Fading

Although Robert Kennedy, Jr. has suspended his campaign to be President, and thrown his lot in with Donald Trump, this campaign sign seems new.

Pretty sure this future is over already.

This seems to be in keeping with reports that Mr. Kennedy is seeking to clear the field in Red states, but keep his name on the ballot in Blue ones (like Washington), where the hope is that he'll siphon off enough support from the Harris/Walz ticket to flip a few otherwise safe electoral votes. I, for my part, am dubious of this plan, but it isn't the most harebrained scheme that I've heard of.

Like all "third party" nominees, Mr. Kennedy never stood a real chance of being a viable candidate; the only real thing that he ever had going for him was the family name, and that was never going to be enough. Ross Perot did a much better job of shaking things up, back in the day.

In any event, it may be interesting to see if Mr. Kennedy remains a factor in the race. The bulk of his support on the left-hand side of the political spectrum seemed to come from people who were dissatisfied with President Biden, and it pretty much evaporated when the President decided not to accept the Democratic nomination to run again. Given that people seem to be still putting up campaign signs, I suspect I'll see his name on the November ballot. I suspect that it will mostly go unnoticed.

Rock Island

Concepts are not durable objects; they are highly subject to change as they are transmitted from person to person, as many people in the social sciences are fond of pointing out. This is part of the reason why the understanding of what it means to be "Stoic" has shifted so much in past couple of millennia. Because most people derive their understanding of philosophical concepts from sources other than philosophy classes, textbooks and primary sources, the pop culture version of stoicism bears only a superficial outward resemblance to the original.

Normally, this isn't much of a concern, after all, modern religious practice has pretty much nothing in common with how things were done when Rome was still the dominant power in Europe, and no-one seems to care that the term "Cynic" appears to have absolutely no relation to the school of Greek philosophy that it derives from. But Stoicism has become caught up in the periphery of the Culture Wars, and this has licensed pedantry about how it's "supposed" to be done.

When I was young, I understood "stoicism" to mean something along the lines of suppressing outward displays of emotion. Having emotions was all well and good, but displaying them in public, especially negative ones, indicated a lack of internal control. And I found this a useful way of understanding things. As a high school student in the 1980s, I found that classmates of mine would call me "nigger" to my face not out of any genuine racial animus, because they sought to get a rise out of me. One which demonstrated that they had a certain level of control. Learning to not respond to the provocations (something which I failed to completely master while still in high school), I found that people were less likely to deploy them.

But it was not a universal position. There were (and are, really) any number of people who felt that anger was the correct response to such disrespect. In this, we disagreed on how efficacious it was as a tool of changing others behavior.

A lot of the modern discourse about "real" Stoicism versus the pop-culture variety centers around the idea that mastering one's responses to emotions means suppressing the emotions (or the perceptions of them) themselves. And I can understand that. The difference between accepting something that cannot be changed and being resigned to something that should be changed is not self-evident to an observer. Accordingly, neither is the understanding that one cannot control others versus maintaining a pretense that no harm was done. As "Toxic Masculinity" has become something that must be stamped out, the difficulty in recognizing its constituent parts becomes clearer.

In any event, I find the discussion interesting, as it provides a glimpse into the broader conflict over the "correct" ways of being an acting. Given how rapidly the world changes, I doubt that there will be anything resembling a resolution before everything moves om. But even the partial insight is a useful too.

Happiness Is A Warm CPU

There was a short piece on NPR's Morning Edition yesterday; "Exploring concerns around users building emotional dependence on AI chatbots." To be sure, it didn't at all live up to the title. Rather it seemed to be an opportunity for banter between the hosts. They did play some commentary from Arizona State University's Liesel Sharabi, but she was given only around 100 words, not nearly enough to really open the topic, let alone explore it.

Which was unfortunate. This really should have been a longer story, or maybe even a podcast episode of its own, because the disappointments and complications of having relationships with actual humans have already led people to have relationships with life-sized dolls and virtual boy/girl-friends. To be sure, the numbers don't seem to be very large. I suspect there's a reason why every story I've encountered about men have dolls as girlfriends features this guy who goes by the name of DaveCat.

One of the recurring worries about these sorts of surrogate relationships is that they will normalize unrealistic expectations of what being in a relationship should be like. But it seems to me that particular train has already left the station. After all, DaveCat was talking about his relationships with his RealDolls in fairly unrealistic terms when I encountered his story in The Atlantic some ten years ago.

In this, I suspect the "danger" of automation and robotics in this instance isn't that it will change what people want. Rather it will become good enough to give them what they already want, but can't currently obtain. Replicant partners that are captive enough to be utterly reliable, yet offer just enough pushback to not seem captive? I can see the lines for that going around the block. It simply takes so much of the perceived risk out of being in a relationship. And that's part of the reason for so much of the automation that we currently have. After all, I've had dishes be broken during cleaning before, but never by the dishwasher.

