Meanies

"Sad day for affirmative-action advocates," the DeSantis War Room account tweeted.
Trump, DeSantis praise Supreme Court affirmative action ruling

This is the sort of thing that makes being engaged in politics difficult. Generally speaking, I'm one of those people who is often described in the media as "moderate," when "idiosyncratic" may be a more accurate label. When I've taken political alignment tests, I tend to come out in the area of Libertarians; which makes sense. I'm all for limited government, am socially liberal and not a defense hawk.

This tends to align me with the Democratic Party, since they reliably check one of the three boxes, as opposed to the Republicans, which usually checks none of them. Still, I don't want to become a committed partisan. Mainly because committed partisanship is how one ends up with people like Donald Trump at the top of the party ticket. And people like Governor Ron DeSantis as his primary challenger.

For me, DeSantis comes across as rather Trumpian; he simply trades incompetence born of an active disinterest in the job for a level of petty vindictiveness. As much as I think that affirmative action as it is implemented in the United States as attempting to solve the wrong problem, the people who back it are well-meaning. Sniping at them comes across as mean-spirited. And it shouldn't take needing to co-sign someone's mean-spiritedness to have political alternatives in this country.

Inattentive

I tend to avoid following the news very closely. Mainly because I can get away with it; neither my job nor other aspects of my day-to-day life require me to keep up on current events. A vague understanding of how the news media works as a business and a general sense that keeping up with the news is a poor way of maintaining a positive outlook on the world don't help. Be that as it may there are some stories that there simply isn't any getting away from; they dominate the headlines for a time, and so even a limited news diet will result in encountering a fairly substantial amount of information about them.

The sinking of a fishing trawler laden with migrants attempting to reach Europe was one such story, even though details were always in short supply, so the coverage, at least as I encountered it, tended to focus on the personal stories of the survivors of the sinking or the families of those presumed dead. So was the disappearance and rescue efforts associated with the OceanGate submersible Titan. Now, while much as been made of the level of coverage given to the search for Titan, OceanGate Incorporated is a local company, and that may have amped things up for this media market.

In any event, it's now become fashionable to compare the level of coverage, and thus "attention," that was devoted to the two stories. The general gist of things is that governments and rescue services put much more time, energy and effort into the search for the wealthy passengers of the Titan than they did for the women and children who went down with the unnamed fishing trawler.

The front pages the past few days have been dominated by the search for the missing sub, said Josie Naughton, co-founder and CEO of Choose Love, a U.K.-based nongovernmental organization supporting refugees around the world.

She said thousands more articles appeared to have been published about the submersible than about the migrant boat, “yet, it’s 100 times as many people who are feared to have lost their lives and these people, they were forced to flee their homes, they were looking for safety.”

A tale of two disasters: Missing Titanic sub captivates the world days after deadly migrant shipwreck

Whether Ms. Naughton's assertion is true, I have no idea. I'm not that good at Google. But I do understand that it's a testable thesis. From time to time, I encounter a story that deals with the number of news stories that have covered a particular event over time. So why not check out that statement, and see if it holds up? Of course, some context would be needed, while I'm not sure than anyone is keeping a specific count, there are perhaps some 20,000 news sites in the world. If a tenth of them published three stories about the search for the Titan, and only two about the fishing trawler while everyone else remained balanced, that's "thousands more articles" right there.

And this points to the problem with asserting that one story or another has received more attention than another story deemed important. How is that measured? Accusations from activists and campaigners notwithstanding, the two stores are not an apples-to-apples comparison. Sure, one can make the point that the resources deployed to search for the Titan should have been deployed to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean, but Coast Guards are national resources; they aren't controlled by the United Nations. It's unlikely that the United States Coast Guard could have made the crossing in time to do anything other than look for bodies. And to say that the Greek response should have matched that of the United States is to presume similarities that are unlikely to hold up.

