Dealt Out

I read "President Donald J. Trump's Plan to End the Gaza Conflict," which was appended to the NPR story on its announcement. It left me with a question... Who makes sure that the Palestinians get what they're promised? None of the 20 points mentions any sort of agreement that's binding on all parties.

I'm not sure that any rational person would expect the government of Israel to adhere to the spirit of any agreement, even if they were to live up to the letter of one, unless some sort of formal sanctions for noncompliance are involved. There's simply too much bad blood there. And of course President Trump thinks that he's an absolutely trustworthy partner, but given they United States' more or less reflexive support of Israel, I can't see why the Palestinians would take him at face value, either. There's no accountability for either the United States or Israel to ensure a good outcome fore the people of Gaza. And Prime Minister Netanyahu has shown a willingness to openly cross President Trump, and his predecessors, when it's suited his purposes to do so, mainly because strong Evangelical support for Israel is a check on imposing consequences.

Perhaps it's a testament to a person's ability to convince themselves that everyone else's opinion of them is in line with their own self-image. President Trump appears to think that this is such a good deal for the remaining members of Hamas that they'll simply give up the fight, but if that were the case, they'd already be suing for peace. And if the Palestinians were ready, willing and able to aggressively police one another for the sake of Israel, things wouldn't be in the state that they are right now.

A good deal comes across as a win for everyone involved, and it's hard to see how this particular plan gets to that point, given that it's basically a call for an unconditional surrender on the part of Hamas, and sets up Gaza to be controlled by someone who doesn't really appear to have the interests of its residents at heart. It could be that the President understands that, but the threat to allow Israel to "finish the job" of destroying Hamas relies on people thinking that the only reason why that hasn't happened already is the United States forcing moderation on the Netanyahu Administration. I'm not convinced that there's widespread belief in that position.

But there's also a strange paradox built into this plan. Both the United States and Israel claim that Hamas is not a legitimate government in Gaza. But Hamas agreeing to the plan would be a green light for President Trump to effectively take over the government of Gaza with this "Board of Peace." But if Hamas doesn't speak for the people of Gaza, it also can't agree to hand over governance to an international body on their behalf. And it's pretty much a given that as soon as another armed insurgency of some sort starts shooting people, or blowing things up, because they feel that they're getting a raw deal out of all of this, all bets will be off. And they likely will come to see this as a bad deal, because it's highly unlikely that Israel would allow a truly sovereign, reasonable self-sufficient Palestinian territory on it's border. Because a Palestine that could defend itself from Israeli incursion could attempt to launch incursions into Israel. And a strong police force that had the support of the people of Gaza can't also be one that's seen to be a tool of the Israeli security apparatus.

Of course, I'm not a Middle-East researcher, or an expert in crafting international agreements. So things could work out swimmingly. But even given the current situation in Gaza, I can't imagine the groundswell of support needed for this plan to succeed actually materializing. Mainly because this deal isn't being made with, or for, the people who are going to have to pay for it.

Not As I Do

Looking back on today's post now that I've written it, I think that this could have simply said "Partisanship encourages the tendency to deny that the failures of one's preferred party are, in fact, the party's own," and been another entry in The Short Form. I may have gone off on a rant, instead. But, what's done is done, so...

The Week's most recent Saturday Wrap kicks off with its "Controversy of the week; Trump: Demanding the prosecution of his political foes," which offers a quick summation of what various news outlets are saying about it. One of the sites it draws from this week is the conservative National Review.

Trump’s demands of Bondi are an “outrage,” said National Review in an editorial. But “Democrats paved the way here.”

The Week tends to paraphrase things in its wrap-ups, sometimes in ways that obscure the broader meaning, so I went to the National Review's editorial to read it for myself.

President Trump’s weekend social media post pressuring Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute his political enemies is an outrage against the Constitution’s guarantees of due process and equal protection under the law.

Sadly, it is also more of the same. Democrats paved the way here with the lawfare abuses on which Trump is doubling down.

One can make the case that American politics only dislikes Whataboutism until it's a useful tool to be deployed against one's rivals and has little risk of being clearly inaccurate, but there's another tendency from American politics on display here: Claiming that "they started it."

Personally, I'm not convinced of the truth of that claim; accusations of lawfare against Donald Trump necessarily come with the presumption that there is no legitimate reason to think that any of the cases against the Mr. Trump had any genuine legal merit. And the National Review's cheerleading is on weak ground here. The only legal case they actually seem to take aim at is New York v. Trump*, which it describes as "an abusive prosecution with no fraud victims in which the absurdly astronomical damage award was recently voided by an appellate court."

Fraud and theft, however, are not the same thing. The National Review is attempting to make the case that lying about one's assets to receive favorable treatment from a lender, or simply to receive a loan in the first place, doesn't count as fraud, so long as the loan is repaid. But that's not how the law works. Sam Bankman Fried is not in prison because he stole money from people... but because he made them take risks that they were not aware of. Now that his investments are being unwound, the investors (or, more accurately, the current holders of those claims... many people, incorrectly convinced their money was simply gone, sold their claims for less than face value) are looking at anywhere from 20%-40% over and above their original deposits. Why should the Trump Organization get off any easier than a fraudster who actually made money for the victims of the fraud? And besides, in the very ruling that vacates the disgorgement portion of the penalty as excessive, the Court notes:

As to the Attorney General’s motion for summary judgment on the first cause of action, Supreme Court found that Executive Law § 63(12) required that the Attorney General prove only that the [statements of financial condition] were false and misleading, and found that defendants repeatedly or persistently used the SFCs to transact business. Supreme Court found that “the documents here clearly contain fraudulent valuations that defendants used in business, satisfying the Attorney General’s burden.”

