Post-it Pessimism

Back in August, NPR asked the under-40 set some questions:

If you're under 40, how have concerns about affordability shaped your life? Have they changed how you typically vote? Delayed a big life decision?

The whole exercise seemed calculated to bring out the gloom in people, and judging from the responses, it did.

The answers are short; they're presented as if typed onto Post-it Notes, and all of the responses printed in the story fit on to one or two of them. And because it was simply an open call for responses, they are, as NPR points out, not a representative sample.

But what readers shared helps highlight a steep challenge facing Democrats and Republicans alike as they work to win over these voters, who are collectively expected to make up more than half the electorate in 2028.

I'm not so sure about that. Mainly because while it's clear that the respondents aren't a representative sample of the American public, it's also likely true that they aren't a representative sample of NPRs under-40 audience. Remember the questions were asking about how financial concerns were shaping people's lives and politics. Audience members whose response was "I've got this," or "I think I'm managing," wouldn't have written in... there would have been no reason to.

Not that there's nothing there. American economic policy has been something of a train wreck for some time now. But that's because, as I remember George Will putting it once, American society doesn't really take steps to avoid problems; it allows them to happen, and then cleans up the mess. And there are plenty of recent examples of that tendency. It's also worth noting that the American political system apparently thrives on pessimism, stoking it at every turn to raise the stakes of elections. Once the message from any given candidate is that a win by the other will be the end of the world as we know it, it is any wonder that people's views of the current state of the world are more easily predicted by their partisan identities than the actual fundamentals?

And the media isn't blameless here, either. We all know that "if it bleeds, it leads" is a common journalistic outlook, but there's also the habit of talking about issues in terms of "how worried people should be" in order to convey a sense of seriousness to the audience. It might be good for that, but it also conveys the sense that anxiety is, in and of itself, as appropriate response to the broader world, even though there's nothing about change that requires anxiety. In fact, anxiety tends to push back against the idea that change is possible.

It's this passivity that eventually becomes the problem. The collective we, as in American society as a whole, and I count myself in that number, have made a myriad of individual and group (if not collective) choices that have brought us to this place. And to the degree our choices have brought us here, they can take us somewhere else. It's going to be slow, and it's likely going to be expensive and/or painful. And I think that's what's really in play here... the "young" people who responded to NPR's call for input are seeing that the pain that other people are working to avoid is going to be visited upon them later. And they're understandably pessimistic about that. But I'm not sure of the utility of constantly reminding people of that, or of presenting it as the outlook of entire age cohorts, rather than just a self-selected sampling.

Dreamed Up

The state Republican Party in California has apparently given up on attempting to support Red states in their efforts maintain/expand their majority in the House of Representatives, and are walking away from their opposition to Proposition 50, which would suspend the bipartisan commission in charge of drawing the state's Congressional districts.

California is a Blue state, a Republican message that effectively comes down to, "Yes, hold on your ideals while our compatriots in the rest of the nation use them against you," was doomed from the start. Why anyone bothered with opposing Proposition 50 in the first place is beyond me; it was clearly going to win, especially given that President Trump has been going from one Red state to another, demanding that legislatures alter their district boundaries to shore up Republican chances of retaining control of the House of Representatives. And Republicans as a whole are no better than anyone else about holding onto ideals once they become even slightly expensive; see how their commitments to state's rights have evaporated. What message they were going to use to appear to the political middle was never clear.

The problem of gerrymandering, however, isn't one that lies with politicians; it's one that lies with the public, and it always has. The term "gerrymander," after all, dates back to 1812. Which means for nearly the entire history of the United States, politicians have realized that there were people whose votes they could count on, and who wouldn't protest the efforts that they would undertake to make those votes more important than others. As long as there's no wrong way to get to the right outcome, this is going to be what happens.

And it's worth pointing out that there's little that anyone could have done to prevent this current race to the bottom. Even if Congress had, at some point in the past, passed anti-Gerrymandering legislation at the Federal level, it's unlikely that the the current Republican-controlled Congress would have resisted calls from the President to repeal, or at least suspend it. There's no viable way to protect legislation from legislators, and there never will be.

President Trump's political instincts demand that he always insert himself into conflicts, and as Blue and Red America become more hostile to one another, the President is just as much beholden to that conflict as he's an instigator of it. Whether it was due to his own temperament or the wishes of his voter base, President Trump seems to have gone out of his way to implement policies that would divide the nation into "for" and "against" camps. It's possible that he feels a need to implement the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 in the most divisive way possible. It's clear that he understands that it's alienating people; otherwise, there would be no need for this gerrymandering project in the first place. The California GOP pretending that the state's Democratic voters are unaware that the President plans to use a Congressional majority to punish them was never going to work.

Over Muddied Waters

Last week, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon - who remains a vocal supporter - claimed there was a "plan" to secure a third term for Trump.

"Trump is going to be president in '28, and people ought to just get accommodated with that," Bannon told The Economist. "At the appropriate time, we'll lay out what the plan is."
Trump does not rule out seeking third term - but says he will not use VP loophole

Part of the problem with the Democrats still not having their act together in terms of advancing strong contenders for the Presidency in 2028 is that it leaves room for garbage like this. While it's possible that the "plan" could simply be whining to the Supreme Court that President Trump is entitled to a do-over of some sort, and hoping that the Republican-appointed justices are partisan enough to pretend whatever arguments put forth should matter to anyone, the most likely way that Donald Trump remains President is that the administration declares some sort of bogus "emergency," Congressional Republicans still feel beholden enough to him to go along with it, and they count on the fact that the Judiciary has no way of enforcing whatever adverse rulings it hands down.

