Killer Argument

I'd never actually understood the logic to work that way...

I've heard "I doesn't make sense to kill people to show people that killing is wrong," often enough that it's just another cliché, and I don't think much about it. In large part because I'd always found the logic of the slogan to be weird. The purpose of punishments isn't demonstration, but deterrence.

In any event, I'm not sure that the logic works even if one takes it at face value; because courts routinely hand down penalties that would be crimes if anyone else were to impose them themselves, sometimes for the same sorts of behavior. Let's take the obvious one: Were I to forcibly bring someone to my home, find them guilty of some infraction or another, and lock them in a spare bedroom for some amount of time, I would, when caught... go to jail/prison. The state would, basically, imprison me for imprisoning someone to show that imprisoning people is wrong. But I've never heard someone argue that logic as a reason that prisons should be abolished. Of course, the world is a big place, and I'm sure that the argument is out there somewhere, but I haven't encountered it yet. The closest I've come is the libertarian Non-Aggression Principle, but it more or less argues against any after-the-fact punishments that require the use of force, since it only sanctions force to stop rights abuses.

There are other arguments against the death penalty that take into account the unique (or somewhat unique) characteristics of the practice, but in this particular case, the argument being made seems like a special pleading.

The Dislike Engine

Affective polarization, the effect where opposing partisans have an active dislike for the other party, and its voters, leads to inanity like the National Security Advisor adding a journalist to a sensitive chat being conducted on a non-secure (at least by government standards) platform, and then making lame excuses for it.

Michael Waltz should have been shown the door, and the whole lot of people on the chat, including Vice President Vance, should really be feeling the heat. This sort of sloppiness has no viable justification. But the Trump Administration is circling the wagons, and attacking Mr. Goldberg, and eventually this will all blow over. Because who are the voters who are supporting President Trump going to look to for accountability here? The Democrats?

Because what affective polarization does is make the other side worse. No matter what happens. In large part because it shifts the locus of attention from what was done to who did it. And when actions are judged by the actor, rather than on their own merits, the verdicts tend to turn on people's perceptions of what kinds of people they're dealing with. And in a nation where "our side" and "their side" are often taken as signifying "good" and "evil," those perceptions can be very black-and-white.

The other down side of this mode of thinking is that there's never any benefit in doing something that doesn't play to one's own supporters. If the Trump Administration did admit that proper protocols weren't followed, meted out discipline and took concrete steps to improve, this wouldn't earn them anything... Democratic lawmakers and their voter bases wouldn't have any real incentive to give them credit for taking the right steps... the incentives of affective polarization are to move the parties father away from one another, and isolate them. And in that environment, accountability is a weapon, and little else.

But this is the path the United States is on, and so there's little to be done but make the best of it. Even if the best won't be very good.

Mixed Message

 

Bad Ends

While we cannot know the detail of the negotiation talks that have taken place behind closed doors - what we do know is that Israel halting aid entering Gaza 17 days ago was an attempt to force Hamas into offering new concessions.

That hasn't worked so far and now it appears Israel has returned to violence in order to try to extract a new deal, one that is more favourable for its political leaders, and one that offers fewer wins to Hamas.
Why has Israel bombed Gaza and what next for ceasefire deal?

I don't think that I am the only person who believes that Hamas isn't daft enough to believe that Israel would abide by whatever new agreement it extracts from them. And that's the problem with breaking a deal in order to attempt to win a better deal; it gives the other party a pretty good reason to doubt one's honesty and intentions. (But what do I know, considering that Hamas is daft enough to think they can force the dissolution of Israel?)

Although Hamas still seems willing to negotiate while the United States is a party to the talks, so there may still be some possibility that some sort of agreement can be reached; but since the Trump Administration has made no bones about the fact that it's clearly on the side of Israel, I'm curious what it brings to the table in all of this. It's certainly not going to hold the government of Israel to any agreements it makes.

