The Path

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to success in modern life is a sense of futility. If one is going to put a lot of time and effort into doing something, it helps to trust that it will pay off. (This is something that I find to be missing from a lot of talk about "grit." "Grit" in the face of certain failure is viewed as quixotic, rather than determination.)

One area where I see a sense of futility consistently at play is in left-leaning politics here in the United States. Broadly speaking, the American Left has, among its policy priorities, maintaining or restoring access to legal abortion (and contraception more broadly) and reducing (if not eliminating) the access to personal firearms. These are areas in which they've faced opposition from the American Right, and, broadly speaking, the Right has been winning this contest. It's likely that, despite rhetoric about allowing states to decide their own abortion policies, that when Republicans take control of the House of Representatives, someone will float a bill to criminalize abortion nationwide, and some of the very people who claimed that it should be a matter for the states will vote in favor of that. (They'll have their perfunctory responses to the knee-jerk accusations of hypocrisy at the ready, of course.) And it doesn't even require having paid any attention at all to the "debate" concerning gun control in the United States to realize that it's going nowhere.

The general reason for this is the phenomenon of the "single-issue voter." While these groups of people are minorities of the overall public, they have the ability to make it difficult or impossible for people who don't toe their lines on their favorite causes to be elected. Make them unhappy, and they walk away. And there's always someone who will rush in to tell them whatever it takes to obtain those votes. And if they want to stay in office, they're forced to walk the walk, at least enough to avoid leaving room for someone to challenge them on the basis of greater adherence to the party line.

The American Left has no such groups of consistently motivated voters on its side. And I think that they've mostly given up on attempting to cultivate them. Which I will admit that I find to be strange. Because the current strategy of appeals to majoritarianism (when it suits them, anyway) and the ideals of democracy aren't getting them anywhere. So, for instance, while there are a number of people on the Left who object the idea of billionaires in concept, as a matter of both ethics and economic justice, the chances of altering the business regulatory environment to eliminate the economic incentives that create the consolidation of wealth are functionally zero. There's something telling about the fact that it was considered more likely that disaffected right-leaning voters in the United States would manage to install a government that would dismantle America's republican form of government during the most recent election cycle.

The question of why the Left tends to be more focused on the idea that "somebody needs to do something," and holding street protests to that effect, rather than coming together as a block of voters and emulating the tactics that the Right has successfully deployed again and again is "above my pay grade," as they say. I suspect that it's another facet of the broader coalitions that make up the American Left. It's hard to get half a dozen people to all agree to what they want on a pizza. Getting a few million people to all agree on political priorities is no easier. And I think that this is the part that's become lost to a sense of futility: the idea that a set of priorities can be created, and the boxes ticked off one after the next. The American Left has the population needed (although there may need to be some shuffling of where people are actually located) to push through legislation on guns, abortion, billionaires or what have you. They need to trust one another to go down the list, rather then people bailing out once their pet project has concluded. This, perhaps, would give them a greater sense of the power they could wield.

In Their Corner

The Economist Asks: How could Ukraine win the war?

Which is a good question, if one that I wouldn't expect a podcast to give a workable answer to. Not because it's the sort of thing that would be beyond a podcast, but because the answer would constitute at least somewhat valuable information. In other words, if the answer was "the Ukrainians could win by doing X, Y and Z," it's a pretty safe bet that the Russians would obtain that information, and, if they found it credible, move to close of the possibility of Ukraine doing X, Y and Z.

As a result, Anne McElvoy's conversation with the former commander of the United States Army in Europe, Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, comes across as more of a cheerleading session than a layperson's introduction to the strategy and tactics of repelling an invasion.

