Looking Up

I avoid doomscrolling. I think. I'm not sure that I'm clear enough on the definition of the term to be able to confidently say that I don't do it. I don't spend much time on news sites these days, because most of them require subscriptions, and I don't find most of them valuable enough to trade date, let alone money, for. And other than Linkedin, I don't have much of a social media presence. I enjoyed Google+, but that's long dead at this point. I could never get a straight answer as to the proposed business models of the would-be alternatives, and so never moved over to any of them. I haunt Reddit once in a while, but don't spend much time reading the news there.

So I don't think that I indulge in a lot of doomscrolling. But even without it, it's hard to find positive news about what's going on in the would, since positive items neither sell subscriptions nor drive attention to advertisers. So my media diet tends to have a fairly negative bent to it... which I dislike, and so I'm less likely to spend a lot of time reading the news.

But why do that, when the positive news is out there... it's just a matter of going out and finding it. Part of it, I suspect, is an aversion to the treacly "rainbows and puppies" sort of good news. It's easy to sort, and easy to report, but it comes across as being pretty trivial. There are only so many rousingly successful grade school bake sales I can be bothered to read about. Perhaps it's due to the stories being mainly human interest. And of course there are always people out there doing good things... the population of the United States is in the hundreds of millions, we can't all be jackasses all the time.

I think that what I'm actually looking for is accessible technology news; something I can read to learn how people are getting out there and solving problem, with enough technical detail that it's not all about the personal stories involved, but in language that I can actually make heads or tails of, given that I don't have a technical education.

That's likely to be a rare beast, and unlikely to be free. But, given the length and breadth of the World Wide Web, it's out there somewhere, I just have to find it. I expect that it will be a worthwhile project. 

Good Reads

What does it take to be a "good news consumer?" Pew research asked this question, and posted a short article on the answers recently. While a plurality of people (some 32 percent) didn't answer, and a about 10% gave an answer that Pew coded as "Other," the most popular answers are listed below, in order of popularity:

1. Be discerning or skeptical
2. Follow the news or stay informed
3. Get news from quality sources
4. Research or fact check the news
5. Get news from a variety of sources
6. Get news from a variety of perspectives
7. Not share inaccurate information
8. Use the news to make decisions

I suspect that I would have fallen into the other category, because the first thing that comes to my mind is to understand the difference between being informed and being entertained. While I agree with the 3% of people who gave an answer of "Use the news to make decisions," I don't generally find most news to be actionable in that way. It's interesting, occasionally very much so, but things like "The U.S. threatens to revoke the Palestinian U.N. ambassador's visa," "Can the West survive ‘drastic’ Colorado River cuts?" or "Trump's priorities are in deep trouble after his revenge tour" don't have anything in them that I need to, or can, act upon.

And in that sense, they're not really all that informative. Not because the information wasn't new, but because there isn't much I can do with it, when it comes to decision-making. And this doesn't even touch upon the stereotypical "if it bleeds, it leads" type of story, which may give people a certain sense of danger, but doesn't offer anything in the way of solutions.

Now, I'm aware that my own news diet is particularly sparse when it comes to actionable information because I don't follow the news consistently enough to pay to subscribe to anything. And if one really wants information that's useful in making decisions, paying for it is the way to go. I've been toying with the idea for some time, but I'm the sort to go for a few days without really checking in on things, and in a situation where what's really being paid for is temporary access, that's a recipe for wasting money. I'm also unenthusiastic about trial periods that require credit cards, and automatic renewals, in the hope that I'll simply forget to cancel and become a recurring revenue stream. (But I understand the incentive structure. And the fact that this is a case where pretty much everyone is doing it.)

Am I a "good news consumer?" I suspect not. While I understand the difference between actionable news and the sort of things one reads as a diversion, I'm not really motivated to seek out "news I can use," as it were, and that limits my intake to things that I don't really gain much by learning. Perhaps I should rectify that.

And Another, And Another

The BBC has a story on their website about charges being filed against a young Florida man who has been accused of sexually assaulting and killing his stepsister during a family cruise vacation. The story is on the News homepage, one doesn't have to go to the "US & Canada" page to find it. In fact, it's more prominent on the News page.