I am still of the opinion that, sooner or later, all of this inevitably ends in the deaths and displacement of the Palestinians. It may not be this conflict, or the next, but it's coming, one way or another. Arab leaders may view Donald Trump's plan to empty Gaza (and I'm sure that the West Bank will come up eventually) of its residents and remake the place into an Israeli-run resort as an insult, but if President Trump could be trusted to live up to his end of the deal (and there's very little chance of that) it would likely be the best outcome that they could hope for. (Although why any sane person would want to get anywhere near a resort that's going to be under constant attack by angry former residents of the area is beyond me.)

The central problem in all of this is the same as it ever was, namely:

Hamas, to put it crudely, has one card to play in the negotiations: the hostages.

The Palestinians, as a people, have nothing to offer Israel in exchange for being allowed to stay, in either Gaza or the West Bank. They can go the "no justice, no peace" route as they have been, but we can see where it's gotten them. And while there is an Israeli Left that's willing to stand up for them, they don't have the political clout to get someone into the office of Prime Minister. Unless something changes, and gives them from real bargaining power, bad deals are likely to to be the only ones the people of Palestine ever get.

One or the Other

In a 1,300 word story, sometimes, two sentences are important.

In the lawsuit, Energy Transfer says Greenpeace participated in a publicity campaign that hurt the project and the firm's bottom line — allegedly raising the cost of construction by at least $300 million.

Greenpeace denies the allegations, saying it played a limited, supporting role in the protests, which were led by Native American groups.
Jury says Greenpeace owes hundreds of millions of dollars for Dakota pipeline protest

Because the question that I have is a simple one... Which is it?

The article talks to a few legal experts, but shies away from the important question: Did Greenpeace actually cross a line such that Energy Transfer had some legal grounds to sue them. While I understand the "David and Goliath" nature of the case lends itself to labeling the action a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, or SLAPP, the right to protest is not unlimited, so it is, at least in theory, possible to take a protest to the point of committing a civil tort against the party being protested against. So I think that it's worthwhile in a story like this to actually talk about the case itself, and not simply its presumed implications.

Juries are neither perfect nor above criticism. So there's no reason to presume that if one or more of the three people that NPR quotes in the story felt that the jurors had erred in some way, they could say so. Pace University associate law professor Josh Galperin says he thinks that Energy Transfer's "real concern is the persistence of the protest — the way it is capable of turning public opinion," but even he doesn't say that the jury was mistaken in their decision. Just because Energy Transfer may have had ulterior motives in bringing the suit doesn't make it without genuine legal merit.

This being NPR, I don't believe that they set out to deliberately bury some evidence in their possession that Energy Transfer may have been in the right. Instead, they're catering to their audience, who, being left-leaning, are likely to see Greenpeace as the victims here. So they're approaching the story from that angle. This isn't journalism shading into advocacy, it's journalism that starts from a presumed truth and presents the case for that understanding of the facts of the matter. And I don't know that there's anything wrong with that. It just left me looking for more information than was presented.

Pushback Party

Democrats in Congress are upset over Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's decision to not filibuster the recent bill to fund the government, allowing President Trump and Republicans in Congress to avoid a shutdown of the government. There's even been talk of having Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez run against Senator Schumer in his next primary election.

But for all of the "deep sense of outrage and betrayal" that Representative Ocasio-Cortez says that Democrats feel, I'm inclined to think that Senator Schumer understood something about a shutdown that  maybe some other Democrats don't at this point: None of the problems that people in Blue America are dealing with would have been solved by a shutdown. It wouldn't have undone any of the initiatives the Trump Administration is driving. As much as I understand people's frustration with the "the Resistance," and the feeling that Democrats don't have a viable plan to oppose President Trump, simply opposing the President hasn't worked for anyone thus far... so why stick with it?

The primary problem that Democrats have right now is that many Americans feel that the party is focused on identity politics and the problems of relatively small groups of marginalized people (some of whom aren't even Americans), rather than attempting to make things better for the nation as a whole. Senator Bernie Sanders has taken some grief for the position that Americans aren't really driven by racial animus, but I think that he's largely right in making the point that when people are regularly eating steak, they don't mind if someone else is thrown a bone now and again. But if they believe their own problems are being ignored, they resent the work that goes into finding solutions for others.

