Out Loud

As LinkedIn has become more of a general purpose social media site, a good amount of advocacy has started competing with the more business and sales related posts for attention. Much of it is business-related social advocacy, such as for more women in the workplace, more opportunities for people with Autism disorders and the like, but there is also a noticeable amount of the sort of strident social media advocacy where people randomly stand up and aggressively proclaim their support (or opposition) to something or other and wait for the likes to roll in. Like the following:

Perhaps it's a good thing that the poster declined to elaborate further, as my first thought was: "citation please." And not because I'm unaware of the fact that wealthy people who find ways to defraud people out of their money tend to be treated more leniently than people who are forced to rely on violence when they steal. But because the statement, taken simply, seems flatly untrue. Presuming that the original poster was referring to the United States when they said "this society," the idea that there is any significant number of people who considered a homeless person stealing $5 to be more worthy of outrage than a wealthy person stealing $5,000,000 is fairly ludicrous.

Where the controversy tends to start is when it's not clear if, let alone which, laws were broken. And this is something that people with money are able to take advantage of in ways that poor, and most middle-class, people cannot. Snatching a bill from a countertop or tip jar and running away with it is clearly illegal, if not worth pursuing in most jurisdictions. But it's also the sort of crime that confronts people with their own vulnerability in a way that dubious financial engineering does not. And it should be noted that outright fraud, even when perpetrated by the wealthy, tends to push people's buttons and arouse public sentiment.

On the other hand, there is a certain subset of the conservative mindset that believes in literally unlimited opportunity for anyone willing to do a modest amount of work to take advantage of it. And there are people in that community that see homelessness and crime as signs of an immoral character. But that's not "this society" any more than Millennials are.

Presenting the existence as mindsets one disagrees with as being indicative of an entire society's worldview isn't even good virtue signalling; there's simply too much noise. And that, I suspect, is why so much of it is simply people shouting in the void; there's not enough information content to engage with.

Boogeyman

Most of us are only now getting a glimpse of just how smart artificial intelligence has become. It's awe-inducing — and terrifying.
How ChatGPT became the next big thing

Terrifying? Really? Why? What happened? Are AIs already rising up, seeking to take over the world and looking to kill random waitresses to prevent their future children from leading a rebellion?

When people talk about "bias" in "the media," the general knock is that journalists, rather than reporting the brute facts, are offering up skewed versions of events in order to benefit the shadowy people who are paying them to deliberately mislead the public. But journalism is a business, and outlets that don't force readers to pay subscription fees in order to read content have to keep the lights on and doors open through advertising. And that means looking to draw in as many people as possible to read stories that cost as little as possible to produce.

And that leaves us with Axios seeking to scare people with hyperbolic language concerning Artificial Intelligence starting to become broadly useful.

Everyone seems to see an array of uses for the technology in ways that are both exciting and scary.

And I get it. News stories that coincide with the way the target audience already sees the world are more likely to be passed along to others. And playing up the uncertainty that systems like ChatGPT generate coincides neatly with an audience that sees itself as under threat from technologies that their employers (and wealthy people in general) will be able to use to replace them in the world of work. Or that militaries (or police forces) could use to injure or kill them remotely. It plays into a sense that the world is unjustifiably hostile to the interests of "the people," in a way that reinforces a reader's understanding that they're a victim (or a potential victim), and thus, one of the "good people."

But it also simply creates and accentuates anxieties, by encouraging people to see themselves as helpless. (Because if there were something concrete to be done about things, there would be no need to be afraid.) I don't see that as helpful. But then again, I'm not in charge of growing readership numbers.

Hobgoblins are exciting sometimes precisely because they are scary. They create an emotional rise that a good number of people seek out. After all, horror movies, and other media intended to frighten audiences, at least for the time that they're engaged with it, are multi-billion dollar businesses. But it seems an unworthy motivation for news outlets. Because ginning up people's fears of the world around them has consequences that can be both serious and long-lasting.

In the end, the problem isn't the technology. Skynet is likely to forever be a work of fiction. Other people, on the other hand, can be prone to see life as a competition, and a zero-sum game, at that. And that, I think, is the underlying fear that the language in these sorts of stories both provokes and plays into. People understand that their fellow homo sapiens can be more than ready, willing and able to "screw them over for a percentage" to paraphrase Ellen Ripley in Aliens. Artificial Intelligence is simply another tool that can be used to accomplish that. But emphasizing people's fear of their vulnerability doesn't, in itself, do anything to tell people how to change that vulnerability. And that, I think, is what a lot of people really seek to know.

