In Isolation

Let me tell you this: I don't understand my parents' relationship. And yet I'm supposed to, over the span of a campaign, understand the reasoning behind the presidential candidate's choice of mate and infer certain characteristics based on his choice. I think that's nearly impossible.
Jon Stewart. (GQ Magazine, October 2004.)

Apparently, this also includes a lack of a mate, as "GOP donors fret over Scott's single status," according to Axios. While this story is presented as a "scoop," I'm not sure that it even qualifies as a spoonful, given the paucity of actual information it contains. In short, anonymous sources report that "some conservative Republican donors" have concerns, "curiosity and apprehension" over the fact that Senator Tim Scott is not married, and he's keeping the identity of his girlfriend secret.

In other words, Conservative Republican donors are afraid that, since Senator Scott isn't obviously married, and thus can't trot out a wife to show what a "regular guy" he is, he might actually be uninterested in being married or (horror of horrors!) gay. But "Conservative Republican Donors Demand Public Displays of Their 'Family Values' in Return for Money," isn't a scoop, given that it's about as unexpected as "Water Makes Things Wet," and "The Sun Rose in the East This Morning." Is there a news story in there about the idea that Republican donors would have doubts about someone who doesn't openly follow the "Family Man" model of Conservative masculinity? Maybe. After all, given that Conservatism writ large is typically defined by concerning itself with wanting to halt the flow of social change, if not roll it back, this seems pretty much par for the course.

Given the fact that Donald Trump is able to raise plenty of money without needing to display any particular fealty, or even lip service, to Conservative values, I suspect that may actually be going on here is that donors have serious concerns about Senator Scott's prospects. Personally, I'm of the opinion that he's running to raise his profile ahead of a more serious 2028 run for the White House. There's almost no realistic chance that he'll win the Republican nomination. Now, I've noted how bad I am at predicting the future, so it would be unwise of me to say for certain that Senator Scott's days as a candidate for President in 2024 are numbered, even if I suspect that it's where the smart money is. Since donors, though, are all about smart money, I would not be surprised if these alleged worries about the Senator's relationship status are simply a smokescreen for more rational concerns about what their donations are actually going to be used for. A lot changes in politics in four years, and people who have no problem donating to him now might not want that to simply go into a "Scott in 2028" fund given that uncertainty.

Gossip and rumor passing for political news is becoming commonplace, as outlets seek to fill page space with whatever they think that someone might be interested in, without needing to expend much in the way of resources fleshing things out. And that's the case here, because their could be an interesting story here, either about a disconnect (intentional or otherwise) between the Conservative donor class and the public more broadly, or concerns over Senator Scott's long-term viability as a candidate. Taking two "anonymice" (as Slate's Jack Sheafer used to call them) and building a story around their leaks, using old stories and a brief history lesson to pad things out saves on costs. "News worthy of your time," has to also be worthy of some resources.

Other Side of the Tracks

The RV homeless encampment near where I work has grown slowly over the past several months. When I first noticed it there, it had three RVs in it. Now eight are parked in the area.

This time, I took a picture from the parking structure that was in the background of that first picture. It's easier to get all of the RVs into the frame than attempting to work from street level.

Vehicles have come and gone from the site over the months. For a while I thought that maybe the space would empty out entirely; perhaps the police had been leaning on the inhabitants. But not long after that. more campers found the space, and every few weeks, another RV would show up.

I can't image that it's pleasant living so close to an active rail yard, especially being so close to a grain terminal; those trains can be remarkable loud. It is, I suspect, why there's nothing in the way of residential in the immediate vicinity. Still people must make do with what they can get, and as the Seattle area's homeless population grows, the RVs, tents and (for the truly desperate) other makeshift shelters proliferate.

Mincing

Florida Governor, and (allegedly) Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis does have some sympathy for the Jacksonville community in which three people were killed in a shooting. Not that you would guess from looking at much of the news coverage of the event thus far. If Governor DeSantis is mentioned at all, the focus in on his macho condemnation of the shooter and his actions. To get to the part where the governor speaks to the community itself, one has to watch the video of his statement.

Governor DeSantis may have some of the responsibility for this; he does seem much more focused on demonstrating his disdain for the shooter than he does on speaking to the community. But he is, as they say, simply following the script. Statements like this are generally expected to be geared more towards expressing outrage and disgust over the act. Especially given that Governor DeSantis, who is very much the model of a modern Republican officeholder, couldn't take the sort of actions that gun-control advocates would call for. The shooter has to be the sole person at fault; as to imply otherwise would raise questions as to why nothing is being done. And the governor's well-known antipathy for all things "woke" (which, for many Black people, includes an awareness that things like this are simply part of life in the United States) doesn't lend him an air of caring about the concerns of Florida's Black population. Not to mention that Southern populism (and maybe Right-leaning populism more generally) tends to cast non-model minorities as enemy "others," favored and coddled by hateful "élites."

Be that as it may, Governor DeSantis didn't simply ignore the community. His comments seemed somewhat perfunctory, almost an afterthought, but he did offer condolences to the people impacted by the event. And that should also make it into the news coverage of the event. I can see why the macho posturing would be of interest, especially for Left-leaning news outlets looking to show how empty and banal that posturing is. And I can also see Right-leaning outlets placing their focus there, too; it makes the governor look tough. But, either way, it's not the complete picture.

I watched Governor DeSantis' video statement. I didn't expect to be impressed, and I wasn't. I understand, however, that something that would have impressed me in this would likely also have been a grievous act of political self-harm, if not suicide. For the governor to have been open and candid about why things like this happen, and the fact that he's not prepared, or not in a position to, really do anything about it would have made him the target of people's ire. The governor understands, correctly or not, that people's feelings about this situation are anger and sadness, in that order. Or, at least that more people are angry about what happened than are sad about what happened. (Although, personally, I suspect that the majority opinion on this is one of indifference.) And the timing of, and time spent on, words addressing those reflect that.