On the one hand, I get it. The public likes these sorts of stories. They generate clicks, and thus, advertising revenue. But on the other hand, they don't seem to generate much else. The BBC, and other news organizations are willing to take on the stories of people who advocate for an end to violence against women, but tends to treat the individual stories about the violence as a form of salacious entertainment.

For my part, I am much more interested in the stepbrother. Or, I will be, once he's been found guilty. Because until then, it's not really worthwhile to ask him about the why of it all. And the why of it all is the important piece. Everyone seems to have an opinion on what causes violence against women, many of them woefully uninformed. But maybe that's to be expected in an environment where lurid stories are seen as newsworthy, but actionable, or perhaps simply explanatory information is too boring to post.

It's understood that people care about this. There's no shortage of anguished, or even outraged, essays about the subject on the internet. Families of the murdered can be heartbreakingly eloquent about the events that took their loved ones away from them. But if there's any broader response at all, it tends to be the same one that all crime that bothers people gets: Put more police officers on the streets, as if deputizing enough of the population will convince people to stay on the straight and narrow. But I'm not sure that any number of police officers would have been enough to stop a young man from murdering his stepsister and hiding her body under a bed.

Of course, part of the problem could be the blame game, and the need to expand the circle of responsibility beyond the perpetrator. That, along with familial loyalty, actively disincentivizes people from pointing out, or even seeing, potential warning signs. But that presumes that they actually know what to look for; and what to do if they saw it.

And that strikes me as the problem with crime news as a form of entertainment, something to be put in front of people around the world, to aid in their daily doomscroll. Crime has causes over and above the people who commit the individual crimes. It's unrealistic to presume that we could know them all, but I would be unsurprised to learn that there's more information out there than the general public has access to. And I fully expect that some amount of it could be very useful.

I live in the suburbs of Seattle. While there have been some really nice sunny stretches here and there, the Puget Sound region is still in the midst of the rainy season, which doesn't "officially" end until the beginning of July. Lots of people around here have at least a passing familiarity with Seasonal Affective Disorder, and the things that go along with it. Understanding how that fits into how crime manifests itself around here could be really helpful in curbing it; as much as it can be curbed in a reasonably dense urban/suburban area.

There's a distinct tendency to shy away from potential genetic causes of crime, and that makes perfect sense; the common reaction is to declare such people irredeemably broken from the start, and simply lock them away, so that everyone else need not be bothered with them. And that's another part of the problem. A person who confesses to wishing to harm themselves is seen as deserving of compassion and aid, while a person who confesses to wishing to harm another is simply a threat. But preventing harm is preventing harm... why does the source matter? And stigmatizing people who come forward to admit that they're having difficulties keeping themselves in check simply makes it less likely that people will come forward.

In the end, the fact that the sparse details of Anna Kepner's death are more interesting, and thus more useful to news organizations, than what steps might be taken to prevent the next death is simply another example of the perverse incentives that pervade human existence. Or maybe the issue is that they pervade human nature, as well.

Misfired

At the risk of coming across as flippant, I'm going to quote Superman, from the DC Comics series Kingdom Come. "You can't have a war," the Man of Steel said to Wonder Woman, "without people dying." To which most people, I expect, would respond with something along the lines of: "That, we knew already." People generally understand the nature of war. While it might not be true that "War never changes," there are certain things that tend to be constants; like casualties.

After the first three deaths were reported, Trump told NBC News on Sunday: “We have three, but we expect casualties, but in the end it’s going to be a great deal for the world.”
[...]
Then in a video posted to social media the same day, he again seemed to ask for people’s understanding about the subject.

“And sadly, there will likely be more [deaths] before it ends,” Trump said, before adding: “That’s the way it is. Likely be more.”

He then added: “But we’ll do everything possible where that won’t be the case.”
Trump’s and Hegseth’s awkward comments about US troop deaths in Iran war

But another constant is the deaths of non-combatant civilians.

Speaking aboard Air Force One on Saturday, President Trump accused Iran of being responsible for the school bombing.