General Hodges saw a lot of factors working in Ukraine's favor, one of which was that people in the United States wanted to see Ukraine win, and this was likely to mean that support for military aid in Congress would continue. This, I think, may be a bit of wishful thinking. (But then again, there is a remarkable amount of wishful thinking when it comes to foreign policy, I've learned.) Not because the public of the United States doesn't, for the most part (after all, there are a few Russia boosters, here in the States, for various reasons), wish Ukraine well, but wishing someone well, and working to ensure they are well are not the same thing. The question is not whether the people of the United States have a favorite of the two warring sides, but how much in the way of both resources and risk that they're willing to put on the line.

Just Like the Rest of Them

In the wake of the rather spectacular collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX (an abbreviation, it turns out, of "Futures Exchange") I suddenly started hearing a lot more about the philosophical concept of "effective altruism." I'd heard of effective altruism mainly through having heard excerpts of philosopher Peter Singer making the case for it on various radio shows and podcasts. Having a passing interest in philosophy, I'd also read a few articles on the topic here and there. For me, the main things that I understood about effective altruism were the concepts that everyone's well-being is of equal value and that giving should be cost-effective. The stereotypical example of this would be if I could alleviate the hunger of three families in the United States by giving $100 over some period of time, but that same $100 could alleviate hunger for 10 families of equal size in Bangladesh, I should give my money to a charity that alleviates hunger in Bangladesh. Likewise, if charity A can feed 5 people for set time with a given amount of money donated, while charity B can feed 6, then I should donate to charity B. By making these sorts of calculations, driven by whatever data is available, one can be most effective with one's charitable giving.

All in all, I hadn't put much thought into effective altruism, and so was somewhat surprised to find that news outlets were running story after story on it, based mainly on the fact that FTX co-founder and CEO Samuel Bankman-Fried was a committed effective altruist. Despite the inference being about as logically fallacious as they come, there seemed to be a rather intense questioning of whether effective altruism was all that it was cracked up to be, given that Mr. Bankman-Fried was a) a backer and b) apparently wildly dishonest and/or unethical in his business dealings. It all struck me as more than a little suspect. Republican operatives seeking to link Mr. Bankman-Fried to Democrats, and framing the entirety of the Democratic Party as dishonest on that basis, was also a straight-up logical fallacy, but an expected one; American partisan politics more or less demands that the political parties claim that any malpractice by anyone even tenuously associated with the opposing party be held up as evidence that the whole party is run by criminals and fraudsters.

And recognizing that partisan aspect to things allowed me to better understand the interest in effective altruism. There are three major schools of thought when it comes to normative ethics: deontology, utilitarianism/consequentialism and virtue ethics. Virtue ethics, because it doesn't tend to deal directly with determining how a person should act in the moment, is often shunted to the side in any number of discussions, leaving a perhaps more familiar deontology versus utilitarianism divide. A divide, it turns out, that can be just as partisan as Republicans versus Democrats. Effective altruism is generally seen as a utilitarian/consequentialist viewpoint, focused as it is on basically doing the most good for the most people, and therefore leaving certain people with a valid claim to be "moral patients" out in the cold. To use the example I cited above, the three families in the United States. If I chose to give $100 to charity B in Bangladesh, and feed perhaps 12 families there, the Americans go hungry, for no other reason than they live in a nation where it's more expensive to feed them. They might argue that there are valid reasons for casting aside equal consideration of interests, and there are a good number of philosophers who agree with them.

Overall, I am under the impression that utilitarianism is the subject of quite a high degree of distrust from people who are not themselves utilitarians. At least, here in the "industrialized West," where incomes and standards of living are fairly high, relative to the rest of the world. And I think that this distrust is playing out here, as critics of effective utilitarianism seek to undermine the idea by linking it to someone now widely understood to be a bad person. Philosophy is subject to human nature, too, I suppose.

No Trace

[A.J. Jones, Starbucks' executive vice president of communications] also claims that the union's stipulation of wanting to observe proceedings violates the National Labor Relations Act, which prohibits the recording of bargaining sessions.

The union has refuted this claim, saying that it wants union members to sit in on the [Zoom] call, not record it.
Why are Starbucks workers striking?