Reactions to violence in the United States are hampered by the fact that there are so many competing interest groups. The each have different goals, and there are pretty much no actions that can be taken that will please all of them. Indeed, any action that one group approves of will be met with dismay and anger from another. All of this is a barrier in situations in which the role of a chief executive, whether they be a governor, mayor or the President, is to "bring people together" after a tragedy. Thoughts, prayers and condolences are all expressions of an inability (or unwillingness) to do anything more substantive. And offering them has become understood to be a way of admitting that nothing more significant is in the offing. For those who understand that the fact that something should be done means that something can be done (for all that Immanuel Kant would have found their logic backwards), those words are hollow and insincere. The need to appear to be vigorous and active in the face of events that frighten people (even if they'll be forgotten before too long) means that the tough-sounding language has to lead, even when it's going to be seen as just talk. If it's all just talk, however, then none of it is particularly more newsworthy than the rest of it.

Holding Out For A Hero

About three weeks ago, I made the observation that part of the reason why Donald Trump appeared to be bulletproof in the face of mounting criminal cases was that many Republican voters "viewed him as vital enough to their interests that they'd be willing to overlook, excuse or explain away whatever they had to." Which I still think works as one of the reasons for his popularity, even though I don't think that it goes far enough.

I was attempting to make a parallel to a friend of mine between how people view Donald Trump and how we, as Americans, are taught to view George Washington. The attempt, it must be said, failed miserably, because my friend believed that for people to have similar views of Donald Trump and George Washington, that they needed to be similar people. People tend to understand their own views of reality as being objective to the point that other people share them (even if they don't admit it), and this can make it difficult to make the case that other people do, in fact, see things differently.

So rather than George Washington, I'm going to use the example of Robin Hood. Robin Hood, according to legend, robbed from the rich, and gave to the poor. And, if one is not reading a retelling of the stories about him that are aimed primarily at children, killed quite a few people in so doing. But people don't, generally speaking, see Robin Hood as someone who acted from a wanton disregard of the rule of law. Rather, it was King John's laws that were viewed as illegitimate. Once King Richard shows up on the scene, Robin is more than happy to become a loyal, and presumably law-abiding, subject. Because Robin is the hero of the story, other elements of the story are judged relative to him, rather than on their own merits. (And this was the point I was making about George Washington. We in the United States don't view him as someone who rebelled against lawful authority; rather the laws of Great Britain under King George III are seen as illegitimate, and most faults that us modern people might find with Mr. Washington are overlooked.)

If one imagines oneself as a needy peasant back in the (fictional) day, and Robin Hood shows up and drops a few shillings into one's lap, the expectation is that one would be grateful and appreciative of the largess, rather than questioning just how said shillings were obtained, or seeing oneself as the beneficiary of one or more open acts of criminality.

And it's the same with Donald Trump. For a large section of the Republican electorate, Donald Trump is the hero who goes out and steals from the unjustly rich to give to the deserving poor (namely themselves). And so the accusations, to say nothing of the legal proceedings, against him are illegitimate on their face. And in the same way that the fact that heroes often had a certain level of self-interest in things was ignored (Robin Hood was quite the poacher; many stories have the Merry Men living quite well for a bunch of people hiding out in the woods in mediaeval times.) Republican voters who understand that Donald Trump is fighting the good fight specifically to benefit them, and advance their interests, are unlikely to see him as being self-serving.

As an aside, this is why I tend to be skeptical of the Conservative/Libertarian idea that societies can work well with reputation-based (rather than formal regulatory) systems for enforcing common mores. They too easily devolve into popularity contests, with people's esteem being the basis for judging their actions, rather than vice versa.

Expectations that this civil suit or that indictment would give voters a reason to move away from Donald Trump presuppose that these proceedings, and the people bringing and/or overseeing them, are legitimate. And, perhaps more importantly, represent the standard people should use when determining their own relationships to others. But that's not how this works. It's not how it's consistently worked for centuries now.

Consider Hunter Biden, the current President's son. Despite Congressional Republicans having been hammering on this for years, with no evidence so far of any wrongdoing on the part of President Biden, House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy has been threatening impeachment proceedings against him, "based on questions about his son Hunter Biden's business dealings." This isn't happening because there is solid evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the President; it's happening because there's enough support for it among Republicans to make it something between politically expedient and politically necessary. Negative partisanship at work.

Right now, Donald Trump is the hero of many Republicans, and that status is unassailable. This is why there's no real contest of the Republican nomination for President. And it's why his supporters are going to stick with him regardless of any accusations leveled against him... even literally shooting someone on Fifth Avenue won't change that. Failing to recognize, or acknowledge, that won't make it go away.

Immaculate

I was listening to the audio version of the recent David Brooks article "How America Got Mean." It's somewhat typical for Mr. Brooks' work over the past few years, I think; an article that posits that the solution for a problem that plagues the present-day United States can be found in its past. Which I get, it's part of what Conservatism is about, the idea that halting, or sometimes reversing, social change is the best way to create a better society.

And just as this article seems to be a lot like other David Brooks articles that I've read and/or listened to, it seems to have the same blind spot. While Mr. Brooks is not averse to noting the problems of the past, he views them as entirely separate from what he understands to be the strengths of the past. And so he envisions society in which the manners and morals of, say, the 1930s can be restored, but the racism, homophobia, control freakishness et cetera of the time can be simply avoided. Taking the bad with the good is only something that people have to do because they insist on modern ways of behaving.

And this, as I see it, frees Mr. Brooks from having to answer one of the persistent questions of societal change: If the past was so wonderful, why didn't people stick with it? Why did people throw the proverbial baby out with the proverbial bathwater if the two were completely unconnected? While I've never encountered Mr. Brooks describing conservative values as "magical" (as Juan Williams has done) this idea that they have no downsides sets them apart from pretty much everything else on Earth. But I suppose that this is the appeal of ideology; it can somehow be perfect.

Unseasonable

There was a bit in The Beverly Hillbillies where Jed Clampett and Mr. Drysdale were doing something or another, and were aided by a young man, who is seen standing off to the side with a hand out. Mr. Drysdale turns to Jed and informs him: "He wants a tip." At which point Jed turns to the young man, and says: "Plant your corn early in the Spring."