"Based on what I've seen, I think it was done by Iran," Trump said. "Because they're very, inaccurate as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran."
Video appears to show U.S. cruise missile striking Iranian school compound

On the one hand, I understand the President's looking to shift the blame. After all, he's been pushing a narrative of the United States being the unambiguous Good Guys in this conflict, even if looks like, once again, President Trump using the military to go after a nation that no-one else is close enough to that they'd be willing to stand up for them, and that doesn't have the wherewithal to fight back in kind.

But on the other hand, there's nothing new or unusual about inaccurate or outdated intelligence, or weapons not being quite as "precision guided" as they're advertised as being. People die in wars. And sometimes, they're people that everyone would rather had not been killed. The history of war is littered with people who has the misfortune of happening to be somewhere that a weapon also happened to be, but who weren't the intended, or presumed, targets of that weapon. Why would anyone expect this particular war to be any different?

It's reasonable for people in the United States to want their nation to have clean hands. It's less reasonable to expect that a war being fought mainly with long-distance weapons is going to result in clean hands. And if the President wants to keep American casualties to a bare minimum, then the United States is going to have to do much of its fighting from a distance. And the more that the war relies on hitting targets from a long way away, the more it relies on reports of what's where and who's who, the more that there are going to be times when a bomb, or a missile or whatever hits someone that it wouldn't if someone had realized precisely who was in the line of fire. The Commander-In-Chief, off all people, should be prepared to own up to that.

Line of Fire

"Too many cases do not appear to meet the test of objective reasonableness with regard to the use of deadly force," the report found. "[I]n some cases agents put themselves in harm's way by remaining in close proximity to the rock throwers when moving out of range was a reasonable option."
CBP has a history of excessive force. Critics say they were unprepared for Minnesota

This isn't a new criticism of law enforcement. It was raised in the media in the aftermath of the Amadou Diallo shooting, and that took place in 1999. I suspect that the tendency of court cases pertaining to potentially unlawful uses of deadly force to concentrate solely on the immediate lead up to the point when an officer pulls the trigger is a large part of this. If the timeline is never wound back far enough to get to the point where it's reasonable to ask: "Should the officer have been in so vulnerable a position in the first place?" there will be little incentive for officers to avoid making themselves vulnerable.

The Trump Administration's reflexive defense of every shooting, and the immediate casting of the person killed as dangerous or a terrorist also ramps up the danger level. Not only because officers can come to feel secure in the idea that the Administration will back them, but as I was taught when I spent a summer as a security guard, a dead person can't contradict your version of events. In this sense, fatal shootings become easier to justify than non-fatal ones, where there is a survivor who can demand evidence of the allegations against them.

But perhaps the central problem is the polarization of the general public... or at least between those people who see themselves as ardent supporters or critics of the Administration. For people who see the Trump Administration's crackdown on economic migrants and asylum seekers alike as warranted (or even long overdue), interference with it, or even protest against it, makes one a bad person. And if the actions of law enforcement mean that bad people are hurt or killed, what's the harm?

The one thing that Americans appear to dislike more than fighting with one another is not having anyone to fight with, and the current Administration understands that it will be forgiven a certain amount of overzealousness, so long as it's directed towards perceived enemies of its base of voters. And as long as there's a significant segment of the public that's willing to ignore law enforcement personnel putting themselves in situations that they then feel the need to shoot their way out of, there will be little incentive for change. 

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.

Headlining

News, due to the fact that it is a business, tends to go where it believes the public's attention is going to be. And that can make looking up the latest headlines into an exercise in understanding where news organizations and aggregators think the most interest will be, as opposed to actually becoming more informed.

Consider these top headlines when I looked up the Technology section of Google News:

It's pointless to ask if the fact that Walmart will have more Switch 2 consoles to sell is genuinely newsworthy, because, in a sense, of course it is, that's why Google is leading with that story. And I think that it's because this is, as the saying goes "News you can use." People who are looking for the new Nintendo system can now plan to go get one, or order it online. The fact that the Switch is back in stock is actionable by people who are interested in it, unlike a lot of news stories today.

Due the short shelf life of the information, it's not the sort of thing that feels particularly informative, big picture. And maybe that's part of the reason why is garners so much attention; it's not just another thing happening somewhere that readers can't do anything to change or improve. It's not the media mining the public's anxieties for clicks. It's "Hey; that thing you wanted? There are more of them now." I can see why that would be appealing to people.
 