But Joe Biden made his disingenuous "bridge President" statements years ago, and the Democratic Party still doesn't seem to have started the work of coming up with who their next candidate is going to be. California Governor Gavin Newsom seems to be looking at the job, but that's really about it. And sure, this upcoming Presidential election cycle wouldn't be the first one where someone previously unknown jumps out of the field to run away with the primary election, but there isn't a field at this point. Absolutely no one seems interested in getting the first mover advantage here. So I'm curious what everyone is waiting for. (It's possible that people are still convinced that if they simply stay out of the way, the Republicans will self-destruct, but one would think that this tactic has been demonstrated to be a bad one by this point.)

The thing is, this doesn't strike me as the sort of situation in which anyone who puts their head above the parapet risks being sniped. Sure, the Trump Administration is going to go after anyone they think might be gaining some level of name recognition, but in an environment as partisan as the current one, that seems more like an advantage than a problem.

It's possible the issue is that the Centrist vs. Progressive divide is hard at work, and some number of people are waiting (hoping) for the midterms to choose a (temporary) victor in that conflict before they make a move. It makes an amount of sense to me, but I'm not a political scientist... when I found out that there were going to be five papers due in the first semester of PolySci 101, I promptly changed majors. So I suspect that my guess isn't any better than the bottom 15th percentile. But it's clear that something's going on. I think that the Democrats need resolve it prior to Steve Bannon telling a media outlet that, at the appropriate time, they'll lay out their plan to have Donald Trump anointed the messiah. Even if only to see who he can get a rise out of.

P.S.: By the way, I don't buy for a moment that President Trump would be above running for Vice President, with the expectation being that whomever was supposedly running to be President resigning as soon as the election results are in. If he actually thinks it will work (a.k.a., that SCOTUS would play along), it's absolutely on the table. 

Clean Living

Even before the final bankruptcy of Rite-Aid, which resulted in the closure of all of the Rite-Aid and Bartell's Drugs locations that weren't converted into CVS pharmacies, there were neighborhoods in the Seattle area where drugstores were thin on the ground.

Like here, for instance.

The Northwest Kidney Centers is in a former Rite Aid location that shut down some years ago. After that, a Walgreens moved into the now-empty store seen the right, just beyond the Taco Bell. (That side of the intersection is Seattle proper.) The Walgreens was there for a few years before it too closed, perhaps a year or two ago. Where people in this area go for their prescriptions now, I don't know. There had been a Fred Meyer store a few blocks further south into Seattle that people could have used, but it's also closed. I think that there is a shopping center with a supermarket, and perhaps a pharmacy to the west of this location, but it's a mile or two down the road.

There are still a few independent drugstores here and there, but CVS and Walgreens have most of the local market that isn't served by supermarket pharmacies. CVS didn't keep all of the Rite-Aid and Bartell's locations open, and, as seen here, Walgreens has also had some contraction in the local area. We'll see if the new acquisition stabilizes things, and people who need medications continue to have nearby places to get them. 

Decorated

A Halloween skull decoration, tucked into a bush.
 

Open-Door Policy

Being opposed to ICE and the President's initiatives on H1B visas give the impression that the Democrats are in favor of completely open borders, or a nationwide variation on the former "wet-foot, dry-foot" policy; anyone who can get into the country prior to being caught is granted indefinite leave to stay, regardless of whether their entry was legal or not. In a nutshell, Democratic contrarianism towards President Trump is pushing them to do things that imply policy positions that they may not actually hold.

If you ask many Democrats if they actually support unlimited, unrestricted immigration to the United States, the answer will be "no." But if you ask them to define the limits, many are hard-pressed to block anyone other than obviously dangerous criminals from entering.

Precisely who the constituency for expansive immigration policy is tends to be unclear... recent immigrants tend to have no problem with people having to follow the rules. Sure, there are plenty of people who would like to see the United States have no rules for who can enter, but many of those sorts are willing to enter regardless of what rules are in place; and because they're not here legally, they can't vote. There's a lot to said for compassion on poor people in other countries who would be faced with a years-long wait, if they were ever granted legal entry at all, but again, those people don't comprise a voting block. And part of the reason why Donald Trump is President again is that many people who do vote felt that not enough was being done to manage (or control, if you will) the inflow of people to the country.

This creates a de facto Democratic policy of treating ignoring entry requirements as perhaps an aggravating factor in other offenses, but as something that it can be ignored in and of itself. And that is a fairly unpopular policy. The Democratic party line can be that any willingness to enforce immigration law is simply thinly veiled racism, but again, that's not going to put another Democrat in the White House, or more of them into Congress.

While it may look as if President Trump and the current Republican Representatives and Senators are going to finally drop the straw that breaks the camel's back onto the beast any moment now, it's looked like that for quite some time, and the animal is still holding up admirably. I don't think the camel has even broken a sweat thus far. And that means that the Democrats are going to have to get out their with affirmative policy proposals that are something other than "The opposite of whatever President Trump has done this week." And that's likely going to mean telling the activist class to cool it for a while, or at least agitate for things that have some broader level of public support.

Metal Heads

LinkedIn has a newsfeed, which, I suspect, is mainly there to drive "engagement." Mainly because it feels less informative that rage-baiting. News that would help the LinkedIn community navigate the current business environment tends to take a very distant back seat to the sorts of splashy stories that people are likely to respond to... and have those responses responded to.

So this morning on LinkedIn News was this: Amazon sees robots eliminating need for 600,000 future jobs. Which, to be sure, overstates things a bit. The Verge has a headline that I think is a bit more in line with the aspirational nature of the supposed goal: Amazon hopes to replace 600,000 US workers with robots, according to leaked documents.

In any event, the response on LinkedIn was about what one would expect. The "Top Perspectives" they selected to present to people were more pessimistic than optimistic about what this change would mean with a few posts simply breaking the story down for the benefit of those who lacked a subscription to The New York Times.

