Bad Words

Today's teapot tempest comes to us courtesy of National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry, who during a recent episode of The Megyn Kelly Show, apparently referred to Haitans living in Springfield, Ohio as "niggers" before catching himself and calling them "migrants."

A prominent White Conservative referring to Black people as "niggers" should surprise precisely no one. It's about as newsworthy as water making things wet. The National Review is one of the big names in Conservative print media here in the United States, and I suspect that a portion of their readership refers to people as 'niggers" when they're out of earshot on a recurring basis. Even if Mr. Lowry personally finds such language abhorrent, I suspect that hearing it, and not just occasionally, was a regular part of his media career. So I'm not sure that the problem is that he said it.

In her X posting, Media Matters' Madeline Peltz notes: "Having a hard time coming to any conclusion besides the obvious one about what Lowry catches himself blurting out here." And I think that this is the real problem that Megyn Kelly, Mr. Lowry and Andy McCarthy are attempting to spin their way out of; the suspicion that the Conservative movement as a whole looks down on Black people, always has and doesn't have a problem with it.

Mr. McCarthy's explanation, that Mr. Lowry has used a short i sound when he meant to use the long version of the vowel, seems patently bogus. Because "ˈmīʹgərənt," with a clear "e" coming between the "g" and the "r," isn't how the word is pronounced, whether one says it ˈmī-grənt or ˈmī-grant. The idea that the otherwise articulate Mr. Lowry made such a bizarre error that just happened to make it sound like he said "nigger" strains credulity.

Racism is one of the few general-purpose charges that really sticks and is viewed a broadly disqualifying in the United States. For Mr. Lowry to have started out saying "nigger," and then catching himself, risks embarrassing the whole of the mainstream Conservative movement. Mainly because while the movement might not wish to be associated with White Nationalists, Antisemites, neo-Confederates et cetera, there's a belief that as long as such things aren't openly spoken of, those belief systems are tolerated, and thus Mr. Lowry was "saying the quiet part out loud."

Everyone understands that most political movements can't really afford to antagonize or jettison their radical elements and still remain politically viable unless the other side(s) also do so. The Left and Right of American politics are no different. But those radical elements threaten to tar the entire enterprise; which is part of the reason why so much political rhetoric is about making accusations that the radicals are really calling the shots. And the fact of the matter is that most partisans would be okay with the radical viewpoint on things. It may go father than they would themselves, but they tend to be more concerned with falling short of the mark than overshooting it. Non-partisans, however, have much less tolerance for radicals who take viewpoints to extremes. And this creates an incentive to appear less tolerant of radicals, and their language, than one might actually be.

No Surprises

While it might be true that “Trump’s own version of reality continues to confound political actors and observers,” the people who support Mr. Trump are not at all confounded.

NPR’s Senior Editor and Correspondent for the Washington Desk, Ron Elving, notes that it may not have been surprising that Donald Trump referred to the possibility of another debate with Vice President Kamala Harris as a “third debate.” The former President was simply counting his debate with President Biden in the list. But then Mr. Elving goes on to say: “But what was surprising was Trump’s claim to having won both debates.”

No professional journalist has any business still being surprised by Donald Trump continuing to privilege the worldview of his voter base over factual accuracy. It’s been more than a decade now. When Donald Trump says that “the polls” say that he won:

In fact, the only polls where Trump won were online polls of self-selected website samples rather than the randomized scientific samples actual pollsters use.

In other words, places where Mr. Trump’s supporters, people who would likely think that he’d clearly won both debates, could go and signal their beliefs and support for their candidate. And in return, Mr. Trump did as he always does; he tells them they’re right. This is his standard operating procedure, and he has yet to deviate from it. There should be no surprises here.