Once More, With Feeling

A picture of the L. A. protests that I came across online, uncredited. If I find the credits, I'll update this.

Okay, I'll bite: What makes people expect that photographs of masked protesters standing on burning, grafitti-covered, Waymo taxis while waving Mexican flags in California is going to make people in Texas, Kansas or West Virginia support allowing people who entered (or stayed in) the country illegally to remain? I get that a riot is the last refuge of the unheard, but I'm not at all convinced that this is the sort of thing that one wants to be shouting at people.

Because I don't know about you, but I don't get "Hey, I love this country and want to remain here," from protesting with the flag of another country.

To be sure, I'm dubious about the utility of protests in general. When the support is there to effect change via normal processes, people don't need to go around marching, chanting and waving signs, let alone setting things on fire. And while I can see some point to the civil disobedience side of things, being arrested and dragged off for setting cars on fire doesn't exactly get people to re-think the laws they live under.

The problem here isn't Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It's United States immigration law. And that's not something that the Los Angeles City Council or the California legislature could change on their own, even if they were inclined to do so. That's something that has to happen at the national level. Even the decision to effectively look the other way and allow people to go about their business "under the radar," as it were, is made from Washington D. C., not Los Angeles or Sacramento.

And right now, Washington D. C. is run by Donald Trump and the Trump-aligned members of Congress; people who have every incentive to come down on the protests like the proverbial ton of bricks, It's no skin from any of their noses if inserting the National Guard into this situation makes everything go pear-shaped; it's not like they're in dire need of the Los Angelino vote. And so in this sense, the protestors are performing for the wrong audience; the Los Angelinos who are sympathetic to them aren't in a position to change policy on a national level.

And that's where voters in Texas, Kansas, West Virginia et cetera come into the picture, because they are the people whose minds needs to be changed, if policy is going to change. President Trump is sending ICE into New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and so on specifically so he can show those voters that he cares about them (by ejecting from the country people those voters see as a threat to themselves) whole disrupting the urban "élites" that they so dislike. After all, it's understood that Red America has its share of migrant labor that's in the country illegally.

I understand that I'm basically making a case for "respectability politics." I don't contest the charge.  But for me, respectability is what supplicants have; and the migrants are, when its all said and done, supplicants. At a minimum, many of them are asking that the laws pertaining to immigration to the United States not be enforced; at most, they asking for them to be changed. And I said "asking" rather than "demanding;" immigrants to crossed the border for economic opportunities not available to them at home have no standing to claim a right to stay. And if the United States needed the migrants more than the migrants needed the United States, they could simply leave and wait for the Administration to come with a way to regularize them.

Something tells me that what's at work here is a poor grasp of history. The self-serving story that the United States tells itself is that Martin Luther King Jr. and the other Civil Rights leaders simply took to the streets, and while there were some bad actors in government who responded with abuse, the rightness of their cause showed everyone that they should get what they want, and it was all hunky-dory from there. But that wasn't how it worked back then. And it isn't going to be how it works now.

Untold

One Joseph Czuba was sentenced to 53 years (with credit for time served) in prison for attacking a Moslem woman who was renting from him with a knife and stabbing her 6 year old son to death. I'd heard about the case, which has made international headlines, but hadn't really followed it. According to the coverage I'd seen, Mr. Czuba had pled Not Guilty to the charges, and I was curious what his defense had been. People plead Not Guilty in a lot of cases where it appears that they were caught red-handed, and I've started wondering if they're entering mental disease or defect pleas (claiming mitigating circumstances that separate legal guilt from factual guilt), or simply claiming that, despite what it looked like and/or whatever witnesses their may have been, they didn't do it.

In any event, I'm learning that standard search engines are a terrible tool for finding this sort of information. Mainly, I suspect, because I'm one of those weird people who takes an interest in these things when no-one else does. The results I was able to find were stories about the sentencing from various news outlets, from the local to the international, although the local Fox affiliate did have what I was looking for, noting that Mr. Czuba's defense team "focused [...] on trying to question the clarity of the evidence."

