, avoided the talking points entirely, choosing to stick with her primary election strategy of presenting a generically uplifting personal story, rather than any indications of what policies she might favor. (The Smiley campaign saves that for the website.)

Because of the format of Washington primary elections, it's possible for two candidates from the same party to face on another in the general election, and so one race had two Republican candidates. It stood out from the others in the complete absence of the typical taking points.

Again, I am convinced that one of the main things one learns from the Voters' Pamphlet is how the various campaigns see the voters they're attempting to communicate it. The Republican candidates avoided explicit "Trumpiness," and mostly stayed away from the "hot-button political issues" that would lead to negative contrasts with the Democrats. They also stayed away from direct attacks, tending to be critical of policy positions that others have done the work of linking to the Democratic party and/or the Biden Administration. I think the lesson that Republicans took away from the primaries is that while it's fine to talk to their own voters in the language of their fears and distrust, going all the way to full culture-war rhetoric would alienate the less-conservative voters they would need to attract in order to actually win elections. We'll see how well it works in a month's time.

Stand-Ins

It's a familiar story; a media company takes a property that has a large and devoted fan base, makes some or other change designed mainly to appear to modern sensibilities, a bunch of said fan base becomes upset, and this is taken as proof of their hatefulness on the part of those fans. Whether its a Black elf in The Rings of Power, or Scooby Doo's Velma Dinkley crushing on a girl, the pattern is always pretty much the same.

So as to not have any elephants in the room, I'm going to mention that when racial or sexual minorities are recast as straight White people, any anger is considered justified. But that's not really what I'm concerned with here.

What I'm interested in is the switch from this being considered "tokenism" to being "representation." Personally, I'm old, and so a lot of these instances still feel like tokenism to me. I find them lazy, mainly because they take advantage of the fact that so many fans are desperate to see someone like themselves in certain media properties that companies can rack up points more or less instantly with these sorts of insertions, which don't call for actually doing any of the world or character-building work that building these sort of characters would normally entail. Granted, in some instances, it can be made to make sense. In the various iterations of the Scooby Doo franchise, the characters have always been more or less sexless, only the Cartoon Network crossover with Johnny Bravo having any indication that the characters even knew was sex was, let alone had active attractions to other human beings. The various Scooby Doo shows were, after all, children's television, and any mention of sexuality tended to be strictly verboten. This is what made Cartoon Network's winking nods funny, the absurdity of adult characters being so chaste as to be effectively neuter.

Of course, the problem is that while there are minority and queer elements to many fandoms, they aren't particularly large. In the nearly 30 years since Milestone Media was founded, its comic universe has barely made a peep. Only one character, Static Shock, managed to find any mainstream success, and, if my last trip to a comic-book store is any indication, he's faded back into obscurity. I know that I, as a Black comic book fan, didn't find the characters to be particularly compelling. For me, the miss was that they were Black super-heroes, rather than being Black super-heroes. Sure, Marvel and DC tended to trade in tired tropes and stereotypes in their characters, but at least the things the characters were doing were worth reading.

But I'm an outlier in that sense; questions of Black identity, and the difficulties of fitting those questions into a world with superhumans in it don't really intrigue me. But there are, from what I understand, a lot of people for whom those sorts of stories are supposed to be compelling. Why were they not buying these comics?

There is a part of me that sees various groups seeking representation, even in small ways, in popular media properties, not because they want to see themselves, but because they want other people to see them. Legacy media properties have built-in audiences who are going to see a Black elf in Tolkien's Middle Earth, or a bisexual/lesbian Velma in Scooby Doo.

In in a situation like that, a new character, or a new franchise, simply doesn't have the pull required. Black people may not have purchased Milestone titles in large numbers, but White comic fans could be forgiven for never even knowing the company existed. This made their titles poor vehicles for increasing the audience for Black characters.

It's going to be a while before the people in various media properties are allowed to simply be people, in all of their disparate traits and confusing contradictions. Right now, many of them are being pressed into service as ambassadors, in the sense that they are not only representations of various groups, but also the representatives of those groups. Personally, I find it an awkward fit, and I look forward to when it doesn't seem so forced.

On Rails

I'm not really a train person. I've ridden Amtrak a few times, mainly back and forth between Seattle and Portland. But I do find trains interesting, especially the wide variety of specialized rail cars to transport specific cargoes. These are fuselage railcars, used to move the bodies of jetliners to and from various factories; such as the Boeing facilities in the area.

Given that Boeing is in the area, I've seen these quite often, but these are actually the first time I've seen a set of them empty.
 

Fight Dud

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is in the news again, this time after claiming that what seem like a couple of random murders are the start of a coordinated campaign on the part of the Democratic Party to kill Republicans.