One "Top Perspective," however, stood out to me for its use of illustration... namely this one:

Not only does it treat Amazon's goal for automation as a foregone conclusion, it's just pretty poor-quality generative system artwork. "We want are taking our jobs?" Really? Guy couldn't spend three minutes to put better text on the signs? It's ironic in that this really illustrates the threat that automation will likely pose to a lot of people: As long as something is fast and cheap, low levels of quality are acceptable. So there's no incentive to turn to people for better outputs.

I understand the need to turn a picture around quickly in order to be one of the first responses to a breaking story; LinkedIn often selects its "Top Perspectives" from commentary that was on the site prior to a story actually showing up in the newsfeed. But this tends to become a case of raindrops blaming the downpour for the flood; if society at large, out of a sense of its own poverty, tends to begrudge people their salaries. Take this story from LinkedIn News, about the rise of job seekers turning to generative automation to create high-quality headshots. Okay, so "a photographer may charge hundreds of dollars for a photoshoot and digital prints" (as an aside, that "may" is doing some Olympic-level lifting here). A lot of people charge hundreds of dollars for specialist work... it's how they support themselves. Price-sensitivity on the part of Americans is creating a situation in which people are looking to automate away other people's livelihoods while hoping that their own will be spared.

That's unlikely to work out in the way people hope it might. According to the piece in The Verge, Amazon hopes to use automation to cut hiring by 160,000 people by 2027. Which would save about 30¢ per item sold. For Amazon, that adds up to a lot: $12.6 billion. But here's the rub... in order to realize those savings (which Amazon's shareholders are going want paid out them in some form or another), they can't pass them on to customers in the form of lower prices. So 160,000 are left looking for another way to support themselves, and the only people likely to see any tangible benefit are big investors. And the job market always rots from the tail... the people who are being paid handsome salaries to make the important decisions aren't going to willingly greenlight technology that would render them unemployed.

The thing about a race to the bottom is that the only prize is being the first one to hit bottom. Still, sometimes even stupid prizes are better than losing, and the costs that come with that. As people feel more and more precarious in their economic lives, doing unto others before it is done unto them starts to feel like a form of security. But there's never any real security once things get to everyone for themselves. Being faster to turn to automation in an attempt to preserve what one has becomes simply a trigger for the Paradox of Thrift. It's a game where the only winning move is for everyone not to play. But a crappy computer-generate picture is seen as better than paying someone for a quality one, while people wonder why no-one seems to value anyone else.

If You Insist

For now, most are willing to take a government check, said John Hansen, the president of the Nebraska Farmers Union. That’s “better than losing the farm.”
Can Trump deliver a farmer bailout in time?

There's government spending, as the saying goes, and then there's our government spending. But that's not to say that everyone tends to like money being given to them, while begrudging it to others, for the same reasons. The American Left, with its bipartite view of the world, tends to be upset when money is given to "élites;" mainly because they so-called élite already have money. (For a lot of people, it's having money that makes one a member of the {as always, poorly-defined} élite in the first place.)

The American Right, on the other hand, tends to have moral reasons against giving money to "the undeserving other," one of two groups of bad people in its tripartite worldview. But that reasoning tends to be that people who work hard and apply themselves can be successful without needing to rely on either and handout, or a hand up, from anyone else. Unless, that is, they're the one's who are hurting... then there seem to be plenty of reasons why simply doing things correctly doesn't lead directly to success in life, and redistribution is justified. (As usual, the political class plays a part in this, as when Conservative politicians telling their rural constituencies that they're overtaxed to pay for urban layabouts.)

And I think that this is the thing that tends to bother Liberals about the Conservative attitude towards the Welfare State; that it smacks of "Welfare for me, but not for thee." Of course, it isn't that simple (most instances of perceived hypocrisy aren't), but without falling back on racial stereotypes, Conservatives tend to have a hard time explaining the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving outside of people they like versus those they dislike. And this feeds a general idea that Conservative talk of "small government" is really just a smokescreen, deployed in the service of what's really a plan to hoard scarce resources for themselves at the expense of everyone else.

Of course, self-image is wrapped up in a lot of this. A person's understanding of themselves colors the way they understand many other things in their lives. And many people's perceptions of themselves as good, and others as bad, tends to be much more durable than anything in the real world.

Conversant

So I went down to se No Kings: The Sequel yesterday, mainly to take some pictures. It was your typical suburban crowd, mostly older people (I think that many of the 20-somethings went to the downtown Seattle protest, instead). It was a typical protest with a bunch of signs, and people would honk their horns in support as they drove through.

Except for this guy:

He lay on his horn as he drove through the intersection in his giant "I'm compensating for something" pickup truck (it was way too clean to be a working vehicle) and lowered his driver's side window just enough to hold his hand out and give the protestors the middle finger.

The protestors, at least the ones on the corner where I was, jeered in response. Partisan signalling from both sides.

When I talk with people on either side of the political divide, I'm struck by the degree to which they understand their own viewpoint to be apparently self-evident, and how that then justifies confusion, and sometimes anger, about what the other side is up to. But there's also a certain pride in not understanding opposing partisans, and that's something that I suspect is more corrosive than it's given credit for. Because once people are in the mode of "to understand all is to forgive all," that presupposes that they see holding a different viewpoint from themselves as something that requires forgiveness.

And as more Americans start to see one another as deliberately perverse, dialog becomes less acceptable. Because not only are people less likely to reach out to "the other side," but such outreach becomes a form of treachery to others on one's "own side."

Halfway

The midterm elections for Congress are a little more than a year out, and that means its time for the Democratic Party to start fighting with itself again. Generally speaking, the “Centrist” and “Progressive” subsets of the party have quite a bit of daylight between them. Hence Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s comment that: “Oh God. In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.”

