Elemental

The question of whether Israel's actions in the Gaza strip constitute a genocide has been hotly debated for nearly as long as the latest fighting between Israel and Hamas has. Now, a pair of Israeli human rights groups have weighed in on the side of calling it genocide.

Genocide has a specific definition in international law: particular acts carried out with intent to destroy a group in whole or in part.

And it's the word "intent" that's really become the stickler. While many people point to statements from Israeli politicians, like the comment from Yoav Gallant that Israel's opponents were "human animals" to explain their positions, the fact remains that the case for whether the government of Israel intends, as a matter of policy, to exterminate or displace the population of Gaza, is, at this point, purely circumstantial. Which doesn't mean that Israel is innocent of the charge, but it does mean that it's difficult, like any charge that requires mens rea, to prove.

The law often uses language differently from the way the public at large, or subsets thereof, tend to use it. Consider anti-abortion activists using the term "murder" to describe the procedure, or people using the term "kidnapping" to describe the arrests of immigrants by ICE agents. In places where and under circumstances when abortion is legal, it is, by definition, not murder, just as when ICE agents are legally allowed to detain someone, their doing so is not kidnapping.

In the case of genocide, the calculus is a bit different; here people tend to judge what is happening based on outcomes, even though international human rights law is based on intent, and if that intent is there, the predicate acts don't have to be particularly horrific, or even effective. They simply need to happen at all.

It's unlikely that there is a formal document, somewhere in an Israeli government office, that spells out a deliberate plan to engage in

... any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

— Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2

And if there is, it hasn't come to light, so people are left to infer the requisite intent. There is a certain degree to which the inferences a given party makes are related to their overall partisanship concerning the issue. Which is what makes the statements from B’Tselem and the Israel branch of Physicians for Human Rights newsworthy; they could be expected (at least by outsiders) to side with the Israeli government and so their inference that the government intends to destroy the Gazan population, in whole or in part, carries weight.

But it doesn't settle the issue. This is, after all, a matter of law, and it's judges, not human rights campaigners, who make the final decisions. Whether they decide that the elements of the crime are all present, or if judges decide at all, remains to be seen.

Background

It's a difficult thing to examine something that one cannot see. Accordingly, I understand the challenge of attempting to take a close look at my blind spots. Technically, blind spots are not absolutely invisible, the real problem tends to be if they're at the point where they're visible in one's field of view, one has bigger problems.

Recently, I've found myself wondering what my "blind spot" is, in the sense of things that affirm the way I look at the world, such that I'm prepared to simply take them at face value. I suspect that it has something to do with complexity; I tend to be more accepting of stories in which people are doing something that makes sense for them, but has consequences for others, than I am of stories in which people are straightforwardly good or evil. The thing about such stories, I'm finding, is that they're unfalsifiable, for the most part. Even when they aren't anonymized, I simply have no way of looking into someone's brain and understanding what they're thinking. Accordingly, there's a lot of assumptions involved.

And the assumptions I make about the world are, generally speaking, true. The same as they are for everyone else, even when my assumptions and someone else's assumptions are mutually exclusive. And this is due to that same unfalsifiability. If I assume good intent, and someone else assumes bad intent, the "proof" of either of our assumptions tends to be our own readings of the reality of the situation. The same readings, it turns out, that created the assumptions in the first place.

Which is really just a long-winded way of explaining, at least to myself, why I think that my own blind spots would be difficult for me to see; they're born of how I see the world, and blend into it. Which is what makes separating them enough to actually examine them in detail difficult. 

Summer Blooms

A summer rose, and its understudy, basking in the sunlight. 

Wrong Bottle

MAGA turns on Trump!

Oh, really now? I must have missed that. Because if Congress is any indication, Donald Trump still has a very secure voter base that he can use as a weapon against any Republican legislator that dares to disagree with him.

Sure, there are people who were positive that the alleged "Epstein Files" were going to prove their suspicions that prior Democratic administrations colluded with the "Deep State" and an international secret society of wealthy pedophiles to do damage to the United States. And once the cat was out of the bag, they'd all be marched off to prison and/or a firing squad and all would be right with the world. And they're a bit miffed that there doesn't seem to be a cat, or a bag, for that matter.

And, okay. So what? These people may not be as enthusiastic about President Trump as they were a few months ago, but that's not the President's problem. Okay, they can agitate for someone whose thinking is more to their liking to mount a primary challenge against Republicans in Congress who aren't being vocal enough about getting the "evidence" out there, but the rest of the Trump electorate isn't likely to go along with them.