And shutting down the government wouldn't have been a solution to anything, other than Democratic lawmakers' feelings of powerlessness. No new jobs would have been created, no price hikes ameliorated, no justice done. The best-case scenario is that the Democrats picked up a bit of leverage; but it'd doubtful they could have done anything immediate with it, and, failing that, they would have been seen as the cause of whatever misery (and, let's face it, inconvenience) would have come out of the whole thing.

Donald Trump is not, by any means, a particularly popular President, but the support he does have is a result of the perception that he's solving people's problems. He may be going about it like a bull in a china shop, but as long as his supporters don't feel that it's their plates being broken, they're willing to support him, and turn their ire on people who don't. The problem with the four years of the Biden Administration was that President Biden came to see another four years as an entitlement, rather than something that he needed to actively work for, on the terms of the electorate. The problem wasn't that is was a do-nothing administration, but that too many members of the public felt that it did nothing for them. Something tells me that Senator Schumer, at least, saw where things went wrong.

Go Team

The problem that I tend to have with partisan rhetoric is, well, it's partisan nature; in the sense that it's by partisans, for partisans, and it doesn't need to make sense to anyone else.

Take Trump Administration Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's comments to Meet the Press last week. In defending President Trump's imposition of tariffs, he said that "American products will get cheaper." His stated logic was that American farmers, ranchers and fishermen would be "unleashed" and when they "explode in value," food prices will decrease. That may as well have been in Burmese for all the sense it makes to me. What's the relationship between this "unleashing" and the costs of farm inputs? How is "exploding in value" going to raise the volume of food produced? What's going to drive farmers to produce more food than demand levels warrant? These are the sorts of questions that I, as someone who isn't a Republican partisan, would like answers to. But I understand that I'm not going to get them, because I'm not in the target audience for Secretary Lutnick's comments, which is, well, Republican partisans.

Partisan cheerleading, whether it's comprehensible to non-partisans or not, is par for the course in partisan environments because people think that it delivers results. If, as I suspect, Secretary Lutnick is attempting to head off, or at least blunt, a looming recession by keeping consumer sentiment high (at least among Republicans), he could just as easily chanted "Brick-a-bracka, firecracka! Siss, boom, bah! More tariffs, more tariffs! Rah, rah, rah!" because what matters isn't the words used, but whether or not the home crowd cheers. In that sense, it's irrelevant what the ground reality is, or appears to be, for other people; what's important is that the right people buy into the message of "It will be great; you'll see!"

But the public at large is made up of more than just "the right people." There are skeptics, critics and the simply neutral in the audience, and their behavior plays a role, too. If the actions of committed partisans were enough to drive specific outcomes, one would think that the United States (and a lot of other places, for that matter) simply wouldn't ever have economic downturns. Surely, George W. Bush, for example, could have mobilized enough committed Republicans to avert the Great Recession if they could have prevented it by themselves.

Partisan rhetoric is an invocation of mind over matter in the sense that "those who mind, don't matter." Secretary Lutnick, and the Trump Administration as a whole, appears to believe that only the people who cheer when they speak matter, despite the fact that this strategy (or non-strategy) hasn't worked out well for people in the past. I'm inclined to chalk a good part of this up to the idea that presidential Administrations tend to see themselves as unique and special; and there's no reason why the Trump Administration would avoid that particular mindset. But I wonder how much of it is a willingness, if not a desire, to believe one's own rhetoric. It's tempting to think that Secretary Lutnick himself believes his comments to "Meet the Press" to be simply so much rambling nonsense, but I don't think I'd be surprised to learn that he's actually convinced himself that an adversarial approach to international trade should be taught in Economics 101 courses as a sure-fire means to rapid economic growth, and the fact that it doesn't make intuitive sense to me is simply proof that I'm a hater.