Was the response to the trawler full of migrants all that it could have been? Based on the limited information that I currently have, I suspect not. But if there is objective fact there, then the information to back it up should be made available. It can be pointless to ask people to do better when the scale that they're being graded on hasn't been shared. Phenomena like Missing White Woman Syndrome have been documented over the years with a number of studies, and a news story on the topic can be reliably expected to lay out the findings from at least one of them.

If this a case of the world caring more about some people than others, it should likely fit into a similar pattern; one that can be demonstrated. Being able to present the evidence is the first step towards creating change.

Holding the Bag

Sunday is my day for grocery shopping, so I went to the store this morning. Washington state, in an effort to increase the use of reusable bags, has banned most businesses from using single-use plastic and requires that they charge for paper or more durable plastic bags.

I tended to prefer paper to plastic long before this happened, and being the forgetful sort, had built up a modest stock of paper bags, which I now use to avoid paying for new ones. Some of these bags are several years old at this point, and they have drawn comments from store employees. A common comment is that the older bags are better made, and hence more durable, than the current bags.

And this makes a certain amount of sense. A store that's giving away free paper bags with every purchase is incurring an expense; every time that a customer reuses a bag, that's one less that the store has to part with. But when a store is effectively selling bags to customers, when a customer reuses that bag, the store misses out on a small amount of revenue that's nearly all profit. And so why spend money on better quality bags?

None of this is meant to be an argument against the state's policy. After all, people were terrible about making sure that the plastic bags were properly disposed of. The reusable bags, however, are a slightly different matter when compared to paper, but it is what it is. But while the lowering of bag quality was certainly an unintended consequence of the policy, I suspect that it shouldn't have been an unexpected one.

Frozen

The price sign from a now-defunct [Royal Dutch] Shell station in Kenmore, Washington, perhaps a mile and a half down the road from an old home of mine. Given that current gasoline prices are some two dollars a gallon higher than this, it's clear that it's been closed for some time. (Mid-2020, at the latest, it turns out.) The vandals who worked over the actual pumps have so far not damaged this sign, and as long as someone is still paying the electricity bill, I suspect it will continue to advertise a price long past.
 

Most of the People, Most of the Time

In a recent episode of Freakonomics Radio, Slate legal reporter Dahlia Lithwick makes what I think is an often-overlooked observation about the business of news:

One of the things that worries me about journalism as we are practicing it now is the monetization of scaring people, right? If you scare people’s face off, they will click. And we know this. But also, I think the commodification of: “I will find out what your anxieties are, and I will feed you a thousand things that will convince you that they’re coming for that.” That is part of the business model here.

As generative "artificial intelligence" has rapidly become a more and more commonplace tool for doing all sorts of things, journalists and media outlets have quickly realized that stories noting how the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse (terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers, depending on who you ask) could us "AI" to wreak havoc generates precious clicks. They're aided and abetted in this (or maybe they're simply being used) by law enforcement, who have come to realize that if they scare people's face off, they just might pay a modicum of attention for a moment or two.

Which brings us to an article in Axios on "How AI is helping scammers target victims in 'sextortion' schemes." (Why "sextortion" is in quotes, but "AI" is not, is something of a mystery.) Not that the headline is accurate; internet thieves aren't using the tools of technology to target people; but rather to make it more likely the people they target will pay up. And since the Horseman being referenced here is child pornographer-adjacent, there is, of course, a "won't somebody think of the children" angle.

"The question becomes, 'How do we develop a law now that's going to protect children 10 years from now?'" [Amanda] Manyana said.

If that's the question, we're in trouble, because it completely misses the point.

Sextortion schemes have typically worked in a few different modes. One popular one was to convince some horny young adult male to send pictures to what they thought was an amazingly attractive woman that 1) they just happened to stumble across on the Internet and 2) was immediately into them, but needed photographic evidence of how hot they were. The amazingly attractive woman would then suddenly (and pretty much inevitably) turn out to be an extortionist, who then threatened to release the photos to all of the mark's online contacts if not paid. The mark, who apparently had been telling everyone they knew that they'd taken an ironclad vow of chastity and moved into a monastery, would pay up to avoid being outed... as a horny young adult.

