A Bargain at Twice the Price

So there's been another multiple shooting, this one at a school, and among the six people killed were three children.

This turn of events has sparked the same, tired, "debate" that each of the last ones for the past several years have. As always, Democrats are calling for restrictions on the public availability of "assault weapons" and Republicans are offering platitudes and blaming things on mental illness. What this means in practice is that Republicans are arguing for a status quo that Democrats find intolerable.

And they're arguing for that status quo, because that's what their voters want. There are plenty of reasons for this desire, but they all add up to a willingness to select candidates for office based on whether said candidates will vote to allow them to retain their weapons. And they understand that the frequent shootings are the price that is to be paid for that.

It could be worthwhile for the debate as a whole to acknowledge that. It's difficult to have watched the United States over the past few years without realizing that a lot of people in the country are willing to tolerate high death tolls if that means retaining what they understand to be their entitlements. Given that state of affairs, harping on the numbers of dead and injured is pointless. If there is a threshold that would serve to change their minds, it hasn't been reached yet. So perhaps there is value in accepting that as a given and moving on, rather than spinning up a fight that isn't going to be won anytime soon, if ever.

But this is the United States, and the idea people are either right-thinking or willfully perverse is embedded in the culture. Along with the idea that if someone doesn't care enough to listen, they're not being shouted at loudly enough. But those people who are invested in the current status quo enough to trade lives for it do so for reasons that resonate with them, even if no-one else cares to understand why.

Flow of Information

If people understand that their subjective understanding of the world around them must be supported by facts, they will seek out information that aligns with the view they wish to hold and accept it uncritically when they find it.

Given this, constantly attempting to combat misinformation is a fool's errand, because the problem isn't the quality of information that people receive, it's their need to believe certain things about the world. And that's not something that can be controlled by flagging social media posts, or limiting their reach. To create a unified understanding of things across groups, those groups must have a high level of common experience, and this simply isn't the case now, as much as people might be inclined to believe that certain things about the world are self evident.

When I talk the small number of people I know who are really staunch conservatives, they have an outlook on the world that predisposes them to see certain information as correct and true, and other information as falsified, often by bad actors for nefarious purposes. And they have a difficult time understanding that not everyone understands the world that way. The same goes for the people I know who are to the political Left of me; the idea that I'm not just as progressive as they indicates to them that I'm not viewing the world in the way it should be viewed.

All information that a person doesn't directly experience is based on trust. And once sources are labelled as trusted or untrusted, it takes a level of consequences to change that. And usually, that isn't there. When one of my more liberal friends tells me that the Federal government colluded to with the banks to ensure that no bankers are held accountable, the penalty for them being wrong about that is effectively non-existent. Likewise when a conservative friend tells me that I'm wrong about the meaning and intent of "woke," because of something they heard on television, it doesn't make a difference in their day-to-day lives that they're wrong.

That's not something that's going to change anytime soon. The fact that the consequences of people's false beliefs tend to fall on other people is an unfortunate fact of life. But it's what we have to change in order to lessen the impacts of bad information on society as a whole.

Meant To Do It

While the U.S. has many vital national interests – securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party – becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.
Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Florida)

When I asked him specifically if he regretted using the phrase “territorial dispute,” DeSantis replied, “Well, I think it’s been mischaracterized. Obviously, Russia invaded (last year) — that was wrong. They invaded Crimea and took that in 2014 — That was wrong.”
Piers Morgan “DeSantis brands Putin ‘a war criminal’ who should be ‘held accountable’ for Ukraine invasion”

In politics, it’s difficult to not only be all things to all people (at least all the people whose votes a candidate wants) but to put on a convincing show of having always been all things to all people. Granted, the task is somewhat easier in a modern partisan environment, where those people who like a given candidate enough will decide that they can do no wrong, and so of course they’ve always been the best person for whatever office they’re running for. But still, it means that politicians spend a lot of time effectively claiming that while they meant what they said, everyone somehow managed to misunderstand what they meant in the same way.

If, as is widely expected, Governor DeSantis does run for President, he’s going to have a fairly tricky time of it. Mainly because he's not beloved enough by Republican partisans. So he has to be enough like former President Donald Trump to appeal to people who like him, while being different enough from Mr. Trump to appeal to those people who don't, and in the process, hopefully cobble together enough of a coalition to make it through a primary election, while not alienating enough people who consider themselves independent to have a shot at winning the general election.