Candy Girl

After the Brown M&M swapped her stilettos for lower block heels and the Green M&M traded in go-go boots for sneakers, Carlson declared that "M&M's will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous," and that when "you're totally turned off, we've achieved equity."
M&M's replaces its spokescandies with Maya Rudolph after Tucker Carlson's rants

Okay. I can't be the only person who is asking why on Earth Tucker Carlson appears to be of the opinion that anthropomorphized M&M candies should be a turn on. But more to the point, I also can't be the only person wondering why Tucker Carlson's call for female (or, perhaps more precisely, female-seeming) cartoon characters to be sex objects is being treated as anything other than bizarre. I mean, he's been at this for some time. Forbes reported on this strangeness a year ago. I have to admit, I was seriously tempted to bring back the "Rampant Idiocy" tag for this post.

Not that this is new. The sexualization of female cartoon characters goes back as long as there have female cartoon characters. But I don't know that I've ever encountered a situation where someone was complaining that some or another female cartoon character wasn't sexy enough, or that toning down the stereotypes was some sort of affront to good taste.

At the end of the day, however, I suspect that this has nothing to do with the footwear that's been chosen for a pair of cartoon candy women. Rather it's about the idea that there is something legitimate, if not simply proper, about treating women (real or imagined) in media as sex objects, there to be ogled by men who want to be turned on. And in that sense, I have to give Mr. Carlson credit for managing to get that case out to a large audience without being called out for it. He's taken aim at the idea that women's sensitivity to being sexualized is the problem, rather than the uncomfortable or even dangerous situations they understand result from that sexualization. (While the second may be rare, depending on the circumstances, it isn't going anywhere, so neither is the first.)

I'm disappointed that Mars Wrigley Confectionery took the bait on this one, since it really seems to me that this is simply a case of Tucker Carlson trolling for views and to display to his audience that he can influence others to do nonsensical things. Maybe there there was a good reason for this, maybe it's a move that will cast the company in a better light later. But for right now, it just seems like caving in to a weirdo.

Read All About It

I'm not a journalist. Which is a good thing, because I'm not a particularly skilled writer. So I don't claim to have a deep understanding of the news business, and how it works. Especially when it comes to story placement. Generally speaking, I suppose that I expect that websites would be structured something like newspapers, with the most important stories at the top.

So I was somewhat surprised when I came across this version of NPR's website earlier today.

Were the accusations against a YouTube personality really the most important thing going on at the time? I'm not sure, for my part, that the story rated more highly than the announcement of layoffs at Alphabet/Google or (yet another) T-Mobile data breach. Or former President Trump and his legal team being fined for misuse of the courts. But then again, I'm not really in National Public Radio's target demographic. Millennials and "Generation Z," it seems, are.

And I can see why the story would be important to them; accusations against culturally relevant figures generally are. Even when they're new enough that it comes across more as youth-celebrity gossip, rather than verified wrongdoing.

As an aside, there was this throwaway line early in the piece: "But for many who follow Callaghan's work, the incident raises questions about Gen Z's tolerance for sexually questionable behavior." Outside of the fact that they never addressed the issue further, or included any opinion from the "many" in question, I found myself wondering just why "sexually questionable" behavior should be considered intolerable. After all, one would expect that the final decision on what to tolerate, or not, would depend in the answers to the questions raised.

But maybe I'm just an old man.

In any event, it's interesting to understand which markets that various segments of the news business are looking to serve. As much as people tend to posit that bias in the news media is about changing (if not outright controlling) people's "priors" and preconceptions, I think it's much more accurate to posit that people select the news they're going to take in based on what most closely aligns with those priors and those topics that they're interested in.

If the young, socially progressive audience that National Public Radio is pursuing finds the allegations against Andrew Callaghan are important enough to base their selection of news sources on who has the most information about them, then NPR will serve that up, and prominently.