Conspicuously absent from the search result, however, was a story from Fox News. Although the Times of Israel covered the story (while also being at pains to add that "antisemitism and anti-Israel incidents" also happened in the United States), and even the famously conservative New York Post ran a story, when I searched Fox News, nothing about the sentencing came up. Which struck me as odd. They could have simply run (albeit with some much-needed editing) the WFLD story and called it a day. And it's entirely possible that they're simply taking their time, and that by the time anyone reads this, a story specifically on the sentencing will have been posted, even if there isn't one there now.

But on the face if it, it seems to point to the idea that news outlets cater their audiences in their story selection as well as framing, posting items that affirm their worldviews and sometimes leaving out stories that don't. And while people tend to insist that news organizations they understand as ideologically opposed should be running the stories that they want people to see, it's much less likely that pressure will be brought to bear to force their favored news sources to cover the "other side's" preferred narratives.

One or the Other

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arm, Presented

There have been a lot of pictures of Elon Musk and his stiff-armed salute at the inauguration floating around. Like this one that I encountered on LinkedIn:

What I would like to know, to be honest, is what's up with that face he's making?

Each photograph, it seems come with a different take on whether or not Mr. Musk was or was not making the Nazi salute (I find the idea that he was making a supposedly Roman-inspired Fascist salute to not be much better), or if Mr. Musk is or is not a (wannabe) Nazi.

And I think that is, basically the point. The ambiguity of the Musk salute is a feature, not a bug. It allows him to speak to two different groups of people, who may not themselves get along, and each can see in his actions what, and who, they want to.

For starters, let's face it, there are still Segregationists and other forms of White Supremacists in the United States today. There were a good number of them when the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s were passed, not all of them have died and some of them have passed their beliefs on to their children and/or other people younger (Or maybe older, who knows?) than themselves. And it's a safe bet that some percentage of these people would happily, if privately, call themselves Nazis, neo-Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. Just because a movement winds up being history's villains doesn't mean that everyone thinks that they were wrong. And regardless of what one thinks of such people, their votes still count as much as everyone else's, and accordingly, they can still swing elections. And this means that people, like Donald Trump, will court them. And when Elon Musk gives what can be plausibly described as a Nazi (or even a Fascist) salute, they feel valued. And may even feel buoyed that Mr. Musk is owning some Libs and/or Jews.

As an aside, while this is what's sometimes referred to as a "dog whistle," that's a misnomer, because, as seen in the photographs, it's being done out in the open. Dog whistles, more properly, are almost a form of Cant, where "if you know, you know," and if one doesn't know, one doesn't suspect. A genuine dog whistle is insider-speak that comes across as innocuous to the uninitiated.

But there are also people who want and/or need something from the Trump Administration and Mr. Musk, who would really rather not be associated with anything Nazi. (The Nazis are, after all, some of history's biggest villains.) For them, the ambiguity of the situation allows them to keep their hands clean. They're not supporting a Nazi, because Mr. Must isn't a Nazi. He even said so. It was just some ancient Roman thing... everyone's blowing this all out of proportion. So they can continue to support the cause, without having to admit that they're backing the Bad Guys.

This works because the United States has an aspect of what one might call Confessional Culture to it, where things become "real" only when they are admitted to. So as long as Mr. Musk doesn't confess to being a would-be Nazi, he isn't. Now there might come a time when the label is forced in him whether he wants it or not, but that time hasn't come yet.

And a good portion of American politics works on just this sort of ambiguity. It's part of the reason why social trust is so low, especially between different political groups; hiding dishonesty in ambiguity is such a commonplace activity that most people simple assume that anyone they don't like who does anything slightly unclear is up to something malign.

Hey. Listen.

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another One

So when the suspect in the shooting death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania he had "multiple fraudulent IDs, a U.S. passport, a gun and a suppressor consistent with those used in the attack" on his person. Not to mention a "a handwritten document that speaks to both his motivation and mindset."

And now that the police have said that the gun appears to be a match for the shell casings found at the scene, it's all lead to me wonder why Luigi Mangione didn't simply walk to the nearest police station and turn himself in. But I will admit that this is mainly because, had it been me, the fake ID that was used to check into places in New York City and the gun would have found their way to the bottom of a river in short order. As for the "manifesto" as media stories have taken to calling it, I could see carrying it if I expected to be gunned down at the scene, but after that? The World Wide Web is a much better place to get one's message out. Now, I doubt that more than a handful of people will ever see the thing.