For all that I find hand-wringing about how people are too selfish these days to be moronic, I understand the critique that people go into relationships mainly as a path to personal happiness, mainly because it (among other things) lowers people's patience for rough edges in potential partners. But then again, most people wind up marrying other actual people in their lives, so I doubt that this is ever going to be a big problem regardless of how alarmist one's take on it is. What I think it will become, however, is mediagenic, precisely because it can be spun as a looming crisis that could spell doom (doom, I tell you!) for humanity. And nothing drives ratings like the promise of a good crisis story. Sometimes, even when the promise isn't at all delivered on.

C*rses

One of the things that I don't understand about swearing is why there is such a need to pretend that people aren't. It's common to hear things that would have scandalized people when I was young. Especially given that, when I was young "hell" was still considered to be inappropriate language in some quarters.

And so when people want to put "swear" words on book covers and have them sold in national chains, they simply replace the vowel with an asterisk... like so:

I can't imagine who they think won't know what these titles say.

So... why bother? It's not like people won't immediately recognize the titles as The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck and Let That Shit Go. If we're not going to be Puritanical as a society, why on Earth would we pretend to be? Sure, there's still something of a taboo about using these terms around preadolescents, but even that is rapidly going the way of the dodo; I've been around children who "swore" like sailors.

References to sex, body parts/bodily functions and waste have pretty much lost all of their shock value, much like "damn" has. So why not just let them go? Language evolves, and sometimes rapidly, there are already new words that are moving onto the list of Think That One Shall Not Say, some of the ones that are currently there, accordingly, can go on to other things.

Tall Tail

What's been described as China's first "triple-A" video game, Black Myth: Wukong, has landed in the news due to controversy sparked by a rather strange set of instructions sent to some number of people who planned to livestream themselves playing the game.

Ahead of Black Myth’s release, some content creators and streamers revealed that a company affiliated with its developer had sent them a list of topics to avoid talking about while livestreaming the game: including “feminist propaganda, fetishisation, and other content that instigates negative discourse”.

Not surprising, because this is China that we're talking about, and the Chinese government is notoriously sensitive when it comes to topics that it believes (correctly or not) might undermine or delegitimize it in the eyes of the populace.

I was watching a video-on-demand recording of one such livestream, and early in the game, the streamer responds to a viewer calling the game "Chinese propaganda." While the streamer wasn't interested in pursuing that line of discussion (after all, they were there to play a hot new video game), I'm sure that debate continued in the comments for a while.

It's an interesting commentary on the nature of relations between the United States and China. Black Myth: Wukong is a video game tied into the Chinese literature. And it's not the only property that's sought to mine the same story for details. The original Dragon Ball manga and anime draw very heavily from Journey to the West, and the Enslaved: Odyssey to the West video game couldn't be more clear about its inspirations. Even Lego got in on the act with their Monkie Kid set theme and accompanying animated shows. So it seems rational that Chinese companies would also get in on the act.

Responding to a video game that re-uses a very popular character from Chinese literature as propaganda speaks to the culture of distrust that has grown up under the geopolitical tensions between China and most of the developed Western world. (Except, it seems, where TikTok is concerned. Go figure.) While I'm sure that the Chinese Communist Party would like for games like Black Myth: Wokong to prompt young people in the industrialized West to think more highly of China, it seems unlikely that a game about an anthropomorphic monkey beating up on gods and monsters with a staff is somehow going to prompt people to overlook either the conflicts between China and other nations, or between the governing philosophy of the Chinese Communist Party and their own values. For some people, a video game is just a video game.

The charge of "propaganda" is usually one of disagreement with the supposed beneficiary of a message, rather than the message itself, and concerns that this new game is yet another plot to undermine China's geopolitical rivals/opponents seems to fall into that category. It's also a charge of stupidity (or at least pliability) on the part of others... no-one ever worries that propaganda will somehow manage to subvert them. And in that sense, it's as self-aggrandizing as what it seeks to call out.

What Is Ours Is Ours

I watched Hank Green's Vlogbrothers video: Is Google Training AI on YouTube Videos? (The answer is, of course, yes.) It's an interesting video, so it's worth a watch, but in the end, Mr. Green makes the case that companies should understand their agreements with users in the way that those users understood those agreements when they were made.

It's an argument that resonates with many people. But it does sort of let people off the hook for understanding what these agreements are intended to do.