My father found that uproariously funny, for a reason that I never quite understood, finding it only mildly amusing, once I was old enough to get the joke. But with tipping now being a hot topic of conversation, my father's reaction to the joke keeps coming back to me.

With the city of Chicago (sometimes known as "home") looking to end the practice of a separate, and lower, minimum wage for tipped employees, "restaurant owners say that would put too much stress on businesses already struggling to recover from inflation and the pandemic, forcing them to raise menu prices and even cut staff." Which I understand. But I am of the opinion that if the only way to remain open is to push some of your labor costs onto customers in the guise of a "voluntary" gratuity, maybe there really isn't a business there to begin with.

Tipping culture in the United States has become a way for business owners (since this goes beyond just restaurants) and employees to collude in seeking to draw in price-sensitive customers by basically lying about the costs of providing service. Because it's not only business owners who lobby against the end of the current practices of tipping. Servers in upscale bars and restaurants, who have little fear of only making the minimum wage (and are, according a friend who used to be a tax attorney, more than willing to hide the money from authorities), are also against the idea.

It all makes the debate over tipping higher-stakes than it needs to be, and fairly disingenuous in the bargain. People arguing for low-wage workers point out that the lower minimum wage means that untipped workers lose out on pay, despite the fact that employers are required to make up the difference if not enough is given in tips. Employers claim that people would be unwilling to pay new prices that would need to be charged, despite the fact that customers are already paying them to some degree or another.

And, believe it or not, even self-serve kiosks sometimes ask if customers want to tip.

The whole thing makes tipping etiquette (and its often-unspoken requirements) confusing as the expectations for tipping expand. And when race enters the picture, things become even worse:

Expecting skimpy gratuities, waiters resist serving African Americans, or they provide poorer service, which discourages blacks from patronizing table-service restaurants.

Study shows blacks tip less -- but they may have good reason

For me, though, it all goes back to pricing. The price of a good or service should be reasonably clear, and not reliant on unwritten rules. The experience of the pandemic pushed employees to ask for higher tips, due to the risks they understood themselves to be taking, but that also helped their employers hide what would otherwise be price increases.

I don't know how it's all going to work out, but I do suspect that the current system will need to change. It's simply not set up to align the interests of everyone involved.

To Go Around

The United States never lacks for teapot tempests. Although I likely shouldn't call them that, or one of the other terms I like to use for them. Because, while they strike me as trivial, at best, for a lot of people, these sorts of disagreements and controversies speak to important factors in their lives.

Consider the reactions to the new Disney production of Snow White. One Rachel Zegler (whom, being old and out of touch with what's hip and with it, I'd never heard of prior to this) has been cast in the title role. Her complexion, given that she's a mix of Eastern European and South American, is decidedly not "snow white." She's also not down with the dynamic of the original animated movie, which is now more than 85 years old. (It hadn't occurred to me before that the original Disney Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs predates the Second World War.) Being one of today's young people (she's named after a character from Friends, after all), she's in favor of a more modern take on the characters and the story.

Cue the outrage. Because there's always "outrage." (It's a pretty low bar to meet these days.)

And while left-leaning media outlets might chalk it up to racism/White supremacy and/or a desire to maintain the "patriarchy," I think that something more is in the mix, and that it may be worth understanding; or at least looking into.

In my own understanding of the world, many Americans are keenly aware of the rejections of others. They feel the sting sharply, and, as a result, are constantly on the lookout for signs that they are being relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy. For people who understand the original Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as being "for them," as it were, a version of the story that espouses different (and competing) values and is perceived as being a replacement of that story, is also seen as a desire to replace them.

One of the complaints about these sorts of updates is, according to Franchesca Ramsey (by way of NPR): "Why not just make a new story, why did they have to change it?" Now, to be sure, I think that part of the answer to this is: It's faster. Creating characters and stories that will come to be seen as iconic isn't a quick-and-dirty process that can be fired off on command. It's very hit or miss, and can take a long time. Snow White is an old story, with many revisions (and sanitations) over the centuries it's been around. But the question reminded me of The Wiz, the adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. While modern "outrage culture" didn't exist in 1974 (although I suspect that as a five-year-old for most of that year, I wouldn't have been aware of it), I think that the idea of The Wiz as being somehow fundamentally different from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, rather than an updated, modernized telling of it, headed off the sort of reactions that The Little Mermaid saw, and Snow White is now seeing. The Wiz was a Black version of the story, for Black people, and as such, it didn't constitute a rejection of the earlier tellings, the values of the audience for those tellings or the audience themselves.

But it's worth noting that it's not only nostalgia that can lead to people feeling rejected. For many people in today's world, simply remaking old stories with the same all-White casting and century (or more) old values, is a rejection of them, and their values. They perceive not only that the media is not "for them," but that it actively conveys a message that they are of lesser worth.

This, of course, creates a situation where one piece of media cannot simultaneously validate both (or maybe "all" is a better word here) sides. Which is a problem in a society in which people often expect to be validated; and, perhaps strangely, seem to believe that what is validating to them is validating to others (although not necessarily everyone).

The United States' habit of validating certain people at the direct expense of others has become deeply ingrained in the public psyche, to the point where it's now an expectation; those who revere their understanding of what the United States once was see changes in the media landscape as being driven by bitterness and vengeful anger for misguided or unintentional wrongs perpetrated by the long-dead, while those who focus on what they believe the United States should strive to be, see resistance as rooted in deliberate efforts to hold on the fruits of past injustice. And both see nothing but bad faith in the rhetoric and the actions of the other. And underlying the whole is a belief in an enduring scarcity that dictates that there can never be enough to satisfy everyone. Someone will go without, but it shouldn't be them.

This may also explain why The Wiz wasn't seen as a threat to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in the same way that Snow White is seen as threatening Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The Wiz was for Black people, mainly because it was made specifically for them. And perhaps this perceived act of creation, a bringing of something new in the world, didn't trigger the same feeling that the pie was the same size, but that the pieces were being cut differently. In this sense "Why not just make a new story, why did they have to change it?" is really asking "Why not just make something for yourselves, why do we have to share (or lose) what is ours?" To the degree that the threat of rejection is also the threat of impoverishment, there are broader, and long-standing, questions of security and safety in play.