But it’s also true that in many other countries, the ”Centrists” and “Progressives” could be viable political parties on their own. But in the United States, they can’t. Especially not now with the Republican brand having been solidified under President Trump (whether it stays that way is an open question). Were the two broad flavors of Democrat to go their separate ways, both of the splinter parties would be out in the national political wilderness for the foreseeable future. They’d have to cooperate just as much as they do now, if not more so, to avoid complete irrelevance.

This understanding tends to result in the two groups attempting to level the other into compliance, even while they also seem to be putting a certain amount of effort into pretending that the other isn’t there. In my own Congressional district, a Progressive would-be Representative has labelled the incumbent a “Centrist” (which is apparently a slur in Progressive circles) and is mounting a primary challenge, presumably because the incumbent hasn’t been loud enough in being unable to bully the majority Republicans into moving to the Left of their voter base.

Their position statement was interesting enough, but it read like a series of Progressive talking points, rather than workable policy proposals, and so this left me with a question: Who is this person going to be working with to implement any of their ideas? Because while one could make the case that the Democratic Party as a whole should adopt more a Progressive ideology, their current lack of legislative success stems from them being in the minority in Congress. If Progressive ideals were so popular across the United States as a whole, this wouldn’t be the case.

While I understand the Progressive’s frustration with the way things currently are, what I’ve seen so far are Progressive challenges to Democrats in safely Blue districts at the federal level. Which is all fine and good, but it’s going to make for a shrinking minority at the national level. Progressive politicians haven’t exactly been killing it at the state and local levels over the past decade; they haven’t been convincing people that theirs is a better way to govern. People like Representative Ocasio-Cortez may feel that the Democrats have too large an ideological tent, but the problem is that there still aren’t enough people in it to consistently drive national policy.

So if the Democrat-on-Democrat bickering cycle starts up again for the midterms, it’s not going to help. Charges of apostasy aren’t going to be useful; the party needs to find things that unite it across the whole of its spectrum to be successful. Whether its two camps can find enough that they both agree are important to them is the question to watch as the elections come closer.

Open Secrets

In a nation that is closely divided politically, neither party can afford to alienate people. And this leads to something of a paradox, given that many Americans have little in the way for people who they perceive as being culpably different from themselves. The Kansas Republican Party has been forced to disband the state's Young Republicans after the leadership of the group was found to have made racist and anti-Semitic comments in a Telegram chat.

Part of this is the pretense that a group that's open to any Republican between the ages of 18 and 40 can somehow be prevented from having some significant number of assholes in it. And in order to maintain that pretense, Republican leaders have to be shocked, shocked, that anyone would make such statements. But part of this is also the pretense that Republicans don't need the votes of racists, anti-Semites and other varieties of undesirable in order to win, and so there's a "zero-tolerance" policy.

Everyone knows there isn't, however. Especially not from a party that decries "political correctness" and sees being "woke" as some sort of heinous crime against all that's right in the world. When speaking one's mind, even if it would deeply offend public sensibilities to do so openly, is seen as not only as virtuous behavior, but an entitlement; a right wrongly stifled by oversensitive people, this sort of thing is to be expected.

And it likely was expected. I'm not sure that anyone who manages to make it anywhere in politics, especially in an environment where the politics of grievance are so front-and-center, wouldn't have seen something like this coming. And in that sense, the problem is as it always is, not in the words and sentiments themselves, but in the fact that they came out publicly. (Not that I'm sure that it matters; one wonders who would be swayed in their vote by this sort of thing.) As negative partisanship has grown, in large part intentionally driven by the political class, closed partisan groups become a breeding ground for this sort of behavior, as being willing to go farther in openly disrespecting groups that are seen as unreachable (and thus have been written off) is a path to respect and status within the group. Such is the nature of an Echo Chamber... this phenomenon has been well-established for years now.

Not that I suspect that the Democrats don't have their own problems with this sort of thing, but there aren't any real slurs that one can use for straight White male Christians that are considered as transgressive as calling people "faggot," "retarded" and "nigga," words that the Politico article wouldn't even print. Likewise, there's no historical act of genocide, or a leader thereof, that one can claim to want to emulate to show one's disdain for the stereotypical middle American.

In any event, the Republican Party has put itself in a difficult position; it can neither stringently police such behavior privately within its ranks, nor own it publicly when it comes to light. One pushes out people the party needs, the other damages the image of itself that it seeks to present. Personally, I'd ditch the latter... I suspect that few enough people are genuinely taken in that it won't make much difference.

Pugilism

It occurred to me today that I've never been injured in a fight that I was smart, or cowardly, enough to walk away from. Heck, I'll own not being the bravest person you'll ever meet. Pain and I don't get along.

But I do think that there's something to be said for really asking oneself if a fight, physical or otherwise, is really worth it before getting stuck in. Mainly, because no matter how the brawl, or shouting match, comes out, it's always a lot easier to lose than to win. Both sides are much more likely to look like fools than to come out looking like champions. Especially when the point of the fight is to be seen fighting. "At least I fought," has never struck me as a particularly good justification for a fight, but I understand that I may be in the minority on that. But for me, a fight is only worthwhile when there's something more tangible to show for it than simply having been in a fight.

That is, for the most part, a side effect of the conclusion that there are better things to be done with the energy spent fighting. (Or even protesting, for that matter.) The world we have now is a side effect of myriad individual choices, often made with no real consideration of what others were doing. The world can change in much the same way.

But I think that for many people, fighting feels less costly. Someone can pick a fight, and call attention to themselves, and be lauded for being on the side of Right and Justice without having to pay much else. And maybe that's why people fight so often; the individual ROI is better than I give is credit for.

Got It Dave; I Can Do That

While it strikes me as a little late to the party, the New York Times has picked up on the trend of "prompt injection" into résumés. The idea is, put simply, that job seekers are placing generative automation prompts into their résumés, hiding them by using white fonts on white backgrounds. When an employer's applicant tracking system (ATS) reads the document, it encounters the prompt, and acts on it.