Donald Trump talks about things in a manner than mirrors how the voters he is appealing to think about things. Mr. Elving can say that economic growth was better under Presidents Reagan and Clinton. But the 1980s and 1990s are effectively ancient history at this point. I’m middle-aged now, and I wasn’t old enough to vote in either election that Ronald Reagan won. And for many of the young men who have moved to the political Right in recent years, Bill Clinton isn’t functionally much different from George Washington: someone who was President before they cared about politics. For many of Mr. Trump’s supporters, the economy under him was the best they’d experienced in their adult memory. It may not have been “the best economy” ever, but it’s likely the best of the ones they care about. And they don’t make a distinction between those.

What’s so difficult to understand about this, that “mainstream” journalism can’t seem to accept the truth of it?

When Vice Presidential candidate Sen. Vance says, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he’s not admitting to finding joy in falsehood. He’s saying that Trump/Vance voters believe that things are terrible, that they’re being ignored by a media that’s actively hostile to them and this is what it takes for their concerns to be covered.

Even Elon Musk’s comment on X that: “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” plays into this, aligning with the Trump base’s suspicion that people with weapons managing to come within a few hundred yards of the former President is indicative of an “élite” plot to kill him, and thus strip his supporters of their champion. The Establishment, on the other hand, retains adequate protections.

Mr. Elving, National Public Radio and a good chunk of the “media establishment” seem to be almost willfully avoiding understanding that Donald Trump is not the disease; he is a symptom. “Political polarization” is not a thing unto itself. It’s being driven by a lack of social trust in the United States, and that is creating divisions in what various groups of voters understand is true about the world around them. National Public Radio’s listenership leans Liberal/Progressive. Accordingly, they have a worldview that is entirely different from, and suspicious of, that held by the Conservative/Reactionary voters who support Donald Trump. And the feeling is mutual. The electorate is no longer one large undifferentiated mass of people who have the same baseline understanding of reality and that expects anyone who speaks to them to adhere to that baseline.

When Mr. Elving notes that:

This entails also the sea change over the use of the three-letter word we were trained as journalists to avoid: lie. We might say a politician was misstating facts or making inaccurate claims. But we could never make the leap of imputing motive.

... he misses the fact that many members of the public have been imputing motives to the media for years, if not decades. The idea that “the media” lies, because it wants to advance its own interests and/or the interests of whatever shadowy cabal people might believe is actually in charge is well entrenched in American society.

When voters take clearly false or openly fabricated statements by Donald Trump or Senator Vance “seriously, but not literally” it’s because they view them as, if not necessarily accurate, necessary correctives to the open falsehoods that they believe are consistently perpetrated by people in “the media.” I understand that whenever National Public Radio airs a story on Latin American migrants in the United States, it’s going to be a sympathetic piece, highlighting the dire conditions the migrants left behind and their hopes and dreams for their lives in the United States. However, for the person who sees economic migrants, who they believe are only interested in enriching themselves, as undercutting them on wages and thus condemning them to unemployment or worse underemployment than they’re already experiencing, that picture is false and its goal is to ingratiate the political Left to people who they feel shouldn’t be voting in the first place.

Mr. Elving’s inability to understand the change in the people the message is being delivered to leaves him with no choice but to focus on the message and the messenger. And to wonder why they don’t conform to his expectations.

Brought To You By...

Anyone familiar with NPRs coverage of the various accusations that the 2020 Presidential election was somehow fraudulent will understand that the network takes a low opinion of such theories; the words "debunked" and "baseless" figure a lot in their stories.

And since Donald Trump is claiming that Democrats are planning to try and use fraud to win this upcoming election, NPR is keeping those terms alive:

When former President Donald Trump told millions of Americans during Tuesday's presidential debate that "our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote," he was not just repeating a baseless claim intended to undermine the results of the upcoming 2024 election.

But apparently, baseless or not, if the checks clear, you too can promote a baseless theory as an NPR sponsor...

If it helps keep the lights on, I suppose.