And so the (left leaning) media stories that have come out recently, purporting to explain how this time, President Trump may have actually alienated voters his coalition depends on seem like just so much more wishful thinking. The hoping that President Trump has finally made one misstep too many is understandable. The President is playing the role of Culture Warrior in Chief, and he's willing to go to great lengths to punish organizations he deems as being opposed to him and the people who support him. If something doesn't change, and relatively soon, he's going to inflict irreparable harm on a lot of people. And given the fact that Republicans in Congress have no real reason to pick a fight with him (after all, if things blow up, he'll be a convenient target for the blame) and the current Supreme Court may as well be on his payroll, mass defections by Republican voters are pretty much the only chance they have.

But I don't think that there's a djinni here to grant that wish. The President's core voters don't have anywhere else to go... non-Trumpist Republicans have pretty much been run out of the party and they're certainly not going to vote Democratic, so if they want to have any hope of Washington D. C., continuing to privilege their interests, then Trump it is. Abandoning this project simply has no upside for the majority of people who identify with the MAGA movement. While it's unlikely that a change of control in Congress would result in President Trump being removed from office, it would certainly remove any momentum his administration has left, and leave him a lame duck.

Given this, I don't see President Trump being in any real jeopardy, at least at the moment. There's simply no-one he could cross that his base holds in higher esteem than Mr. Trump himself. Of course, that can change; anything can change, so I should likely decline to make predictions about how this is going to turn out. But for the time being, wishes are what the President's detractors have. But it's a means of making them come true that they need.

Big Screen

Well, as the kids say these days, that escalated quickly.

One Andy Byron, whom I never heard of before yesterday, was at a Coldplay concert on Wednesday with one Kristin Cabot, who I'd also never heard of. The two were shown on the "Kiss-Cam," displayed on the concert's Jumbotron, well, kissing. Their reactions made it evident that they didn't want to be seen together (which is likely what sealed their fates...), and the internet took it from there.

Mr. Byron, it turned out, was the chief executive officer of a technology company named "Astronomer." And Ms. Cabot was Astronomer's chief people officer. Who Ms. Cabot wasn't, however, was Mrs. Byron.

Mr. Byron tendered his resignation, and the board of directors accepted it, in a statement they noted: "Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability, and recently, that standard was not met." Which is all fine and good, but the statement lacks one detail that I would like to have known: What standard was breached?

Presumably, Ms. Cabot reported to Mr. Byron, and so I can see the problem there. But in most companies, that's not an issue of standards of conduct and accountability... that's a matter of the actual rules; one does not enter into romantic relationships with subordinates. The power dynamic there is just too freighted, and so it too often results in relationships that are later labelled as sexually abusive.

But if the extent of the problem is that Mr. Byron and Ms. Cabot forgot that big concerts with "Kiss-Cams" are a bad place to carry on a relationship that's meant to be a secret (not that big concerts without a "Kiss-Cam" are all that much better), then the only people who should really care about this are Mrs. Byron and the divorce lawyers who will be tasked with ensuring that when she returns to being a single woman, she's a pretty wealthy woman.

Outside of that, no laws were broken, so what's the big deal? If sleeping with someone other than whichever partner one had committed to were a firing offense, the unemployment rate in the United States would be significantly higher than it is (or the participation rate lower, take your pick). Again, the reason why this would be verboten in most American companies is the reporting relationship, and Astronomer's statement  doesn't speak to that.

Astronomer is throwing Mr. Byron (and Ms. Cabot too, I presume) under the bus to show that they still pay fealty to a standard of marital fidelity that most Americans no longer hold themselves to. And for what? Were their customers really going to go to competitors over this? I get that Mr. Byron and Ms. Cabot's carrying on, and being called out (over, and over, and over again) on social media was embarrassing. I think I saw five different posts related to it on LinkedIn alone yesterday over breakfast. But marriage in the United States isn't what it used to be, and I'm not sure why corporate America is so invested in helping the more Puritanical elements of the general public pretend that it is.

Rationing

I suspect that people are not as much irrationally concerned with technology as they are rationally concerned that they live in a society where their fellow citizens, driven by a sense of their own poverty, will mumble regrets while watching them starve if it means getting something for slightly less than it would have cost them otherwise. Technology is not the threat, it is the tool that actualizes the threat that a perceived need for thrift poses to those whose employability is tied to other people's willingness to make discretionary purchases.