And this sort of cherry-picking, siting rulings only to the degree that they are favorable to one's case, is common in American politics. Granted, in this case, the lack agreement between the court's five justices lends itself to such selective interpretations.

While it's true that the appelate court voided the high judgement against the Trump Organization, again, in the ruling it says: "Because none of the three decisions garners a majority, Justices Higgitt and Rosado join the decretal of this decision for the sole purpose of ensuring finality, thereby affording the parties a path for appeal to the Court of Appeals."

So while it seems that the court did find the disgorgement order excessive, it was struck down, rather than being sent back to be recalculated, so that the appeals process could move forward. This has been cast as a victory for the President, but it seems more of an administrative matter to me.

The problem with claims of "lawfare" is that the underlying allegation, that court cases are being brought for political reasons, doesn't have a formal process to find fact. When the National Review's editorial notes...

The tension has been resolved over time by the norm that, while presidents guide the DOJ’s enforcement priorities as to subject matter (e.g., more emphasis on border enforcement, even if that means less on, say, public corruption), the administration of justice in individual cases proceeds without political interference — conducted by theoretically nonpartisan prosecutors, applying the law as written and checked by the independent judiciary.

Trump is grossly disregarding this practice.

...They then proceed to insinuate that Democrats had done the same. Whether my own basic research into things refutes that insinuation is left to the reader, but more to the point, if President Trump is "grossly disregarding" the precedent of "the administration of justice in individual cases proceeds without political interference," why does it matter if someone else didn't?

Here I would note that the National Review avoids claiming that either the Biden Administration or the Governor of New York actively sought to push unwarranted prosecutions of Donald Trump. "Former FBI director James Comey" and "New York State Attorney General Letitia James" are not the chief elected executive officers of any federal or state jurisdiction. They did not pressure anyone to bring cases against Mr. Trump. And even if one believes that they were incorrect in their assessments of Mr. Trump, nothing has come forward to say that they were acting in bad faith.

And this (finally) gets me to my biggest gripe with the National Review's take on things. By claiming that "Democrats paved the way here" the National Review absolves President Trump for what is a clear escalation. "The Democrats" did not do what President Trump is doing. President Biden did not publicly lean on Merrick Garland to bring United States of America v. Donald J. Trump, Waltine Nauta, and Carlos De Oliveira. Likewise, New York v. Trump was not the result of a pressure campaign by Governor Hochul. This is not a case of partisan business as usual. The President is demanding the targeting of people he feels have wronged him out of personal pique, and a sense that since they are bad people (as is everyone who opposes him) they must be guilty of some culpable illegality.

Claiming "they started it" because people like President Biden and Governor Hochul didn't step in to forcibly quash the proceedings is, in effect, to justify the President's open interference in the workings of the Department of Justice on the grounds that Democratic politicians didn't previously openly interfere in the workings of the Federal and New York Departments of Justice.

While it's commendable that the National Review is willing to risk the ire of Republican members of Congress and President Trump's voter base to come out at say that the President's open political interference in the workings of justice is bad, their inability to seek placing ultimate blame elsewhere demonstrates one of the biggest problems with partisanship; the inability to admit that parties, including the parties one supports, have interests, rather than principles. The National Review's conclusion references "the public’s disdain for lawfare." If such a disdain existed, we wouldn't be seeing this. Republicans not liking it when they believe that Democrats have behaved badly, and Democrats not liking it when they believe that Republicans have behaved badly, does not add up to a broader public disdain for bad behavior. Especially when each group of partisans believes its members can do no wrong. It's simply partisanship. Genuine disdain does not engage in "they started it," or "whataboutism." It simply condemns. And as long as the public of the United States is divided against itself, no such simple condemnation will be forthcoming. And it's disingenuous to pretend that it will. 

* More specifically: People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, Allen Weisselberg, Jeffrey McConney, The Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, The Trump Organization, Inc., Trump Organization LLC, DJT Holdings LLC, DJT Holdings Managing Member, Trump Endeavor 12 LLC, 401 North Wabash Venture LLC, Trump Old Post Office LLC, 40 Wall Street LLC, Seven Springs LLC 

Fair or Foul

Who will be moderating TikTok now under these new owners? Who, from this board of Trump allies, will be setting the policies? We can expect a significant portion of TikTok’s users will be unconvinced by Trump’s assertion that “everyone’s going to be treated fairly” on the platform.
The TikTok Signing Was Good Theater But Only the First Act

I don't think that the "significant portion of TikTok’s users" are necessarily wrong in their skepticism of President Trump, mainly because I note that the President said "fairly," and not "equally." President Trump comes across as one of those people for whom "fair" means something along the lines of "in accordance with what they deserve," and it's pretty clear that, as a committed egoist and partisan, that what people deserve is judged in accordance with how he feels they treat him and Trumpism.