And how would the Starbucks Workers Union propose that members be prohibited from recording the proceedings? There are any number of ways to make a video of what's happening on a computer screen. Sure, the Union could expel anyone who released a recording, but that's closing the barn door after the horse has gone off and founded a cryptocurrency start up. For the Union to claim that members observing the call would be stopped from recording it is either hopelessly naive or openly disingenuous. Just because someone lacks access to the Record function built into Zoom does not mean that they have no ability to make a viable recording of the call.

While I understand that unions are meant to advocate for their members, the assumption that all approximately 7,000 people in the Starbucks Workers Union are either too ethical, or too tech-illiterate, to figure out a way to record a Zoom call without anyone knowing that they've done so goes beyond simple advocacy. It's possible that the Union's leadership are themselves lacking in the sort of technological savvy that would give them an understanding of how a call might be recorded, so, for the sake of argument, let's give them the benefit of that doubt. In that case, why not ask Starbucks why they determined that members observing the call carries a risk? (Personally, I suspect that Starbucks hasn't granted the Union the benefit of the doubt, and I'm not at all surprised by that...)

The adversarial nature of the relationship between the people who work for companies and the people who own and manage them is tailor-made for this sort of thing. The Union has no incentive to believe that it would be trivially easy for any participant or observer on a Zoom call to record it, and Starbucks management has no incentive to believe that the leadership of the Union is dealing in good faith. And once neither side has an incentive to see the other as being an honest partner, things quickly fall apart.

Law of Rules

It's a stereotype that Conservatives care more about rules, law and order than Liberals do, at least here in the United States. This stereotype is mostly one of branding; the Rule of Law tends to be employed as a punishment for being frightening and/or unpopular as, if not more, often then it is used in response to misbehavior. And people of all political persuasions tend to have a greater interest in rules that protect their interests than they do in rules as a general concept.

And so it was that left-leaning media outlets spent a lot of time openly fretting and clutching their metaphorical pearls in the run-up to the recent mid-term elections, when it looked like devotees of former President Donald Trump and the "Stop the Steal" mythology might carry the day and install themselves as Secretaries of State and other elections officials in jurisdictions dotted around the nation. The clear concern was that such people would actively interfere in elections, pushing the nation towards "autocracy" and away from "the rule of law."

But I think that human nature is something of a constant, and so it was that National Public Radio published an article with the headline "The U.S. moves to shield Saudi crown prince in journalist killing." The article, sourced from the Associated Press is basically a litany of activist complaints about the fact that the Biden Administration has concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is entitled to the same sovereign immunity for lawsuits in American courts that any other head of state or head of government would be. The end of the article points out speaks about some of the details of sovereign immunity, but, for the most part, the article comes across as outrage mining.

I'm not sure, however, what there is to be outraged about. Sovereign immunity is not a new concept, nor is it a particularly contentious one. The fact that it gets in the way of Crown Prince bin Salman being hauled into an American court does not change that. People being of the opinion that the Crown Prince is an oppressor and tyrant is not a valid reason for the current Administration (or any other, really) to decide that the precedent of sovereign immunity should be thrown out, or even that an exception be made in this particular case.

This is the primary driver of "threats to the rule of law;" the idea that sometimes, the letter and/or the spirit of the law come between someone and the outcome that they understand themselves to be entitled to. Whether that is considered a good a bad thing often rests not on an understanding of the law and its purposes, but on who a particular party is more sympathetic to, or which interests are being served. It does little good to wring one's hands about the decline of lawfulness, when one is only concerned with the laws that are found to be to one's benefit.

Reward if Found

A poem, masquerading as a notice of loss. Spotted while walking through Seattle's International District.

Hung Up

Construction has been halted on the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago after a noose was found at the site.

This isn't the first time that this has happened.

Amazon temporarily halted construction of a new US warehouse again after an eighth noose was found at the site.