And a lot of that is going to mean spending time telling people that things were mischaracterized, while hoping that those same people don’t see those words words as an excuse, or worse, a blatant pander. It’s a situation that demands, even more than it encourages, dishonesty, denial of missteps and looking for people to blame. Predictable side effects of a culture (or maybe species would be more accurate) that seems to hold that actually learning what the public wants, and then shaping one’s public persona to fit that is the wrong way to actually serve the public. (I think this is because being responsive to the public means turning one’s back on one’s voters if they wind up in the minority.)

I’m not sure that I expect Governor DeSantis to actually make a go of it. But whatever happens, it will have been the plan all along. Or so we’ll be told.

Budding

It's that time of year again, and that means that flowers start to catch my attention. I never paid any real attention to flowers until I owned a camera. Now, they stand out for me as possible photo subjects. Mainly because while they may sway in the breeze, they aren't otherwise mobile, and that gives me the time that I need to get set up and snap a good picture.

There are some cherry trees in the Seattle area; mainly, as I understand it, on the University of Washington campus. They were gifted to the school by Japan. But mostly, we have plum trees. At least, I think they're plum trees; I don't ever think I've seen a plum on any of them.

In any event, the flowers are striking. Especially on a nice sunny day.

Adam and Yves

 I came across the following political cartoon today:

There is a lot going on in this cartoon. Which is somewhat refreshing in a world in which many political cartoons are one-note and simplistic takes on partisan talking points. Not that this cartoon isn't an illustrated Republican talking point, but at least it shows some sophistication about it. Even if it uses the term "Woke" in a manner that seems completely nonsensical outside of Conservative echo chambers.

I was somewhat struck by the artist's use of the word "thingy" rather than "penis." Surely penis isn't so terrible a word that it can't be used in a situation like this, especially given that "Adam" appears to be unselfconscious in his use of the word "breasts." But even it were, surely in the entire pantheon of euphemisms for it, there would be something more evocative than "thingy."

I find it interesting that "Eve" relates that the Snake told her that she was transgender and then performed the surgery on her. I suspect that pretty much all transgender people see themselves as having more agency than that, especially those who transition in adulthood. The implication that being transgender is somehow a plot of Satan (or whatever one wishes to call the Christian adversary) is also interesting, in the sense that it doesn't take much to realize that many Christians may feel this way, but it's something rarely stated. (Although I suppose it may be a common refrain from many pulpits.) It casts convincing (if that's what one would call it) people to retain the outward sex they were born with as a means of defending them from bad influences, something which I could see ending badly in certain circumstances.

Eve's saying that "the Snake told me God made a mistake" is also interesting, with it's direct implication that gender dysphoria is evidence of some divine error. Again, it pits the transgender community against the Christian conception of God in a way that's fairly rare for people to say out loud.

The idea that the Snake has a plan to prevent people from having children is also interesting; especially in light of the stereotypical Conservative concern over falling birthrates (mainly in Western European nations and the United States).

I'm unclear on why Adam is bald in this cartoon, although it may be to draw attention to Eve's brightly-colored hair, which may be intended to evoke queer people more broadly.

Having Eve be the transgender person is an interesting choice. On the one hand, it allows the artist to imply that both characters are naked, and clearly show the scars from Eve's double mastectomy. But it does mean that the common talking point of men transition to women in the service of sexual predation can't be touched upon.

I recall a line from a movie I saw quite some time ago, in it, a religious zealot tells a young woman who wants to do something different with her life that "God has given you your place, and you shall keep it." (Which is, itself, an interesting phrase. I remember it quite clearly, yet cannot seem to find any record of it being used anywhere. Even Google can't seem to find more than one reference to it.)

This addition of transgenderism to the Culture Wars echoes the old arguments about homosexuality, and its supposed incompatibility with Christianity. We'll see if, in the end, these new arguments also turn out to lack staying power in the face of an expanding community, and expanding ties between communities.

Mostly Sunny

 

The Seattle area isn't as rainy as people sometimes think it is. Mainly because even when it does rain, it tends not to be that much; a tenth of an inch in a day is a common level of precipitation.

But sometimes, even in "the rainy season," the place just has nice days.

