Distracted

There was a post on LinkedIn this morning, claiming that when wealthy people complain about wokeness (the fight over which is pretty much over, I think) and gender issues, they're attempting to "distract" people from "something." (As an aside, one would expect that people would be clear on just what they thought this "something" was.)

What I find to be interesting about this is that no-one ever says that they didn't deal with what they understood to be the real problems in their lives because they were "distracted" by what other people were telling them were their problems. I've certainly never been in a situation where I didn't understand that something was a problem for me, because I was too busy being upset over something someone else told me to be upset about. Unless, of course, you ask the person who was telling me what they thought I should be upset over... They tended to be absolutely convinced that I didn't understand my own problems.

Part of the situation, I think, stems from the fact that there are certainly a lot of people out there who do better when certain very wealthy people do better. And if they understand that what bathrooms people use mean that the values of their stock portfolios are going to drop, they might feel they have an interest in making sure that people use the correct bathrooms. I don't know anyone like that, but I presume that they could be out there. Stranger things have happened, after all.

But I think what's really going on is a combination of confirmation bias, and appeal to authority, which has become mixed in with people's self images. For a person who understands that wokeness is simply an inversion of historical forms of prejudice and discrimination, "the first shall be last," so to speak, it's not surprising that they see that as a threat to their interests, especially people who see the economy as a zero-sum game. Lydon Johnson may have said(https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/commencement-address-howard-university-fulfill-these-rights): "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair," but for many people in the United States, programs like Affirmative Action felt like punishments directed at them, and they didn't see themselves as the guilty parties of past injustices. And so when a person who has "made it" comes out and says "woke ideology" is an obstacle to success, that feels like validation from someone who should know.

Opportunities often come at a cost to someone. And for most of American history, the opportunities afforded to straight, white men, came at a cost to gays, non-whites and women. mainly because of the perception that heads of mainstream households were both more in need and deserving of them, and the fact that in times of scarcity, the people in charge of doling out resources tend to end up with the most of them. As long as terms like wokeness and diversity, equity and inclusion come across as simply coded terms for "payback," as in making the mainstream bear the costs of opportunities for others, they're going to frighten people. And fear has a way of commanding people's attention.

Hey. Listen.

"This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wakeup call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives," Livelsberger wrote in a letter found by authorities who released only excerpts of it.

[...]

A law enforcement official said investigators learned through interviews that he may have gotten into a fight with his wife about relationship issues shortly before he rented the Tesla on Saturday and bought the guns. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation.
The soldier who died in Cybertruck explosion wrote it was intended as a 'wakeup call'

If anyone at the Associated Press, or NPR, noted the irony, it didn't make it into the article. But news sources know where their clicks come from... offering random, and sometimes completely irrelevant, details about events to the public. And so they're willing to print information from someone that they directly say shouldn't be giving that information to them in the first place. Just to pad out a story a bit more before the broader public loses interest.

I could go back and rehash what I was saying a week and a half ago about there being more interest in the murder of a child beauty-pageant contestant from nearly three decades ago than there is in say, fiscal policy, but even dead horses deserve a break now and again.

So instead, I'll see if I can make a coherent point about all of this using former President Jimmy Carter. President Carter was, in my estimation, the last, and perhaps the only, scrupulously honest man to have lived in the White House. What this meant in practice was that he didn't sugar-coat things. And while he may have had other shortcomings as the Chief Executive of the United States, I think that one of the lessons that politicians learned from his example was never to follow it.

While I'm pretty sure that the United States, as a nation, is not unique in this, it's fairly obvious what messages the population, as a whole, want to hear. Donald Trump rode his willingness to convey those messages back to the White House, even when it's pretty clear that he couldn't have been sincere about all of them, and some of them practically require rewriting the laws of economics as we currently understand them. But they lined up with what enough people understood to be true, and want the future to look like, that it lead to electoral success. President Biden did the same thing before him, and we can go on and on. And it's the same with Congress. The body as a whole has a poor approval rating, but people tend to think their own Representative and Senators are doing a pretty good job (as long as they're of the correct party, anyway).

Master Sergeant Livelsberger was attempting to foment a Republican revolution within the United States, calling on "Fellow Servicemembers, Veterans, and all Americans" to "be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary." It's a stereotypically simplistic answer for things, but the underlying sentiment, that there are serious problems with the United States that are being ignored and that the public is somewhere between complacent and complicit, is perhaps more common than it's being given credit for.

President Carter made the point that the United States had serious problems, and look where it got him. Not because of the message itself; there's no shortage of people who are willing to say there are problems. But because of the implication that the solutions wouldn't be easy or inexpensive. The letters that the Las Vegas police have released seem to point to the solution being as simple as chasing Democrats out of national government and going back to the 1950s. Nothing more than several days of inconvenience and ignoring several decades of social change. But no real mention of the blood, sweat and tears that would be required. The things that people seem to shy away from when there's anything else on offer.

Because, I suspect, they feel they've earned their leisure. And they'll turn a deaf ear to anyone who says otherwise. And I'm not going to exempt myself from this. I'm not exactly a fan of the higher tax rates (and accompanying lower standards of living) that would be required to sort out the nation's finances. I'm simply resigned to the fact that it's something that must be done, and soon. But I'm not dumb enough to think that it's an attractive way of looking at the world.

And Around

Another New Year's Day in Seattle.