Which may be a shame. I get that a number of people are disturbed by the gunman's "folk hero" status, and don't want other people following in his footsteps, but if anyone's going to do that, those wheels are already turning. If Mr. Mangione was the killer, preventing the public at large from reading the document simply closes off an avenue of understanding.

Sure, in an effort to fill the 24-hour news cycle and attract audiences (and the advertising dollars that follow them) news outlets will interview anyone with a pulse who can tell them something about Mr. Mangione, but it's likely that all that will be released of the "manifesto" are incriminating snippets.

It's become something of a cliché in cases like this to speak to a friend or neighbor who expresses nothing but utter surprise that the suspect could commit whatever crime they're accused of. And then it turns out that they're no different than the last ten people whose untreated mental illnesses led to tragedies. There's a case to be made for anticipating this being the case, and better public understanding of what people in these situations are like before they open fire might allow for interventions before bloodshed happens. But the fear of copycats, founded or not, will win out.

Judged

I'd worked up something of a long diatribe for this post, diving into how social desirability bias leads people to deny things happened, rather than admit that they're excusing them, but it occurred to me that I could distill the point down into something simple. So here goes:

No legal system can legislate how people see themselves, or those people they see themselves reflected in.

For all that Donald Trump has spent the past eight years or so loudly proclaiming that he can flout rules and get away with it, when push has come to legal shove, he hasn't claimed a right to be pardoned. Rather, he's claimed a scrupulous adherence to the rule of law that contradicts nearly every aspect of the persona that he's built for himself.

And because his supporters understand themselves as upright and law-abiding, he must be, too, and so they believe it, despite the evidence, and despite the persona. Because the laws of reality can't legislate how people see themselves or their heroes, either.

Disequilibrium

"America and Israel have reacted with outrage," says The Economist, "at the implied equivalence between Israel and Hamas."

I'm not sure what this "implied equivalence" is, given that it's understood that not all crimes are created equally. The fact that Hamas' actions back in October, and continuing to the present were and are heinous doesn't write the government of Israel a "get out of international law free" card. The International Criminal Court believes that both sides have broken laws. That implies no more equivalence than the fact that petty burglars and murderers alike are subject to arrest by the local police in most places.

It's true that laws can often become a hindrance when attempting to deal with someone who has no compunctions about ignoring them. Hamas, after all, is not a state actor, and whether one sees them as terrorists, freedom fighters or simply criminals, they are unlikely to decide that laws apply to them. After all, people who (honestly or cynically) see themselves as unjustly oppressed tend to view the law as an illegitimate tool of the oppressor. And so this puts the state of Israel in a tough spot. The ICC, however, doesn't have to care about that. And they shouldn't, really. If Israel has what they consider a valid defense, let them raise it at a trial. Nations already claim extenuating circumstances every time they decide they need to attain this or that goal. Taking each of these claims at face value would make international law even more meaningless than it already is.

It's understandable that the Netanyahu Administration has adopted a "whatever it takes" attitude. And even with that, it's not hard to make the case that they haven't gone anywhere nearly as far as Hamas. But that's not the standard that the ICC is using. To behave as though it were is disingenuous.

Mincing

Florida Governor, and (allegedly) Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis does have some sympathy for the Jacksonville community in which three people were killed in a shooting. Not that you would guess from looking at much of the news coverage of the event thus far. If Governor DeSantis is mentioned at all, the focus in on his macho condemnation of the shooter and his actions. To get to the part where the governor speaks to the community itself, one has to watch the video of his statement.

Governor DeSantis may have some of the responsibility for this; he does seem much more focused on demonstrating his disdain for the shooter than he does on speaking to the community. But he is, as they say, simply following the script. Statements like this are generally expected to be geared more towards expressing outrage and disgust over the act. Especially given that Governor DeSantis, who is very much the model of a modern Republican officeholder, couldn't take the sort of actions that gun-control advocates would call for. The shooter has to be the sole person at fault; as to imply otherwise would raise questions as to why nothing is being done. And the governor's well-known antipathy for all things "woke" (which, for many Black people, includes an awareness that things like this are simply part of life in the United States) doesn't lend him an air of caring about the concerns of Florida's Black population. Not to mention that Southern populism (and maybe Right-leaning populism more generally) tends to cast non-model minorities as enemy "others," favored and coddled by hateful "élites."