For a Few Dollars More

I was talking to some friends about software, and the subject of subscriptions came up. It's understood why companies would want to lease things, whether they be goods or services, via a subscription; guaranteed income streams. Companies like Microsoft portray this as something that's good for customers, and in some circumstances, it is. Were I the type to buy every new iteration of the Office software suite when they were released (especially for multiple computers), I would certainly do better to subscribe to Microsoft 365 and always be on the cutting edge with all of the latest feature updates. But as someone who has made barely any use of functionality released since Office 2013, a subscription would have me constantly paying for features that I don't use, but needing to constantly pay to retain access to the limited feature set that I do use.

But where the discussion became interesting was when it turned to electric vehicles. Zero Motorcycles offers a number of features for its vehicles that are effectively paywalled.

For example, with the 2022 Zero SR/S, if you want to charge your bike 17% faster, that’s $295. Want to use the built-in dash-display navigation system? $195. To double your charging speed, as explained in the previous section, that is $1,495. Live somewhere chilly and want to use the included heated grips? That’s another $195.
The New (Worrying) Trend Coming with Electric Bikes: Features as a Service

These aren't add-ons to the motorcycle. They all come with it. But in order for a rider to use them, they must have been purchased by the owner. And because the features are built into the motorcycle at the factory, if the machines are profitable at the base price, all of the extra features are pure profit.

Because these are one-time payments, they aren't exactly the same as a "features as a service" subscription model. But one can see how it would operate. But I'm not sure that it's a concept that will really catch on. I have a fairly basic model of car. It's nice, but it lacks a lot of the bells and whistles that I could have gotten, had I decided to pay more. I can, however, see where they would have gone, had they been installed. This modular approach makes more sense than a single model, with all of the features locked down, because it allows automakers to tailor their vehicles to the needs of their buyers. Consider someone who doesn't live somewhere chilly. Not only are they unlikely to pey $195 for heated handlebars, why would they pay for the hardware if there were an option from another manufacturer where they wouldn't have to?

In this, the "feature as a service" model seems to be a rather large opening to lower cost competitors. To go back to the example of Zero Motorcycles, why would someone pay for an 18 kWh battery that will then cost them an extra $2,000+ to fully use, when a motorcycle with a 15 kWh battery would be cheaper from the outset? The cost savings that Zero would have to realize with its unified production model would have to be able to beat the lower costs that other could offer for similar performance. When dealing with small numbers of units, it can make sense, but at scale, it seems dubious; which is likely why we haven't seen the model more in the automotive or gasoline-powered motorcycle markets.

Investors are important to businesses. But a small business with few investors and a large customer base will likely do better than one with lots of investors, but few customers. And if someone thinks that they can lure customers away from "feature as a service" models by not spending so much money up front, they'll likely attempt it.

A Brush With the Law

PinkyDoll is at the vanguard of the ‘NPC’ trend that has captured the attention of TikTok users, in which content creators mimic the repetitive actions of a non-playable character (NPC) in a video game. PinkyDoll has said she’s inspired by the background characters that inhabit the world of the Grand Theft Auto series of games. Also called “idle animations” video game developers code in these background characters to create the effect of a bustling world.
The ‘NPC’ livestream TikTok trend helping creators earn cash

“Knoll’s Law of Media Accuracy,” typically understood to be “Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge,” strikes again. Except that this time it's a web page, and my knowledge is second-hand, since I’m not a video game animator.

“Knoll’s Law” is a more interesting phenomenon than it’s given credit for, I think. It can be taken as a knock on journalists, or journalism more broadly, but it’s really simply a proof that they have the same problem the rest of us do; namely, that it’s often difficult to learn new things and get all of the details correct out of the gate. “Idle animations” in video games are not those animations given to the non-player characters (commonly known as “NPCs,” a term borrowed from tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons) to make the world seem more full. (Due to the computing power than NPCs tend to need, many games seem to have many fewer background characters than one might expect.) Rather it’s player characters (the characters directly controlled by the player, such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Geralt of Rivia, Cloud Strife or Mario) who have idle animations, which kick in at a point after the player stops inputting commands to the game. The startup intervals and duration vary, but their purpose is to impart some movement to what could otherwise become a static scene and personality to the character. These can be quite sophisticated, responding to context and elements of the portrayed environment. It’s also worth pointing out that NPCs are not simply background characters; they are all characters in a game who are not controlled by a player; including primary allies and the story’s antagonist[s].

Journalistic misses like this one, which are evident to people with a passing familiarity with the subject at hand, are an indicator of the lack of resources that newsrooms currently have. Because it seems that, in an organization like the BBC, there should have been someone with enough knowledge of the videogame industry to catch that. It could have been that there was a rush to get the article posted, given that there have been other stories about the NPC phenomenon. Quite a number of them, in fact. Because as trivial as they may seem, stories about the newest viral trends on TikTok bring in clicks, and thus advertising money. It’s the meta of the Internet economy, monetizing attention to (and/or judgement of) what people are paying attention to online. But whether rush to publication or lack of resourcing, newsrooms are starting to have noticeable difficulties in avoiding what come across as basic errors in their stories.

The degree to which this may be a problem is unknown. While my understanding of “Knoll’s Law” prompts me to understand that the media may not be a reliable source of information on many subjects where the journalists writing the stories have at little firsthand knowledge of the topic as I do. Of course, the only time that I can know that a journalist lacks knowledge of a topic is when they say something that contradicts what I already know about it. And this means than I am often left to simply realize that I can read an article or two on something, and still be uninformed about it. I expect, however, that there are people who take their own brushes with “Knoll’s Law” to be evidence of media bias and/or dishonesty. In that regard, it has the potential to become a vicious cycle, as inaccuracies lead to reduced readership, which leads to lower staffing levels, which can create more openings for inaccuracies to creep in.