Echoes

I am not a fan of the idea that non-White people shouldn't have to explain the impacts and effects of racism to White people. Mainly because I'm a firm believer in the idea that "if you want someone to know something, the best course of action is to tell them yourself."

But I was wandering through a subReddit that I happen to be a member of, and found a conversation in which I ended up, over the course of several comments and a couple of days, writing nearly four thousand words in a vain attempt to explain to my interlocutor that after many officer-involved shootings of people in general, let alone Black people, that later turn out to be unjustified, officers are scapegoated for problems that afflict American society at large, not simply police officers. And that those problems that are specific to police departments tend to be rooted in a lack of broader accountability, rather than simply a perverse love of misconduct on the part of law enforcement.

Reading it again after more than a year was a surreal experience, mainly because the person I had been attempting to explain all of this to had later gone and deleted all of their own comments, so the only thing left of the other side of the conversation were the times when I quoted them back to themselves in my quixotic efforts to drive home what I felt was a simple point:

Police officers are not the problem; the perception of the Black population of the country as willfully perverse agents of violence and anarchy is.

If that sounds familiar, it may be because that's the point that I was making with Standing Still, which I wrote while the Reddit conversation was still happening.

I don't know if I successfully made the point to any of the readers of Nobody In Particular, but I utterly failed to make it to the person I was attempting to explain it to on Reddit. And so I understand why so many Black, and other non-White, people simply have no time for the role of educator. It can eat up a lot of time, and a lot of effort, and not appear to have any impact on the broader world. And if it's going to seem futile, why bother with it?

But I suspect that many difficult things seem more or less futile. That's part of what makes them difficult; the sense that the effort put into them won't come to anything. And attempting to convince someone who is the hero of their own story that they're the among the primary antagonists in one's own is always going to be exceedingly difficult, if for no other reason than it threatens a sense in which many people find meaning; as researchers have noted: "people want to view their actions as having positive value or as being morally justified. That is, people are motivated to act in a way that reflects some positive moral value, or at least to interpret their behavior as conforming to ideals and standards of what is approved and acceptable." And making someone else's life difficult because of a perceived difference like "race" is no longer approved and acceptable.

The primary problem with "race" relations is no longer the open hostility, legal discrimination and one-sided violence of years past. It's cooled into resentments and grievances; and being resentful of and and aggrieved by, the resentments and grievances of others. And so people talk past one another, sometimes at length. And so attempts to change even one person's mind through conversation seem quixotic. But be that as it may, leveling rhetorical lances at windmills strikes me as a better choice than simply laying them aside.

What Then

Think about a person who has suffered from depression and chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for many years. She has received on-and-off treatment with variable results. She feels hopeless, has continuous negative thoughts about herself, and wants to die. What should this person do?

It's an interesting question, and one that, unfortunately goes unanswered as the author's intent is to hold up assisted death, whether that be assisting a person in ending their own life or ending the life of a person who is unable to carry out the deed themselves, as unethical. And okay, I can understand that viewpoint. And I can understand the idea that "there is something cynical and nihilistic" about the argument that for some people, death by something other than natural causes may be their best option. But leaning heavily into the point that "as members of a society" we have a duty to mitigate the suffering of the severely mentally ill doesn't answer of the question of what recourse the suffering person has if "we" fail.

In fact, after the first paragraph, where we are told that in Belgium, the sufferer can speak to their psychiatrist or therapist about assisted death, the hypothetical patient is never mentioned again. At all. They become a footnote in an argument that is ostensibly about what options they have when they feel they have exhausted all others. And that's unfortunate because "What should this person do?" is a very important question, especially when one is arguing that one option they might have be taken away from them. For some people, hope is a very powerful emotion, but it must be kept in mind that it's not possible to force it on someone else.

And maybe people know this. It occurs to me, that other than the seemingly obligatory anti-suicide messaging that accompanies stories of people actually attempting or committing suicide, I haven't yet come across can article that attempts to speak to someone with, say treatment-resistant depression and suicidal ideation, and convince them that there are better options out there than seeking to end their own lives. To the degree that the people suffering are part of the conversation of what they should do about it, they're props, at best, rather than active participants. Perhaps because they're seen as so broken that there's something wrong with taking them seriously. Or maybe because their disorders render them poor spokespeople for themselves. I don't know. But I am starting to find their absence conspicuous.