Try Not

There is a quote from The Empire Strikes Back that gained rather remarkable longevity: "Do, or do not. There is no try." It's a pithy saying, and Yoda is a memorable character, and that might be why it's lasted for so long, but like a lot of otherwise mundane things, there is some wisdom in it. But I didn't get that until decades later when my girlfriend and I were watching a Tony Robbins video. I could always take or leave Mr. Robbins, but my girlfriend was a fan, and so I watched. A woman in the audience was telling Mr. Robbins about some or another problem she was having, and, when he gave her an action to take to work towards a resolution, she said that she would try. Mr. Robbins stopped things and spent a bit of time doing a deep dive on "trying" until he basically came to the point that setting out to try to do something was different than setting out to actually do it. Trying, he noted, was putting forth enough visible effort to shield the person from blame if they failed, and they often expected (if not planned) to fail.

It was an interesting point, one that hadn't occurred to me before, and it stuck with me. I started evaluating my own actions in terms of trying versus doing, and paying attention to the world around me in those same terms.

There is, I've noticed, a lot of trying in politics, where failure is often seen as a sign of incompetence, regardless of how unrealistic the task at hand might be. And so avoiding blame can sometimes seem to be the singular goal of office holders. It's a side effect of the sort of promises that are expected of people who run for office, at all levels of the ladder. Including, it turns out, the President of the United States.

I think that the Trump Administration has set out to try to improve the economy, and Americans' material prospects, because it really doesn't matter if they succeed at it. It's the nature of partisan politics; one's supporters will always be willing to make excuses for failure and one's critics will offer no credit for success, so expending political capital on genuine effort to make change comes across as pointless.

So the Administration embarks on prosecuting the Culture Wars instead, while it's surrogates and spokespersons insist that trade wars, declaring Biden Administration programs fraudulent and dismantling federal agencies will somehow spark lower prices for domestic goods and create a booming job market. And the fact that financial markets, not to mention large swaths if the general public are starting to look askance at this is chalked up to politics, rather than an understanding of economics.

It has the hallmarks of an attempt to avoid the blame for failure, rather than working to succeed. To be sure, this isn't a situation that's unique to the Trump Administration; they're just, in being more nakedly partisan than earlier presidential administrations, dialing it up to 13. Because, I believe, President Trump still cares about public opinion. Although perhaps "Republican opinion" is a more accurate term. So long as Republican voters never get to the point of seeing him as incompetent, he'll be able to retain his role as de facto owner of the Republican party, even if he's no longer eligible for the office of President. And he's likely to need that, because if Congressional Republicans ever come to see him as a liability, they're likely to sacrifice him to their own political ambitions, if not simply survival. And so he has to appeal to his base of voters. Because, try as he might, he still needs them more than they need him.

Hidden Away

An old co-worker shared an article about a teen who committed suicide after being targeted by an extortionist. The scheme has become known as sextortion, and, from what I understand, has become fairly common. Tragic endings to it, fortunately, are still fairly rare. It's the sort of thing that gets people up in arms, but I think that there's a social component to it that's often missed.

While often described as a scam, it's more accurately seen as a form of blackmail. Here's how one Reddit group describes it:

This scam occurs when you meet a woman/man on dating service/social media site/forum/wherever and they ask you to go on Skype, WhatsApp, Telegram, or another messaging system. They will ask you to exchange naked pictures, and they will usually ask you to include your face in the pictures. They will then threaten to reveal the pictures to your family/friends if you do not pay them.

Where things go entirely off the rails is when a teen doesn't have the money to pay the escalating demands for money (since extortionists don't stop with a single payment) and is convinced that being dead is better than being outed.

American society, while not perhaps literally Puritanical about it, tends to be uncomfortable with sexuality, especially young adult sexuality. High school and college students are often expected to be effectively neuter, with no sexual feelings or even an understanding that sex exists. And this is what the extortionists play on; a young person's desire to live up to this unrealistic expectation. Accordingly, there is a need to hide this part of themselves. And society often plays along with that. Consider this description of sextortion from the article:

The scheme is when scammers target people, often young boys, and coerce them into sending explicit images.

Casting the young person involved as having been coerced into sending the photos that are then used against them avoids recognizing that young people are quite often easily prompted to act without thinking when there is a promise of sex, a relationship or even being seen as sexually desirable.

Greater understanding and acceptance of this would, I think, go a long way towards averting some of these tragedies. A person letting their sexuality get the better of their good sense shouldn't be something that young people feel will result in them being cast out of the families and peer networks. The shame that America society uses as a means of social control can come with a higher cost than makes any sort of sense.