Specialization, brought on by technological advancement, has allowed people to become very good at skills that are required neither for society to function, nor for people to care for themselves. This puts them at risk of losing their livelihoods when other people feel straited. 

Pre-Ocean

The creek that runs through the greenbelt behind my home. A few miles from here, it empties into Lake Washington, which still maintains, via the Ballard Locks, a connection to Puget Sound. The water that gets to there can then make its way to the ocean, and see the wider world.

I should go out into the Pacific one day. But I have no idea what I would do on a cruise. 

Graffiti Wars

An interesting case of dueling graffiti that I encountered today at Seattle's Gasworks Park. I'm not sure what's going on with the Star of David on the left side of the frame, or what came first, but it's fairly clear that, on the right side, someone set out to make the swastika into a set of four connected stars... at least once the figured out what a Star of David should look like.

Swastika graffiti pretty much always draws some sort of response to it, which may be part of the reason why it pops up as often as it does. Trolls, I imagine, are much more common than actual would-be Nazis. 

Is a Magic Number

There have been a number of layoffs in various sectors of the tech industry over the past couple of years or so. Some people managed to land on their feet within a fairly short period of time, some dropped out of the labor force entirely and some entered the ranks of the long-term unemployed. Which is never a good place to be. Especially in a society that doesn't come across as a fan of the social safety net.

A lot of job seekers feel hard done by, whether it's the impression that generative automation attached to applicant tracking systems are rejecting their applications out of hand, companies appearing to use the hiring process to mine for free work or simply having to go through multiple rounds of interviews only to have the process dropped without any word. And it makes sense that applicants would find the process obnoxious, because for most roles, there isn't anyone who's accountable for the experience of applicants.

And because no-one's being graded on it, no-one's paying attention to it. I've sat through my share of business reviews, and our HR partner was constantly being asked about the size of the hiring funnel and time to fill roles. There wasn't a word about the experience of applying to the company, even for the people who were hired. The people who didn't pass the various gates of the process weren't even a consideration.

In an environment where applicants for open roles are plentiful, there's no need to conserve or recycle them. So employers don't feel a need to ensure that the process works well for applicants; if someone had a bad experience with applying and never seeks to work for that company again, well, there are plenty of other fish in the sea. And applicants tend not to want to burn bridges with potential future employers so while they might complain about being ghosted or having to do an excessive amount of homework as part of the process, they're unlikely to name names... and so even if other people were prepared to take their business elsewhere due to how a company treats applicants, they wouldn't know who to punish.

To me, all of this is obvious. Which, as my father would always remind me, means that I'm the only person who sees it. I suspect that it would be worthwhile to change that. The employment market tends to be very much opaque, and so a certain amount of conjecture and deduction is a necessary component to talking about it. Maybe it should be less opaque. Given businesses' incentives to treat everything as a trade secret, more information is unlikely to be forthcoming, but there would be value in people who used to be on the inside sharing some of their knowledge. The most difficult part of job hunting is always knowing which haystack the needle might be in; better information could have benefits all around.

(This, by the way, is post three thousand, three hundred and thirty-three. Hence the title.)

Monochromatic

Someone hasn't been paying attention until recently, it seems.

The fact that this bumper sticker is in black and white is, of course, quite intentional. It's intended to represent the starkness of the perceived divide and the stakes involved. Which made it feel theatrical to me. Of course there are differences in moral thought that manifest themselves through politics. The fight for same-sex marriage should have made that much abundantly clear. But someone suddenly finds themselves on the disadvantaged side of the politics of it all, and so they go out and buy a bumper sticker. Just to let people know how upset they are.

There have always been differences in how people viewed morality in the United States. The question has been how willing they were to conclude that the rightness of their thought gave them the right to impose their moral sentiments on other people (presuming, of course, that they see it as an imposition). And that's been a variable. Whether or not the value of that variable is high enough to erupt in widespread violence is doubtful, even though there are always people who feel that the best way to bend the arc of history towards justice is to soften it with blood. Sometimes their own, but generally that of other people. As a former co-worker of mine put it: "If you're not willing to force other people to do what you think is right, I question your commitment to your ethics."

In that sense, I would think that we're fortunate that for much of our history, many people's commitment to their ethics has been lax. Because the alternative rarely ends well for anyone, really.

Although perhaps I should say that people in general are fortunate in that those people who disagree with them tend to be more committed to their interests than their ethics. And people's interests tend to include work with, or at least not working against, people near them.

And that's really the concern one would have about the sentiment expressed on this bumper sticker; that someone is telegraphing that they're close to deciding that cooperation with those with whom they disagree is no longer in their interests, because the stakes are rising, and the costs of cooperation along with them.