Out To Sea

So I was in Barnes and Noble recently, and the manager there, who's an old acquaintance of mine, clued me into the fact that they were clearing out a number of books. (I tend not to read the big sale signs when I'm in a store, or I would have figured it out for myself.) One of the books on discount was Send Help!, "A collection of marooned cartoons," as it says on the cover.

As advertised, the book is mainly a series of cartoons about being stranded in the stereotypical "desert island." You likely know the sort, a small, roughly conical bit of land sticking up out of the ocean. It's completely covered in sand, with a single palm or coconut tree at its center.

But the book also touches on the history of the trope, and I was surprised to find that there were "stranded on a desert island" cartoons from the 1930s and 40s that could just as easily been published yesterday. It's one thing to be told that the central themes of island cartoons, like death, relationships or business as usual are timeless. It's quite another to see it for oneself. It's a reminder that some problems, even those that seem quite simple, are often insoluble in practice, and that the way people think of them hasn't really changed in the past nearly 100 years.

I hadn't really paid much attention to humor cartooning, outside of the occasional New Yorker caption contest. I think I should change that, because there's a richer history there than I realized.

Faire Weather

This not actually a photo of the Oregon Renaissance Faire. (Unless Oregon knows something we don't.) That was back in June. But the same organization now owns and operates the Washington Midsummer Renaissance Faire, where this picture was taken. As with every year, I have to admire peoples' willingness to go in costume during the warmest month of the year. Not that Seattle-area summers are particularly hot or humid, but some of the outfits people put together are quite elaborate.

The faire is in a new location this year, much closer to the city proper. but somehow, even more dusty than the previous location. (Don't wear your good shoes.) This is the problem with faires that don't have permanent cites, there tends to be lots of bare dirt. Which means on the rare occasions it happens to rain on a faire day, lots of mud.
 

Pretty Pennies

The beauty of technology is that is actually benefits us all. So, we're going to get better product, and yes, illustrators are going to be in less demand, but high-end illustrators have to create these computer images. And we're going to get better content; for less money. So I think that's fine; I don't feel sorry for anybody who's replaced by machines, if it's more productive and drives down the cost of all goods and services to all people.
Michael Pachter "The Economist Podcasts - Money Talks: Lights! Camera! Inaction…"

And this, I think, encapsulates the problem that many people have with capitalism, the idea that it's okay to sacrifice people, so long as everyone else can obtain a slightly higher standard of living in the bargain. For the defenders of capitalism, I don't know that they understand how statements like Mr. Pachter's come off to others. Okay, so motion pictures are better and cheaper. That's cold comfort to someone who can't afford to go to the movies or subscribe to a streaming service, because their replacement with a machine has resulted in them being unable to support themselves.

The defenders of free market capitalism tend to come back with the claim that labor markets are highly elastic, so much so, in fact, that anyone willing to expend even modest effort can do quite well for themselves, because Capital isn't much, if any, more powerful than labor. It's a viewpoint that lends itself to blaming those who lose out on or are left behind by technological advances. But such is the nature of faith.

But at the bottom of it all is a belief in what I call infinite demand. Put simply, it's the idea that, on the level of societies, people never get to the point of saying "No thanks, I have all of the goods and services I need right now." While the supply of individual goods and services can exceed demand, the supply of all available goods and services will never meet the demand. Therefore, there is always something that someone can do that will pay well enough to support them. Attached to this understanding is that a certain basic level of capital, enough to allow any person to take effective advantage of unrealized demand, is free for the asking.

This is all fine and good, but it's pretty clear that it doesn't line up with many people's lived experiences. Spend any amount of time on LinkedIn these days, and one is almost certain to come across posts by people who are openly desperate to return to employment. Telling people who are literally begging their networks for help that they have just as much power as prospective employers simply comes across as cruel. It also comes across as at odds with reality more broadly. In part because the rhetoric about employers being "desperate" to find people to work for them is, as usual, overblown. It's rarely as hard for employers to find people as they claim it is. What's difficult is being picky about who works for you, and then expecting to find the market glutted with candidates. One of the reasons why inflation is trending downward again is that wages aren't rising particularly quickly anymore. A problem that businesses are unwilling to throw money at likely isn't that big of a problem.

Modern economies run on discretionary income. The fact that people don't need to buy those goods and services means that it's risky to invest a lot in the capacity to provide them. And increasing production by reducing the number of people needed to produce things can quickly become self-defeating; once enough people have been put out of work to drive down the cost of goods and services, there aren't enough people who can afford them, even at the lower prices. And even if one has no sympathy for the people themselves, it's hard to imagine how an economy can work if the people who control all the capital have no customers outside of one another.

Jerks at Sea

And yes, all the social media joking was hiding a fear that today's political climate has left racists emboldened to attack a Black man in broad daylight for doing his job.
Eric Deggans. "I've spent my career explaining race, but hit a wall with Montgomery brawl memes" National Public Radio. Thursday 10 August, 2023.

This reminded me of something that I've said here before:

For any single interaction, the difference between a racist and an asshole is negligible.

Then, as now, I'm not questioning the idea that there are racists in this country, or that they would attack someone in broad daylight for the color of that person's skin. But the Montgomery docks incident wasn't a matter of people making it clear they had a problem with someone who was Black. Remember, this whole incident started out as an argument over an unmarked parking space, for a boat. (Although things are clearly marked in the one photo I've seen.)

Damien Pickett was a co-captain of the [sic] Harriett II, a riverboat carrying over 200 passengers that needed to dock but couldn't. A much smaller pontoon boat was wrongfully docked in the Harriett II's designated space.

The occupiers of the pontoon boat were white men. Instead of moving their pontoon, they decided to hit Mr Pickett.
Tears. Shock. Joy. Why viral Alabama boat brawl matters

Sure, there is an element of race; racial slurs (three guesses which one) were shouted, and the video I've seen of the fight tends to break down along racial lines, with other White people rushing in to attack Mr. Pickett, and Black people coming to his aid. But the Montgomery police have said that they don't believe the crime was racially motivated. Sometimes, White people, like everyone else, are just assholes. The pontoon boat could just as easily been a boat full of Karens.