And in that sense, they were the most important thing happening. Perhaps this is (and has been) why older people seem out of touch with the world around them. As people age out of the target demographics of the news sources they followed, they simply find the big stories of the day to be less relevant, and less worthy of spending time on. I know I'm starting to feel that way. I read the Andrew Callaghan story more out of curiosity with NPR's editorial decision-making than any actual interest in someone less than half my age seemingly getting into trouble for being persistent when pursuing sex. Perhaps that curiosity will be enough to keep me in the loop.

Problems and Poleaxes

The team that produces the National Public Radio podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour didn't release an episode on Martin Luther King Day, and so the Code Switch team stepped in to present "Rolling the dice on race in Dungeons & Dragons." Not sure that I see the relevance, but whatever.

The episode was, as might be expected, a rather tired and perfunctory examination as to why the construct of races in Dungeons and Dragons (which are really better described as species) doesn't pass muster in the 2020s. On the off chance that anyone with even a passing interest in both tabletop role-playing and the social justice movements in the United States couldn't have figured that out.

It all felt kind of Nostradamus to me, in the sense that here were a group of people, examining a game that was first published in the mid-1970s through the lens of modern ideas of social justice and concluding that it was intentionally problematic by standard that didn't exist yet.

But here's the thing... it's not that Dungeons and Dragons, especially in its early incarnations, isn't wildly biased. It's just that the biases weren't tied to early 21st century notions of White supremacy. Rather the game reflects the biases of the sources that Gary Gygax and company consulted in putting it together, which were genre fiction and reference materials that in some cases, dated back decades. And the fact that Dungeons and Dragons grew out of fantasy wargaming. More than simply funny-looking people based on Norse myth and J. R. R. Tolkien's novels, Dwarfs and Elves were troop types. Which is why in the "basic" versions of the game, they were also classes unto themselves.

The biases, and occasional outright bigotry, that was present in many of these sources finds its way into the game, and it worth talking about. But in order to do that, one has to be familiar with the game in a broader context, rather than just trotting it out as curiosity to demonstrate to an audience that one finds problems in the same things (and for the same reasons) that they do.

The Calm After the Storm

Being a native of Chicago, I tend to scoff at what counts as "heavy rain" here in western Washington State. Here, it can take a couple days, if not a week, to generate the sort of numbers that a good Midwest thunderstorm would dump in an hour or two.

Despite the fact that the rainfall here strikes me as somewhat anemic, it can still be quite a lot of water. And it's enough to move quite a bit of material.

Like the trees in the photo above. This particular photo doesn't really give an idea of just how many trees there are, but there are a lot of them, deposited here because there's a slight bend in the river that allows debris to accumulate. It's a useful reminder the weather doesn't have the be violent, to be powerful.

Fruity

I'm not normally one for political cartooning. Many cartoonists are openly partisan, and so the cartoons are little more than visual representations of partisan talking points, created for the consumption of like-minded partisans.

Accordingly, many of the political cartoons I've come across recently lack any sort of nuance or more than a superficial treatment of their subject matter. Now, to be sure, cartoonist Pat Byrnes isn't always above such things (personally, I would have liked to have both caricatures smiling), but I do think that this particular cartoon captures the fact that the classified documents incidents of President Biden and former President Trump are not the same.

Of course, this, like most political cartoons, is preaching to the choir. The "us good, them bad" mode of political thinking has solidified into the consistency of granite and very little, if anything, has the wherewithal to change that in the next decade or so. Mainly because the public would have to be invested enough in understanding what was happening to really pay attention and understand the nuances involved. And that's not really where the incentives lie at this point in time. "Gotchas," whether warranted or not, simply make people feel better, and that's that. But, more to the point, partisan identity has become a stand-in for all sorts of what might be termed "character issues."

And this complicates matters, because partisans are unable, or unwilling, to see those who disagree with them (whether they my opposing partisans or non partisans) as objective observers. At the same time, there's little incentive for such objectivity, since it carries no rewards; one's own side will cast one as a traitor, and while they other side might welcome the agreement with them, they're still likely to see the person as an enemy.

Hidden

Not far from my home there is an entrance to a greenbelt. It's a relatively small area of undeveloped land that breaks up the monotony of street after street of single-family homes. Of course, with it being winter now, it's not as green as one might first expect, although there are a good number of plants that have retained their foliage.