The addition of "AI" to the scheme ups the ante somewhat, because now, it's supposedly easy as pie for an extortionist to scrape the internet for pictures of random people, and use that to create believable video of said random people in sexual acts. So laws. Must. Be. Passed.

But the underlying problem, which never seems to come up in any of these articles, is somewhat different. If some unknown party sent you a sexually explicit video out of the blue, claiming it was of someone you knew, why would you a) believe them, and b) seek to confront, or even punish, the person in the video based on that alone? As the Axios article points out: "So-called 'deepfakes' and the threats they pose have been around for years." So why do people think that they should act on anything they see? Especially without making at least some effort to corroborate it?

While much has been made of people's willingness to use motivated reasoning to find reasons to disbelieve what is likely accurate information, because it conflicts with what they want to be true, there is also the problem of people's skepticism being behind the times.

What frightens people into paying extortionists who claim to have explicit photos or videos is the sense that their denials to people who supposedly love, or at least like, them will fall on deaf ears because some shady character on the Internet shows up peddling evidence that undermines what turns out to be a shaky believe in that person's worth and/or worthiness. There isn't a law that will protect people from that for 10 minutes, let alone 10 years, in a society where the constant perception of scarcity often means that supposed evidence that disqualifies people from aid or opportunities is seen as a helpful tool for making hard choices significantly easier.

Tilted

There is a certain amount of controversy over whether people are products of their environments, their own "characters," or some combination of the two. I tend to be of the opinion that people commit acts that their society considers criminal, or at least undesirable, because those actions are rational responses to perverse incentives. And there are always perverse incentives; food that one person has stolen from another is just as nutritious and satiating as food acquired by more honest means.

But just because humanity inhabits a world where perverse incentives come with the territory doesn't mean that people have to create more. And it's there where I wonder if people are perhaps looking in the wrong places when it comes to attempting to regulate the behavior of others. Because perhaps it does more good to understand the perverse incentives that surround a person, and see if they can be changed, than it does to simply decry the fact that people respond to those incentives.

Part of the problem, I suspect is that it's easier (or at least less expensive) to create bad options than good ones, and so people who see themselves as social engineers, often having a series of constraints to live within, tend to focus more making behaviors they don't want difficult and expensive, rather than actively making the behavior they do want easy and cheaper.

Let's Do The Twist

Some years ago, I'd started to notice a peculiar recurrence in my debates with people. Somewhere along the way, my interlocutor would accuse me of "twisting" their words. This is, generally speaking, an accusation of acting in bad faith, and so my initial response was one of indignation, laced with an understanding that the person I was debating lacked an understanding of how logic worked. But, as the saying goes, the one constant in all of your dysfunctional relationships is you, and so I started paying attention to what I was doing that elicited this response. And I realized that it was taking the logic of a given argument, generalizing it, and then showing that if that same logic were applied in similar situations, the outcome was one that both parties agreed was repugnant. And this became the objected-to twist.

My general argument could usually be phrased as follows: The fact that applying argument A to situation S1 to arrives at positive outcome O1 does not prove that argument A is positive if there is an easily-accessible situation S2, that while similar to S1, produces repugnant outcome O2 when the same argument A is applied.

This is still my general method of evaluating a logical argument, attempting to understand if it holds up generally, or otherwise outside of the narrow scope of the situation in which it is being deployed. Needless to say, I'm still accused of "twisting" things. But I still think it's helpful, because a primary source of unintended (and often unpleasant) consequences of various ideas is a failure to understand the broader implications of same.

And that brings me to the subgenre of philosophy that one might call "the apologetics of free will." To lay my cards on the table, I am a determinist, courtesy of a strange intersection of my own materialism and the understanding that "random" is simply another way of saying "too complicated to predict in real time." Therefore I am always somewhat amused by people who claim that we "should" believe in one side or the other. Since the current state of the Universe, including what people believe, is a function of natural laws operating on the past states of the Universe, of what importance are exhortations to believe one thing or another?