Daily Bread

A protest outside of a local Indian restaurant. I suspect the new management is the problem. I don't eat Indian very often (especially given how common it is around here) but had still managed to hear about the ownership of one of the local places. They have acquired a reputation for stiffing their workers in some remarkably creative ways, and so, as they've expanded their business by purchasing other restaurants, protests have followed them.

Fairly Shared

The problem with the ability of people to do what they will, it often seems, is that they do things that someone else disagrees with. Especially when they're doing it with resources that someone feels are better used for other things.

I was reminded of this when I came across this article on Melinda French Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs, Anne Wojcicki and Mackenzie Scott; which has been trending recently on LinkedIn. I found the criticism of Elon Musk in the left-leaning article to be amusing: poor Americans in Red states have long been critical of NASA for being focused on space exploration, when that money was (obviously) better spent on themselves. Mr. Musk taking a chainsaw to government programs has been cheered by people who are certain that money that was once going to fight AIDS in Africa or to pay for news subscriptions will now be allowed to line their pockets in the form of lower taxes. Everyone, it seems, has a better use for the money that someone else is spending on things. I've learned to be quiet about my own hobbies when in certain company, lest I be reminded, yet again, of just what good the price of a set of Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks (let alone genuinely fancy dice) could do for this or that group of poor people somewhere.

I've heard ethics defined as "What we owe to each other," but in a society where people often feel straited while others have "more than they could ever use," that often tends to shade into what people feel that others owe to them. People tend to cast their gaze up the socioeconomic ladder, acutely aware of what they don't have. And I expect that the Trump Administration is going to bring a lot more awareness, as people's loss aversion sensitizes them to any program or benefit that may go away, and leave them holding the bag for the advantages that administration allies appear to gain.

The commitment to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has always been dubious in the United States; the impulse to take from others to look after oneself has always been strong, and periods of prosperity broad enough to suppress it have been rare. In large part, I think, because resources don't care where they come from, or how they were obtained. Altering the distribution of resources tends to be an easier lift than procuring more resources, leaving people with room to complain that the current distribution is unsuitable for them.

Home Street Home

There is, in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood, a bit of street that's been blocked off in the service of making a couple of the corners easier to navigate. This small patch of pavement has what looks like some public art in it, but its primary use has become a campsite. As I've noted before, Ballard is something of a destination for certain members of the area's homeless population, and while the city may clear an encampment from time to time, and even take some fairly stringent methods to keep them away, the problem tends to simply migrate to the nearest place that hasn't been blocked off. And, as one can see, it's migrated here.

While President Trump has promised a coming Golden Age in the United States, at the rate things are going, I doubt that there will be much sign of glistening before the next round of elections in November 2026. While the Make America Great Again crowd will likely still have the President's back, that's not going to be enough so save Republicans in Congress, and it's unlikely that Democratic majorities in the House of Representatives and/or the Senate will be quite as willing to sit back and allow Mr. Trump to continue whatever plans he has in mind.

So at that point, will it have all been worth it? I suspect that the number of people sleeping in tents on the pavement, in Seattle and outside of it, will have grown, perhaps quite substantially, by late 2026. Will there be a bright light on the horizon that will give those people inclined to give Mr. Trump the benefit of the doubt a reason to do so?

Partisans like to claim that anyone who doesn't back their guy is rooting for failure, and while there might be some truth in that, most people don't genuinely want the results of that failure. Most people... there are always going to be a few who decide that it's worth it whatever the cost. But most Americans aren't that big on things they want being expensive... it's (a small) part of what has brought the United States to where it is. And if people who aren't hardcore supporters come to the conclusion that whatever they get from a Trump Administration is more expensive than it could have been, they may not vote Democratic, but they're going to walk away. And any real chance for Mr. Trump to make things better will go with them.

I don't care for his tactics, but I don't want to see Donald Trump fail in improving the economy. More poverty, more desperation, more people in tents out on the street does not make things any better; for me, or for anyone I know. I'm as skeptical of the Trump Administration's current actions as President Trump (at least to appearances) is confident in them. It's a big possibility space, so we could both be wrong. But if one of us is going to be right, I'd rather it be him.

