Line Up

The protestors who fly the Palestinian flag over I-405 east of Seattle were out again this weekend. I live not far away from the more northerly of the places where they set up, and saw one of their number walking to join them.

Good-For-Nothing

Back in the day, the song "War" by Edwin Starr (the stage name of one Charles Hatcher) was one of my favorites. As a teenager, I would take a tape player out with me when I cut the grass, so I could listen to it as I pushed the mower around. The song's anti-war message was pretty hard to miss, even for someone like me, who was more into the music, and it flits around inside my head from time to time.

I was reminded of it again yesterday, when I was reading an NPR article on a small rally in Israel in support of resuming Israeli Jewish settlement in Gaza. I have been of the opinion for some time that Palestinian militants shoot themselves (and the rest of the Palestinian population, for that matter) in the proverbial foot every time they pick a fight with Israel. Not simply because the casualty counts are always remarkably one-sided, but because it's always an open invitation for Israeli Zionists to make the case for their project of ethnic cleansing. And while it's not government policy in the United States to back such a thing any more than it is in Israel, the fact that there are American Christians, especially Evangelicals, who view the presence of the Palestinians in the area as an obstacle to a Messianic new world tends to seep into policy, just as much as people's belief's that crime is worse than it is or that their experience of inflation demonstrates that the economy is tanking.

But it seems that no matter how little it gets the Palestinians in the end, there will always be people spoiling for the next fight. It's possible that there's a drive for the large-scale martyrdom of the Palestinian people behind it all, but I suspect that it's really just as simple as as anyone else's reasons for backing a war; the belief that it can result in, or is the only viable path to, the desired outcome. And that people who are convinced that there's no real profit to be had in the enterprise are simply being defeatist.

Maybe it's time to own that label, however, under the philosophy of "if the shoe fits..." For my part, I am "defeatist" when it comes to the Palestinian's chances of undoing the grant of a substantial portion of the former Mandate of Palestine to the State of Israel. That is to say, I fully expect, and accept, that the result of more fighting will be the eventual displacement of a good number of the Palestinians (to where, I have no idea), and the extermination of most of those who remain. Granted the battle is not always to the strong, nor the race to the swift, but it's pretty evident that here, that's the way to bet.

And it's possible that I'm not the only one who would place their money on this outcome, and there are elements within Gaza, the West Bank and maybe even the Palestinian diaspora who have decided that they're going to go down swinging. If so, I salute them, even as I expect that I will mourn for them. But it does seem like something of a waste. Then again, I suppose that for some people, there are more important things in life than living. And I can understand the principle, even if I must admit to being unable to understand the specific application being put force here.

In "War," Mr. Starr notes that "War has caused unrest, within the younger generation. Induction, then destruction; who wants to die?" And maybe that's why the message seems to not find it's mark. For the people this conflict is forced upon, it is something worthy of unrest; it's a fight they don't want. But not all wars are waged on the wishes of "élites" who have no direct skin in the game. Sometimes, they're waged with the (sometimes grudging) support of people who understand that, despite the costs, the fight is worth it. Because I suspect that very few of the people who start these conflicts want to die. But they see it as an acceptable outcome, in the larger scheme of things.

I've noted before that I believe the Palestinian's problem to be that they have nothing to offer in return for what they understand is theirs. So they are reduced to extortion, in the same way that protestors here who chant "no justice, no peace," are playing the only card they have. Even if it would be better, even for them, to fold.

Booked

Stopped in a Barnes and Noble today, and saw these. I find it interesting that that the byline for Save America is "President Donald J. Trump," considering that Mr. Trump is currently not the President, and, contrary to what I had previously thought, the title is not conferred for life.

While it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, I do find in interesting how the presentations of Mr. Trump and Vice President Harris' books match their broader personalities; Mr. Trump being self-aggrandizing and Vice President Harris being about as low-key as someone running to be President can manage.

It was also notable that there was a children's book for the Vice President. I would have expected there to also be one for Mr. Trump, but perhaps that's not really his thing.

Partial Picture

The difficulty with staying informed isn't that the news media is necessarily untrustworthy, it's that its coverage of the world is necessarily incomplete, and editorial decisions, even when they can be inferred, are not transparent. And this is to be expected. After all, there's no independent source that one can consult that has an exhaustive list of every event, person or circumstance that may be newsworthy. So there's nothing to compare to.