Construction stoppages seem to be a really expensive response to someone being a jackass.

And statements like "It is a heart-stopping reminder of the violence and terror inflicted on black Americans for centuries," and "This repeated behavior is calculated, and clearly meant to stoke fear and encourage racism and bigotry. What we have been seeing at this facility is wrong, and we condemn these actions in the strongest of terms," do little but make the Black community as a whole seem brittle and thin-skinned.

Having put up with a decent amount of trash like this when I was in high-school (lo, these many eons past) I came to understand that sometimes, people do this sort of thing because they're seeking to send a message of hate. But sometimes, the goal is simply to get a rise out of someone. And when businesses and politicians take the bait, the tactic works. Of course, that alone isn't necessarily a good reason to always remain stoic in the face of such events, so I also offer this consideration: what do these responses actually change?

When the finding of multiple nooses at the Amazon facility in Connecticut halted construction there, an investigation was launched, but there doesn't appear to have been a resolution of the case. No-one came forward to identify the perpetrator (even with $100,000 on the line), and the news reporting didn't change the mood around "race relations" anywhere. And they don't create more resiliency in the Black community. If anything, they simply reinforce the idea that the United States is, and always will be, a racist place; only the outward manifestations of bigotry change over time.

Some random yahoo who feels powerful in their ability to shut down a construction site by surfacing people's fears of a return to an America gone by is unlikely to escalate things if their actions are ignored. Mainly because the sort of people who do escalate these sorts of things are generally looking for more than the sort of fleeting news coverage that comes from incidents like this. Accordingly, moving on with life (and construction) is a better path that a lot of sound and fury that in the end, signifies nothing.

Mix and Match

When certain activities, places and institutions are segregated, such as men's (or boys') and women's (or girls') sports, men's and women's bathrooms or men's and women's jails, what is the criteria for segregation? Biological sex, or gender identity?

When these segregations were conceived, their wasn't a widespread idea of gender as an identity, if the concept existed at all. "Sex" and "gender" were considered synonymous terms, more or less universally. But now that there is, at least in some quarters, the understanding that "male" refers to sex and "woman" refers to gender, when we speak of the various segregations drawn along those lines, how are people being categorized?

National Public Radio has decided that it's self-evident that since we speak of "men's" versus "women's" that gender identity is the divide. "A transgender beauty influencer was put in a men's jail after her arrest in Miami" is written with an assumption that the Miami-Dade County corrections department has done something obviously wrong. Independent evidence, however, is not presented. Now. it's possible that the arresting officers and jail staff knew who Nikita Dragun was, and deliberately placed her in a men's unit, but no evidence is given for that. Likewise, the statement that Ms. Dragun is "legally female" came from a public relations representative, not from any sort of document. So I'm given to believe that when Ms. Dragun was arrested, someone had some reason to understand that while Nikita Dragun identifies as a woman, her original (and maybe current) sex is male.

And that takes us back to the question of who "men's" jails are for: biological males, people who identify as men or some combination of the two. (I suppose that one could ask the same question of women's jails, but a cursory Google search did not reveal any cases of transgender men going to jail...) It's worth a broader social conversation, rather than one driven simply by activists, because as more and more people decide that the way out of narrow gender-role expectations is to change their gender identity, it's going to become more of a concern; although likely still quite rare in the grand scheme of things. Still, given that it's the corner cases where things tend to fall apart, clarity on the topic couldn't hurt.

The media conversation about these sorts of things tends to be driven by the audience of a given media outlet. NPR tends to attract a young, and left-leaning audience, for whom the transgender community are another set of victims to be embraced and championed. I'm sure that Fox News, for example, leans in the other direction. But the mediated conversation between these outlets and their audiences is only part of the conversation that can happen. Society, writ large, is unlikely to become particularly involved. Most people simply don't care enough about the topic, as neither side holds any real terror for them. But still, voices a little less invested in one outcome or another can provide useful input into areas of contention.