To be fair, it's entirely possible that NPR isn't aware of the exact content of the ads. It's likely that some organization or another simply purchased sponsorship space, and when some automated system determined that there was nothing gory, sexually explicit or whatever about the image, it was allowed to go ahead. And I don't think that media outlets have the equivalent of a know your customer law, so they may not have to do much vetting of groups that pay to sponsor articles. That may not be a good idea in all cases, however...

Strings

The Left and Right in American politics often don't understand one another. Many Democrats appear to think that demonstrating Donald Trump's deficiencies will help turn the tide of the election, and a friend of mine was making the point that the media was being derelict in their duty by not striving more forcefully to ensure that anyone thinking for Mr. Trump was aware of his flaws. But many of his followers see him as an instrument of the divine, and it doesn't matter if the puppet is broken when people have put their faith in the puppeteer.

College Betting

One of the original purposes of this weblog was to explain things about the United States to people born and/or living outside of it. I drifted away from that, but this post comes back to it. I had been listening to the most recent "Question Time" episode of The Rest Is Politics, and in it, Messrs. Campbell and Stewart covered two topics in succession, "Explaining the American Electoral College system" and "Why is there such a large divergence between polls and betting markets?" I wasn't impressed with the way Mr. Campbell dealt with the second of these topics, mainly because I don't think that he understood how it related to the first. And so his answers felt more like guesses (although reasonable ones). So I'm going to take a crack at both of them.

The Electoral College of the United States is a body that comes into being once every four years, and its role is to vote on who should be the next President and Vice President. This is the count that actually matters, not the popular vote totals. There are 538 seats in the Electoral College, which is why Nate Silver originally named his site (now part of ABC News) FiveThirtyEight.  To win the Presidency, a candidate needs a simple majority, or 270, of the electoral votes. Each state has a number of electors equal to the size of its total Congressional delegation (Representatives plus Senators). Washington D.C. also has three electors, as if it were a small state, and that's what creates the 538 seat total. In almost all of the states, whichever candidate wins the popular vote in that state receives all of that state's Electoral College votes; they are not divided proportionally.

As a result of its construction, the Electoral College favors small states over large ones. This is in part because when one divides the population of the United States by 435 (the size of the House of Representatives), the resulting number is larger than the populations of the least-populous states, yet those states still receive at least one Representative. Montana has, after the 2020 census, one Representative per approximately 540,000 people (mainly because it has enough population to have two Representatives), which is less than the average size of a Congressional District, which is about 750,000 or so people. That each state also receives two Senators also skews the Electoral College away from the popular vote. Wyoming, with its single Representative and two Senators, receives 3 Electoral College votes, or one for every about 271,000 people who live there.

The larger states, and those that just miss the cutoff for an additional seat in the House of Representatives are the ones that lose out, because the states in those categories tend to be ones with large urban areas; accordingly, the urban/rural divide in American politics comes into play. The citizens of the states with highly populous "Blue" (Democratic leaning) cities find that their votes "count for less" than people who live in states that are composed of mostly (or exclusively) "Red" (Republican leaning) small towns. This is also why the Republican share of the House of Representatives tends to be higher than their share of the popular vote across all House elections.

This becomes the explanation for why the betting markets don't necessarily line up with the "polls," even if one presumes that those polls are 100% accurate reflections of how the actual popular vote would turn out. (Which they aren't; and they aren't intended to be.) When most people talk about polls in the United States, they tend to be referring to national polls. And, for the reasons I laid out above, those national poll numbers are meaningless when attempting to sort out who is likely to win a Presidential election.