People have been making noises about things reaching a tipping point for some time now, some out of fear and others to make those they disagree with afraid. But people deciding that fighting is better than cooperating is a very real risk, and the more that people on different sides of the disconnect feel that they aren't receiving what they're entitled to, and those other people are to blame, the greater the chance of things going sideways rises.

Allowance

In the aftermath of the Independence Day flooding in south-central Texas, I encountered a question online that I wasn't expecting, although perhaps I should have, given its age and ubiquity: "Why would God allow this to happen?" It was asked in the context of Camp Mystic, the Christian summer camp for girls, but could just as easily apply to the whole event.

I suppose that people will trot out the usual answers, such as the sinfulness of mankind and the need to have bad things happen in order to appreciate the good, but a different answer (or perhaps retort) occurred to me while considering the question: "What part of 'Flash Flood Alley' is difficult to understand?"

And I realized that some variation on this is likely a good response to the question in a lot of instances. A lot of places that are some combination of desirable, useful and/or inexpensive have some hazard associated with them. I mean, were it not for the fact that I live in an area cluttered with trees and other obstructions, I'd have line-of-sight to an active volcano, one that's considered one of the world's most dangerous. Were it to erupt, things in this area would go downhill in a remarkable hurry. And "What part of 'active volcano' is difficult to understand?" would be a very valid question.

While in a sense, the question "Why would God allow this to happen?" is about the seeming inactivity of the Abrahamic god in the face of tragedy (I wonder of Hinduism or Shinto ask a version of the question.), it strikes me that it's also about the idea that humans, especially worshipers, are important enough that the laws of nature (and/or human behavior) should be altered in their favor, regardless of any other considerations, including intentional or inadvertent risk-taking. The Guadalupe River watershed isn't consistently dangerous, otherwise no-one would live there (I would think, anyway), but like any number of other places (say Tornado Alley), it's not  "safe" in the sense that one can be reasonably assured that Mother Nature won't come knocking in a blind rage. And, to some degree or another, therefore, living in these places comes with the assumption of a certain amount of risk. And, comparatively rarely, that risk goes south in a big way, at least for some segment of the population. And sometimes with human help; our built environment, especially here in the United States, can be just as much a hazard as whatever natural process is in play when a disaster occurs.

There are good reasons to live and/or work in places where it's not clear that the Earth really wants anyone to be. But it's worthwhile to understand when that's what's happening. Because the reasons for not putting the resources into being well-adapted to the specific locale are often less good. Remember that I included "inexpensive" as a potential characteristic of hazardous locations. And asking why people don't look after their own well-being is likely a more fruitful line of inquiry than wondering why the Universe doesn't structure things so they don't have to.

America Third

So it seems that Elon Musk has decided that, rather than throw his hat in with the Libertarian Party, to start his own, the "America Party." Because he asked his followers on X if there should be a party "that actually represents the 80% in the middle." I suspect that Mr. Musk understands about as much concerning political polling as he does branding. But in any event, the poll said, in effect, "go for it," so here we are.

While I have nothing against new political parties in the United States, given how badly dysfunctional the Democratic-Republican party duopoloy have become, I don't fancy the chances of this "America Party" actually getting anywhere. Mainly because this really comes across as Mr. Musk simply being random again. He hasn't even come up with a platform yet. The precepts of:

• Reduce debt, responsible spending only
• Modernize military with AI/robotics
• Pro tech, accelerate to win in AI
• Less regulation across board, but especially in energy
• Free speech 
• Pro natalist
• Centrist policies everywhere else

Were proposed by someone on X, and Musk simply showed some enthusiasm for them. Which may turn out to be a good thing; these planks seem much more like Mr. Musk's personal eccentricities than an appeal to the general public from the center outwards. Were Mr. Musk inclined to retain one, a political consultant could help him come up with something better.

But it remains to be seen how effective it would be. Non-partisan voters are each non-partisan in their own way, and Elon Musk doesn't come across the the sort of person who would inspire large numbers of people to come out and vote for him and his other candidates. And even if he can, he's more likely to simply upset the apple cart than ride wave to real political influence, since the chances his America Party could win a majority in any chamber of Congress are vanishingly small.

As much as I understand his decision not to go with the Libertarian Party, he would likely be better as a financier and/or fundraiser than an actual candidate. The America Party is going to have to come across as something more than simply a pet project of Mr. Musk's, and if he's it's only visible face, it won't be able to manage that.