In this sense, the President isn't being dishonest. Disingenuous, perhaps, but not dishonest. Because I don't think that I'm the only person who understands what President Trump thinks of as "fair." Even if the President isn't being clear about it in the moment.

Given the way that the President has acted up to this point in his second term, one would be foolish to think that all political perspectives are going to given equal time on a TikTok run by people who support the President or want his support in turn. Because the President, and his supporters, have very clear ideas of which political outlooks are legitimate, and which are not. And so those TikTokkers who are left of center, let alone openly Socialist or Communist, are going to find that a Trumpist-run TikTok actively works against them. And to the President's mind, that will be fair, because they're bad people, and bad people don't deserve a platform for their ideas. And with Trump allies controlling the moderation of TikTok, the political Left in the United States will have less of one.

In this sense, it's worth taking the President at his word, if for no other reason than to understand how he sees the world and the role of social media platforms in it. The problem with TikTok has stopped being that ByteDance is beholden to the government of China, and thus cannot be trusted to push back against requests for data about American citizens that China may want to exert leverage against, and has morphed into TikTok having the potential to be a way for the President to broadcast his message to people who have no real interest in signing up for Truth Social and/or have fled X. And while TikTok, under the control of allies of the President, is less likely to make an effective intelligence platform for the Chinese Communist Party, it's more or less guaranteed to be to pressed into service as a bullhorn for the Republican Party. And I suspect that there's an impression that TikTok's audience is more captive than X's, and therefore more likely to stay awhile, and listen to the President's messaging. Whether or not the bet that there won't be an exodus pays off remains to be seen, but I think that a lot of people regard it as fairly safe.

David Frum once noted the following about the workings of justice in China in The Atlantic: “What’s really going on here is something once explained to me (in a different context) by a China-watcher: ‘They say that an official who has done wrong will lose power. But what really happens is that an official who loses power will be accused of doing wrong’.” And this encapsulates the President's idea of "fairness." Now that the Left is out of power in Washington D.C., it is accused of doing wrong. And the Trump allies who are poised to purchase the American branch of TikTok (if it ever happens) understand this. And as long as Donald Trump is allowed to position himself as the final arbiter of fairness in American society, any media outlet he comes to control will reflect that.

1B or not 1B

The numbers tell the story: Indians still account for 70% of H-1B recipients, but only three of the top 10 H-1B employers had ties to India in 2023, down from six in 2016, according to Pew Research.
Trump's $100,000 H-1B visa shock: Why US may lose more than India

This somewhat undersells things. This story, from Al Jazeera, makes the change plainer (it shows head to head numbers from 2014 and 2024). But the BBC does nod to it: "Indian outsourcing giants such as TCS and Infosys have long prepared for this by building local workforces and shifting delivery offshore." And raises a question. If TCS and Infosys have been scaling back their use of H-1B visas to bring workers into the United States, and we're not hearing about their businesses suffering, what was up with all of those workers they were importing? If Tata Consulting and Infosys could start hiring domestic labor once they saw the writing on the wall, what was stopping them previously?

There's an unspoken assumption in the H-1B visa debate, when it comes to supporters of the program, that the skills that the United States was importing simply weren't otherwise available. But what is India providing graduates that the United States is not? Not much other than a willingness to work for lower wages, as far as many Americans are concerned. As far back as 2013, Rutgers University put out a paper questioning the persistent complaints from business leaders about a talent shortage.

According to [the Council of Advisors on Science and Technology's] analysis of the engineering workforce, the nation is currently graduating about 25,000 more engineers every year than find work in that field.

They also noted that in 2011, when Steve Jobs told President Obama that the primary obstacle to employing 700,000 Americans in manufacturing was an inability to find workers, at going labor rates, that many domestic hires would have zeroed out pretty much all of Apple's net profit for the year. And this is what leads to the widespread skepticism about the H-1B visa program (and outsourcing, for that matter) among Americans of many political persuasions... the suspicion that it's just a way to lower labor costs at their direct expense. And so more and more American workers feel that their incomes are being sacrificed in the name of corporate profits, and that credulous politicians (like President Obama) were buying into cynical corporate misinformation. And while some Americans are cheap enough to look the other way when people a few towns over are rendered unemployed, there's a certain self-importance that tends to to awaken when unemployment comes for them, personally.

The idea that the main reason that Indian companies like Cognizant, Tata Consulting Services, Infosys and Wipro led the list of H-1B visa utilization in 2014 (and three of those companies are still in the top ten) is that they were Indian companies, preferring to hire Indian nationals (rather than Americans) to work in the United States, became pretty well entrenched. And the boosters of the guest worker program tend to avoid addressing that, instead turning to the tried-and-mostly-sucessful playbook of claiming that labor is the one commodity that somehow avoids having its price drop with greater availability.

There are, of course, all sorts of predictions that the United States labor market will fall apart without the approximately 100,000 annual entrants that the various H-1B programs allow. But if, as the Rutgers paper suggests, part of the reason that Americans were avoiding STEM fields was that the degrees were expensive and competition from guest workers made the return on that investment uncertain, in a handful of years, the shortfall would be made up.