D Three

I was listening to a podcast about robotics and automation and the trope of "robots coming to take our jobs" was front and center throughout most of it, as well as roboticists and automation company executives talking about labor shortages and "dull, dirty and dangerous" work.

This framing, I believe, moves the conversation away from the actual social problem that large-scale automation risks; namely that the elimination of certain forms of labor may not create opportunities for other labor at the same skill levels. If a bar is able to automate making and serving drinks (an example from the podcast that appears to fall well outside of the touted "dull, dirty and dangerous"), what work does this create that the bartenders whose skills have been obviated will be able to qualify for?

The podcast hosts dutifully raised the point that workers would need retraining if they were going to remain employed in a society with high level of automation, but, and this has always been the problem with such schemes, private companies see the benefits of making, selling and deploying systems of automation, but it is governments that are expected to foot the bill for preparing the public for disruptions to the labor market. And,  at least here in the United States, governments have been poor at the task, in no large part because those jurisdictions that have the most work to do tend to be the most starved of resources, because their constituents are already financially straited.

Definition

It’s worth reiterating that these studies were conducted in the US, where most religious people are adherents of Abrahamic monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). Things might look very different in other cultures. But, if these findings are correct – at least in this Western context, where being religious typically means believing in a creator God – they raise the question of whether secular Western society is in a position to reproduce the existential benefits of religion.
Michael M Prinzing "Religion gives life meaning. Can anything else take its place?"

Fair enough, I suppose. But, what are "existential benefits of religion?" From what I could glean from the article, the answer seemed to be "existential comfort." Not that "existential comfort" was clearly defined.

Like a lot of popular philosophy articles on "meaning in life," this one presupposes that having some sort of meaning in life, even if it goes no farther than a person's self-perception that "At present, I find my life very meaningful," is better than not having it. But no mechanism as to why this should be the case is offered. I am one of those people who is of the opinion that life is meaningless; life need not make sense (it doesn't need to form a coherent and satisfying narrative), it doesn't need to be independently valuable (so the statement "this person's life is worthless" is not truth-apt in any way) and it doesn't need to have any form of significance (the fact that, at some point in the future, no-one will either know or care that I ever existed is not a bad thing in itself). And people tell me all the time that I have adopted the wrong stance on such things. Yet, they are always at a loss when I ask them, "why?"

It's possible to make the point that certain things about life are better for people who understand themselves to have found some meaning in life, but I'm not sure how important that is. It's something like  avoiding tobacco and alcohol. There is clear evidence that people who don't smoke and don't drink live longer than people who don't. Both those are averages - it's not like the longest possible healthy lifespan of someone who smokes and drinks is shorter than the shortest possible healthy lifespan of someone who does neither. There are simply too many other risk factors in play for that sort of causal relationship to exist.

But with something like meaning in life, there is another possibility in play; the simple idea that it's possible to believe that having meaning in life is better than not having it is independent of whether there is any such thing as meaning in life, and that any despair brought about by a lack of meaning is a result of being told that one should despair. I think of it as being similar to the idea that one should be sad when confronted with the death of a family member. But there are any number of reasons why it may make sense to be something other than sad. These tend to be ignored in favor of a social consensus that dictates sadness in most circumstances. And one might not even understand that the main driver of sadness in a given situation is the expectation that one will be sad.

I have a suspicion that the same is true with the quest for meaning. Enough repetition of the idea that a meaningless life is not worth living, and it makes sense that people will internalize that idea. Every so often, I'll have a conversation with someone who insists that whether I know it or not, I'm miserable and suffering because I don't feel that life is meaningful. "Don't you realize you're desperately unhappy?" I have been asked. Eventually, I started answering: "No. Do you want me to be?" They would tend to answer no, but then insist that I had to be. "Only if I listen to you," I would reply. A few people I have said this to responded as if it had never occurred to them that a sense of despair over life's meaninglessness could be something other than an objective, effectively physiological, response. And this despite the fact that the sort of meaning that Abrahamic monotheism posits is nothing close to universal.

And if it's possible that the way left-leaning media and political figures talk about current events contributes to depression(https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-are-young-liberals-so-depressed) among young liberals, it's possible that the way Western society talks about lack of meaning could do the same. So perhaps the "existential benefits of religion" are simply a matter of people being told that they exist, and responding accordingly.