I'm going go out on a limb here (although I'm convinced it's a very sturdy one, and say that this doesn't actually work, and hasn't for some time, if it ever did (which, honestly, I'm dubious about). It's always being presented as a clever job application hack, but in reality, it would be an enormous security flaw.

In the New York Times article, no-one in recruiting comes out and says that their generative automation systems had ever been successfully controlled by an injected prompt... the anecdotes all come from job seekers who claim to have landed interviews by having done it, or are simply counts of attempts. There are no quotes from engineers or the ATS companies. So this is really a story about people's perceptions of what's going on in systems. And that's worth keeping in mind.

Because if someone could hide a prompt in a random document and have a reasonable expectation that a system would act on that, it would be threat actor heaven. Why bother with social engineering or doing the work to find zero-day exploits when spamming a company with résumés could reliably result in an applicant tracking system opening a back door, exfiltrating data on all of the other applicants or sending over login credentials? It's worth understanding that not all of these systems are home-grown. If companies were selling systems this easily controlled by outside actors, there would have been highly-publicized lawsuits by now, especially considering these attacks have been talked about for months already.

And if this sort of thing worked, "A.I. poisoning" (mention of which is conspicuously absent) would be trivially easy, because it's not hard to hide messages in various forms of media. Steganography goes back to 400 B.C.; hiding machine-readable messages in files is nothing new, given that the bulk of most computer documents is machine-readable code that most human users never see. Sanitizing inputs is not something companies are just now figuring out.

These stories peddle a message of hope (There are jobs out there, and you can get them if you're smart!) and affirmation (You're cleverer than the idiots in corporate HR departments.), and play on people's suspicions that "A.I." is not all it's cracked up to be. But by focusing tightly on job seekers, and not potential threat actors, articles like this New York Times piece ignore the fact that if this has been taking place since "the first half of the year" it would no longer be a zero-day exploit. It would have been patched by now. Technology stories that avoid educating people on how technology actually works don't do anyone any good.

Misprint

These two news stories turn out to be more alike than one would expect from their headlines.

Mainly because the text in each case is the same. The story about whether Democrats are at risk of losing the Gubernatorial race in New Jersey is completely absent from the page; its text is the copy about the Noble Peace Prize. Given that this is part of yesterday's Evening Review, it seems that this error has been up at least all night, supposedly without anyone at The Week noticing and having it fixed.

This is how news outlets die; their staffs become so small that there aren't enough people to make sure that major items, like having stories match the headlines that lead them, are done properly. Maybe the editor overseeing the page was overworked and just sort of glazed over it. Maybe there was a problem in the software that translated the stories to the final production page. Maybe the job was outsourced to a generative automation system, the capabilities of which were overestimated. I have no idea. I just know that this isn't the first time I've noticed something glaringly wrong with The Week's website recently.

I'm not sure what the solution to this is. A lot of advertising-supported news sites are suffering from low advertising rates, driven by the fact that the number of places available to place ads dwarfs the number of high and middle-quality advertisers out there. YouTube has gone to war with ad-blockers, and the site users who employ them, in a bid to demonstrate greater reach to advertisers, and thus justify higher rates. But it's not at all clear that Alphabet has managed to force everyone to either watch the advertising that YouTube presents or pay for a subscription. It's also not clear that the advertising is any better that it had been before. Having a video interrupted mid-word for a poor-quality ad, or one that's almost certainly fraudulent, is a poor user experience, and it's understandable that people feel that having to pay to avoid them is somewhat extortionate.

The Week could implement a subscription wall, either free or paid, but I don't know if that really solves the problem, either, as readership would certainly decline. Axios tends to gate stories behind a free subscription to the website, but it's really clear that signing up is going to lead to a lot of new inbox traffic, a hassle that people might not want to deal with.

Given that The Week tends to offer roundups of other coverage of the stories presented, tracking down information on the Democratic Party's woes in New Jersey shouldn't be difficult. But that's kind of the point of The Week, it tracks these things down, so that readers don't have to. If the problems with the website are indicative of big enough problems that the outlet is at risk of becoming non-viable, readers could lose a useful piece of the overall news landscape.

Blowhard

Back in August, the President signed an Executive Order that purports to criminalize burning the American flag... Or so some media outlets would have one believe.

Reading the actual text of the Executive Order tends to belie the President's assertion that “We took the freedom of speech away.” Mainly because it's little more than an instruction to Attorney General Bondi to find existing laws that can be used to prosecute people who happened to have burned a flag while they were up to something else.

My Administration will act to restore respect and sanctity to the American Flag and prosecute those who incite violence or otherwise violate our laws while desecrating this symbol of our country, to the fullest extent permissible under any available authority.

The President is, however, fairly clearly hoping that a case can be brought to the Supreme Court. Texas v. Gregory L. Johnson was decided 5 to 4 back in 1989, and one doesn't have to read much into the Order to understand that he's hoping the current 6 justice Conservative majority will reverse the earlier precedent. 

(c)  To the maximum extent permitted by the Constitution, the Attorney General shall vigorously prosecute those who violate our laws in ways that involve desecrating the American Flag, and may pursue litigation to clarify the scope of the First Amendment exceptions in this area.

This likely means that the Justice Department will start looking for some or another Red state to prosecute someone specifically for burning the flag. After all, a conviction for some other violation wouldn't provide the requisite go-ahead to ban flag burning as an act of protest in and of itself.

For me, the real problem with all of this is that it's the President, once again, going after random Culture War grievances rather than solving any sort of real problem. While sure, I suspect there are people whose biggest concern is that some random left-wing protestor won't spend enough time in jail to make them love the United States again, most of the nation has bigger fish to fry, and this Executive Order offers no help for them. The flap over the whole thing, generally from left-leaning media outlets, obscures that fact.