The problem with the Trumpist way of doing things, though, is that it's not likely to stick. Students who suspect that the next President won't continue the policy are likely to go into other fields, not wanting to face a sudden influx of guest workers showing up just in time for them to graduate. The President's open nativism doesn't help, either, as it taints the entire exercise with a whiff of racism that people who would otherwise support the change want no part of.

Shareholder primacy and profiteering, abetted by a political class who feel they need piles of money to get their messages to a passive public, are starting to drive more and more conflict between the business class, who are seen as the haves, and general public, who view themselves as the have-nots. The ghost of President Reagan's trickle-down theories of economics still haunts Washington D.C. (not to mention many state capitals), and politicians seem to constantly buy into empty promises that corporate welfare will turn into corporate largess for the population at large.

President Trump understands this, and is tapping into it. It's remarkable that he's managed to play a fairly strong hand so poorly.

Last Act

I was coming home from having spent the evening with some friends when I passed this small rally? memorial? for Charlie Kirk. This was out on the edge of the greater Seattle metro area, the "drive until you qualify" zone that high housing costs closer in tend to push people to. As a result, it's something of a convergence zone between the deeply-Blue Seattle area and the fairly Red rural parts of the state.

Most of my social circle, and pretty much all of the people within it that I actually see on a regular (even if infrequent) basis are left-of-center, even the ones who live out in the boonies, and passing this prompted me to wonder how much it matters whether political segregation in the United States is physical or not. I doubt the men in this photograph have been talking with their more Liberal neighbors, given that none of the Liberal people I know in the area have been reporting such conversations.

This is not to say that no such conversations are happening. I still talk, sometimes, with the more Conservative members of my circles. But these are people that I've known, sometimes for a very long time. They aren't the result of outreach "across the aisle," as it were.

The idea that Charlie Kirk was in the business of dialog and debate has become something of a given for many people, in the days after his death. But one of his best-known tactics, that of making assertions about some topic (or some people) and then inviting people to "prove him wrong" wasn't a style of debating; it was simply showmanship. No random person on the street (especially not a random college student) was going to have the very specific information needed to force a concession from Mr. Kirk or his audience that, say, Justices Kagan, Sotomayor or Jackson never benefited from any formal or informal "affirmative action" initiatives; if for no other reason than such programs aren't about individuals. The "Little Rock Nine," and other situations where schools were forced to make room for specific, named individuals, and it was clear that they wouldn't have been admitted otherwise, is not the norm.

There's nothing wrong with showmanship and advocacy, or even blending the two. A lot of people who have driven significant social change in the United States have had some level of a showman's instincts. After all, there are a fair number of preachers on the list, and the line between a good preacher and a good showman has always been thin.

But putting on a good show is not the same as really communicating with other people in a way that advances the two-way movement of ideas an understanding. 

Decreed Quiet

If there is going to be a discussion of the role of social media in spreading violence, with the goal of making the point that it's now reasonable to suppress online speech in the name of a safe society (for some definition of "safe"), I would submit that domestic violence is a much more pressing problem than political violence.

Political violence makes headlines precisely because of its rarity. That, and the fact that it tends to befall people other than the usual victims. Domestic violence, on the other hand, is newsworthy only locally, if at all, specifically because it is so common, even if it's only about 20% of the overall homicides that take place in the United States. Unless it's a wealthy or a celebrity family, it's simply background noise.

Political violence tends to be regarded in the same way as (suburban) school shootings; political figures, like suburban schoolchildren, are presumed to have an entitlement to "safety" that large swathes of the general public (including many married women) are not granted. It's only certain violence that's "not supposed to happen." But if society is going to be okay with the rest of it, the sudden hand-wringing over specific incidents feels like people attempting to make the things that frighten them into public concerns. Which seems a tough sell in a nation that's demonstrated a remarkable ability to ignore the problems of millions of people through judicious application of the Just World Fallacy.

There's no reason why, however, if the propensity for violence is transmitted from one person to another via uncontrolled online forums, that domestic violence wouldn't move from person to person this way. It doesn't take long to find examples of violent sexism online... one doesn't really even have to look for them most of the time. There are any number of male-dominated online spaces where casual, and sometimes unthinking, justifications for violence against girlfriends and wives are nearly guaranteed to pop up. Stopping the spread of such speech, even if it only cut the rates of intimate partner abuse by a quarter would likely do much more than dropping the rate of politically-relevant killings in the United States to zero.

Humanity has managed to be remarkably violent long before the advent of social media. Accordingly, the idea that clamping down on Facebook and the like will make it easier to maintain peace seems to be wishful thinking. And many people suspect that the Trump administration understands as much. While much of the criticism is clearly partisanship talking, the President is open enough in his opinion that his political rivals should lack the equal protection of the law that a suspicion that this is the actual end goal doesn't seem unreasonable.

But it's worth pointing out that there doesn't seem to be a lot of support for the idea that protecting everyday women is a better reason to go after freedom of speech than protecting the Conservative celebrity class among the Republican base. And I think that this is less about overt sexism than it is about partisanship. For many people, the difference between a random crazy person and a "radicalized," politically-motivated assassin is the politics of the target, and therefore the presumed politics of the killer. Politics is something so important that only other people would kill for it. As I noted before, domestic violence is widespread enough that it's everywhere.