In any event, I was reading another "apologetic of free will," where the author, one Professor Kennon Sheldon makes the following argument:

Regardless of who is correct in this debate [between free will and determinism], my work has led me to a second conclusion that I consider even more important than whether we have free will or not. It’s that a belief in our own capacity to make choices is critical for our mental health. At the very least, this belief lets us function ‘as if’ we have free will, which greatly benefits us.

It's nothing that I haven't read, or heard, before. From there, Professor Sheldon goes on to lay out three reasons why he "consider[s] belief in free will to be important and beneficial." They are:

1. The feeling of having free will satisfies a need that is critical to being mentally healthy.
2. It makes one a better person.
3. It has the most integrity of the available choices.

The last one is the weakest in my opinion, mainly because Professor Sheldon creates some straw-man reasons for a belief in determinism; none of the options listed include "because people genuinely believe that this is how the Universe actually works." Because remember, Professor Sheldon doesn't claim to have solved the question of which viewpoint is correct; he advocates for a choice to believe in free will, regardless of the reality of the situation.

Generalizing the argument out, I arrive at: Regardless of the truth of the matter, the wise choice is to believe what is healthier and brings the most benefits. You can see how it's fairly simple to take a point that hasn't been settled yet (or that people don't believe has been settled) and claim that if some research says that it's the best thing to believe, that wisdom dictates that it's best to believe that.

I'm going to pluck a piece of low-hanging (if not boxed and ready to ship) fruit here and use religion as an example. It's not hard to find research that says that Christians are happier, and many Christians will rattle off reasons why non-believers fail to be believe that scrupulously avoid engaging with the idea that they genuinely don't believe in deities (or at least in the Christian conception of what a deity should be).

In a regime that says that one's understanding of the truth of the world around them should be dictated by a cost-benefit analysis, rather than honest assessment of their lived reality, it's easy to fall into one of any number of traps that demand belief in certain ideologies. Should minorities in the United States be counseled that since they can't definitively prove that the system is stacked against them, that they have just as much access to opportunity as the mainstream? One could certainly make the argument that not seeing oneself as marginalized and at risk from the broader society is better for one's mental health. And there are plenty of Conservative Americans who would say that someone who believes in the promise of America is a better person and subscribes to a belief with more integrity than someone who doesn't. So does Professor Sheldon's logic hold there? If not, why not? History?

It's possible that the professor's book on the topic goes into the subject in enough detail that it allows for selection between different circumstances. Having read books with the expectation of finding such nuance and having been disappointed up to this point, however, I'm not so sure. In any event, Professor Sheldon's Psyche article struck me as a call for judging belief based on what effects come of that belief. Which is reasonable, but one can see where it might easily become more than a little twisted.

Unstated

A White House National Security Council spokesperson referred Axios to the Israeli government. The spokesperson added that the U.S. "has been clear that advancing settlements is an obstacle to peace and the achievement of a two-state solution."
Scoop: Israel to announce plans for thousands of new settlement units in West Bank

I'm not sure why anyone thinks that the current Israeli government is the least bit interested in a "two-state solution," given that they see no benefit Palestine being a nation-state. It's been made clear on multiple occasions that Israel sees the Palestinians as hostile to their continued existence, and isn't in favor of their having a self-governing and self-reliant country, since, in order for it to be able to defend itself, it would also be capable of fighting with Israel.

Given that Israel is already a formal nation-state, with international recognition, and no-one really prepared to go to mat in order to preserve the status quo, complaining that Israel's actions make things more difficult seems to be a waste of time. Israel is acting in what it understands its interests to be, and it's been pretty clear for some time now that there are enough people in the country who want to annex the whole of the West Bank (and possibly even Gaza), or will simply stand by as it happens, that international hand-wringing is not going to make a difference.

Israel's domestic politics favors the expansion of settlements. And while there are any number of people, organizations or even nations that would rather they didn't, no-one is really placed to do anything about it, because there aren't large or vocal enough constituencies for genuine pushback. Diplomacy requires that both sides understand it to be their best option, and that simply isn't the case for Israel at this point. They understand their best option to be pushing ahead with settlements, and weathering whatever unrest this causes, because it's worked for them in the past. And it's doubtful that things have changed enough that it won't work now.