One can make the case, though, that President Trump has actually been quite clever. He's given people something to get worked up about. Conservatives can cheer for what they hope will happen to protestors that they don't like, and Liberals can overreact to the President's bloviating (which is easier than reading the actual executive order). And the media on both sides can encourage them. It's the worst kind of win-win.

A Cloud of One's Own

‘I want to be good because you want to prove to God so you go to that next step.’

Trump on his desire to reach heaven, during an Oval Office briefing with reporters. The president has spoken of his mortality several times in recent months and said during the briefing that the subject is “very important” to him.

The Week, Quote of the Day. Wednesday, 8 October, 2025

I have a theory about this, and it goes as follows: That people's responses to the President's comment are more likely to be driven by their political identities than their actual theology. Whether one believes that faith without works is dead, or that people are saved by faith alone, becomes largely irrelevant. For someone whose politics aligns with the President, Heaven is in the cards. For someone who has no patience for Donald Trump's methods of reforming government,  if there's an afterlife, he's going to be dismayed at what he finds.

Part of this is the simple malleability of religion, even Christianity. People simply read into it whatever it is they want to find there, and find ways to do away with those things that don't affirm their understanding of the way the world should be.

But there's also an aspect of this that's based on the idea that Christianity offers a personal relationship with the divine and salvation for anyone. While classic Christian doctrine holds that everyone is in need of forgiveness to attain Heaven, that forgiveness is pretty easy to come by, enough so that being convinced that one doesn't have it is often considered a symptom of very low self-esteem or even poor mental health.

And I think that these factors allow people to see their religion through the lens of themselves, rather than any sort of external criteria. The fact that people are generally the heroes of their own stories pushes them to use themselves as the yardstick for measuring right and wrong. And this allows them to map their own opinions onto the divine, or the Universe at large, as the case may be. And so people, the President included, can convince themselves that doing right in the world and following their own interests are one in the same.

Vision

All too often the truth is often secondary to what people want to hear and what they want to enjoy getting worked up about, whether it's in a sexual or righteous way. Information finds its level and its target.

Yoz Grahame. Comment on "Banning blogging, 'Toothing, and Yoz." Many2Many, 5 April 2005

Back in the day when Windows still had screensavers, I started collecting quotes to use in mine. The above was one of them. A little more than twenty years later, it still feels relevant. Mainly, I suspect, because it's actually a fairly timeless observation.

This strikes me as one of those things that people believe about one another. In the post that Mr. Grahame was commenting on, one of the primary points concerned fact-checking, and the fact that many people tend to pursue it vigorously when presented with information that they disagree with (and thus, want to see falsified), and pass on it when something aligns with their tastes, interests or prejudices. But Clay Shirky, who authored the post wasn't just speaking about "people," he was also speaking about his readers, and calling them to task for being willing to believe things they really should have second guessed.

When I read Mr. Grahame's quote, I replace "people" and "they" with "I," and ask myself: What do I want to hear? What do I want to enjoy getting worked up about? What may be both the upside and the downside of this blog is that it's nearly two decades of pointers to precisely those things. I want to hear that the world is complicated place, and simple-sounding solutions are doomed to failure, if not making things worse than they were when they started. I'm too old, I suspect, to enjoy becoming worked up about anything these days, but I will argue that the United States is a fractured collection of mutually hostile (yet well-meaning) groups to anyone who will listen.

In other words, were it up to me, I would have it all figured out. Just like everyone else. Because it makes me feel perceptive and intelligent. But in reality, I am likely neither of those things, at least, not any more so than anyone else. Otherwise, I'd be better at predicting the future than I am, and would be comfortably retired by now, what with all of the money I would have made on the stock market and selling my best-selling book(s).

In the end, I know that I don't know. The world is, in my understanding, a very complicated place, and I can only see the small part of it that unfolds directly around me. Everything else, I take on trust in one source or another. And that tends to lead to very distorted views of things.

Dark Strokes

 So I saw this headline on the BBC this morning: "Tories pledge to remove 750,000 migrants under borders plan." Given the fact that the United Kingdom's Conservative Party feels that the most pressure on it is coming from Nigel Farage and the Reform Party to their political right, this makes sense. But I'll come back to this.

Because there was another headline that caught my attention: "'I have everything to ruin you' - BBC tracks down sextortion scammer targeting teenage boys." I have a passing interest in Internet fraud, and the media coverage thereof; accordingly, I wanted to see if the article had anything interesting or new in it. The piece is bookended by the stories of Kari and Brad Boettler and South Carolina State Representative Brandon Guffey (R-48th District). Each had a son, Evan Boettler and Gavin Guffey, respectively, who committed suicide after who they thought was a young woman turned out to be an internet blackmailer, or "sextortionist" in common parlance.

But the headline notes that the BBC tracked down one of these Internet extortionists, and that's what I was interested in. The trail takes them to Nigeria, and they start talking to people there. The Nigerians, unsurprisingly, do not come off well. This statement about Nigeria's "Yahoo Boys" sets the tone for much of the middle of the story:

These young men, often in their 20s, live in impoverished areas but dream of fast cars and quick money.

The first young man they speak to is identified only as "Ola." He comes across as callous, due to poverty; he's quoted as saying "I don't feel bad because I need the money." Interestingly, it's not noted what he needs the money for. The reader is left to presume that he simply wants to wealth, and the status in his community that comes with it. Ola is also presented as being ignorant, "It was apparently impossible for Ola to believe a British or American teenager couldn't pay. In his mind, being born in the West automatically meant privilege." Which is easy enough to understand, I suppose, but Ola is also shown as being Internet-savvy enough to create fake profiles of young women, using internet-based tools to generate names. As an aside, it takes a certain amount of knowledge to use these properly... otherwise one can wind up creating a LinkedIn profile for a woman named "Keith."