And that, I suspect, really makes the difference here. Cracking down on social media companies in order to force them to police the speech of political opponents is just that, a way of going after political opponents, people on the wrong side of a high-stakes debate over the future of the nation. Looking to the social media (and regular media) landscape to protect the public at large tends to implicate the public at large. And it's common for people to avoid mirrors when they think the reflections won't be flattering.

Facing

A lot has been going on in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's shooting. President Trump and other prominent Republicans have called for those who were critical of Mr. Kirk, or seemed to celebrate his death to be fired from their jobs, and there have even been calls to round up and prosecute people believed to be a part of "the radical Left." The accused gunman, now in custody, is facing calls for their execution, which started even before formal charges had been filed.

This seems to fly in the face of Mr. Kirk's advocacy of the First and Second Amendments. He said that real problems would start when Americans stopped talking to one another, and he seemed to be aware of, and okay with, the idea that in an armed society, the wrong people would wind up being killed, so one presumed he understood that he might be one of them. (I would claim that he understated the problem, as even only taking homicides into account, some fifteen thousand or so people die every year from shootings.) But none of this has stopped angry voices on the Right from calling for more firings, at the implied risk of government sanctions, and calls for vengeance after the incident.

This is, to a degree, simply to be expected. Partisans tend to be good at mobilizing anger; it's a very effective tool for fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts. And there's nothing new about calls for violence after the killings of those who avoided calls for violence themselves. Few things seem to convince people of the necessity for violence more than the death of a peacemaker.

But they do tend to have a tarnishing effect, at least in the immediate aftermath, on the deceased. In this instance, Republican calls for those who are critical of their politics to be punished with unemployment are nothing new. So was Charlie Kirk simply a useful shield against criticism? Someone to hold up when it was pointed out that American Conservatism seemed to have no problems with "cancel culture" when they were the ones calling for cancellation? Or was Mr. Kirk a willing smokescreen, having taken it upon himself to present a false image of the American Right that people could cloak themselves in?

There's no way of knowing, but the seemingly immediate and quite public discarding of the tactics that Mr. Kirk appeared to pursue (at least at times) seems to justify the questioning of how important they were to the broader Conservative movement of which he was a part.

Of course, a lot of this is led by President Trump, and conflicts are too much a part of his standard operating procedure for him to ever be credible in calls for peace and unity. If there's anyone from whom calls for a ceasefire are cover for reloading the guns, it's the President. And given the degree to which the President single-handedly directs the Republican Party, it's no wonder that everyone who is anyone in the party simply does what they perceive him to want.

And that shifts the focus to the relationship between Mr. Kirk and President Trump, and I, for my part, suspect that all of the President's political relationships are fundamentally transactional. And that in this case, that worked both ways. And Charlie Kirk is mainly of use to the President as someone whose death can be held up as a vehicle to convey to the Trumpist base that they're under threat, and that only the President, with a compliant (to be generous about it) Congress can save them from the hobgoblin of "the radical Left." Whether Mr. Kirk would have approved is something of a moot point.

 P.S.: Big picture, this isn't a knock on the President; it's just how politics in a polarized society works. Recent events, however, have brought it into sharper focus. 

Recoil

Reactions to the shooting death of Charlie Kirk are everywhere, and that means that LinkedIn is no exception. What I noticed, however, was that the mentions of Mr. Kirk's life and views were all really anodyne, and stripped of the things that made him such a controversial figure. Mr. Kirk's advocacy for gun rights wasn't the thing that stood out about him and Turning Point USA to many of his critics. After all, one could plausibly make a case that Mr. Kirk was a White Supremacist, and to many in the LGBT community, he was an open bigot.

And that becomes the problem. Because there seems to be an unspoken idea that if it's admitted to that Charlie Kirk was a bad person by some or another standard, that his shooting becomes justified. And so people who want to make the point that political violence has gotten out of hand, or that it's wrong to celebrate the death of another human being wind up needing to sanitize his image, in order to make caring about his fate acceptable.

But it shouldn't need that. Okay, a case can be made that Charlie Kirk was a right jackass. That's an awfully low bar to justify a shooting.

And maybe that's all that needs to be said about it. Charlie Kirk didn't need to be a hero to everyone for his death to be a tragedy, and an unnecessary (if not wholly unexpected) one at that. But this is what a combination of hate, fear and distrust do to a nation where it's easy to be armed. Whether Charlie Kirk was legitimately a source of that hate, fear and distrust is beside the point. Even without him, it would have been there. It was Mr. Kirk's high public profile that made him a target of it. And his death exacerbates it.

Which means that, before long, it will hunt down someone else. And if that person may have had a hand in it, that will be excused, at least by some, in the understanding that humanity in death is something that must be deserved, rather than simply being something that everyone has some entitlement to.

By Association

While the United States isn't as openly Puritanical a place at it once was, there is a still a certain desire for spotlessness in some things, and this lends itself to a level of needless dishonesty.

"The president did not write this letter [to Jeffrey Epstein], he did not sign this letter, and that's why the president's external legal team is pursuing litigation against the Wall Street Journal," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday.