Nobody In Particular is not really "my" content, despite the fact that I am the person who wrote most of it, and the photographs that I post here are mine. And that's true of all of the content I generate as a user of a service. That "content," whether it's blog posts, photographs, online comments or even my Linkedin profile, really belongs to "us." And just who are "we?" For my blog, "we" is a combination of myself and Alphabet, which owns Blogger. For my LinkedIn profile, "we" is a combination of myself and Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn. For the old Live Spaces version of my blog, and the posts and photographs that were posted there, "we" as myself and, again, Microsoft. Now, in theory, Alphabet and Microsoft are "licensors" of my posts, profile and comments et cetera, but in reality, the licensing agreements that are built into the Terms of Service for these services make us co-owners. Or at least, that's the reality as Alphabet's and Microsoft's legal teams understand it. And that's pretty much the point.

I think part of what makes people upset about vacuuming masses of material written by people into LLM training data without express consent, even if only subconsciously, is that it reminds them of the poverty that they suffer for the poverty they feel. Mr. Green makes the point that migrating away from YouTube, in order to have more complete control over the contents of the video that he, and his company, Complexly, create, is non-viable. My first response to that was: "That was the entire point, Mr. Green." Because Hank Green didn't have (or, maybe, lacked the willingness to spend) the resources to buy the infrastructure to post videos and the like to the web himself, he contracted to YouTube to do it for "free." But YouTube had a price... co-ownership of everything posted. And while Mr. Green may have been under the impression that the license that YouTube demanded in exchange for not making him shell out money for server space, bandwidth et cetera, applied to uses that were extant or imaginable at the time, it's a safe bet that no-one on YouTube's legal team saw it that way. And using those videos to make themselves even more money without offering any more payment was part of the plan all along.

Alphabet is using YouTube videos to train their generative automation tools because, as far as they're concerned, those videos belong to them just as much as they do the people who created, recorded and posted them. And that prompts people to feel that something has been stolen from them. But it wasn't. They gave it away, in exchange for thinking they were getting something inexpensively.

I understand that it's likely that my posts on Nobody In Particular are also being used to train these large language models. It's part of what I signed up for, regardless of whether I was thinking about it or not. If Alphabet and Microsoft find a way to spin my words into literal gold sometime next week, I fully expect that they'll go full speed ahead with that, secure in the understanding that the license they've granted themselves will give them every right to do so.

Modern American capitalism angers so many people because it's so often built on such one-sided relationships, and in so being, reminds people that they're often on the side of the relationship that doesn't start with much of value to offer. As a result, once there is something of substantial value, the other party extracts all of it. It doesn't have to be this way, but it will require us as a population to pull together and stand together to bring collective will to bear on corporate America. But given the state of our politics, that's simply not in the cards.

Missed a Spot

This article in The Washington Post, What AI thinks a beautiful woman looks like. is emblematic of much of the debate around the potential social impacts of generative automation tools, and how they, by constantly regurgitating broader social biases, can be instruments of perpetuating those same biases.

But something stood out for me when looking at the procedurally generated portraits that had resulted from the authors' prompts.

Several of the prompts started with the phrase "A full length portrait photo." This is a fairly standard term, and it refers to a photo that is, well, full length. The subject's entire body is in the frame, with no part of the head or feet cut off or cropped. Many of the images shown don't meet that criteria. While it's certainly possible the The Washington Post cropped the images for best effect, many of the ones presented are full length, so it seems odd that the Post would have needed to crop only select images for clarity.

And that raises something of a dilemma. If the Post cropped images that were full length when first generated, how do we understand that we're seeing what was given to the reporters? There's no indication in the article that any alterations have been made, so it can be difficult to say what may or may not have been changed about them. But if images aren't cropped, then it's pretty clear that these tools are still having difficulty with the "follow basic instructions" part of generating images. In that light, a lack of diversity in skin tones, age and body type in the images generated may not be the biggest problem that needs dealing with.

And this goes back to my current knock on calling these systems "artificial intelligence."

Given the size of these datasets, makers of generative systems are not going to be able to go in and make sure that all of the images are captioned or tagged in ways that will work for everyone. It would simply be too time consuming and two expensive. And so this could simply be a case of "garbage in, garbage out." And if it strikes one that current standards of beauty are garbage, perhaps the results stand to reason.

Convinced

Last year, I was in Mississippi, to visit family. It was an interesting place. I don't go down there very often, and in the past it had always been for funerals, so I was never there long. This last trip, I had some time to spend, and so in addition to meeting with family, I had the opportunity to meet some of the neighbors.

One of the neighbors was an older White lady, very nice, and quite talkative in the way that people can be when they meet someone new to them. As part of out very wide-ranging discussion, she informed me that the area was changing, in part due to the number of immigrants to the area. Having come down from the Seattle area, the place struck me as being nearly immigrant-free; I think I could count the ones I met on my fingers. But a jump from two to four is often more noticeable than going from ten to twelve, so I understood how the low baseline number made even the modest increase seem large by comparison. One of the things that the neighbor told me about the influx of people was that they were purchasing small businesses. My mother, who spends much more time down that way than I do, had told me about South Asians buying a couple of local businesses from owners who were retiring. Again, I didn't think anything of it at first; immigrant-owned small businesses are fairly thick on the ground in the Puget Sound area.