The Last Word

Today is Election Day in the United States for the midterms, and that means an end to voter outreach. I wound up on the radar of Republican Tiffany Smiley's campaign to challenge Patty Murray for her seat in the United States Senate, and that meant a steady stream of text messages. As one of those text messages helpfully pointed out, whether or not one votes in any given election is a matter of public record. So, presumably, the Smiley campaign recognized that I am what many political types refer to as a "likely voter." Presumably this, and the fact that I live in a very White suburb of Seattle, prompted the campaign outreach, given that conversations with acquaintances didn't reveal a universal outreach effort.

The messages were generally pretty simple, basically doing little more than implying that Senator Murray was helping the wealthy and "special interests" and wasn't interested in helping "families." It was the typical appeal to an unspecified "change" that challengers to incumbents often put forward. For me, the overall effect was a resounding "meh." The fact that Mrs. Smiley's plan lacked any affirmative agenda or details of note meant that there was nothing there to potentially take issue with (because who's against fighting for families), but it made her main qualification seem to be the fact that she wasn't Senator Murray. And if that's the only criteria, then I qualify to be a United States Senator.

Someone running a longshot campaign needs to bring a little more to the table, in my opinion. I could be proven wrong, but I don't think that Senator Murray is in any real danger. If the current Republican establishment felt that there was a significant chance of Mrs. Smiley winning, former President Trump would have likely given her an endorsement, seeking to pad his win rate. The fact that he couldn't be bothered betrays a lack of faith in her prospects.

This is the downside of partisanship, when it comes to elections like this. Given that Washington is considered a solidly Blue state, Mrs. Smiley's campaign could likely be considered somewhat quixotic. But this in in part because she likely couldn't really tailor her message, policy ideas or tactics to the audience that she needed to reach, as doing so would have meant putting a remarkable amount of distance between herself and the broader Republican Party.

For now, I suspect, the nearly 20 text messages I've received over the last four weeks are likely to be the sum total that I'll hear from the Smiley campaign. And while I'll be happy that the campaign isn't blowing up my phone, I think that outreach could have had potential, had it not been so scattershot and last-minute.

One Of Us

I read part of an essay on Aeon, titled "The lethal act." The subtitle lays out the premise: "The Buddha taught not to kill, yet his followers have at times disobeyed him. Can murderers still be Buddhists?"

I have to admit that I lost interest and didn't finish reading the piece. Mainly because, I think, I'd already arrived at an answer: Of course they can. There are any number of rules-based philosophies in the world. Rarely, if ever, it is considered the case that violating even important rules is a complete disqualification from considering oneself an adherent of said philosophy. And in those cases were it is disqualifying, it tends to be because the the number of rules is very, very, small, such that they define the philosophy in and of itself. For example, one cannot both be a vegan and regularly choose to eat chicken sandwiches.

Of course, I'm not a Buddhist myself, and am not particularly well-versed in it. Perhaps the prohibition against killing is central enough to Buddhism that it does become the de-facto defining characteristic of the faith. But I've always understood Buddhism to be much broader than a particular stance on the value of life. I've always understood most religions to be rather complex in the way they look at, and interact with, the world, and defying attempts to boil them down into two or three things (let alone one) that people must always strive for. This may be a side effect of the fact that for a lot of philosophical viewpoints, religious and otherwise, the central tenet of the practice is fundamentally impossible. To use the example that I'm most familiar with, there is a general sense in the Abrahamic religions that one is called upon to be like God. But God is omniscient and omnipotent, two characteristics that human beings cannot realistically aspire to; and the remainder of God's divine attributes flow from those facts about it. So any quest to be like God is more or less immediately doomed to failure; this is not seen as being an impediment to being appropriately or properly Jewish, Christian, Molsem, Baháʼí or what have you. So I don't see why a failure to be like the Buddha should be considered much of an impediment, either.