Trump is used to shaking off criticism - but the Epstein story is different

Personally, I wonder what the external legal team is going to say: That it's patently clear that the handwriting only looks like that of Donald Trump? Claiming the note is faked is going to be a heavy lift; the President's legal team/supporters are going to have to find a forger. If a chain of custody can be established for any length of time, there would need to be a claim that the book was planted prior to that, and it's already been pointed out that this would be a difficult accusation to square.

Democratic lawmakers and other elected officials are hoping that some ability to tie President Trump to Jeffrey Epstein will restore the law of political gravity, which is, in my opinion, wishful thinking. But the bigger question is why should it serve to bring the President down? Okay, so Mr. Epstein turned out to be a sexual predator. What does that have to do with anyone else?

The BBC article notes that people like the UK's ambassador to the United States, Lord Peter Mandelson, "very much regrets ever having been introduced to Epstein." I get that this is something of a requirement for people to stay in the public's good graces, on either side of the Atlantic, it speaks to another of those standards that people have, but don't tend to hold themselves to. If simply knowing, or being very good friends with, someone who turns a criminal was that bad, a lot of people should be in very deep trouble. But "friend" and "accomplice" are not synonyms.

To be sure, the the Administration is attempting to dig itself out of a hole that it dug for itself; if one is going to make a big deal about guilt by association, it shouldn't be in connection to someone that there's plenty of photographic evidence that the President was, once, associated with.

Still, it seems a bit over the top. Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein had a falling out in 2004, about the time when the very first allegations were being made. And there's no indication that he and President Trump ever reconciled after that point. So what does it matter that the two men moved in the same circles? Money and power have always sought access to each other, and themselves. This is simply the way the world has always worked.

Jeffrey Epstein's toxicity, even years after his death, makes him a useful tool; there's political benefit to be had in smearing him on people. But that benefit is a the result of the public not wanting to believe that a pervert can avoid surrounding himself with other perverts, and a populist desire to want to prove that the "Élite" are deliberately evil and dangerous. And one of the things that buttresses that worldview is people's willingness to play into it. Granted, it's not as if the media, politicians and other tastemakers suddenly all dropped it, that it would go away, but its influence likely would be lessened.

And that, I think would be a good thing. If for no other reason than it would make a lot of public life more honest. People keep secrets, even from people close to them, let alone people they socialize with for the sake of being seen with them, or because they're looking for some or another favor from them. They don't spill the beans to everyone they talk to who happens to be of the same social class, or has a similar bank balance. (Or happens to be in the same holding cell. I'm impressed that juries still believe random jailhouse snitches.)

I'd say that people's fear of letting "bad people" get away from them is fueling what comes across as a hypersensitivity to any indication that someone isn't entirely on the straight and narrow, but that seems to undersell what's in play. 

Slow Burn

Fatal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee in North Carolina ignites crime debate. This is a headline from the BBC, which, as one might guess, is based in Britain. So they can be forgiven for thinking that the stabbing death of Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte Area Transit System train, ignited a debate, when, in fact, this is a fire that's been burning for decades now. That fire being the tendency of "White America" (to the degree that there is such a thing) to regard the Black population of the country as agents of violence and anarchy, who, through their actions, contribute to a sense of lawlessness and unease, and therefore are legitimate targets to be cudgeled with the Rule of Law.

For all that Republican state legislators in the Southeast are railing against law enforcement officials, prosecutors and judges that they perceive as being "woke" (which here is really just another way of saying "soft on crime"), the fact of the matter is that "Prison" is not the correct answer to: "How do we keep the mentally ill, even those with criminal records, from hurting people?" It is, however, a convenient answer, especially given that Donald Trump is currently President of the United States, and Democrats are considered to be insufficiently harsh when it comes to criminals Black Americans, by the stereotypical Trump voter. (Not that Democrats hold a monopoly on this; a Trumpist acquaintance of mine, back during the campaign, sought to induce me to support the President's election by talking up Mr. Trump's moves towards "criminal justice reform," which seemed to be little more than a euphemism for "letting Black people out of jail early.")

The point behind Black Lives Matter was, at least in part, to attempt to shift the perception of Black Americans away from a constant, looming, threat to decent law-abiding people, and to just people, like anyone else. And part of the tragedy of Black Lives Matter was its abject failure in that regard. But, as will most tragedies, more than one failure goes into them, and here, perhaps the biggest failure that lead to the tragedy of Ms. Zarutska's stabbing was the withdrawal of the Federal government from mental health treatment back in the 1980s. President Reagan intended it, at least publicly, to be a devolution of responsibility from Washington D.C., to states and communities. States and communities, it turned out, that had no intention of picking up the tab, and numbers of mentally ill people were left to fend for themselves, or to the sympathies of others.

Black people, like transgender people, are easily-vilified Others, especially for Conservatives, when crimes occur, because they help bolster the narrative of the People being preyed upon by the undeserving Other, who are in turn being abetted by a willfully perverse Élite, who allow the predation in return for ill-gotten votes. And I think that part of the reason for this is that focusing on who commits a crime (so long as it's someone else) offers the possibility of a "low-cost" solution. Mainly because someone else would be paying it. Whether it's a push to keep Black people with criminal records in jail, possibly for life, primarily as a form of incapacitation, or declaring gender dysphoria a serious enough mental illness that it warrants banning transgender people from owning guns, the debate around crime in the United States has tended to want to avoid being about "what" in favor of a focus on "who." And this is a fire that's been burning for a long time. There's no end to the flames in sight.