The interesting piece of the conversation came when the neighbor told me that the new arrivals had purchased their businesses with grant money given to them by the federal government, as a means of helping them to displace the locals. No evidence of this was offered; instead, it was described as "obvious" to anyone who understood anything about the area.

One of the things about conspiracies is that they can offer straightforward answers to questions without requiring a lot of background knowledge of the topic. And in this case, it freed the neighbor from needing to understand the economics of migration, overall. While there are a number of people who cross the border between the United States and Mexico because they're poor, and looking for better work than they can get at home (and sometimes, work period), immigrants from many other parts of the world are fairly well-off. After all, they needed to be able to afford intercontinental air fare. And given that many of them are locked out of the domestic market for the skilled jobs they held in their home countries, buying and running a small business was one of the better options available to them. Attempting to explain this to the neighbor, however, was something of a lost cause, mainly, I suspect, because her original story not only made sense to her, but it allowed the circumstances around her to make sense to her. So I didn't push very hard; there would have been no real benefit in winning.

Still, I felt badly for her. I know a good number of people who have a distrust of government, and for some, it's a very frightening state in which to live, constantly suspecting that "the people in charge" have it in for them. They strike me as some of the people that the Heritage Foundation's "Project 2025" is designed to appeal to; the sort who see agents of the government as nefarious.

Given the fact that egosyntonic stories about the world aren't going anywhere, there may not be much to be done about things like this. Which is unfortunate, because the fear and worry that underlie many of these ideas is a burden that weighs down people who are already laboring under the weight of having few options to advance themselves..

Whatever

Whatever happened, I wondered, to Connie Sun? After I'd heard about her comics blog from NPR, I followed it for a while, then would drop in now and again, and eventually some time had gone by since I'd last read it. I dropped in, and found that the most recent post was more than a year old.

It is, in a way, the curse of the Internet. It's remarkable easy to feed more interests than one can reasonably keep up with, and so it's inevitable that some, if not many of them are going to fall by the wayside, until something reminds one of them. By which point, the thing in question may no longer exist.

I understand, intellectually, that the internet is ephemeral. In the end, it's all just links to digital media, and digital media is ephemeral in a way that other things are not. I have a few books in my home that are older than I am. And while those books may be out of print, the books themselves are still there. They are physical objects, and that lends them a durability (nothing in genuinely permanent) that seems to be lacking from computer files.

The tenuous connections and pseudo-connections facilitated by the Internet are just as ephemeral, but at least to me, they also tend to lend the people themselves that same quality. I'm petty sure that Ms. (or maybe she's become Mrs. in the meantime) Sun is still doing her thing, and still being a perceptive observer of the world, her place in it, and how she and it interact as she moves through it. But I don't actually know Ms. Sun; I simply followed her cartoons from literally the other side of the continent. At that remove, I can't even prove that she's a real person; it could have been a pseudonym, for all that I know. And in that sense, the lack of updates to her blog are no different than if she'd been deleted by someone who decided that they no longer needed to maintain that identity.

I've "met" a lot of people on the Internet who have effectively ceased to exist in the same  way. I suspect that they're still out there, but with the digital connection between us broken, it's like they were never really there at all. Kind of like losing a telephone number or an address back in the day,

And so I wonder. Are there people out there for whom I am simply another ghost in the network of machines? A person who wandered in out of the digital ether, touched their lives briefly and then disappeared again?

Out Loud

There is a saying in American politics that a gaffe is when a politician (or a candidate for political office) says what they actually think. There's something telling in that, not about politicians, but about the public, and its need to have the political class see them in a particular way.

With the flap over Senator J. D. Vance's "childless cat ladies" comment yet to die down completely, I decided to take a look back at the big comments that have come out of other recent presidential campaigns, and see how it compares. In 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama made his "guns and religion" comment that people saw as insulting to rural Americans. In 2012, Mitt Romney's "makers and takers" comments, secretly recorded at a fundraiser, were taken as disdain for nearly half of the country. And in 2016, Hillary Clinton caused an uproar with her "basket of deplorables" remarks.

What I found interesting about Mr. Obama's and Mrs. Clinton's remarks is that the focus was on one specific phrase in their remarks; "they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them" and "you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it," but their broader context was about empathy. Mr. Obama was making the point that these were people who had been left behind by policies of previous administrations. And while it was the Clinton campaign that slammed then-Senator Obama for his comments, when Hillary Clinton effectively made the same point in 2016, she was noting that the other half of Trump's base felt let down and abandoned, and were desperate for change. In effect, each of them were calling upon the American Left to see past its visceral dislike of Right-leaning voters, and understand that they had problems that needed to be solved, as well.