I understand, given the history of the United States, that it's easy to presume that the White boaters held some animosity towards Black people, and that's why the brawl started. But it's also easy to look at the recent history of the United States and come to the conclusion that these were just a bunch of people who decided that they didn't want to move their boat, and anyone not in an obvious position of authority was going to make them do so. Given the general behavior of people since the recent SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to think that the boaters would have assaulted a security guard or police officer if they thought they could have gotten away with it.

When I was young, the well-meaning adults in my life set out to teach me to find racism under every rock. And I understand why. Modern Americans tend to treat the days of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement as if they were ancient history, these are events that happened in living memory. Part of the concern that came out of the Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, Et al. v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Et al. decision was that if the Supreme court was willing to overturn the 50-year precedent of Jane Roe, et al. v. Henry Wade, District Attorney of Dallas County, nothing would stop them from going after the 54-year precedent of Richard Perry Loving, Mildred (Jeter) Loving v. Virginia. One of the things that I think that a lot of people have difficulty wrapping their heads around is just how tenuous many Black people in the United States believe their position to be. Or the degree to which they understand widespread overt racism to be biding its time, as opposed to dead. I suspect that many would paraphrase William Faulkner, and say  "It's not even past."

But not dead though it may be, that doesn't mean the past is a pleasant place to live. If for no other reason than it lends that unpleasantness to the present. And, if one is not careful, to the future. I'm not calling for people to deny that racism exists, because it does. There are people who understand themselves to be of higher character, more deserving and/or simply superior to others, based on nothing more than the color of their skin. But not everyone who picks a fight with someone whose skin tone differs from their own falls into the category. A lot of the time, people are simply assholes. Maybe that's something that we need to be harder on, as a matter of course.

Winging It

This past weekend, I listened to a podcast. It was something of a profile of yet another right-wing internet personality. That part of it, frankly, was boring. Where it was interesting was where it touched on the reaction to such people by their critics. Here, I would like to have seen it go deeper, because it's become a fairly broad phenomenon, and I would like to see a more thorough analysis.

The podcast profile noted that there's little point in the American Left pointing out that someone is a racist, an anti-Semite or even a fascist if that person leans into those labels. And people have started leaning into them because there is now a substantial audience for whom the terms racist, anti-Semite and fascist have come to mean: "Has our best interests at heart." I've made this point before, and while yes, it's cynical, I have yet to have anyone tell me it's broadly inaccurate. People don't have principles. They have interests. Because eating is good, and principle is inedible. Accordingly, for a person who finds a modern day state that values pluralism, tolerance and diversity is not working for them, naming people as openly hostile to those values carries no shame.

FiveThirtyEight had a couple of headlines that illustrate this: "Is This The Indictment That Really Hurts Trump?" and "Will Three Indictments Prove Too Much For Trump’s Campaign?" The underlying expectation, which I've heard from any number of media types, is fairly clear; the idea that, sooner or later, the drumbeat of criminal accusations against Mr. Trump will grow loud enough that voters will begin to look elsewhere. But there's never a real reason why anyone expects this to happen. After all, Republican voters aren't supporting Mr. Trump's bid to return to the White House because they want or moral or legal exemplar. They support him because they understand that his re-election is the best way to safeguard their interests. And Mr. Trump understood this from the beginning. When he remarked that "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible," he was referencing more than his popularity; he was expressing the sense that people viewed him as vital enough to their interests that they'd be willing to overlook, excuse or explain away whatever they had to. Or simply fall back upon the age-old idea that what's right in the world always draws unjust opposition.

And in an age of intense negative partisanship, this works for people, because they understand events in the world around them through their partisan viewpoints. No matter what happened during the Trump Administration, it was better than what would have happened during a Hillary Clinton Administration. And no matter what happens in the Biden Administration, it's worse than what would be happening in a second Trump term. This is the reality that people live within. Not because they're somehow out of touch with the truth of what's going on around them. But because their perceptions start with their understanding of whether things are being done to help them or to hurt them, and they go from there. It is, in a way, the ultimate triumph of politics. Causes are no longer inferred from effects; they're simply matters of faith. And it's difficult to argue with faith.

And the American political system has, for any number of years now, behaved in a way that reinforced people's faith that it couldn't, or simply wouldn't, look after the interests of all of it's citizens. That government was liable to being captured by some or another interest group and turn its efforts towards benefiting that group at the expense of others. The American Right has managed to convince itself that it's their turn to have others benefit at their expense. And the far Right says that if someone is going to dominate, and victimize others, it's better to be the victor than the victim. It's not a difficult message to sell to people who have been left behind by "progress" that feels like little more than someone else taking what was once theirs.

What I've found interesting about the common critique of Trumpism, the far Right, and the like is that it doesn't make the point that a pluralistic, diverse and tolerant democracy is going to do a better job of helping the majority of people meet their needs than a "fascist" dictatorship or racially-based caste system (and then take steps to concretely show this). Rather, it (like a lot of institutions, really) simply repeats, over and over, that the people who are being asked to give something up in the service of a more pluralistic, tolerant and diverse world have enough to share without missing any of it. Their subjective lived experience that this is not true is dismissed as deluded or condemned as a commitment to injustice.

Donald Trump understood this, and by doing little else than telling people that their subjective feeling that they'd been left behind was a deliberate outcome created people who were unjustifiably hostile to them, rode a wave of resentment all the way to the White House. (He just may ride it back there next year.) And in his wake, a number of people have come to understand that people's broad disaffection with their circumstances in life, and the idea that those circumstances are just and/or their own fault, offer them a path to fame and wealth. Of course, this didn't start with Donald Trump; but I do think that his sudden and somewhat unexpected success with it boosted it in a way that may not have happened had the votes in 2016 fallen in a slightly different manner.