Turned Around

I’ve related the story before about growing up Roman Catholic, and eventually drifting away from that over the understanding that Satan wasn’t real. One of the side effects of coming to the conclusion that supernatural Evil wasn’t real was questioning its more mundane counterpart, and an arrival at an agreement with Socrates’ belief that no person, knowing good, willingly does evil. And that brings us to this:

I don’t believe that people who understand justice willingly turn a blind eye to injustice, either. And so for me, aphorisms like this encourage people to see themselves as unsafe in situations in which there are differing definitions, or understandings, of justice and injustice, because underlying this is are a number of assumptions. And because this is a two-sentence aphorism, rather than a detailed philosophical examination of theories of justice, there isn't room to surface those assumptions.

But even if we take a very simple definition from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and consider justice to be “what we owe to each other,” it’s not a given that every person has the same understanding of what every other person is owed, and who owes them. Or, perhaps more importantly, whose claims to being owed something come first. For instance, what does it mean to tolerate misconduct, for instance? When I was a freshman in college, it was understood that being a football player came with certain privileges... like the ability to strike another student without being expelled. Looking back on that earlier post, I realize that I said that the player was never disciplined... but I don’t know that they weren’t, simply that it had been communicated to the student body as a whole that assault was grounds for expulsion, and the football player wasn’t expelled. Was this the college “turning a blind eye to injustice,” or deciding that it owed someone else more than it owed the student who the football player had struck? With the benefit of several decades of hindsight, I’ve come to suspect the latter. And the problem with the school, therefore, isn’t that it failed to live up to it’s conception of justice, it’s that the idea of justice it presented to the students was simplified to the point of being inaccurate.

And this is, in part, I suspect, due to not wanting to openly deal with the disagreements over the definitions that it would have caused. Because it’s easy for people do decide that a school should prioritize the rights of the general student body over the football program; making the case that the school’s dependence on that program should be allowed to manifest itself as an openly different set of rules is more difficult. And I suspect that the school didn't see anything unjust in avoiding that disagreement.

I will stand by by understanding that the school felt that it owed someone else more than it owed the student that the football player had assaulted, although I realize the disadvantage I place myself at in not being able to offer any sort of informed opinion of who that other party might be. This is the danger in taking what may look like a cut-and-dried case of injustice, and arguing that there’s more to it than meets the eye.

But still, I make the case that the school did not willingly ignore its obligation to the students as a whole; instead, its obligations were structured in such a way that maintaining the football team was the most important consideration that it faced from that incident.

But since safety is also a concern here, that should be addressed. I left after that freshman year, not over the school’s revealed preference for the football program over other considerations, but because I felt that the academics were garbage, and if I was going to have to suffer through three more years of education, it may as well have been a decent one. For me, it wasn’t a matter of justice; it was that, even on a scholarship, the place didn’t seem to be worth the money.

But I would say that students would be correct in feeling unsafe about the school’s behavior. Not because the school was willing to ignore open injustice, but because it wasn’t willing (or able) to be open and honest about what its understanding of justice actually was. And so to return to the graphic, safety shouldn’t depend on aligned definitions of injustice, but it does depend on known definitions of injustice. It’s like due process of law in a legal setting. A person who goes into a situation with the understanding that their lived experience of an event is going to carry the most weight is unsafe, because their misconception of the hierarchy of obligations will lead them astray.

And in this, the habit of conflict avoidance that “obvious” instances of injustice tend to create works against society as a whole. Concealing, rather than owning, differences with the mainstream over what people are owed creates active misunderstandings of what people should expect. And that is where the danger lies, even though it’s often not what people are told to be on the lookout for. To go back to my college example, the student was let down, not by the school tolerating misconduct, but by not being clear on what constituted misconduct, and that it differed for different students, in the first place. That knowledge would have allowed her, and all of us, really, to make more informed choices concerning education.

P.S.: I never found out if the student who had been assaulted went to the police and sought a legal remedy against the player who struck her. If she did, nothing came of it, for one reason or another.

Staged

Being an ineligible bachelor does have its downsides; every so often I encounter another wild stereotype of single men that I never knew existed previously, and society tends to expect that every adult is a member of a couple and is structured accordingly, but, for the most part, it's an okay lifestyle. I've had plenty of time to grow accustomed to it, and the couple of times I've left it, returning has felt like sliding into a comfortable bed. It's something that I started during college, when I realized that I wanted nothing to do with the dating scene, and it's given me a level of sympathy for women who have decided that they're ready to call it quits on the whole thing.

Not being actively in the dating pool, however, I wind up watching the whole thing from afar or reading about it on the Internet, and the newest complaint that women have is with the vaguely-named "performative male." I'd never heard of it prior to this evening, when I ran across a small piece in The Week, running down a few articles on the topic. The Vox article I didn't read, because it's behind a paywall, but I read through the rest, and it's a familiar story: women being a combination of fed up and suspicious of the male tendency for fakery when they think that there's a chance for sex on the one hand, and the realization that this is kind of the way it always is and not all women are so dim as to be unable to watch out for themselves on the other.