Typical media incentives tend to push stories towards the more sensational, but something can be sensational without being either informative or actionable. But this is the nature of free (and even some paid) news sites. While one could say that this is due to the fact that their main customers are their advertisers, rather than their readers, advertisers don't have a big interest in story selection; they want stories that will attract the most eyeballs. And that means that news sites, as a business, are searching for the largest common denominator. The mass market, unsurprisingly, seeks to cater to the greatest mass of people.

And so what it really comes down to is my own perception of myself as an outlier when it comes to the news, based on the fact that I don't find the stories presented to be particularly useful most of the time. They can be interesting, and somewhat diverting, but they often strike me as being more entertaining than particularly informative. But, again, not having a worldwide index of everything that's going on at my fingertips, I couldn't say whether the coverage as I encounter it is representative or not. I simply have the impression that I'm outside the target demographic for it.

Lying Down

Here's a really cold take on things: If you tell someone something that they really want to believe, because it lines up with something that has high emotional salience for them, there's a good chance they'll believe it.

This isn't new. So why do journalists (of all people) seem to have so much trouble understanding that this is how people work? "America's Gullibility Crisis" is an article from Axios that mainly demonstrates, well, if you tell someone something that they really want to believe, because it lines up with something that has high emotional salience for them, there's a good chance they'll believe it.

Surprising, I know. But when Texas Republican Chip Roy shares a headline that turns out to be faked, or "Pro-Harris accounts" claim that Karl Rove is campaigning on her behalf, the reason these things catch on is simple: Republicans want to believe that Democrats could only win November's election via fraudulent means, and Democrats want to believe that Donald Trump is so loathsome that even Karl Rove would rather see Vice President Harris win.

I'm not clear on why this is so difficult to understand, or why it's considered newsworthy. Wishful thinking isn't a new concept. Part of it may be that this all seems really sudden. The American public didn't seem so invested in partisan and personality-driven politics a decade ago, and journalists may not have been prepared for the phenomenon, even though it's been there all along. But I suspect that this is also something that been relatively rare in affluent White communities. The sort of motivated reasoning that underlies Axios' "gullibility crisis" had been more common in poor and minority communities (where people felt that government didn't work for them, or was actively working against them); but that's not where the national media spent much time. So, like any number of other concerns, it was safe to ignore until it "went mainstream," as it were.

But while motivated information intake and reasoning may be alarming to journalists, especially those that lean Left, for most people, it simply isn't a problem. There's no cost to them for believing that Democrats are plotting to falsify election results or that high-level Republicans are abandoning Trump's ship. It simply doesn't matter; no-one's paychecks depend on them getting that information correct. And correct information is only useful to the degree that it makes things work better or more smoothly. In politics and culture (especially during culture wars), that's simply not the case. And if there's no benefit to being right, why wouldn't one expect people to believe whatever they want to?

Left In

Every election cycle, the State of Washington sends a Voters' Pamphlet to each home. It's a convenient way to see who, and what, is on the ballot this time around. I've paged through mine, and checked to see how many parties were fielding candidates for President. This year, in addition to the Big Two, there are eight.

Three of them stood out for me:

• The "Socialism and Liberation" Party
• The "Socialist Workers" Party
• The "Socialist Equality" Party

My first thought was, "Wow. That's a lot of Socialist parties." Then, I became curious why. There could be any number of reasons.

It's possible that one or more of them are not seriously contending the election. Now, to be sure, there is a sense in which none of them, or any of the other "third" parties, are seriously contending the election. I'd be impressed if any of them managed to pull in a full percentage point of the vote, and utterly blown away of they managed two points. Their chances of winning a single electoral vote is, flatly, zero. But here I mean not serious in the same way that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and his "We The People" Party is not seriously contending. They are on the ballot here in Washington in hopes of siphoning enough support away from Vice President Harris and Governor Walz that the Trump/Vance ticket might have a shot at winning; "We The People" has removed themselves from the ballot in states friendly to Mr. Trump.

And it's possible that the trio of Socialist parties are more of the same, on the ballot here in Washington with Republican support, in hopes that disaffected Progressives might take the opportunity for a protest vote, and maybe give Trump/Vance a shot at an upset.

It could also be a party-building exercise. I'm always dubious of third parties attempting to run for the Presidency when they don't appear to hold any down-ballot offices; mainly because a) there's no chance that they'd win, and b) even if they did, they wouldn't have any members of Congress that they could rely on to help advance their policy platform. But it's reasonable to presume that the various Socialist parties have placed themselves on the ballot in Blue states, because they're mainly looking for name recognition, and Blue states offer them more bang for their buck in that endeavor. Pushing back against this theory, however, is the fact that I have seen exactly zero yard signs or billboards for them; relying solely on the Voters Pamphlet would bring them to the attention of people like me, but precious few others. But this sort of third party strategy would explain why I didn't see any parties that appeared to be running to the right of the Republicans.