When Mitt Romney made his comments, we wasn't speaking to the public, but to wealthy donors, and as a result, his comments lack the call for understanding and compassion that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton had been making. He was speaking to a group of people unlike the people he was speaking about, and, as a result, his remarks came across as much more disdainful. In part. I suspect, because he was laying out reasons why his candidacy wasn't more popular than it was. Apparently, "hey, I'm running against a popular incumbent, and things are going well under his watch," wasn't going to be good enough to mollify them.

Likewise, J. D. Vance was speaking to Tucker Carlson, and the Fox News audience. While this was a public forum, Mr. Vance likely understood that the audience for Mr. Carlson's show was highly partisan. And, at least for a time, he was right. It took Hillary Clinton surfacing his remarks for them to become newsworthy. Mr. Vance was speaking to a partisan audience, in a venue that was all about negative partisanship. Like Mitt Romney, he was speaking to people who expected him to be hostile to, and critical of, opposing partisans.

What makes all of this interesting is this interplay between the audience and their partisanship. Hillary Clinton was also addressing one of the unspoken realities of politics; that "deplorable" or not, people are allowed to vote, and their votes can be the difference between winning, and having a chance a favorable policies, and losing. Democratic politicians have a challenge in speaking to their supporters about Republican voters, because while rank-and-file Democrats may be angry at them, the broader Democratic message is that government can work for people. And that includes people who are angry, even perhaps unreasonably so, that it hasn't worked them in the past.

Republicanism, at least as I have experienced it, makes no such concession, being much more comfortable with the idea that the conservative ideals it espouses (or simply pays lip service to) are self-evidently the Right Way To Do Things, and opposition to them is often born of deliberate perversity and bad faith. But that's not a good public-facing message, hence why the statements that landed Messrs. Romney and Vance in the public hotseat weren't made on the stump, but to friendly audiences.

And maybe that makes it worse. Sure, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton said unflattering things about Republicans, but they said it to their faces, as it were. Mitt Romney and J. D. Vance were speaking about Democrats, but not in venues where they expected Democrats to be listening.

Top Down

The reason why people turn a blind eye to it is that Thailand is, of course, an incredible economic success story. And this was part of the story with Bangladesh. Its economy was growing so fast that people turned a blind eye to the authoritarian government. Thailand is far, far, wealthier... I mean, it's a pretty poor country, when I first went there in the early 80s. It's now a proper upper-middle income country and, you know, an economic miracle. And this is one of the problems, that the link between being a liberal democracy and delivering growth, which, it was this sort of story for 200 years, has been broken. And increasingly from China to Thailand, people are looking at these more authoritarian models and saying, "Well, we don't really mind as long as we're getting wealthier."
Rory Stewart. "Iran’s Imminent Retaliation & Is The Press Softer On Labour?" The Rest Is Politics Podcast. Thursday, 15 August, 2024.

In other words, if it's not broken, why fix it? For supporters of liberal democracy, and other representative forms of government, autocracy is broken by definition. And they'll point to places such as Venezuela and the like to make their point. But in China, Thailand and other similar places, the fact that the government is autocratic, or even totalitarian hasn't resulted in obvious mismanagement of the place. And so widespread resistance to the regime isn't present, because most people don't see the need to change the government to better their material conditions. And people will put up with a lot if it means raising their standards of living.

Liberal democracy is a means, not an end. If it's going to persist, it has to delivery what the populace demands of it. Increased standards of living may be what people are after, but things like national pride have also pushed people to suffer, if not embrace, governments that appear to be disasters from the outside. This, of course, is true of almost any government, but the individual freedoms that many liberal democracies provide mean that they can, intentionally or not, vote themselves out of existence if they are not careful.

And presuming that support for representative governments is a moral imperative can easily become a form of not being careful. Much is made of politicians who have little patience for "democratic norms," but those are also politicians who tend to understand what their constituents want and expect from them, and they put in the effort to deliver it. And not needing to work around the law or political opposition parties (especially opposition parties motivated by negative partisanship) can make the job much easier than it is elsewhere.