Of the prestigious "Mc" family, no less!

When the BBC talks to "Ghost," a leader of a "Hustle Kingdom" or group of young men collectively engaged in online frauds of various sorts, he "said they were mainly conducting financial scams, mostly romance, not sextortion, as he was a 'God-fearing person.' He said only people with a 'black heart' did this." One wonders precisely which school of Christian theology allows for defrauding people by tricking people into thinking they've found a new (if financially needy) life partner, but frowns on the rug-pull of attempting to blackmail them.

"Ghost's" religiosity becomes a convenient segue to the next bit of the story, in which we're told that the Yahoo Boys engage in "visiting local priests to bless scams, and to cast spells they believed would make victims more compliant, or protect the scammers from being caught." Case in point being one "Ade," who allows the BBC to tag along as he visits a "cyber-spiritualist" for a ritual "a ritual the spiritualist said would bind him to wealth and protection," and involved the sacrifice, and partial consumption, of a dove.

When I asked how common this was, the healer told me he saw six or seven Yahoo Boys a day. For Ade, it was not superstition but a business expense.

I suspect that for most of the BBC's readers, especially in (but not limited to) the industrialized West, it is simply superstition. Backwardness pressed into service to facilitate crime. Not that Nigerians are above using the tools of high-technology; and shelling out for them. The next fraudster the BBC speaks to reporting hiring a woman to facilitate his frauds, and spending $3,500 on a deepfake face-swapping tool, claiming that the returns justified the investment.

The story turns back to the United States for a time, getting responses to the concerns raised from Meta and Snap. To be sure, they don't come off all that great, either, but corporate CYA-speak rarely does. But we do go back to Nigeria one last time, as it turns out that the BBC was specifically looking for whomever had extorted Evan Boettler. They were unable to find him, because the Nigerian ISP GloWorld, had failed to keep user information as it was supposed to. Whether out of incompetence or deliberate non-compliance (among other possibilities) is a mystery.

None of the Nigerians photographed or on video in the piece show their faces; apparently ski masks are all the rage there these days. (Maybe they hit the slopes after a hard say in the fraud mines.) Which raised a question for me: Who were they afraid would be able to identify them? And if what they were doing was illegal enough in Nigeria that fear of arrest and prosecution was reasonable, why did the BBC not present any interviews with authorities there, seeking to understand what was being done to combat the problem?

As I  noted before, Nigerian, and perhaps sub-Saharan Africans more broadly, do not come off well in this story. There's pretty much nothing positive in the picture the BBC article paints of them. And that takes us back to Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, and her pledge that if the Conservatives win the next election (and she becomes Prime Minister), a Trump-style purge of illegal migrants is on the agenda.

The part of "the Global South" that is closest to the United Kingdom is Africa, and so a good number of migrants to the United Kingdom, and also the European Union, come from there. And a good portion of the hostility to them is driven by the idea that they don't bring anything worthwhile with them; they're simply needy people with a penchant for criminality. So for many people, having them around is all cost, and no benefit. And while nothing about the BBC piece comes across as intending to play on the prejudices of Britons, such intent isn't really necessary. The contrast between the partially-named or pseudonymous Nigerians and the Boettlers and Representative Guffey is no less clear for not being deliberate. And yes, Ms. Badenoch and the Conservatives (or the Reform Party, for that matter) can create their own stereotypes, but why pass on work that the BBC has done for them?

In the end, the biggest problem with the piece is that it hinted at a "gotcha" moment, when an intrepid BBC reporter tracks down a sinister extortionist, and confronts them on camera, leads the authorities to them, or both. And that's not an entirely reasonable expectation, after all, Hassanbunhussein Abolore Lawal was extradited from Nigeria to face five federal charges in connection with Gavin Guffey's extortion and death. Although it must be said that Mr. Lawal didn't know when to quit, and that likely had a lot to do with his being tracked down. (Not to mention the fact that if convicted, he'll be well into middle age by the time he completes even the minimum possible sentence.)

But perhaps a story on how to protect one's loved ones, or oneself, from these schemes would have been more useful. The story's referencing of the various tools available to people being targeted by such schemes comes across as boilerplate, and besides, it's all reactive, rather than proactive, with the BBC placing the sole onus for protection on the providers of online services who have both weak incentives and poor tools to do such work well. "Ola" notes that "young boys are scared of their pictures being released to their class groups, their parents and their friends," and there seems to be a general acceptance of that fact. But young men are always likely to do dumb things when pursuing relationships and sex. Evan Boettler and Gavin Guffey killed themselves because they perceived that being dead was better than being outed as having sent explicit pictures to someone who turned out to be someone other than who they claimed. And the whole scheme works on the presumption that paying ever-escalating amounts of money is preferable to one's friends and family knowing that one's willing to do something dumb in the hope that one gets an attractive girlfriend out of the bargain.

The problem is that there no longer a good way to make the case that part of the problem lies with Anglo-American society without casting people like the Boettlers and Representative Guffey as culpable in the tragedies that have been visited upon them. And this is a common dilemma. Telling people that taking precautions makes it more difficult for perpetrators to act is often seen as casting those people as perpetrators themselves and absolving wrongdoers of culpability. And so there's a singular focus on bad actors; even at the risk of casting entire swaths of humanity as undesirables to be kept away from one's shores.

Autumn Blossoms

The weather in the Pacific Northwest tends to be mild, although there have been more hot stretches in the Spring and Summer over the past few years. One of the side effects of this is that the area appears to lack a real Winter, as one might experience it in other places. As a result, it seems to be always possible to find something in bloom, sometimes even plants that otherwise seem to flower only earlier in the year.

Safe and Quiet

I was listening to a recent episode of Derek Thompson's Plain English podcast the other day; the provocatively named How America Became a Nation of “Free Speech Hypocrites.” Mr. Thompson's guest was Greg Lukianoff, and the who talked about how things have come to where they are, with the Progressive Left and the Populist Right seeming to vie for the title of Most Hostile To Speech They Don't Like.