International diplomacy has acquired an air of "Stop! Or I'll shout 'Stop!' again" and "strongly-worded letters," to the point where it's rational to not take it seriously. Israel understands that no-one is going to stand up for the Palestinians in a way that changes the calculus of further construction in the West Bank. And I'm sure that most other interested parties have that understanding. It doesn't make sense to pretend otherwise.

Smarts

A sticker I found on a lamppost in Seattle. Apparently, these have been popping up for some time now. But other than that, it's all a mystery to me.
 

Scrub-a-dub-dub

"LIV, Laugh, Launder: The Morality of Sportswashing" is one of a proliferating number of articles about the idea that the merger of LIV Golf, and the Professional Golfer's Association Tour, and how this is intended to burnish the image of Saudi Arabia.

Fair enough. I just have one question: How is this intended to work, exactly? According to Sports Illustrated, sportswashing is "the use of sports to present a sanitized, friendlier version of a political regime or operation." In "LIV, Laugh, Launder," the author defines it as "a practice used by states to launder their reputation and distract from less savory activities and human rights violations." Okay, but does that actually ever happen?

Who, precisely, forgot that Saudi Arabia has been accused of unsavory activities, including the out-and-out killing of a critic of the government, simply because they wanted to watch some golf on television? China hosting the Olympics didn't seem to make a dent in anti-China sentiment (deserved or not) here in the United States. Sure, there have been some statements from golfers that seemed to downplay Saudi Arabia's myriad failures to live up to what one might loosely call international standards, but I don't know anyone who takes their cues on human rights from golfers. Or Olympic athletes. Or professional sports leagues.

As I understand it, the problem with sportswashing seems to be that it gives people other things to talk about than what human rights and good government activists want talked about.

The goal of sportswashing is to reduce scrutiny applied to negative actions by essentially using sport as a distraction.

But this makes an assumption that I'm not sure is true; that absent this or that sporting event, the people who would have been watching or paying attention would have been examining the negative actions of the nation or organization that put on the event. It's true that when I'm watching, say, a rugby game (a sport that I immensely enjoy when I happen to catch it, even though I have no idea of what's happening on the field), I'm not looking deeply into the human rights records of whatever nation or nations the teams playing hail from. But I'm not looking into those concerns even when there isn't a rugby game on to watch. A rugby game is much more likely to come between me and housekeeping than it is to come between me and human rights activism. Mainly because human rights activism very, very, far down my current list of priorities.

And the people I know who are motivated to be activists for human rights or good government? They're so on the lookout for anything that may "distract" me (or others) from their cause that the only thing they have time for, when it comes to many sporting events, is, well, making accusations of sportswashing. So I'm not sure that sportswashing has enough real-world effectiveness to actually be a thing. It may be more likely that some people just like the idea of owning a golf tour.

Red, Blue, Violet, Yellow

So the Public Religion Research Institute conducted a survey, "The Politics of Gender, Pronouns, and Public Education."

The second section of the article asks: "Is Gender Binary?" Had they asked me, I think I would have answered: I don't know... Define 'gender'." Because this one of those things where I suspect it's important that everyone be on the same page as to the language they're using. As a cultural matter, I think that gender is binary, at least in the sense that American culture lacks anything like the "third" or other genders that some cultures do. "Non-binary" does not come across as a gender, in and of itself. At least as I encounter it, it's more of a rejection of the standard "boy/man and girl/woman" labels. It's kind of like saying something is neither red nor yellow - there is no word in American English that describes everything that isn't red and yellow as a single color. It's somewhat the same with non-binary. To say that an adult is neither a man nor a woman doesn't describe what they are, nor, at least in common usage, does it seem to be intended to. And in that sense, at least in the United States, gender is effectively binary, even if "none of the above" is an allowable answer.