People understand which side their bread may be buttered on, and they understand costs and trade-offs. Western governments today aren't, in my opinion, doing a very good job of making the cost-benefit analysis work to their benefits. Some of it is simply a matter of maturity. Thailand, China and Bangladesh started from much lower baselines; so long as their governments were reasonably competent and free of corruption, the nations were going to grow; they were well placed to take advantage of changes in global demand. Europe and North America are going to have much harder times developing industries that both create a lot of value and employ large numbers of people at better than the current prevailing wages. But some of it is also the kruft, to use the technical term, that builds up in highly complex governments that have formalized and involved processes for change. Take generative automation tools. If various forms of both limited and capable artificial intelligence start erode the need for human mental labor what the industrial revolution did to physical labor, the advanced world is going to undergo a period of serious upheaval. If action is not proactive, it will need to be quick, and slow bureaucratic processes will not cut the mustard. If autocracies prove to be more nimble and responsive, people will continue to sour on liberal democracy, and the citizens of autocracies will be even more convinced that turning a blind eye was the right choice.

Arbitrary

File under: Apparently, all publicity is good publicity.

In October of last year, Dr. Kanokporn Tangsuan and members of her family ate at the Raglan Road Irish Pub, which is part of the Disney World resort. Because Dr. Tangsuan was allergic to both dairy and nuts, she and her husband attempted several times to ensure that her dishes would not include those ingredients, and were supposedly assured that they wouldn't. Well, they did, and Dr. Tangsuan died from “anaphylaxis due to elevated levels of dairy and nut in her system.” Her husband, Jeffrey Piccolo, is suing Disney Parks and Resorts for wrongful death, and is seeking other damages.

The Walt Disney Company is requesting that the case be dismissed, claiming that Mr. Piccolo is bound by the arbitration clauses he agreed to when signing up for a free Disney+ subscription, which was subsequently allowed to lapse, and using a Disney-owned website to buy Epcot tickets earlier in 2023. Accordingly, his suit is in violation of his agreement with the company.

This strikes me as a high-risk strategy, namely because it runs the risk of inviting legislation to curb, or even end, the arbitration clauses, given that this case is already in the news, and big corporations are popular with neither Democratic nor Republican voters at this point in time. Both parties may want to deny the other a legislative victory, but their constituents may be willing to look past their own partisanship in the name of sticking it to Big Business. Disney looking to have the case stayed and sent to forced arbitration is also a bad look for them because it hints at the fact that they suspect that they couldn't win in court. Despite the fact that the arbiters are allegedly neutral third parties, everyone understands who selects and pays them.

Either way this comes out, however, it's unlikely that Mr. Piccolo will see a resolution soon. If Disney loses the case, they will certainly appeal, seeking to have the verdict overturned. Although they may decide that cutting a substantial check to Mr. Piccolo is their best option.

In the end, this may be the first bell to toll for the practice of forced arbitration. There's nothing really in it for the public at large (despite what corporate public relations people might say), and if it engenders the sort of sloppiness/negligence that's being alleged in this case, some enterprising politician is going to see the benefit of leading a parade of torches and pitchforks to go after it.

Watching and Waiting

I've allowed my photography to lapse recently, and so I've been going through my old photos. Some of them I haven't seen in years. It's reminded me of how much I enjoyed taking them. Like this one. I wonder how long it took the bird to decide to take the plunge.

Ownership

Slate ran a story about legal proceedings related to the shootings Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, something that had dropped off my radar in the years since it happened. Apparently, the name, image and likeness of Nikolas Cruz, the shooter, are now the property of shooting survivor Anthony Borges. The goal here appears to be to both block any participation by Mr. Cruz, who us now serving a life sentence for the shooting, in interviews, documentaries or other media appearances, and to prevent other people from making any direct mention of Mr. Cruz in commercial media, like documentaries. It's an interesting use of the law. Given that Mr. Cruz and his attorneys agreed to this particular aspect of the settlement with Mr. Borges, it seems unlikely that anyone would be able to challenge it in court.

I understand the motivation and the rationale for this, but I'm a bit dubious about it as a matter of public policy. Not because I think that it's a bad idea, per se; I can see why damnatio memoriae would be sought by survivors of attacks and the families of those killed; people tend to take an interest in those who commit atrocities, and that interest can quickly balloon into fame. Being able to block that would have clear benefits. But the Florida legislature already passed a law removing the previous requirement that death sentences be imposed only by unanimous agreement of the sentencing jury, just so they'll be more easily able to execute the next person who does something like that. If it's understood that hard cases make bad law, setting out to weaponize the law to be used against people who frighten us has a lot of potential to backfire.

While there are a lot of complaints that representative governments don't always do a good job of catering to the desires and needs of the citizens, sometimes the problem is that they can do too good a job of it. A willingness to tweak or change the law every time it doesn't go far enough to satisfy people's outrage leads to laws that are much easier to use as weapons than people might realize. And people tend not to pay much attention when laws are used against people who are easily written off.

Blotted

The Culture Wars make things strange.

I live in a sleepy suburb of Seattle. Almost nothing happens out here. But from time to time, I'll be online, and someone will ask "I'm thinking of moving there... is it safe?" And one can tell by the answers which side of the Liberal/Conservative divide that people come down on.