Ballard is a nice place; to visit and to live. But it's a lot better when that living is indoors.

Which Problem

The first thing that comes to mind, every time I see yet another online argument that pits "meritocracy" against "diversity" is:

A brilliantly inspired solution to the wrong problem is still solving the wrong problem.

Regardless of whether one believes that the Trump Administration's hostility to "diversity, equity and inclusion" programs is born of a sincere desire for the United States to operate solely on some or another definition of merit, or is little more than a fig leaf covering a mindset that wishes to return to the days of openly discriminatory hiring practices (which wasn't really all that long ago), the argument over it misdirects the spotlight.

In accepting the framing that the number of desirable jobs should be limited when compared to the number of people who want them, the focus moves away from remedying scarcity to managing (and sometimes, it seems, nurturing) it. And there's no way to manage scarcity that will force everyone, especially those who can't get what they need, to concede that the distribution is fair. And because "fairness" is not an objective attribute of anything, it will always be a bone of contention.

There is no value in looking for yet another way to figure out who should be left without a piece of the pie. It's simply a recipe for argument and division. But sometimes, I suspect, that's the point, given that there's no way to win a fight that doesn't happen.

Behind the Curtain

Politics has a way of making people stupid. Or just appear so, in any event.

• "If I'm gonna be fair these questions needs to be asked today. Why is the release of the Epstein list always a shit show?" tweeted Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy.
• "What's the point of booting out illegals and criminals while somehow becoming a safe haven for the Tate brothers?"

MAGA world erupts over Andrew Tate release, Epstein stunt

Given the fact that he owns a successful media company, it's highly unlikely that Mr. Portnoy honestly doesn't understand what's in play here. The Trump Administration expected the broader Republican voter base to reward it for it's actions. Mr. Portnoy feels the need to project ignorance because the alternative is to look bad. But politics makes everyone look bad, and it couldn't do a better job of it had it been purpose-built to do so.

The Trump Administration may have miscalculated, but the calculations are pretty clear. To the degree that Jeffrey Epstein is considered to have colluded with the "élite," it is the Democratic political, technology and social "élite" that has been accused of aiding and abetting him. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that "The Epstein Files: Phase 1" are going to back that up, even if they needed to be heavily edited in order to do so, and the Trump Administration was expecting that people would start going after prominent Democrats on that basis. Again, that assumption may have been mistaken, but given the way this has been working out in the past, it wasn't unreasonable or irrational. (Why the Judiciary Committee decided to Rickroll people, however, is completely beyond me.)

As for the Tate brothers, President Trump pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, despite supposedly believing that drug trafficking should carry the death penalty, as an open reward to Libertarians who a) voted for Mr. Trump and b) believed that Mr. Ulbricht was being persecuted by an overreaching state. Given that Andrew and Tristan Tate have also cultivated images of themselves as victims, their popularity among right-leaning young men and the fact that unlike the stereotypical American image of a drug dealer, they're White, it's not much of a stretch this time either to see the Trump Administration believing that there were political benefits to being seen in their corner.

Given that a large part of media savvy is understanding how people think, it seems unlikely that Mr. Portnoy wouldn't have grokked this. But the open transactionalism and potential hypocrisy do make parts of MAGA world look bad in the eyes of people who are important to them. (In other words, people other than Liberals/Democrats.) But this is the nature of politics, especially politics in a nation where people tend to care more about the outcomes they want than any level of consistency in the processes employed to attain those outcomes, but are still self-conscious enough about it to not want to be seen that way. An unwillingness to be honest with oneself and others tends to have that effect.

As much as I would love for the American public as a whole to drop the pretense, it's not going to happen. Public piety still demands lip-service to certain precepts, while insisting on sincerity. And so there will be people who make a show of that sincerity, perhaps because they've worked very hard to believe in it themselves. But even when they don't, given the consequences from deviating from the script, I expect that people will still continue to read from it, and express surprise when it's at odds with reality.