Personally, I think that it would be useful for American society to have more than simply two genders; mainly because the boundaries of the genders seem to be shrinking, rather than expending. As such, the labels seems to hew closer to their common stereotypes than I recall them doing when I was younger. But even outside of that, it may make sense to have a social understanding that terms like "masculine" and "feminine" may not cover all possibilities. Sure, the two may be viewed as a continuum between two poles, but that makes the distinction necessarily one-dimensional. Perhaps that's not a good way to conceive of it. One could imagine adding some understanding of intensity; some people come across as so weakly attached to either gender that they're effectively neuter. And even in a binary, it's not always possible to draw sharp distinctions; some people really are androgynous. That would give us four.

Which, come to think of it, may not make a difference. Consider, for a moment, the idea that in the United States, we have a "two-party" system. But there are more than two political parties in the United States. There are a few "third parties." But their influence and reach is so small as to be negligible, and so everyone speaks of the United States as having only two parties. While not a binary in reality, it's a binary in effect, and thus, in language. I wonder of the politics metaphor isn't more apt than I first thought it. After all, "Independent" functions in much the same way as "non-binary." It marks a person as identifying as neither Democrat nor Republican, but isn't itself a party affiliation - in the American two party system, a Socialist and a Libertarian are equally "independent." (And equally irrelevant.)

And maybe that's what it's all about for many people. Are the people who use "they" as their pronoun, or say they aren't a man or a woman? Yes. Are they relevant to anything? Not enough to count. So 1 + 1 + X = 2, because no matter what the value of X, many people don't see it as any different from zero.

Roadblock

Axios posted an article this morning pointing to the oft-cited disconnect between people's understanding of their own financial situation (those people who rate their own finances as "at least okay" in the Federal Reserve's "2022 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking") and their understanding of how the national economy (those people who say that the national economy is "good or excellent").

In the piece, Axios shows a chart (a subset of some data in the survey results) that points to the idea that people's overall assessment of the national economy took a dive when the SARS-2 coronavirus pandemic broke out, and hasn't really recovered since.

What's interesting is the invocation of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.

It's hard to see what could turn sentiment around. That's largely because of Fed chair Jerome Powell, who doesn't want and won't allow some kind of economic boom — he thinks the economy is running too hot already.

Presumably this is because Chairman Powell is of the impression that an economic boom would raise demand more than it would raise supply; this, in turn would place upward pressure on inflation. Which is understandable; there's simply no immediate evidence to support the contention that this is the thought process. Axios doesn't offer any; and it's unclear if the Axios reporter himself believes that Chairman Powell is wielding some sort of deliberate veto of an "economic boom" or if this is supposedly what the public believes. There's no mention of Chairman Powell in the survey results, or at the link in the Axios article, leaving the source of this particular data point a mystery.

Part of it may be the way the economy is generally spoken of. Interest rate increases are designed to make the cost of money higher, which should lead to decreases in borrowing-supported demand. And since one of the drivers of inflation is a high demand and low supply, lowering demand should bring prices down.

In any event, I'm dubious on noting that Chairman Powell appears to have some sort of personalized control over the whole of the American economy in the way mentioned. It seems to be a recipe for the blame game, which rarely serves anyone well.

Soundproof

A former manager of mine shared a post from one of their contacts on LinkedIn, which, in turn, was a reposting of another social media post. I was tempted to say that I would spare readers the details, but I'm not sure that it's a good idea. So, understanding that I take a risk of setting a bridge on fire, here is the original post.

Rule number one of social media, according to another person I used to work with, is that whenever a post outrages you, it's a bad idea to act on that. Which I think is good advice; outrage mining is a thing for a reason.

The table shown, helpfully labelled as Table B2, comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Productivity and Costs report, First Quarter 2023, Revised. The revisions in that particular table are what are called the R2 revisions, and are generally released around 130 or so days after the end of the Reference Quarter. In this, case, October through December of 2022. Contained in the full report is a link to a helpful explainer: "Revisions to BLS quarterly labor productivity estimates: How large are they?" That (quite long) article notes:

The R2 estimate is released at the same time as the prelim estimate of the following quarter, because the R1-to-R2 revisions are generally not large enough to warrant a separate news release. Subsequent revisions to the R2 estimates, such as those due to the BEA comprehensive revisions to the national income and product accounts, can be large and can occur long after the reference quarter. Thus, the estimates are never really “final.”