Be that as it may, Governor DeSantis didn't simply ignore the community. His comments seemed somewhat perfunctory, almost an afterthought, but he did offer condolences to the people impacted by the event. And that should also make it into the news coverage of the event. I can see why the macho posturing would be of interest, especially for Left-leaning news outlets looking to show how empty and banal that posturing is. And I can also see Right-leaning outlets placing their focus there, too; it makes the governor look tough. But, either way, it's not the complete picture.

I watched Governor DeSantis' video statement. I didn't expect to be impressed, and I wasn't. I understand, however, that something that would have impressed me in this would likely also have been a grievous act of political self-harm, if not suicide. For the governor to have been open and candid about why things like this happen, and the fact that he's not prepared, or not in a position to, really do anything about it would have made him the target of people's ire. The governor understands, correctly or not, that people's feelings about this situation are anger and sadness, in that order. Or, at least that more people are angry about what happened than are sad about what happened. (Although, personally, I suspect that the majority opinion on this is one of indifference.) And the timing of, and time spent on, words addressing those reflect that.

Reactions to violence in the United States are hampered by the fact that there are so many competing interest groups. The each have different goals, and there are pretty much no actions that can be taken that will please all of them. Indeed, any action that one group approves of will be met with dismay and anger from another. All of this is a barrier in situations in which the role of a chief executive, whether they be a governor, mayor or the President, is to "bring people together" after a tragedy. Thoughts, prayers and condolences are all expressions of an inability (or unwillingness) to do anything more substantive. And offering them has become understood to be a way of admitting that nothing more significant is in the offing. For those who understand that the fact that something should be done means that something can be done (for all that Immanuel Kant would have found their logic backwards), those words are hollow and insincere. The need to appear to be vigorous and active in the face of events that frighten people (even if they'll be forgotten before too long) means that the tough-sounding language has to lead, even when it's going to be seen as just talk. If it's all just talk, however, then none of it is particularly more newsworthy than the rest of it.

Read All About It

I'm not a journalist. Which is a good thing, because I'm not a particularly skilled writer. So I don't claim to have a deep understanding of the news business, and how it works. Especially when it comes to story placement. Generally speaking, I suppose that I expect that websites would be structured something like newspapers, with the most important stories at the top.

So I was somewhat surprised when I came across this version of NPR's website earlier today.

Were the accusations against a YouTube personality really the most important thing going on at the time? I'm not sure, for my part, that the story rated more highly than the announcement of layoffs at Alphabet/Google or (yet another) T-Mobile data breach. Or former President Trump and his legal team being fined for misuse of the courts. But then again, I'm not really in National Public Radio's target demographic. Millennials and "Generation Z," it seems, are.

And I can see why the story would be important to them; accusations against culturally relevant figures generally are. Even when they're new enough that it comes across more as youth-celebrity gossip, rather than verified wrongdoing.

As an aside, there was this throwaway line early in the piece: "But for many who follow Callaghan's work, the incident raises questions about Gen Z's tolerance for sexually questionable behavior." Outside of the fact that they never addressed the issue further, or included any opinion from the "many" in question, I found myself wondering just why "sexually questionable" behavior should be considered intolerable. After all, one would expect that the final decision on what to tolerate, or not, would depend in the answers to the questions raised.

But maybe I'm just an old man.

In any event, it's interesting to understand which markets that various segments of the news business are looking to serve. As much as people tend to posit that bias in the news media is about changing (if not outright controlling) people's "priors" and preconceptions, I think it's much more accurate to posit that people select the news they're going to take in based on what most closely aligns with those priors and those topics that they're interested in.

If the young, socially progressive audience that National Public Radio is pursuing finds the allegations against Andrew Callaghan are important enough to base their selection of news sources on who has the most information about them, then NPR will serve that up, and prominently.

And in that sense, they were the most important thing happening. Perhaps this is (and has been) why older people seem out of touch with the world around them. As people age out of the target demographics of the news sources they followed, they simply find the big stories of the day to be less relevant, and less worthy of spending time on. I know I'm starting to feel that way. I read the Andrew Callaghan story more out of curiosity with NPR's editorial decision-making than any actual interest in someone less than half my age seemingly getting into trouble for being persistent when pursuing sex. Perhaps that curiosity will be enough to keep me in the loop.