For a certain segment of the online Conservative population, playing up their concerns of crime, and their responses to/preparations for it is a form of virtue signalling. They will list off the things that happen in their neighborhoods, even petty offenses like vandalism, and inform people that they carry mace when walking the dog (even if they make it a point to say they leave their guns at home). Every trip out of doors is a cause to be vigilant and ready.

For me, the Seattle Eastside (those suburbs on that sit East of Lake Washington, like Redmond, where Microsoft is located) are about a safe as your average pre-teen sleepover. Most of the crime out here is an annoyance, Cars are broken into, and occasionally stolen and there's a certain background level of property crime in the service of financing drug habits. When I lived in Chicago and Evanston, on the other hand, a roommate was mugged, a co-worker was raped and I knew more than a few people for whom the sound of gunshots didn't warrant a response. (My car, however, was left alone.) By comparison, crime here is more bothersome than worthy of concern. But then, I don't pine for the 1970s. Mainly because I realize that I don't have an accurate picture of the 1970s... after all, I was in grade school for most of it. It had its own problems, but internet culture and high levels of partisanship weren't among them.

Concerns over crime mean different things to different people. For some, they're about the collapse of good government (a.k.a., what they remember as draconian punishments for criminals), for others, it's about the inherent wickedness of mankind and the immanent return of the divine to earth. There are, however, those people for whom it's a real, day-to-day, concern. But when you live were I live, those people are few and far between.

You Gonna Eat That?

 A hungry, hungry seagull, perched on the windshield of a pickup truck. hoping to find a way to get some of the driver's leftovers.

Words to the Wise

The Week describes its "Daily News Digest" as follows: "Distilled from dozens of the world’s most trusted news sources, each update delivers the clarity and perspective you need to make up your own mind."

Arguments that the news media is in the business of "telling people what to think" generally don't hold water for me because, as I've mentioned before, I'm of the opinion that people chose their news sources based on what they think, rather than the other way around. And I also understand that many media outlets, including The Week, are as much, if not more, in the business of advocacy as they are information. Again, because this is what their readership expects of them. Along with, it seems, a certain amount of flattery.

One reason that news outlets tell their audiences that the final decision is in their hands is that it implies that there is some other group of people who simply blindly believe what they're told to, and lack the faculties to do otherwise. Fox News, with their "We report, you decide" slogan, was engaging in this, casting aspersions on both the "mainstream media" and the "mainstream" audience. This does everyone a disservice. But it stands to reason. Just about all of the news one encounters on a daily basis is effectively a diversion from other things. Not in the sense that it's a "distraction" from the "more important" things that people "should" be paying attention to, but in the sense that it isn't actionable. There was an audio story from The Atlantic in my podcast feed on the Darién Gap, the "Tapón del Darién," where Panama and Columbia meet. Given that it links South and Central America, a lot of migrant traffic goes through the area, and most of the piece was made of up of the human-interest stories of said migrants. Interesting, to a point, but not really useful in terms of taking any action one way or another. The push factors that drove people to leave their home countries and the pull factors that resulted in their destination being the United States were simply out-of-scope for the article as written. It had a viewpoint, and advocated for it, because, again, the readership of The Atlantic expects that, and I suspect it feels good for people to have their viewpoints reflected in the media they interact with. But they aren't being spoon-fed "what to think" any more than anyone else is. They're engaging with outlets that they trust. And maybe also flatter them to some degree.

Bold Choice

There is someone who sells advertising space on LinkedIn who scored a real coup.

LinkedIn's approach to advertising is a bit different from most websites. Given that LI is basically just another social media platform, advertisements are just another post, albeit a "sponsored" one. So rather than being special modules that have to be dropped into a page (and ad-blockers can detect), the ads look just like anything else in people's feeds.

Given this, I'm curious how they are targeted, because I've seen this ad pop up in my feed a few times recently. (This is another side effect of LinkedIn ads being posts on the site... one can link to them directly...)

To be sure, management types are just as likely to use LinkedIn as anyone else. But most companies, especially large ones, are going to have more individual contributors than managers, so one wonders if LinkedIn is really the right place for a spot that comes across as anti-labor. Especially given the number of people who use the site primarily to look for their next job. Of course, this may be why comments are turned off for the post. But people can still repost this into their own feeds. The one repost of this ad, was, unsurprisingly, critical of it.

Many businesses need to advertise their services; this being how they inform people that their services are available. And it's understood that advertising is something of a crapshoot.  After all, John Wanamaker is reported to have said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” But I suspect I know which half of the advertising budget this spot would up in.

Another Round

Video game performers, like voice actors and motion-capture performers are currently striking, hoping to pressure video game studios into commitments around the rules for the use of generative automation tools to simulate their performances and to be paid for such uses as if it were new performance, royalties, in a manner of speaking.