To be sure, I've never been motivated enough by sex to be willing to perform for it. Once 20-year-old me had gotten it into his head that women weren't really interested, I had plenty of other things to be doing with my time. But I've known a lot of men in the interim who did seem to feel a need to be attuned to What Women Want, or, at least, the kind of guy that the needed to pretend to be in order to get a date. And I understand why women have had more than enough of that pretense, because the outcomes can be way worse than simply going on a date with someone who turns out to be inauthentic. I'd become fed up with the dating scene over much lower stakes.

So I legitimately feel for them; feeling the need to try and figure out if the person that one is out on a date with is actually the person they're presenting themselves as must be stressful. Especially when the perceived consequences of getting it wrong can be severe. But part of me is with Alexander Stoffel on this; I think his understanding that suspecting everyone who doesn't fit a certain mold of cynical deceit simply incentivizes a different form of pretense is more accurate than it's given credit for.

It would be nice if society could do away with the posturing and posing, but that would also require not attaching so much status to the ability to attract a desirable partner. I have no illusions about that coming to pass anytime soon. So "performative males" are simply going to be one in a long string of different categories of men to watch out for. Or just deal with, as the case may be. 

Unthought Of

But what if profits weren’t the only, or even primary, incentive? What if we rewarded employee wellbeing, positive community and environmental impact, innovations that reduced suffering or improved health not because they could be commodified but simply because they mattered?

We’ve been in capitalism’s grasp so long that we’ve been trained to think these things are impossible. But why should they be?
Laura Moore "Work is broken: Marx, alienation, and the Great Pretending"

If I had a dollar for every time I saw this description of things, I don't know how many dollars I'd have, but it would be a good number of them. This idea, that living under Capitalism "trains" everyone to think that Capitalism is the only possible system, is common enough to be a cliché. (After all, a book was written about the subject a decade and a half ago.) But if it were true, why are so many people writing about some alternative economic system for it have become a trope unto itself?

The answer, I think, is found not much later in the essay:

To upend what sits at the root of everything would mean pain and havoc, not just for those at the top but for everyone.

And so I suspect that people understand that change is possible. But that it's not painless. But I think that pointing this out, noting that what stands between people and the better world they want to come into existence is their own pain tolerance, isn't affirming. And in a world where creating a Substack is no more difficult than having a blog, cutting through the noise means being really, really, attractive to people. And sometimes, that means being willing to tell them what one understands they want to hear.

And blaming a factor external to the reader, like "Capitalism" can be attractive. Because it casts them as not being an agent of their own dissatisfaction. Which I understand, because taking the blame sucks. No-one wants to feel, for instance, that the reason why young people can't afford a home in their area is their attachment to all of the equity that rising home prices have given them. Or that the reason why fast food workers are so poorly paid is that theirs is an industry driven almost entirely by discretionary purchases, and their price sensitivity is part of what keeps prices low. While the media loves to tout companies "reaping record profits," little is said about the fact that this is what puts money into the 401k and IRA funds of the middle class.

And, I'll be honest, this is the world as I prefer to see it, but I think that the real problem with Capitalism is that it's a convenient scapegoat for the fact that in many Western nations, and especially the United States, caring for one another simply isn't en vogue. People's sense of poverty drives them to place themselves ahead of the employees of the businesses they patronize, their communities, the environment or the health of strangers. But it's a sense of social desirability that can prevent people from acknowledging that. And Capitalism accepts the blame without complaint, just like any other inanimate object would.

Self-Definition

I don't have to search for meaning in my life. All I need to do is tell certain people:

• I don't find life to be meaningful
• I don't suffer from crippling depression

And they will stop at nothing to find the meaning in it all and force me to acknowledge it.

I know that it's something of a troll on my part, and therefore, I shouldn't do it, but I find it interesting the degree to which there are certain things that it is presumed must be true of all people. Personally, I'm dubious about meaning specifically because I've done a lot of reading on the topic, and find it somewhat broader than many people give it credit for. Not in the sense that some everyday activity counts as "meaning," and therefore everyone is necessarily finding it on a day-to-day basis, but in the sense that it can lead people to do negative things just as much as positive ones.

Many definitions of "meaning in life" that I've come across mention significance. And while people often point to things like helping others, or raising children as a way of being significant, a mass shooter who makes national or international headlines is often more significant. And it doesn't even take a mass casualty event... Luigi Mangione have certainly racked up a huge number of significance points, merely for being willing to ambush and kill a man that many people hadn't even heard of prior to the shooting, immediately rocketing to a level of fame, and sparking a national conversation, that surely rates highly enough to count as meaningful.

The fact that things like this are often swept under the rug speaks to the idea that meaning, even in a person's own life, isn't really something that they decide for themselves. Society seeks to retain a veto on whether or not a person's life is genuinely meaningful, in part, I think, to try to steer people towards socially-valuable activities in their pursuit.of meaning. I'm not sure that it's working, but I understand the logic being employed.