But beyond the philosophical aspects of it all, a lot of these things are as much communities as anything else. I know a lot of people who are political partisans, and, as anything who has studied partisanship in the United States can tell you, consistency is not a requirement. Considering that even knowing and understanding a party platform falls, for most people, somewhere between entirely optional and a complete waste of time, adhering to a set of rules clearly isn't very important: so long as the group accepts how one behaves, that is. And I think it's the same with Buddhism. They're a community as much or more as they are followers of a religion. And as long as they have the support, or even simply the understanding, of that community, I'm not sure the rest of it matters.

Irregular

I was getting caught up on my podcasts, and was  listening to "Checks and Balance: Donkey years" from the Economist.

Charlotte Howard: Idrees [Kahloon], you've written a cover for us over the summer about the way Democrats talk about social issues; so beyond abortion, this sort of broader "wokeness" within the Democratic party. Have Republicans been successful in painting Democrats as culturally "out of touch" or focused on the wrong things; issues that regular voters don't really worry about? Or has the center of gravity in political debate really shifted from anything related to wokeness and cultural stuff back to the economy.

Mr. Kahloon's response was interesting. He talked about Democratic candidates who described themselves as Socialists, "Defund the police," what James Carville calls "faculty lounge talk" and gender inclusivity as things that Republicans were keen to talk about. But of those topics, only "Defund the Police" has anything to do with "being woke." Not that people understand "Defund the Police," either.

Because later, I was listening to "The Issues Worth $9 Billion In Ad Spending" from the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst, said that attacks against Mandela Barnes for supporting "Defund the Police" were inaccurate. Host Galen Druke pointed out that Mr. Barnes was in favor of moving funding from police to social workers and other services, such as crisis intervention/violence interruption. Which is pretty much the definition of "Defund the Police," regardless of whether Mandela Barnes has used the term directly.

Mr. Rakich noted that the popularity or unpopularity of the policies behind "Defund the Police" depend on how pollsters ask the question. Which is reasonable, but if people don't actually understand what the original policy description was, does that really make a difference.

My takeaway from all of this, as a Black American is that a major part of the problem that "Black America," as a population of people, has with advocating for its interests is a fundamental inability to shape and communicate perceptions around those interests. Staying woke, Defund the Police and Black Lives Matter all have this problem, in the fact that they have become cudgels for Conservative Whites to beat up Liberal Whites, rather than language for Black people to tell one another to remain aware of racial prejudices/biases, to advocate for reducing the law-enforcement response to disordered (rather than illegal) behavior and to hold themselves up as deserving better than to be treated as expendable props in public safety theater.

As much as I disliked "woke" as a term, and felt that "Defund the Police" was more or less asking to be misinterpreted, opening these up as fronts in the Culture Wars does a disservice. And the fact that the people for whom these issues are important were completely unable to prevent that demonstrates the degree to which Black Americans are sidelined in political discourse. Because aren't Black Americans who understand (correctly or not) that they live in a culture pervaded by racism "regular voters" too?

Hollowed

I was reading yet another article where the author focused on what they called an "empty promise." The term "empty promise" is a common one, referring not simply to a commitment (real or implied) that someone does not believe will be kept, but one that should, as a matter of morality or ethics, be kept. Of course, there is also a matter of relative importance. Most divorces, after all, render the vows the couple took "empty promises," yet that generally doesn't rise to the level of the common usage of the term.

The definition creates a contrast with a fulfilled promise, and that's the way many people typically understand it. A "promise" becomes "empty" once it becomes clear to someone that the perceived commitment that underlies it will not be kept.

But maybe it's more accurate to see all promises as empty at the start. Fulfilling a commitment is never as simple as making it. After all, talk is cheap, right? Rather than starting from a presumption that every promise made can be carried out, it may be better to evaluate what it would realistically take to do so; and therefore if people are being requested to make commitments that it's unreasonable to believe will be carried out.