Faked data, indeed.

The easiest way to get someone to believe something that isn't true is to start with something that they believe is true, especially when they don't know much about the subject as a whole. In this case, that the media is somehow colluding with the Federal Reserve Bank to trick people into believing that interest rate hikes are necessary, when they actually are not, based on data that can be fairly arcane, and most people don't pay any attention to.

To be sure, I don't pretend to understand all of the data that the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes. After all, my day job doesn't require that I understand any of the data, and while I can be something of a data nerd, this lies outside the standard range of my hobbies.

But I have come to have something of a sense for hyperbole when I stumble across it. (Or, as I sometimes do, go looking for it.) The original post, from "Wall Street Silver" takes a single table from a government report, links it to perceived recollections of media reports from three or four months ago, and uses that to bolster a narrative of media complicity in government malpractice, for an audience that dislikes what they understand to be the media establishment, and views the current administration as hostile to the national (as in their) interests. And, like a lot of conspiratorial thinking, it offers an easy and simple answer to a difficult and complicated question.

When people speak of threats to American democracy, from both the Left and Right, this is the sort of thing that may not receive as much air time as perhaps it should. While I understand the focus on potential political violence, and hence the constant attention to the events of January 6th, 2021, the decline of social trust that lead to the demonstration, riot, insurrection or what-have-you is less attended-to. It's all fine and good to go on and on about echo chambers and the like. But without an understanding of why people come to see their echo chambers as welcoming and comforting places, it will continue to be difficult to coax people out of them.

Unbalanced

I spent some time, while driving from and to work over the past couple of days, listing to an audio version of David Brooks’ most recent column in The Atlantic: “The Outer Limits of Liberalism.” The podcast, hoping, perhaps, to put a much finer point on it, is titled: “The Canadian Way of Death,” perhaps because so much of the beginning of the piece is devoted to Mr. Brooks’ complaints about Canada’s Medical Assistance In Dying (or MAID) laws. To make a long story short, Mr. Brooks contrasts what he calls “autonomy-based liberalism,” which he clearly feels is a both misleading and broken, with what he terms “gifts-based liberalism,” which he presents as something of a panacea to many social problems, not the least of which being people perceiving themselves as having the freedom to end their own lives.

Personally, I take mild exception to Mr. Brooks attaching the label of “gifts-based liberalism” to his ideal form of liberal thought. The gifts are secondary, it’s the obligations that go with them that Mr. Brooks really feels are central. Accordingly, I’m going to use “obligations-based liberalism” to describe it, instead. Besides, it makes for a much clearer opposition between the two.

In the end, I see nothing really wrong with “obligations-based liberalism,” in and of itself. But I think that Mr. Brooks, as proselytizers are wont to do, massively oversells it. While he sees the excesses of “autonomy-based liberalism” as those of a good idea taken too far, he doesn’t acknowledge that “obligations-based liberalism” is subject to the same problem. Which is why the liberalism of personal autonomy is a thing in the first place. This does make a certain amount of sense, however. For Mr. Brooks to point out the potential excesses of the liberalism of social obligation, he would need to risk the ire of those who support the idea, while earning little to no good will from those who oppose it.

And so he’s left to pretend that there is no balance between the two to be struck. Society should simply use its ability to impose obligations on others (for the gifts those people have no right of refusal over) and individuals should surrender their autonomy to those obligations and burdens, because since the people in Mr. Brooks’ anecdotes who follow that path have great outcomes, the same will certainly be true for everyone.

And this, I suspect, is more of a problem than the excesses of either variety of liberalism; the simple fact that we live in a world in which being open and honest about the downsides of the things one supports is considered to be somewhere between stupid and treacherous. And so many people limit themselves to preaching to the choir, while those outside the congregation consider them to be foolish or dishonest.