In the same way as the broader entertainment industry strike earlier, I suspect that this is going to backfire to a certain degree, because there are always going to be small, independent studios that aren't covered by any agreement. A SAG-AFTRA member quoted in the NPR story on the strike casts the dispute as being one between studio executives and workers, because portraying corporate executives as greedy and hostile to those less well-off than themselves tends to be a winner, but unless the tools are expensive enough that only the major studios than afford to use them, the big names are as likely to be followers in the use of the technology as they are to be leaders.

And if they are followers, then all bets are off. Smaller studios, including those that are only a single person with some passion and a game idea, are going to be all over generative automated tools as a way of putting out games with the polish and appearance that the big studios manage. Sure, a lot of games indulge in quirky pixel art or proudly display graphics that haven't been cutting-edge for the past quarter-century, but a lot of that is driven as much by necessity as it is by aesthetics. After all, if people didn't want the latest and greatest, I'm pretty sure that Square Enix could have saved a fortune on their Final Fantasy VII updates by sticking to the animation style of the original. And some of what made Resident Evil so charming back in the day were clever uses of workarounds for the technology of the day; Capcom left the old look behind for a reason. Tools that allow lower-budget operations to put out better products will be adopted, regardless of how often SAG-AFTRA attempts to stand athwart progress shouting "Stop!"

One of the ways in which unions protect their members is by shielding them from competition; in this case from technology. But they can only shield members from organizations they have pull with. SAG-AFTRA may be able to intimidate some small studios by threatening to stifle them once they become large enough that they would need to rely on unionized labor, but that's unlikely to work on an individual or small group of friends who are working on a labor of love. And if these tools allow for these independent games to be competitive in the marketplace, they're going to attract more people to use them.

The answer to automation is always going to have to be the next thing. If automation is going to produce the next wave or jobs that only people can do, then the goal should be to start looking for that wave now, and bringing it about, rather than sitting on the shore commanding the tide to turn back. (After all, even kings know better than to think that would work.) But that's a serious ask for an organization that's built on protecting the ability of people to do things as they've been done in the past.

Distortion Field

I was listening to a recent episode of the Plain English podcast, one that was investigating the question of "Why are Conservatives happier than Progressives?" Guest Greg Lukianoff put forward the theory that much of Progressive culture works on what he calls "Reverse Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy." In effect, instead of combating the cognitive distortions that lead people to become anxious and depressed, Progressivism stokes them, and in ways that Conservatism manages to avoid, even when it engages in some of the very same behaviors.

One question that host Derek Thompson asked, that would have liked to see more time spent on was the nature of the problem that Progressive culture had set out to solve with this Reverse CBT regimen they'd started on. And that's kind of a shame, because I think understanding what circumstances a behavior is attempting to adapt to is very important in both understanding why it is maladaptive and what a better option would be.

I suspect that a lot of it deals with self-esteem and self-worth, given that those are prime drivers of many cognitive distortions. While I suspect that it's really no different than any other time, the modern world seems to be a particularly difficult place for people to maintain positive images, some people of themselves, and some people of others. While I agree with Mr. Lukianoff that the political utility of fear leads to the political establishment using it as a tool, I think that it politics doesn't create fear so much as find and amplify it. To paraphrase Dahlia Lithwick, if you scare people's faces off, they will vote.

But it occurs to me that just as I replaced "click" in Ms. Lithwick's original with "vote," one coiuld replace with any number of other actions. The more I think about it, the more institutions in the world around me come across as being invested in people's fears, and thusly in the cognitive distortions that feed those fears, as a way of looking out for their own interests. Perhaps the question isn't why Progressives have such high rates of depression and anxiety, but when those maladies are coming for everyone else.

Is Who He Is

“I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.”
Donald Trump. 31 July, 2024

The idea that anything that Donald Trump did during his term in office comes close to signing the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 is laughable on its face. Yet he repeats the claim over and over. So I have the same question today that I had beck in 2016 when Mr. Trump would talk about all of the things that he would do for Black people: Who is he talking to?

And this is emblematic of the way that Mr. Trump speaks when he's not in front of a friendly audience, because that's the only audience that he every really talks to. Everyone else, he talks about. I suppose it comes with being in a position where he doesn't really have to listen to anyone, because any competent campaign manager, or even staffer, would have told him to actually attempt to address the audience in front of him, just as he would at a rally. But this has never really been Mr. Trump's style, and I think that his surprise upset of Hillary Clinton in 2016 reinforced for him the idea that it didn't need to be.

It's odd, because I suspect that Mr. Trump could be as popular with the public as a whole as he appears to want to be, and tells people that he is. But that would mean giving up attempting to play various groups off against one another. And I think that's simply too central to who he is.