A lot of promises remain "empty" simply by virtue of the fact that the party making the promise is not the party responsible, or empowered, to fulfill the promise. And it's easy to sign others up for things that it's unrealistic to ask of them.

Treating all promises as empty at the start, as something to to be filled, may help to drive an understanding of just what it being committed to, and who is being called upon to make that commitment. Which may not result in more promises being honored, but it might result in people counting on fewer of them. Which is useful enough, in its own way.

Off With Their Heads

The Google app that comes with Android phones is basically a portal to click-bait, celebrity gossip and low-end lifestyle content. It's rumored that there are ways to train it to serve up items that one finds useful and interesting, but I suspect that they would take more time than I am willing to devote to the project, given my results thus far.

In any event, I was attempting to sift through the banal flotsam that it had presented me, when I came across the "headline" that "Miss Argentina and Miss Puerto Rico reveal they secretly got married." Given the source, I immediately suspected that the headline wasn't all it was cracked up to be; while the implication was that the two beauty pageant contestants had married one another, I figured the actual situation was that they were simply married, and thus had been ineligible for the "Miss" appellation that these pageants require. Something of a scandal in pageant circles, sure, but not really a big deal.

For once, my reflexive cynicism led me astray, and it turned out that Mariana Varela and Fabiola Valentin had married one another. The headline had been genuine celebrity gossip click-bait. The internet was abuzz with stories of the two women. And one of those stories featured this photograph:

Who shows photos of a married couple from the neck down?

Hmm... I wonder who the target audience was?

I don't consider myself a feminist by any stretch of the imagination, but even I found this to be beyond simply poor taste. Sure, Mesdames Varela and Valentin are attractive women. They were, after all, at one point selected by some or another panel of judges to be among the most beautiful women in their home nation/territory. And there are certainly legions of "thirsty" men (and likely more than a few women) who are desperate for anything they can get of their bodies. But catering to that desperation in this way; by literally reducing the two to their bodies, feeds into an idea that considering their bodies to be the only thing worth valuing about them is legitimate.

To a degree, of course, this is kind of the whole point of the beauty pageant business; holding up a standard of femininity that pretty much begins and ends, with physical attractiveness. But at least the women are allowed to show their faces.

It's the common problem with any sort of attempt to drive social change on behalf of a group of people; self-advocacy is almost always necessary, yet almost never sufficient to bring about the desired end goal. Action needs to be broader than that.

To be sure, the whole story is, in a lot of ways, simply a chance for people to ogle two attractive women, and be titillated by the fact that they're less than entirely heterosexual. Former beauty queens marry all the time; winning national, or international, pageants doesn't come with a contractual obligation to remain single (and thus available for people's fantasies). I don't recall the last time I heard about such an event, let alone having Google decide that it was important enough for one of the very limited slots in their phone app.

Unhealed

The Week has "A complete timeline of Kanye West's antisemitism fallout." It's pretty much a recap of the past month of West/Yeezus/St. Pablo/Yeezy/Ye's (or whatever it happens to be now) railings against the Jewish population of the world and the scramble of various large companies and well-known brands to put some distance between themselves and Ye (which is apparently his legal name now), so as to avoid being tainted by him. If you didn't find any of this interesting enough to follow in real time, there's nothing really of interest in the article.

What's most interesting about it is what isn't present; any mention of his mental health. Although like any number of other people with mental disorders, he doesn't see himself as sick, and often says so. Apparently this is enough for people to treat him as if he's simply being a jackass, as opposed to someone who's suffering from a genuine disorder.

In general, there appears to be a dislike of acknowledging people as mentally ill. I think it's because it makes them less culpable for their actions. But it strikes me that there's something off about ignoring mental disease or defect because it's viewed as an impediment to pointing fingers, or punishing someone. If, as is seems the case, Ye is actually sick, simply telling him to knock it off isn't going to help. He shouldn't have the be shuffling down the street, drooling on himself or think that he's literally the Messiah for people to understand that.