Localized

The goal had been simply to head down to Alki and take some pictures of downtown Seattle from there. It's not the most interesting place in the world to take pictures from, and I have quite a lot of them, but I did it anyway, with a mind towards including in a photograph in the rather uninspired idea I'd had for today's post.

Instead, I came across this:

Maybe it's just because I didn't pay any attention, but I never noticed this sort of thing when I lived in Chicago. And to be sure, they aren't everywhere in the Seattle area, but I come across them often enough that they strike me as common.

While I was taking photos of the memorial, a man came up and explained what had happened to the couple. I'd simply presumed that they'd been struck by a car while attempting to cross Harbor Ave. Despite the fact that there's a crosswalk from Luna Park, crossing the street there can feel like taking one's life in one's hands, given how people will sometimes come tearing around the curve. The reality of the case turned out to be much more grim.

As the man related the story, I started to feel that I'd been living under a rock. This had likely been a big case, if only due to how the bodies were found, and here I was, just now hearing about it. (Even true crime podcasts had picked up the story.) I'll admit to being somewhat disconnected from the news of the area, due in no small part to having ended my cable television subscription not long after the Seahawks won Super Bowl XLVIII in 2014. While I often don't feel informed after watching the news, not watching it leaves me in the same state of affairs.

But realizing that I was ignorant of this also served to point out that in a lot of ways, I still don't think of the Seattle area as "home." I've spent about half my life here at this point, yet retain the feeling of being a passing visitor rather than a permanent resident, despite not really having any plans to go anywhere else any time soon. When I think of "home," it's still Chicagoland that comes to mind, despite the fact that when I'm out there, the place has changed so much that if feels like a completely different locale. (Because, honestly, it is.)

It's weird to have lived in a place for so long, and still not feel particularly connected to it in any real sense. Perhaps that is something that will change on its own. I suspect it will have to; I'm not sure what to do about it.

Musk (L-Nowhere)

While Musk continues to muse about his third party, reports have emerged that Libertarians are trying to coax him into their corner.
How successful would Musk's third party be?

The United States appears to have two broad types of "third" parties: national, and local. What it likely needs is one that can span both. To be fair, the Libertarians are trying to cover all the bases, but they don't really come across as competitive in most jurisdictions; currently, they do best in non-partisan mayoral races (of which self-identified Libertarians seem to have won about a dozen currently). It's also worth noting that the Libertarians have a legitimate claim to being the third party in American politics, despite being a very distant third, with only about 3% of the vote in 2016, which was their high-water mark.

The general gist here seems to be that the Libertarians think that with Elon Musk's finances backing them, that they could actually become competitive in elections. And that may be true, but I'm not sure that I would bet on that. Mr. Musk's recent, open, feuding with President Trump likely means that the number of votes he could siphon from the Republicans would be fairly small, there seems to be little concern that the President used Mr. Musk as a patsy in setting up the "Department of Government Efficiency," before pushing for a budget that promptly ate all of the supposed savings that DOGE imposed and then bloated the federal budget even further. Likewise, many Democrats have nothing but anger at Mr. Musk for his role in electing the President and then in taking a chainsaw to programs and initiatives that they believed in. It's entirely possible that a Musk-funded Libertarian Party picks up disaffected voters here and there, but he's likely radioactive enough that large scale defections from both parties are highly unlikely. And defections would need to be from both parties to avoid simply becoming a spoiler, and thus a target for whomever feels their electoral chances are the most damaged.

But a bigger concern might be the obvious one... finding a constituency. Under Donald Trump, Republicans have learned that small government isn't really what they want; they prefer a government that spends lavishly on their priorities and withholds from people they don't like. And Democrats, for all that they seem to be poor at governing effectively, have never met a centralized solution to a problem that they didn't like. Given the haphazard and partisan manner in which DOGE operated under Mr. Musk's direction, I can't imagine he'd be okay with the sort of Libertarianism I have some sympathy for, and the fact that they're openly courting someone that nakedly dishonest leads me to reconsider what sympathies for them I still have.

Still, the Libertarians going from 3.2% in a presidential contest to 10% would be a really impressive showing (even it comes nowhere near what Ross Perot was able to attain), and could really have an impact on American politics, especially if concentrated in otherwise competitive states. (Here in Washington, for instance, if a Libertarian ticket took it's entire 10% share from the Democrats, the Democratic candidate would still win by a comfortable margin.) So the question becomes how many bridges has Elon Musk burned, and can any of them be repaired.