Which brings me to something else that occurred to me. As I noted, there weren't any parties that appeared to stake out a position to the right of the Republicans. And maybe that's because the Republican platform appeals more to the Far Right of American politics than the Democratic platform appeals to the Far Left. As much as the Republican caricature of the Democratic Party casts them as unrepentant (although not always open) Socialists, there have always been Socialist parties in the United States that have sought to stake out positions to their Left. And there are any number of Progressives, for that matter, who are of the opinion that the Democratic Party leans too far to the Right of American politics.

While I have heard of third parties that have sought to occupy the space to the right of the Republicans, there have never seemed to be as many of them. Now, it's possible that, not really attempting to win the election, they've adopted a strategy of only appearing on the ballot in Red states, the opposite of what I conjectured above. In such a case, I'd never hear of their candidates unless they somehow made the news.

So maybe what's happening here is that between the two major parties, there is a rightward skew; the "non-partisan" area between them is not in the center of American political thought, but is itself somewhat to the right. This would leave a greater vacuum on the Left, and, as such, more parties have arisen to fill that void. Being a random weblogger, rather than a political scientist, I have no idea.

So, in that sense, it's not even an educated guess. But it's an interesting phenomenon, regardless of the precise cause.

To Speak, or Not to Speak

I started listening to the Misinformation and the Three Languages of Politics (with Arnold Kling) episode of EconTalk. I made it about a third of the way through, and then gave up. Not because I had a problem with Professor Kling's notions that giving one entity the power to censor others is dangerous, or the idea that the antidote to bad speech is more speech, but because the discussion between Professor Kling and Professor Roberts seemed to go out of its way to avoid the real question that lies at the heart of things like "misinformation" and "censorship": Who is empowered to decide what is harmful?

It was already a given that some speech should be punishable, because it was harmful: Professor Roberts called out threats of violence early on. And in the wake of this, the idea that Holocaust denial, for instance, was effectively harmless was assumed, but never examined.

And while I understand the idea that thee is no harm done to anyone by the simple fact that someone claims that the killings of some six million Jewish people and another six million others didn't actually happen, there are nations in Europe that have decided otherwise. So rather than simply condemn them for being overly censorious in a misguided attempt to protect the hypersensitive, I think that a discussion of the various metrics have for determining whether, and when, people are harmed by speech was in order.

Because no matter which decision a government comes to, someone is going to be unhappy. Either someone feels that their free speech rights are being trampled (or they aren't being given a right that they should have) or someone's going to conclude that harms to them have been trivialized.

And the body that decides between these incompatible interests is not the censor, but whomever decides what it is the censor can sanction people for.

Replacement Holiday

A lot of the stories that I recall about Christopher Columbus from when I was child were Hero stories. The brave and intelligent Columbus making a perilous journey, and in so doing, demonstrating how wrong about the world the benighted and backwards other Europeans were. After all, most of them thought the world was flat. And if someone pointed out that the Greeks had be able to demonstrate the Earth was round, Renaissance Europe looked even worse; they'd somehow managed to forget what had already been established about the planet.

This story is, of course, false. The reason many people felt that the Columbus expedition wouldn't work was they they knew the Earth was spherical, and they knew roughly how large a sphere it was. If the whole distance between the west coast of Europe and the east coast of China had been open ocean, no-one would have heard from Columbus or his men ever again. But "Columbus lucked out that there happened to continental land masses within range of his ships" isn't as inspiring a story.

In any event, Columbus Day was basically instantiated as a celebration of Italian Americans. (Although now there is a theory that says that Columbus was a Spanish Jew.)

But that's changing now, with the push to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day. Which, of course, has a Hero story of it own. The brave and upstanding Native Americans, dealing with oppressive colonialists from across the ocean, and in so doing, demonstrating how morally bankrupt the benighted and backwards Europeans were (I'm sensing a theme here). Having been enabled by Christopher Columbus (who didn't "discover" anything, since people already lived here), they brought diseases, forced migrations and involuntary religious conversion to the Americas.

In any event, Indigenous Peoples Day is basically being instantiated as a celebration of Native Americans.

As I've noted before I'm somewhat cynical about the whole push for Indigenous Peoples Day. It throws Cristoforo Colombo under the bus but doesn't otherwise do anything... as some Native American activists have pointed out.