Incapacity

But with a child so young, traditional principles like punishment, accountability and rehabilitation "don't really apply," [University of Richmond law professor Julie Ellen] McConnell said. "As a 6-year-old, he just doesn't have the intellectual capacity to even understand how to form the intent to commit a crime like this."
A 6-year-old shooter raises difficult questions for the criminal justice system

Okay, I'll bite. Why not?

I used to work with children for a living (if you could call it that, given the salary) and one of the things that I came away with from the job is that adults tend to underestimate children's abilities to understand the world around them, especially power relationships. Take the unnamed child who shot an severely injured his teacher last week in Virginia. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that the student could have intended to injure the teacher over some action or another that he didn't like, and understood that guns are capable of injuring people. Children, after all, hit, kick and bite one another with dreary regularity, and it's common to not only impose a mild discipline, like a "time out" on a child when they do so, but to tell them that if they do so again in the future, another discipline would be forthcoming. If children are so intellectually incapable that they can't understand that their behavior draws disapproval, why does that behavior make any sense?

What many children seem to lack, in my understanding, is the idea that their current emotional state is not a blanket justification for anything they might do that stems from it. Granted, I've met more than a few adults who seem to have trouble with that reasoning, but still, it strikes me as being part of what sometimes strikes people as a lack of empathy in children. Sure, children will commonly say it's bad when other children hit them, but that's because children tend to never see being hit as a rational response to their own behavior. But "they started it" is less a childhood dodge of culpability than their standard way of looking at the world; children can having difficulty with the idea that their wants and desires aren't imperatives that the rest of the world needs to immediately indulge.

But more to the point, I don't know that I find casting children as mentally impaired when compared to adults a necessary step in deciding that sending them to juvenile detention is inappropriate. In Virginia, the minimum age for detention is 11. Whatever the reason for making that choice, it wasn't, and couldn't have been, based on some fact of biology that kicks in at a child's 11th birthday. It was a choice that was made because it seemed reasonable to the people who were making it. And that's all that's really needed in situations like this. It strikes me as unreasonable to lock small children up for long stretches of time, even for serious misbehavior. And part of of this is because, yes, children's outlooks on the world are different from adults; and their general inability to understand long-term consequences makes it somewhat pointless. But here in the United States, a large part of the legal system is about finding someone to punish, so that people understand that the world is "fair." Which is why the child's parents may now be under investigation for failure to keep the child from taking the gun. Perhaps if there wasn't such a need for an eye for an eye, there wouldn't be a need to equate childhood with brain damage.

And That's Terrible

The phenomenon known as "swatting" is a simple one. Someone calls a police department, and says that a serious violent crime and/or hostage situation is occurring at some or another address. The department's SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics) team swings into action, only to find out that a hoax has been perpetrated. If everyone involved is fortunate, no-one is killed prior to the deception being uncovered. Otherwise, as has been case on a few occasions, tragedy ensues.

The practice first entered the public's consciousness (and the lexicon) due to the swatting of individuals. But it also happens to organizations. In the case of the National Public Radio story that aired this morning, parties unknown called police departments to falsely report active shooters in schools.

The practice creates problems for a lot of people, not the least of which being the students, faculty and staff of a swatted school. And so this is something that seems newsworthy. Which made it surprising that the story that National Public Radio ran on the phenomenon this morning seemed completely devoid of information. The story purports to be about the lasting consequences of swatting schools, but other than the one mother saying her daughter was basically freaked out by what happened, it doesn't even live up to that.

The piece is basically a human-interest story speaking to the day's event. Which is marginally interesting, but it feels like something between a filler piece and a missed opportunity. Granted, I'm not a journalist myself, but surely, there is something more informative about the practice that could have been the basis for a story. Part of what's going on, I suspect, is that I'm not really in NPR's target audience, and their target audience is into this human-interest stories. There's also just a greater focus on human-interest stories in the media landscape in general, as they allow for news outlets to present their viewpoints by selecting the people whose stories they tell.