I haven't taken the time to walk through it yet. Even though I drive past it pretty much every time I leave my home, I hadn't really registered that it was there. If I hadn't gone out for a walk and passed by it, I wouldn't have even noticed that it has trails.

Still, it's something of an asset to the neighborhood, and one that I should make time to take advantage of one of these days.

Incapacity

But with a child so young, traditional principles like punishment, accountability and rehabilitation "don't really apply," [University of Richmond law professor Julie Ellen] McConnell said. "As a 6-year-old, he just doesn't have the intellectual capacity to even understand how to form the intent to commit a crime like this."
A 6-year-old shooter raises difficult questions for the criminal justice system

Okay, I'll bite. Why not?

I used to work with children for a living (if you could call it that, given the salary) and one of the things that I came away with from the job is that adults tend to underestimate children's abilities to understand the world around them, especially power relationships. Take the unnamed child who shot an severely injured his teacher last week in Virginia. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that the student could have intended to injure the teacher over some action or another that he didn't like, and understood that guns are capable of injuring people. Children, after all, hit, kick and bite one another with dreary regularity, and it's common to not only impose a mild discipline, like a "time out" on a child when they do so, but to tell them that if they do so again in the future, another discipline would be forthcoming. If children are so intellectually incapable that they can't understand that their behavior draws disapproval, why does that behavior make any sense?

What many children seem to lack, in my understanding, is the idea that their current emotional state is not a blanket justification for anything they might do that stems from it. Granted, I've met more than a few adults who seem to have trouble with that reasoning, but still, it strikes me as being part of what sometimes strikes people as a lack of empathy in children. Sure, children will commonly say it's bad when other children hit them, but that's because children tend to never see being hit as a rational response to their own behavior. But "they started it" is less a childhood dodge of culpability than their standard way of looking at the world; children can having difficulty with the idea that their wants and desires aren't imperatives that the rest of the world needs to immediately indulge.

But more to the point, I don't know that I find casting children as mentally impaired when compared to adults a necessary step in deciding that sending them to juvenile detention is inappropriate. In Virginia, the minimum age for detention is 11. Whatever the reason for making that choice, it wasn't, and couldn't have been, based on some fact of biology that kicks in at a child's 11th birthday. It was a choice that was made because it seemed reasonable to the people who were making it. And that's all that's really needed in situations like this. It strikes me as unreasonable to lock small children up for long stretches of time, even for serious misbehavior. And part of of this is because, yes, children's outlooks on the world are different from adults; and their general inability to understand long-term consequences makes it somewhat pointless. But here in the United States, a large part of the legal system is about finding someone to punish, so that people understand that the world is "fair." Which is why the child's parents may now be under investigation for failure to keep the child from taking the gun. Perhaps if there wasn't such a need for an eye for an eye, there wouldn't be a need to equate childhood with brain damage.

What You See

Okay, so here is what I want to know... What rock has this guy been living under for the past few decades? The military has, for as long as I've been aware of it, had a large number of non-White people in it. It's been, for the most part, one of the best ways for non-White people to get ahead in life. I had plans to join the military after I graduated college - but kidney stones rendered me unfit for service, and that was the end of that.

And there have always been a decent number of women in the military. Mainly because modern militaries have a number of functions other than simply fighting. While private military contracting companies are a thing, it's not as if the various branches of the United States' Armed Forces have contracted out everything outside of being on the front lines.

But more to the point, there's nothing "woke" (regardless of how badly on bastardizes the definition) about the military being a place of opportunity everyone who enlists, including people who are something other than White men. Why shouldn't the military draw from all of the various demographic groups that make up the United States as a whole?

It's interesting that the profile picture for "end wokeness" says: "I support the former things." Maybe they're hankering for the days in which minorities were given the dirty and dangerous jobs that White soldiers didn't want to do. Or when servicemen regarded women in uniform as "comfort women," there to cater to their sexual desires. There's a reason why that garbage came to an end: the nation started realizing that mistreating those who volunteered to serve was a bad idea.
 

Holiday Cheer

I was at the grocery store today, and, at the end of one of the aisles, there is a little place where holiday candy tends to be stocked. Now that Christmas is over, it's full of Valentines Day candies, including Reece's Peanut Butter Hearts. They're basically the same thing as regular Reece's Peanut Butter Cups, but they're somewhat larger, and the ratio of peanut butter to chocolate seems to be higher, so they taste different.