Mr. Lukianoff made the point that the current climate of censoriousness started on the Left, in élite college campuses, and while Mr. Thompson acknowledged that, he wanted to be careful to not cast both sides of the issue as equally blameworthy, something that I came to regard as something of a fool's errand; people who are motivated to see themselves as the heroes of a story can become incensed simply at being told they're just regular people; placing any blame on their shoulders will certainly arouse their ire. More importantly, who cares where the blame lies? Unless which set of partisans originated the problem will make a material difference to crafting a solution, blame is pointless.

But the thing that disappointed me most in the conversation was the absence of any mention of "harm." Not in the sense of who was being harmed by the Trump Administration's current actions, but in the sense that the origin of "political correctness" and "cancel/accountability culture" is the idea that words can do real harm. Personally, I'm not on board with that idea myself, for the most part, and I suspect that the Civil Libertarian Left and the Libertarian Right, as Mr. Lukianoff termed them, would both agree with me on that.

And this, I think, is why the current phenomenon has its roots with the Progressive, or perhaps more accurately, Social Justice, Left. While people often regard attempts to clamp down on speech to be cynical silencing of dissenting voices in the service of power grabs, I remember the Social Justice movement as being sincerely, if overly, concerned with the importance of protecting what they saw as marginalized groups and halting the spread and/or acceptance of ideas that were openly damaging to those groups. And while the Populist Right often laughed at the idea, this wouldn't have been the first time they've adopted the language of harm and grievance once they saw its overall usefulness.

While the Trump Administration would never be particularly open about it, I suspect that they, or at least certain among them, are well aware of the fact that many American Conservatives consider themselves to be put upon, if not actively oppressed, and in need of protection, not to mention the general privileges that American culture tends to grant to those it sees as victims.

And I think that this tends to be glossed over in discussions of free speech, if for no other reason than restrictions on speech tend to call to mind cynical and/or thin-skinned autocrats. People who understand free speech to be expensive for, and dangerous to, themselves tend to have little use for it. People, like myself, who have no problem with expansive free speech rights also tend to believe that its costs are negligible at most. So it's also, I think, important for people like myself to understand that other people have very real fears, even when we don't share them. Because very few problems in the world are ever solved by forcing people to live with their fears. And this one won't either.

Shuttered

So the Federal Government is "shut down" again, mainly because Democrats and Republicans alike are convinced that their base voters are with them, and less-partisan voters will blame the other side. Ostensibly, the reasons are that Democrats see no reason to vote for a spending bill that doesn't give them anything in the way of a political victory that they can take back to their voters, and Republicans have decided that now that they're in charge, they shouldn't have to make any compromises. But at the end of the day, this comes down to who the public is going to blame, and therefore, who can campaign on this situation in the run-up to next years mid-term elections.

Personally, I don't see anything particularly egregious in what the Democrats are asking for. And I'm not sure that Republicans will find that their voters were ever so opposed to government interventions in free markets that they'll be happy to pay more (or be unable to pay) for health care, simply so that President Trump can stick it to Barack Obama. Perhaps Republicans are convinced the TrumpRX direct-to-consumer medications plan will placate people, but there are already similar schemes in place.

The interesting thing about President Trump is that his political instincts are at once spot-on and wildly off the mark. There's been a lot of grumbling about government spending, especially since it tends to entail high deficits. To be sure, a lot of that comes from a litany of unfunded tax cuts in recent decades, which themselves tended to be panders to an electorate that wanted more in the way of government services than it was willing to pay for, but even with that, there were programs and projects that could have been trimmed back (or simply tightened up) with little in the way of public objections. But the way the Trump Administration has actually gone about things (with no small amount of guidance from the Heritage Foundations Project 2025 plan) appears to mainly about doing away with government activities that he didn't like, or that were seen as at cross-purposes with Conservative populism. Other programs that could reasonably be considered wasteful, on the other hand, were left in place. It plays well with a Conservative base, but puts off more Liberal-minded voters. And to many people, that seems to be the whole point.

To be sure, it makes sense to pick one side, and risk alienating the other, when one has to make a partisan-coded choice, but there's no real indication that the things that the Trump Administration has chosen to take on needed to be partisan-coded. Take medication prices, the item that TrumpRX is intended to address. President Trump isn't out in left field with his understanding that price regulation by other governments has resulted in a certain level of corporate profitability being generated by American citizens. There are any number of people who would have liked to see reform in the way medicines are priced here in the United States. But there's not much in the way of evidence that removing subsidies for health insurance for lower-income Americans and pushing them to buy direct from manufacturers at higher prices comes out to be a win for them, given that they'll still have their other medical expenses to pay.

So what really is the point behind this fight with Democrats other than fighting with the Democrats? Neither party has ever really been of the opinion that an electoral loss should mean placing their agendas on hold until they can return to power, so there isn't a principle argument to made here. (Especially given that principle pretty much doesn't exist in politics in the first place.) Not that the Democrats have chosen a particularly wise hill to die on themselves... If they don't come away with something that looks convincingly like a victory, they're simply going to have proven themselves impotent, and harmed their brand in the bargain. Not that they'd been particularly effective up to this point, but this fight is going to come with collateral damage that wouldn't have been there, otherwise.

But the big risk for the Democrats is that a loss here re-awakens the argument that it's been nearly a decade since they knew what they were doing. While the standard Republican line is that the Democratic "élite" is dangerously un-American, the real risk for the party is being seen to be run by incompetents. Having allowed themselves to be lulled into a sense that all they needed to do was stand back and watch the Right self-destruct, they've shown themselves unwilling to be roused from that. If they lose this fight, they'll simply have shown that they still don't have it together.