The states (and the District of Columbia) can be ranked according to their propensity to vote for a Democratic or a Republican candidate for President. And for between 44 and 46 six of these, it's effectively already known who is going to win the state/District. They may as well not even be voting in November. I, for example, live in Washington State, which is considered Blue. All of the state's electors will be voting for Vice President Harris, because there's absolutely no question that she'll win the popular vote statewide. This is so much of a given that Donald Trump may as well not even be on the ballot here. (Candidates for President come to Washington to fundraise, not to campaign.) Were he to actually win this state, it would be such an upset that everyone would be talking about it. So it's the 5 to 7 "swing" states, in which the outcome is still undetermined, that will decide the winner. And if one is putting money on the outcome, the only polls that matter art the ones in those states. And right now, despite the fact that Vice President Harris has a lead in the national polls, the swing state polls are a lot closer and tend to favor Donald Trump slightly. And so do the degree that the swing state-specific polls deviate from the national poll numbers, that's what any bettor who actually hopes to see their money again is paying attention to.

Zero For Five

"5 thought-provoking cartoons about thoughts and prayers," the headline promised. I was intrigued. I've come to regard "thoughts and prayers" as something between cynical and helpless, and if political cartoonists had something to say about it that would add nuance, so much the batter.

No such luck. Only two of the five cartoons actually addressed "thoughts and prayers" directly, and, as with most of the cartoons that The Week publishes, those were simply openly partisan. In this case, knocks on perceived conservative/Republican indifference and/or hypocrisy. Not a shred of nuance in sight. Which is unfortunate. I might not find the defenses of "thoughts and prayers" that I've encountered to be either useful or nonpartisan, but they at least point to a different perspective on it. And if no-one is offering that in illustration, The Week doesn't do anyone a service in saying they do..

Words Are Money

I came across a post this morning selling coffee mugs that read: "The seven most expensive words in business... We have always done it that way." "Seven" was double-underlined and there was a number by each of the words, presumably to make it easier to recognize that there were, in fact, seven of them. "We have always done it that way" and its variants have become common targets in pop-culture leadership because they've been enlisted as signifiers of being behind the times, or fear of change.

But "We have always done it that way," is an answer to "Why are we doing it this way?" And that itself is a stand-in for: "What are we solving for with this process?"

So maybe the seven most expensive words in business are better expressed as "We don't know what problem we're solving."

Processes are, generally speaking, instituted to solve a problem. "We have always done it that way," is a testament to the fact that processes can often survive much longer than problem statements. It's like some acronyms; one asks people what they stand for and no-one knows, everyone just uses the acronyms, because that's what they learned. Accordingly, it should be trigger to dig in, find (or reconstruct) the problem that someone was originally attempting to solve, determine if a) it's still a problem and b) the current process is a workable and efficient solution and then, make sure that it's documented somewhere accessible. Then make whatever changes are needed.

If ignorance of the problem is the expense driver, making changes in the name of performative agility or adaptability isn't going to help anything.

As Usual

I was paging through some LinkedIn posts that I'd set aside for later, and came across one from a recruiter that read as follows:

So after posting a recruiter role, I received over 200 applicants in under 24 hours.

I'm having a thought, what if I gave all these recruiters access to source and find us candidates?

If a candidate they source gets a job they get paid full commission, that simple.

Why is this powerful:

1. It gives all laid off recruiters the ability to make money
2. It gives us more bandwidth
3. We can then hire the best recruiters, it's like a trial run

What do you all think??

I was not surprised to find that it wasn't a popular idea. There were comments that people would find ways to game the system almost immediately, but most of the objections were to asking people to work for free, in the hope of gaining a commission, but with no guarantees that they'd get anything for their time.

And it strikes me as being similar to any number of other Bad Ideas that come out of corporate America; it's envisioned as a win-win, but pretty much no-one outside of the organization itself sees it that way.

I think that this is more indicative of how businesses think than the deliberate evil that they're often accused of; their first priority is themselves, and so that's where the benefits are aimed. Sure, the recruiter who posted this saw it as an opportunity for recruiters who had lost their jobs, but any benefits to them were contingent; the company's benefits were more locked in.