Anyway, they're currently going to $1.25 each, or 4 for $5. A little ways from this, near where the seasonal non-food items are normally stocked, are the leftover Christmas candies, including the Reece's Peanut Butter Trees. Those are now on deep discount, and are being sold for 39¢ each. The Peanut Butter Trees are pretty much the same thing as the Peanut Butter Hearts; only the shape is different. If one is a Reece's Peanut Butter fan, now is a good time to stock up. (They freeze really well.) Personally, I'm past the days when I could stock up on them, as, now that I'm an old man, peanuts are bad for my skin.

But it's interesting to see what the holiday theming does to the price of two items that are, for all intents and purposes, the same. Both are highly processed (and sweetened) peanut butter in a low-grade chocolate shell; they're the same weight and the same calorie count. Yet the vaguely-evergreen shaped ones are now one-third the price of the heart-shaped ones, simply because Christmas was a little more than a week and a half ago and Valentine's day is somewhat more than a month away. After which point, the cycle will repeat, as Reece's Peanut Butter Eggs replace the Hearts on stores shelves.

Of course, this is a common phenomenon. There's all sorts of random Christmas-themed bric-a-brac on store shelves right now that's past it prime sales time. But most of that strikes me as much more strongly themed that the Reece's Trees. Given the number of evergreen trees in this part of the country, one could likely get away with selling them year-round without most people batting an eyelash.

But to the bargain bin they have been moved, and it is from there that they will dwindle away to nothing so that the Valentine hearts may have pride of place for a while.

The Easy Route

I found an article on Psyche.co today: "How to be a happy nihilist." In it, Wendy Syfret offers advice on how to embrace optimistic, or "sunny" nihilism. Which is all fine and good as far as it goes. But it strikes me that there is a simpler way.

Simply drop the idea that life must somehow be "meaningful" for it to be happy.

I don't remember when I first encountered the idea of the meaning of life outside of the clichéd image of someone climbing a mountain to find some wise guru at the top to whom they can put the question of life's meaning. I think that I may have been out of college by that point. I managed to live to adulthood without realizing that philosophy was even a thing, let alone that you could take classes in it.

And I wasn't miserable or unhappy throughout that time. At least, not for want of meaning. Life had its ups and downs, and I rode the roller coaster just like everyone else, but the idea that happiness in life was contingent on finding some poorly-described meaning in it had never occurred to me. And I suspect that there are plenty of people the world over who manage perfectly happy lives without any broader sense of meaning for no other reason than no-one has told them that it's not possible.

Today, when I talk philosophy with people (like this wonderfully thoughtful ex-philosopher now police officer I met a few weeks ago) and they tell me that I can't be happy without understanding the meaning of my life, I simply ask them: "Why?" With the exception of a few people who decree that meaning is an indispensable part of happiness, such that anyone who has not found meaning is simply deluding themselves as to being happy, it's rare to receive an answer to that.

And so I remind them that just like any other article of faith, not all people are going to hold it. (Although when discussions do start to legitimately turn on articles of faith, that's usually my cue to be elsewhere. Faith admits no need for evidence, and so people can explain themselves to one another, but debate is usually pointless.)

In the end, though, I enjoy reading article on people's understandings of meaning, precisely because it is otherwise such a nebulous and undefined term. And I am happy for people who have found a meaning of life. But for myself, learning to do without it was worthwhile.

Practiced

Nobody in Particular is not, strictly speaking, a photography blog. I do post a fair number of pictures, but this isn't conceived as a place to show off my photographic talents. Mainly because I don't have much skill with the medium, or my equipment.

Perhaps it's time that I changed that.

I had meant to take up portrait photography in 2020, but I hadn't really done anything to make progress on that goal prior to "the pandemic" (as if it were the only one to have ever happened) and between the emergency orders and people's general unwillingness to be in the same space as another human being for most of the year, I never managed to get anything off the ground.

I'm still very self-conscious about asking people if I can take their picture, so I don't know if I'll get anywhere with portrait photography this year, but even failing that, I do want to simply become a better photographer. And if I take more pictures, I'll consider giving over more posts to them. Let's see if it works out.