Swept

This is the sort of thing that drives resentment of the homeless population of the area, but doesn't actually spark any efforts towards fixing the problem. I will be unsurprised to find that the next time I'm in the area, the sidewalk, if not the entire encampment, has been cleared; this isn't the sort of thing that I expect the locals, even in a stereotypically liberal place like Seattle, will suffer gladly.
Unwalkable

Well, the next time I was in the area was yesterday, and somewhat to my surprise (considering how bad I am at predicting the future), the encampment was gone.

In its place were some nice planters; and some very large stones. While it's generally too much to expect people with substance abuse and/or other mental health problems to be good neighbors, there are apparently limits and the small encampment in Ballard crossed them. The result being that the city (most likely) has made camping in the area much more difficult than it had been before.

And simply clearing the camp and placing large objects to prevent tents being pitched again the the future doesn't do anything to solve the problem. More than likely, the people who had been living in the camps are still homeless; they've just been pushed elsewhere. Which may be enough for the locals to declare victory. Of course, elsewhere might not be very happy with that turn of events. Which runs the risk of a race to the bottom, as neighborhoods compete to be the least welcoming of the homeless.

The problem, as it exists now, has been building for decades. I moved out here a quarter-century ago, and one of the first things that struck me about the area was the rather large number of homeless people, compared to Chicago. My first impression was that Seattle was simply a more clement place to be homeless than Chicago, where the summers and the winters can be severe enough to be fatal. But in the meantime, I've learned that there are more deliberate reasons. Rocks and planters won't lower the high cost of housing, or create more places to build. That takes political action; which there isn't much motivation for at this point.

And Going, and Going, and Going...

WHO says Covid remains a global emergency but pandemic could near its end in 2023

That's nice. Come back when there's actually something resembling information to share.

One of the things that I was looking for when this whole mess started up was clear guidance. Not only on what governments were going to do, but what the trigger points were. This way, it would be possible to look at the situation as it unfolded, and have a workable idea of what was coming, and what preparations it made sense to take.

No such luck. And I think that this is what drives a lot of the conspiratorial thinking concerning the SARS-CoV-2 situation. (Even calling it an "outbreak" seems strange, after three years.) As much as the public health community here in the United States found its job made more difficult by a lack of public trust, I'm not sure that much has been done to repair that trust. Pushing the World Health Organization to create and publish formal guidelines for when a pandemic starts, and when it ends, might help. It's difficult to make the case to people that three years in, with many people having some level of immunity from vaccination and/or having been sick with the disease, that it's still an emergency. A problem to be dealt with, sure. But after all this time, an emergency seems to be stretching things just a bit. SARS-CoV-2 seems to have passed through its acute phase, and has now become a chronic concern. A rather more serious one than other respiratory viruses, like influenza, but still a chronic concern. The language of emergency doesn't seem to suit things at this state.

“We remain hopeful that in the coming year, the world will transition to a new phase in which we reduce hospitalizations and deaths to the lowest possible level, and health systems are able to manage Covid-19 in an integrated and sustainable way,” [WHO Director-General] Tedros [Adhanom Ghebreyesus] said in a statement.

As the saying goes, hope is not a strategy. If the World Health Organization and other public-health bodies are going to retain credibility, they're going to have to do something more than hope that something changes; especially in the face of a world that is constantly changing. If a 70% drop in the number of serious illnesses doesn't allow for the alert level to be brought down from it's highest point, maybe a more granular scale is in order. Because eventually, things are going to get to a point where no-one feels that these statements are worth listening to. And that could have serious consequences the next time around.

Unintelligent Artifice

It should come as a surprise to no-one that if one trains an Artificial Intelligence on what people post to the Internet, a chatbot powered by that AI will sound like the average person on the Internet. And as anyone who has had the misfortune of spending any amount of time interacting with people on the Internet will tell you, it's not going to sound informed, compassionate or even mentally healthy. And given people's incentives to demonstrate the shortcomings of AI, prompts to bring out the worst in it are inevitable. Active, deliberate and intensive troll-testing is an absolute must under these circumstances. There is no reason why Microsoft should be burned in this a second time, given that it's a known quantity.