A good number of journalists and political commentators don't seem to understand this. They understand liberal democratic institutions as the self-evidently correct way to go about things, and thus that people have a responsibility to them that overrides their own wants and needs. Perhaps it's a belief that progress should always move in one direction, such that any deviation from the correct path can only be the result of something being deeply wrong. But nothing in the world is genuinely self-evident. The changes that have occurred throughout human history have come from people pursuing what they understood their interests to be at the time; those who managed to succeed altered the landscape for those around them.

Even if one believes that things aught to be a certain way, that is not enough to bring it about. Rather, the state of the world is something that must be worked for. The American Left tends believe in their vision of pluralism, tolerance and diversity enough to demand that they be the norm, but not enough so to put concerted effort into showing they would work for everyone. Or, at least, for a large enough segment of the populace that there's a consistent majority who would vote to maintain them. The forces of illiberality understand their audience, and what their audience wants from them. Moreover, they also tend to understand how to prevent the opposition to them from actually being effective. Preaching to the choir podcasts are little more than a way to allow the audience to congratulate themselves on their commitment to what's right and proper. What's needed is action that shows people that a liberal democratic world is both necessary and sufficient to bringing people the lives they want to lead.

One Among Many

A self-described "southern journalist who is tired of a lack of common sense" says: "Let's talk about a GOP constitutional amendment...." Sure, okay... but it's worth pointing out that the policy which would require said amendment was not advanced by the Grand Old Party. Rather it was put forth by Vivek Ramaswamy. Vivek Ramaswamy is not the Republican Party. He's simply a businessman and author who is running for Vice President.

And his idea is that people younger than 25 don't value the United States enough to be automatically granted the right to vote. So his proposal is to raise the overall enfranchisement age to 25. For those people in the 18 to 24 range, they would be allowed to vote if they either a) had been in the military or some sort of "first responder" job for six months, or b) passed the civics test that immigrants seeking citizenship need to pass.

This is described as: "straight out of a movie that was satirical [...] and making fun of fascist governments." Now, I've never seen Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers. But I have read the Robert Heinlein novel. Now, I will admit that I wasn't particularly interested in what the story may have said about Mr. Heinlein's politics. I was interested in the book as the genesis of the modern idea of powered armor, something that was left out of the original movie due to special effects budget constraints. In the Starship Troopers novel, birthright citizenship has been eliminated across the board. Only those people who have served in the military are full citizens, with the right to vote. If I remember correctly, there was a bit in the book about attempts to expand the allowable service to other things. But, there was one important concession; because military service was a requirement for citizenship, the military was not allowed to turn anyone away. If a person wanted to enlist, the military had to accept them, and had to find some job they could do. At the end of the book, the main character's parents enlist, and are leaving for their training. I've heard that that Mr. Verhoeven was satirizing the setup that Mr. Heinlein had put forth, in the same way that Mr. Heinlein took some pot shots at modern liberalism (and society in general, for that matter), but if Mr. Ramaswamy's proposal actually matches what's in the movie, then Mr. Verhoeven also took some liberties with the setup.

The video purports to explain "Why the GOP would want this" - but no evidence is ever offered that "the GOP" as a party is interested in advancing Mr. Ramaswamy's idea. The amorphous "they" is thrown around, but again, this is the idea of one person. At the end of the video, the commentator notes that people are going to ask who made the proposal. But, even then, rather than name Mr. Ramaswamy, he simply sidesteps.

It's this sort of thing that leads to the term "extremists" being thrown around as often as it is. The fact that Vivek Ramaswamy is (allegedly) seeking seeking the Republican nomination for President of the United States, and is polling above 0% (he's at about 7%) is not the same as the Republican party having decided to add his idea to their current policy platform in the name of disenfranchising young voters because it's somehow too difficult to indoctrinate them into Conservative ideology. There is no rule that states that in order for a person to run for a major party nomination, their views must line up with some idea of how the party views the world. Otherwise, people like Senator Bernie Sanders (who is an Independent when he's not running for President) and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. would have been preemptively frozen out by the Democratic Party apparatus. While I'm not particularly highly engaged in politics as a matter of day-to-day life, I try to avoid being completely out of the loop; enough so that I would like to think that I would have heard of something as consequential as the Republican National Committee formally moving to adopt Mr. Ramaswamy's position, especially given the level of effort that changing the United States Constitution would require.

The unwillingness to make the determination between anyone claiming membership in a group and the group itself is common, especially in a situation like American political parties. This commonality, however doesn't make taking some statement made by a person and passing it off as the policy of some group to which they belong any less disingenuous. There are a number of corrosive elements to modern American politics, and this is one of them. But it's also corrosive to social trust, and that is also in a bad state. Democrats and Republicans are far enough apart, in both style and substance, that one doesn't need to play fast and loose with how one represents the other side to drive the two of them further apart. So I'm not sure why it's worth creating higher levels of distrust to do so.

(Aside: Other than Donald Trump, there are no people actually running for the Republican nomination. They're either running to be Mr. Trump's pick for Vice President, like Ramaswamy, to raise their profile for a 2028 or maybe 2032 run, like Governor Ron DeSantis or Senator Tim Scott, or they're simply hoping to score some of the few anti-Trump points that are left out there, like Governors Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson. Sure, out the current field of more than 250 people, some of them may be deluded enough to think they can swing it; however, no-one with enough name recognition to be included in a poll is that far out of their mind. And many of the very dark horse candidates are likely running simply to call attention to some cause they favor. For the big-name candidates, this assessment is based more on their actions than their words; the way the field is acting now, it's hard to believe that they're serious about unseating Mr. Trump.)

Props

I'm not very good at modern video games, especially the big, "AAA" titles that sit at the top of the market. They require skills and reflexes that I no longer have, and lack the time to regain. Fortunately, I can get a sense of these games without having to play them myself, given the substantial number of people who hope to game their way into, if not internet stardom, a workable sideline by posting videos of themselves playing on YouTube.

And this is how I came to learn of Final Fantasy 16. It's an action-adventure game, that takes a lot of the elements that have found their way into the Final Fantasy franchise over the decades and seeks to tell a new, and somewhat mature, story with them.