But in the end, holidays like Saint Patrick's Day, Juneteenth, Cinco de Mayo and Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples Day don't come across as celebrations of the various peoples that make up the United States. They're days to go shopping and/or to have a party, but other than that, who cares? I don't see any of this as creating a nation that celebrates the different people that make it up. But maybe that's too much to have ever expected.

Linked Together

Some years ago, it was evident that LinkedIn was changing. In part, because the system is flexible enough for people to approach it from a number of different directions.

The problem isn't that traditional LinkedIn also has to make room for Linktagram, FacedIn, SnapLink, WhatsIn and LinkTok. It's that these might not be equally valuable to everyone, but there's no way to focus on the experience one wants. For me, LinkedIn takes all of these different ways of interacting, puts them through a paint shaker and dumps them out on me as an undifferentiated mess. So I have to do the work to sort through my feed to find what might be of value to me, when some really simple features would make that much, much, easier.

As it is now, they compete. And as more people move to one mode or another, that mode can come to dominate people's feeds, even if it not that useful for them. I had been able to stem the tide somewhat with aggressive use of the Mute feature, but since that was deprecated, I've had to start unfollowing people to manage things. Which is an unsatisfactory solution.

The late, lamented, Google+ (well, I lament its passing) had, for a time, a nice functionality called Circles. Circles allowed user to group their contacts into buckets, and then send posts to those individual buckets. So I could create a Gaming circle, for instance, and my posts about Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop games could be aimed to those people I knew would be interested. Here on LinkedIn, when I look at my Activity, it's broken down into Posts, Comments, Images and Reactions. While LinkedIn has created an algorithmic recommendation engine of posts it thinks I might light, I find it difficult to keep up with posts from my connections. Being able to see, for instance, just the posts of my first-level contacts from time to time would make the platform more useful in that regard

This won't solve everything. There are always going to be people who feel that they're doing me (and themselves) a favor by manipulating things to get something in front of me in spite of my active disinterest in it. But if LinkedIn can find a way to make it easier for people to experience the site on their own terms, they'll be on to something.

Counter Signed

 

With the elections being in less than a month, campaign yard signs are still common in the area, and that means that sign vandalism is also common. The general pattern is simple: When a Republican campaign worker is putting up signs (such as those in the background), they uproot any signs for democrats in the area, as has happened to these signs for Representative DelBene in the foreground.

Larger signs, that can't be easily pulled up or knocked over, are simply destroyed. It's gotten to the point where large campaign signs simply aren't put up anymore, given their expense and the certainty that they'll be cut to pieces. It's a tit-for-tat game where each side blames the other. But the small signs still abound; even if they spend about half their time lying on the ground.

Grinding

The current conflict between Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement (known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas) turned one the other day, and currently shows signs that it has a long and healthy life ahead of it, with Hezbollah and Iran having joined in the fighting. This is, as always, bad news for the residents of the Palestinian Territories. Gaza has received the worst of it thus far, with more than half of the buildings in the territory damaged or destroyed, and just over 42,700 people killed since the fighting began.

And this is always the way of things. While it's led some people to speculate that Hamas cares more for attacking Israel than it does for protecting Gaza, I have a sinking feeling that the reality may be worse, and the dead and injured in Gaza are seen as literal martyrs to Israeli aggression, people whose suffering is tallied as proof of the enemy's evil.

Given that Gaza's population is somewhat greater than two million people, even the current level of casualties could be maintained for decades without depopulating the place. And if tens of thousands of deaths, plus many more injuries and displacements aren't enough to push the belligerents to make some sort of accord, one can see this dragging on and/or recurring again and again.

The restoration of the Mandate of Palestine is simply not an option for any sort of foreseeable future. Even a return to the 1967 borders seems to be a pipe dream at this point. The current population is Israel isn't going anywhere, and since Israel is more populous (by about a factor of three) than the whole of the Palestinian Territories and there are always more Palestinians killed or injured in the fighting than Israelis, Hamas' actions are never going to have the desired outcome. The Palestinians are always going to come out on the short end of a war of attrition.

But that's the thing about religiously-driven conflicts, I think. There is always an understanding that a power greater than military capability (or simple mathematics) will decide things. Even if a demonstrated track record of a divine thumb on the scale of conflict is lacking.

The whole thing feels like a large-scale feud, marked not by progress to a conclusion, but an interminable series of outrages and reprisals, as each side seeks to prove that it has the greater stomach for the conflict. Grudges can last a very long time; some have continued on for centuries, perhaps even stretching into a millennium. I suspect that this one will, in the end, be a viable candidate for that kind of longevity.

Cascading

A statue with a fountain in it.