"Democrats want Republicans dead," according to Representative Greene, "and they have already started the killings."

I don't know if Representative Greene is sincere, cynical or mentally ill, and in the end, it doesn't matter. Because she isn't the problem. The idea that, in a nation where violence is endemic, that two random incidents that escalated to violence are part of some sort of coordinated campaign is the problem. Or rather, that there are people who are eager enough to believe that they've become targets that this makes sense is the problem.

Of course, Republicans aren't alone in this. The only surprising thing is how late they are to this particular tactic. Taking the actions of a few individuals in a nation of 330-plus million and making those out to be indicative of some broad nationwide trend is practically a profession for any number of people.

As I see it, there's a weird sense of safety in these things. Because the enemy is always implacably hateful, yet clearly incompetent. If people in Rwanda could engage in a widespread massacre of their fellow citizens with machetes and sticks, it stands to reason that in a nation with as many guns as the United States, mass targeting of Republicans would be pretty straightforward. If, as Republican filmmaker Dinesh D'Sousa claims, the Democrats were able to round up hundreds of people to steal an election, it seems that they could round up more than a couple of people to commit lethal political violence.

In any event, it's identity politics being weird again. It won't be the last time.

Fractured

People in the United States spend a lot of time arguing about Capitalism. There are two broad camps, and they tend to ask different questions. For one camp the question boils down to: "Capitalism: Wonderful or terrific?" while the other tends to ask: "Capitalism: Threat or menace?" Each side understands its particular worldview as self-evident, and so reacts with mistrust to those people who share the opposite view. Or any other view, for that matter.

Many of the people I know tend to lean Liberal in their politics, and so suspicion of Capitalism runs high. Mainly because of ideas that a) the primary purpose of societies should be to care for the well-being and actualization of their members and b) Capitalism actively opposes that purpose. On the Conservative side of my social circles, things are a little less clear. Most of the Conservatives I know as less economically conservative than they are religiously conservative, and a lot of their opposition to what they understand as "Socialism," comes from the fact that the government of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was, and the government of the People's Republic of China is, officially atheist. (Although perhaps simply non-Christian is a better way of putting it.) Therefore there is a certain degree to which their support for Capitalism comes across as because "God wills it." However, a case can be made that they also believe that a) the primary purpose of societies should be to care for the well-being and actualization of their members and b) Capitalism actively promotes that purpose.

For my own part, I am dubious of both sets of claims. Mainly because I have long been of the opinion that there is no set of institutions or ideologies that humans can create that will substantially alter the motivations and goals of the humans that comprise them.

In other words, the problem with America is the Americans, and changing the system(s) of economics and/or governance is not going to solve that particular problem. While some of my more Progressive friends hold up the Scandinavian nations as examples of what a well-functioning and caring society could (and should) look like in the United States, the social democracies of the Nordic countries did not create the impulse for their citizens to take an active interest in each other's well-being. Rather that impulse shaped the social democracies they created. Likewise, the counter-example than many Reactionaries cite, Venezuela, wasn't brought down because they were doing Socialism as intended; the problem was that late President Hugo Chavez instituted his reforms as a means of class warfare, and the classes (and a lot of other Venezuelans, it seems) are still at war. By the same token, the constant conflicts that ripple across the United States are not the result of either too much, or not enough, Capitalism or Socialism, but because of a general inability of the people of the United States to see one another as all having a certain shared set of interests. And, as much as I dislike the phrasing, I suspect one could go so far as to say that Americans routinely fail to credit one another with even shared humanity.

And without that underlying unity, the rest of it simply doesn't matter. No form of government, economics or religion (or lack thereof) is going to change the degree to which Americans see one another as worthy of having their well-being and actualization cared for.

The problem with premise a) which I put as: the primary purpose of societies should be to care for the well-being and actualization of their members is not that many think of it as false. Rather, the premise is somewhat overly broad. Because I think that a lot of people feel that the primary purpose of societies should be to care for the well-being and actualization of the just, law (and/or norms)-abiding and right-thinking among them. And in this sense, the degree to which Liberals feel that they fare poorly under Capitalism and Conservatives fear that Socialism would be punitive and impoverishing for them are features, rather than bugs. And no system can create unity and shared prosperity when the motivation behind implementing it is to punish those who dissent from The Right Way of Doing Things.

The history of the United States is rife with examples of one group of people doing better for themselves by shifting the costs of their benefits to one or more other groups of people, either because it was presumed that them bearing those costs was simply their natural lot in life, that they had otherwise shown themselves undeserving of prosperity or were simply out of sight and out of mind. And the discussion of who should pay for the benefits of others has yet to be taken off the table.