The fact that this was put out there for people to critique points to that disconnect. People don't normally volunteer for a beating, and I don't think that this person intended to, either. They simply lacked the ability to see this from the point of the view of the audience they were presenting it to. And I would venture that this is because being able to take that outside perspective isn't highly valued in the organization that this person works for, or the business community at large. Or maybe it's a targeted myopia, that prevents people from seeing the objections to the way they do things. After all, everyone who had a comment likely worked for a business, or had done so in the past.

The Pursuit of Cash

In the recent "The Chase Glitch Proves Checks Are Stupid" episode of the Slate Money podcast, Felix Salmon, with some backup from co-host Elizabeth Spiers, argues that the young people who wrote massive checks to themselves thinking that they could obtain free money this way should be forgiven, because "Gen Z" simply doesn't understand how checks work.

Personally, I think the problem is that a lot of people, and not just "Gen Z" don't understand how money, let alone banking, works, or even what money really is. So it makes sense that it's unrealistic to expect young people to understand how checks actually work. But I don't think that forgiveness should be on the table so easily, because even of young people didn't understand check fraud, I suspect that a lot of them do understand taking something from someone else, and thinking that they would never be caught.

If you haven't heard about this, the basic gist of it is simple: A person writes themselves a check for some (usually fairly large) amount of money, deposits that check into a Chase automatic teller machine, and when the ATM shows the new account balance, withdraws some amount of money from the machine... generally much more than their original balance had been. The check bounces, because there wasn't enough money in the account to cover it, and the would-be clever person now finds themselves deep in the red. This had been touted on TikTok (because of course it was) as an "infinite money" "glitch" over the holiday weekend and while the number of people who rushed to take advantage of it has been wildly overstated, there have been several examples of people online showing their bank balances going negative once things started shaking out.

While I understand the idea that many of the people who showed off the money they believed they'd been able to get on social media didn't have the mens rea for check fraud, attempting to take advantage of a perceived flaw in a system to benefit oneself at the expense of the people who run the system isn't exactly above board behavior. If a person can reasonably be expected to understand that ATMs don't print the bills they dispense to people, then it's reasonable to presume that people understand the money comes from somewhere, and likely belongs there. After all, this is not a situation in which the understanding was that Chase was holding some sort of promotion or giveaway, and people thought that the bank was intending to give them money with no strings attached.

Rewarding ignorance, or even making it less painful in circumstances where it otherwise carries consequences, creates something of an incentive to ignorance. High profile prosecutions of people for attempted check fraud, even if they didn't understand that's what they were doing will push people towards realizing that understanding how their bank accounts actually work is better than not understanding that. Harsh lessons are still lessons, even when it seems distasteful to teach them.

The Dying Daylights

I was reading through Axios the other day, and came across the following graphic:

It purports to show how many hours of sunlight places "lose" between the Summer Solstice and the Autumnal Equinox, given their locations in the contiguous 48 states.

This strikes me as a particularly obvious example of a news outlet using a negative framing of a story to drive clicks. Once one leaves the Tropics, the differential between the roughly 12 hours of daylight on the Equinoxes and whatever the "longest" and "shortest" days of days of the year are rises, accelerating as one nears the Arctic and Antarctic Circles. Here in the Seattle area, as the graphic indicates, the difference is more than three and half hours. This should be evident to anyone who understands how the axial title of the Earth works; the difference is greater here than in Miami, because Miami is much closer to the Equator.

So of course the more northern latitudes "lose" more daylight during the Summer, because they "gained" more in the Spring. It's the very nature of the beast.

There may be something to be said on the effects of the changing amounts of daylight on people who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (although the primary driver of the condition here in Seattle seems to be the fact that it's commonly cloudy throughout the Autumn, Winter and Spring), but a slapdash story concerning the changes in the length of the day doesn't begin to touch on it.