It was a nice day out today, so I went out with my camera to take some pictures. I'm not sure that this statue/fountain was the most interesting thing that I encountered, but it found it striking, so here it is.

One Drop

The problem isn't that no one raindrop feels responsible for the flood; it's that no one raindrop believes that its absence would have made things better.

I understand the idea that the choices that individual people make aren't particularly important, and that social systems need to change in order for certain segments of the population to experience justice. But I think that this attitude, while well-intentioned, leads people to think that their own contributions to how the world works are too small to be at all important. But what is a system other than the actions of a group of people over time?

Haunted

Character.AI allows people to create, well, generative "AI" characters (who could have guessed). And. earlier this week, a user created one of Jennifer Anne Crecente, who was murdered by her boyfriend in 2006, when she was 18. The family was not happy.

But what's up in the air at this point is what can be done about it. While people are angry with the company on the family's behalf and calls for lawsuits have already started, as is common in such things, no-one has yet pointed to any laws or regulations that have been broken. And while the American legal system is convoluted enough that it's generally possible to find something that can be grounds for a civil tort or criminal charge, that's not a good use of the law.

What's going to be put in place to deal with this will, more than likely be driven by emotion, rather than sound legal doctrine. While it's possible that it will turn out that the creation of large language model-based character chatbots will be limited to the person that the character is a likeness of, that strikes me as unlikely. There is going to be a market for representations of people who have already died; Hollywood will see to that, and they're unlikely to settle for always needing to deal with all of the heirs and other relations of an actor they would like to resurrect for a movie. Let alone historical figures, whose extant families might easily number into the hundreds or thousands of people. Even making exceptions for people killed by violence seems unlikely to fly, in that circumstance.

Still, something will likely have to be done. Society will demand it, and it's difficult to say that anything should go.

The technology ethos of "move fast and break things" means that it's always going to be ahead of the regulatory state, which moves quickly only when Congress is overreacting to something. And even then it can't match the speed of innovation. The resources to allow government agencies to actually attempt to get out ahead of things like this are not forthcoming, and even if they were, businesses have a tendency to keep secrets in the name of competitiveness.

It would, I think, be better if a public consensus could be reached on what limits and prohibitions should be placed in technology, but that would require a level of cooperation that's unlikely to come into being any time soon.

Don't Wait

One of the technologies that the advance of generative automated systems (otherwise known as "generative artificial intelligence") has created some enthusiasm about, at least in parts of the technology sphere is "Autonomous Agents." Put simply, an autonomous agent is a system that can act to achieve one or more goals set for it without needing continuous supervision from a person, and has a certain ability to learn from its actions and feedback; adjusting its subsequent actions accordingly. These may not rise to the level of artificial general intelligence, but one could imagine them as expert systems.

I was reading an article on the expected future benefits of such systems and I noted that any discussion of the effects on employment were conspicuously absent. And this is something that's only going to become more important over time, considering that dockworkers on the East and Gulf coasts are looking for "absolute airtight language that there will be no automation or semi-automation," at the ports. In any event, during the ensuing conversation, my interlocutor sought to tie this back to earlier periods of technological change saying: "The individuals who understood and prepared for the changes were the ones who adapted and thrived. This will be a challenge that, as a society, we’ll need to address, and hopefully, we can learn from past experiences to improve our approach moving forward."

Hope, however, is not a strategy. And neither is asking individuals to correctly guess what the future is going to look like, even a year from now. Technology corporations often consider the exact details of their progress towards goals to be business secrets, and to expect people to understand which jobs will be viable going forward and which ones will wither and die is unrealistic.

One of the enduring problems that the United States labors under is the general lack of unity of the populace. It's valid to make the point that American Individualism has lead to quite a bit of progress and invention, but it's also lead to people who fall behind being, as often as not, left out to dry by fellow Americans who attitude might best be summed up as "better them than me." As the ability of technology to do work that currently requires people advances, this is going to become a bigger and bigger problem. Waiting to find out if it's going to depress the overall need for labor is not a workable plan; that threatens to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. The last thing that we need is to be in a position where companies are rushing to implement widespread automation in order to slash their labor costs before large sections of their customer bases find themselves unemployed and without viable prospects. A situation where it takes literal generations for labor demand to rebound will not be pretty.

So the time to start looking at the future of labor is now. Someone has to get started on this. And, as I well understand, when one looks in the mirror, "someone" is looking back at them. I have no idea what needs to be done. But I guess I'd better start finding out. I don't know when or even if genuine autonomous agents are going to arrive. But society needs to be ready before they do.