One of the primary plot elements is a group of people (or non-people, really) termed "bearers." Bearers are, unlike the rest of the population, capable of using magic naturally, and as a result of this are despised and enslaved by the non-magical populace. (People born into the aristocracy often exempted, of course.) It's one of those design decisions that the cliché "bold choice" was specifically coined for.

The problem is that the delivery is about half as subtle and nuanced as carving "slavery and prejudice are bad" into an anvil and dropping it on someone's head would be. And it's not helped by the fact that model of slavery being presented is modeled on the practice of chattel slavery in the Americas, but without having any discernible basis in the economics of the setting.

The people I'm watching play the game have not finished it yet, so I don't know everything the designers have done with the story element, but, for the time being, the whole thing seems to be driven by the desires of national leaders at some point in the past. I'll be pleased if it turns out that there is some sensible reason that fits in with the world as they've built it, but I'm not expecting much change.

A common problem with including "difficult" topics in popular media is that people tend to forget that bad ideas didn't take hold because they were bad ideas; but because in the context in which they operated, they seemed like good ideas. Having the main characters of Final Fantasy 16 pushing back against a society that embraces slavery would likely work better if the slavery in question seemed to exist for any other reason than to have the characters fight against it; or for the audience to pat themselves on the back for being incensed by it.

Disconnected

I suspect that I've said this before, but every so often, something really drives it home to me: Humanity doesn't scale well.

I live in what might charitably be described as a faceless suburb of Seattle. It's a little more upscale, and somewhat less conservative, than the faceless suburb of Chicago that that I grew up in, but both were the sort of bland, colorless places that you could drive through and never realize that you'd been there. They're also both the sort of place that are small enough that city-dwellers regard them as minuscule, but large enough that they readily subdivide into cliques that have little to do with one another.

A couple of neighborhoods over, on the other side of the expressway, a house caught fire early this morning. I noticed it because the house in question is on a ridge overlooking the grocery store that I normally shop at. From below, the plume of smoke was easy to see. I drove by the scene on my way home. Fire trucks and ambulances were still arriving, even as the firefighters already on the scene where working to, I suspect, keep the fire from spreading to the other homes nearby, as the large, boxlike structures filled most of their lots. Uncontrolled, the flames would certainly have jumped the small gaps on either side.

Throughout the day, I checked the news, looking some word on what happened. Nothing. There didn't seem to be a single mention of the home that had burned. It was if nothing had happened. Even the smell of smoke was faint by the time the remnants of the plume reached my home, and well before lunchtime, even that was long gone.

I'm not nostalgic for the small-town life. I'm not wishing that one of my neighbors had knocked on my door to draft me join a bucket brigade or into caring for a burned pet. Communities like that are close-knit, but that comes at a price. Still, there's a part of me that thinks that a fire nearby should be a bigger deal than this one feels like.

If I hadn't just decided to go to the grocery story, more or less at random this morning, I would have never known that there was a fire. It would have been just another in an endless series of non-events that happen in places like these. Places that don't have enough people to have the sorts of things that make them interesting, but do have enough people that the vast majority of them will be forever strangers.

One of my neighbors did stop by today. She'd received an official-looking letter that, with her limited English skills, she had difficulty parsing. I skimmed it, then read it more closely, then explained it to her, along with what was being requested of her, and what she needed to do to fulfill that request. We didn't talk about the fire. She had the letter to concern her, and I needed to get back to work. As near as I can tell, she had no idea that, not very far away, a family may have been burned out of their home that morning. Because between our homes, and the one that burned, there are just too many people to know them all. And for all of the technology that we have to supposedly stay connected to one another, most of those connections are lost in all the noise.

Neither Way

I still know the odd Republican, and so, from time to time, I get a text message, seemingly intended to recruit me to the side of Conservatism through alerting me to some or another outrage perpetrated by someone who is intended to represent the whole of the American Left.

Maybe. I think.

Because I can never be sure if whichever of my vanishingly few Republican acquaintances sent the note honestly expects me to take it at face value. Generally speaking, none of what they send me stands up to even cursory research, at least in the sense of living up to the breathless hype. (But then again, nothing really lives up to the hype; if it did, the "hype" wouldn't have been hype...) Rather it's the sort of thing that prompts one to react without thinking about it, presuming that one's been waiting for just that sort of "proof" that the other side is chock-a-block with hypocrites, criminals and liars who are simply waiting for the chance to destroy everything that's right and good.

And no matter how many times I tell people that I don't believe that people operate in the world with deliberate ill intent, they keep sending me things that only make sense if I make that precise assumption about people.

So do they think that I'll eventually take one of these things at face value, or not? Honestly, I'm not sure which would be worse.

Now, to be sure, I also know some Democratic partisans. They don't bother attempting to stir me to outrage. Presumably because they've actually paid attention when I told them I wouldn't bite. I am, however, expecting at least one of them to start.

When someone shares an openly partisan take on something with someone who is not a fellow partisan, they can expect that this other person will either a) take that information in as the unbiased truth of the matter or b) treat the information as something that has been passed through the hands of, well, partisans, and, as such, reflects their specific view of the world. (Attempting to understand how the other person sees the world, and engaging with them accordingly seems to be right out.)

And so when someone tells me that all of the evidence against Donald Trump has been fabricated, on the basis of them reading that someone claims to be writing a book that will prove it all, I wonder what they actually expect me to believe.

For them to expect me to say: "Wow, I didn't know that. That's really opened my eyes to the idea that the former President can do no wrong and that he's being maliciously persecuted," seems to be expect that, deep down, there is only one legitimate way to see the world. I suppose that in a certain sense, it's complimentary, but this is undermined by the generally low quality of the information presented. On the other hand, if they expect me to say, "Well, here's yet more partisan drivel," why are they wasting both their time, and mine? If they understand the burden of proof that I have for coming over to their cause, why bother with things that they know don't meet the bar?

What bothers me about it either way is the sense that I'm being spoken at, instead of with. And I think that this is becoming the standard mode of political speech in the United States. People speak with those people who are already inclined to agree with them, and at everyone else. It's talking for the sake of talking.