Hand in Hand

I was listening to Russ Roberts interview Richard Reeves on "the problems of boys and men in today's America" on EconTalk today. To be honest about it, a lot of it seemed like a fine whine, with Professor Roberts and Mr. Reeves united in the opinion that men were suffering from a crisis of meaning/significance due to a sense that they weren't needed. This was, of course, mostly discussed as an "everybody" problem, rather than something that men need to sort out for themselves. Or, considering the emphasis on families, something that fathers needed to teach their sons to deal with.

Things picked up towards the end of the discussion, when a particular variation on the "marriage contract" was discussed. Put simply, the deal was this, women enter into marriage to gain financial security, and men enter into marriage to learn to be mature and "civilized." When feminism removed the need for many women to be dependent on men for their livelihoods and material well-being, men lost access to the emotion work that women performed on their behalf. (Note that colloquially, this is often called "Emotional Labor," but sociology Professor Arlie Hochschild, who coined both terms, used "Emotional Labor" to refer to paid work, where managing one's own or others emotions was considered part of the job.) And this makes sense; after all, if women were bringing financial and material resources to the partnership, the expectation that men would come prepared to share in the emotion work (not to mention the housework) of the home seemed reasonable. But, of course, men were slow to adapt to the new reality, and so are seen as less and less useful as partners. As Mr. Reeves puts it:

The problem is, we're in a situation now where women aren't willing to marry "idiots" [meaning being immature, referring to a quote from an acquaintance of Professor Roberts], and then help them become non-idiots. The used to be. [...] But women now are looking to marry men who've already ceased to be idiots, rather than marrying them to help them to cease to be idiots.

This lack of preparation is unfortunate, because it's not like no-one was able to see this coming. Forty years ago, when I was in high school, the Black community in the United States was already starting to deal with a lot of the concerns, like educational attainment, that Mr. Reeves mentioned to Professor Roberts. And by the time I made it into college, it was in full swing. I went to a Historically Black College/University for my Freshman year, and it seemed to me that the student body was some 80% female. I may be overstating that somewhat, but women outnumbered men by no less than two-to-one. And with Black women then being no more willing to shoulder the emotion work of maturing their partners (or marrying risky ones) than White women are now, many Black men found themselves locked out of the marriage market, and the only thing that a number of them could think of to do was advocate that women be returned to positions of dependency.

But, as was noted in the podcast, that djinni is out of the bottle, and good luck getting her back in. Because one of the things that women have purchased with their ability to pay their own bills is freedom from being in the position where an abusive or otherwise poor partner is better than not having a partner. I can't think of any rational reason why women would want to go back to a situation where their needs were so easily, and brutally, used against them.

It's interesting. I know a guy, and I've known him since we were children, and he and I had a version of this very same discussion. He was angry over not having found the partner he wanted, and I pointed out that he wasn't a person that his desired partner (or anyone reasonable) wanted, and he said that he would be, because being with her was the catalyst he needed to change. The tide on this doesn't flow in his favor.

But he'd also set himself against the solution that Mr. Reeves proposed; that other men take over the process of making immature men into worthwhile partners for women, because he had so internalized this idea that such was women's work.

Society will shift, and the era of extended adolescence will end. It doesn't have any real choice. Clocks don't run backwards, unless they're very, very broken. Most women have internalized the difficulties, and sometimes the impossibility, of changing men, even if men haven't all internalized the fact that the responsibility is now theirs.

Hole Lot of Nothing

Eight years ago, when the Mercantile building, in the background, was under "renovation" (all that was retained was the brick façade), it caught fire and pretty much burned to the ground. The building across the street from it caught fire, too, and wound up being completely destroyed.

The Mercantile building was rebuilt, and is now a reasonably high-end apartment building. The building across the street is the hole in the foreground of the picture.

It's a shame and somewhat confusing, as it's not like this isn't valuable real estate. A grocery store here, even a small one, would do great guns; as it would be the only full-service grocer within walking distance of the entire downtown. Even more housing would be welcome, given how high local costs are. But here it sits, still empty, with no sign of anything being done.