Bedrock

It's a simple enough sentiment: "The foundations of trust are reliability and integrity."

But, I would hasten to add, the foundation of reliability and integrity is trust. I first encountered it as a bit of snark, but "he who never wins and never quits is an idiot" is more true than I think many people are willing to give it credit for. Keeping one's word and keeping one's commitments are both predicated on the idea that there will be a payoff in the future.

And I think the problem is that the people who preach things like reliability, integrity and grit are so accustomed to the payoff happening that they don't realize that for many, if not most people in the world, it's not a given. If reliability and integrity are simply avenues to being taken advantage of, people aren't going to display them. Not out of a disdain for virtue, but out of a belief that virtue is an expensive path to receiving nothing in return.

Whatever

Whatever happened, I wondered, to Connie Sun? After I'd heard about her comics blog from NPR, I followed it for a while, then would drop in now and again, and eventually some time had gone by since I'd last read it. I dropped in, and found that the most recent post was more than a year old.

It is, in a way, the curse of the Internet. It's remarkable easy to feed more interests than one can reasonably keep up with, and so it's inevitable that some, if not many of them are going to fall by the wayside, until something reminds one of them. By which point, the thing in question may no longer exist.

I understand, intellectually, that the internet is ephemeral. In the end, it's all just links to digital media, and digital media is ephemeral in a way that other things are not. I have a few books in my home that are older than I am. And while those books may be out of print, the books themselves are still there. They are physical objects, and that lends them a durability (nothing in genuinely permanent) that seems to be lacking from computer files.

The tenuous connections and pseudo-connections facilitated by the Internet are just as ephemeral, but at least to me, they also tend to lend the people themselves that same quality. I'm petty sure that Ms. (or maybe she's become Mrs. in the meantime) Sun is still doing her thing, and still being a perceptive observer of the world, her place in it, and how she and it interact as she moves through it. But I don't actually know Ms. Sun; I simply followed her cartoons from literally the other side of the continent. At that remove, I can't even prove that she's a real person; it could have been a pseudonym, for all that I know. And in that sense, the lack of updates to her blog are no different than if she'd been deleted by someone who decided that they no longer needed to maintain that identity.

I've "met" a lot of people on the Internet who have effectively ceased to exist in the same  way. I suspect that they're still out there, but with the digital connection between us broken, it's like they were never really there at all. Kind of like losing a telephone number or an address back in the day,

And so I wonder. Are there people out there for whom I am simply another ghost in the network of machines? A person who wandered in out of the digital ether, touched their lives briefly and then disappeared again?

Is Who He Is

“I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.”
Donald Trump. 31 July, 2024

The idea that anything that Donald Trump did during his term in office comes close to signing the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 is laughable on its face. Yet he repeats the claim over and over. So I have the same question today that I had beck in 2016 when Mr. Trump would talk about all of the things that he would do for Black people: Who is he talking to?

And this is emblematic of the way that Mr. Trump speaks when he's not in front of a friendly audience, because that's the only audience that he every really talks to. Everyone else, he talks about. I suppose it comes with being in a position where he doesn't really have to listen to anyone, because any competent campaign manager, or even staffer, would have told him to actually attempt to address the audience in front of him, just as he would at a rally. But this has never really been Mr. Trump's style, and I think that his surprise upset of Hillary Clinton in 2016 reinforced for him the idea that it didn't need to be.

It's odd, because I suspect that Mr. Trump could be as popular with the public as a whole as he appears to want to be, and tells people that he is. But that would mean giving up attempting to play various groups off against one another. And I think that's simply too central to who he is.

Envision

There are, I am told, five "noteworthy" candidates for the Republican nomination for President of the United States. One is, unsurprisingly, Donald Trump. The other four are:

• Nikki Haley
• Asa Hutchinson
• Vivek Ramaswamy    
• Corey Stapleton

Otherwise known as people who have zero chance of becoming President of the United States in 2024. Even though Corey Stapleton was the first to announce his candidacy, I'd never heard of him until I looked up the list (and that was mainly because I couldn't recall Vivek Ramaswamy's name). All four of these candidates are going to be running campaigns that will be somewhere between hopeless, utterly quixotic or just simply ignored. The base of the Republican party is currently too enamored of Donald Trump and/or Trumpism (or MAGAism, if you prefer) to give any of them a first thought, let alone a second.

But this is true of most candidates for President, and a lot of other offices, if the voters' guides that the state puts out are any indication. So I always wonder why they do it. Nikki Haley and Asa Hutchinson at least have some name recognition within the party. But Governor Hutchinson is running to be the sort of Republican whose willingness to ignore the anger and fears of the Republican electorate is what led to Donald Trump being elected the first time. There's no sign that Republican voters are ready to give his brand of Conservatism another bite of the apple. Vivek Ramaswamy strikes the correct Culture War notes, but so does Donald Trump.

There may be something to be said for delusion, but all four of the contenders strike me as reasonably intelligent people; one doesn't get to be Ambassador to the United Nations or a successful businessman by being completely out of touch with reality as most people tend to experience it.

And that leaves me with a certain level of curiosity as to what any of them expect to attain by running for President that they couldn't attain without it. Of course, I could be completely wrong about their chances. After all, no-one really took Donald Trump seriously when he announced back in 2015, either.

And that raises the question: What do these people (and a few others) think that they see in the Republican electorate that other people don't? Donald Trump saw a culture of grievance and victimhood that was ripe for exploitation (and he did so, masterfully). Counting Trump out was to either overlook or ignore the bitterness and outrage that other people had been calling out for years.

I don't consider myself a particularly watchful or astute political observer. Sure, I remember the hullabaloo over Barack Obama saying, back in 2008:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

But I didn't pay enough attention to the speech itself to realize that it was an accurate portrayal of the Republican electorate of the time; that only became clear to me once Donald Trump made grievance politics the order of the day. So perhaps there is some other speech that I should have paid more attention to, in order to understand why people who otherwise appear to be simply wasting their time think they have a viable path to the White House.

And so I'm curious. I'm curious what they see that others don't. And whether it's out there in the quantities they think it is.

Rate of Change

One of the arguments against the idea that humans evolved to their current state is that it denies the innate "special-ness" of humanity. If humans are not so much different from other animals, the thinking goes, how can it claim a privileged place? Whether humanity is "deserving" of a privileged place in the grant scheme of things is open to debate, but it's pretty clear, to me, anyway, that a lot of people understand that humans should operate under their own set of rules, if they don't already. One way that this manifests itself is in the idea that human evolution should be a matter of political will, at the species level, rather than a response to environmental and/or social pressures, like it is for other lifeforms.

There are a number of ways in which "human nature" gets in the way of people's ideas of what the world should be like. A primary one is the fact that humans have a habit of forming themselves into groups of varying sizes and setting themselves against other groups, if not then remainder of humanity, in ways that produce zero-sum outcomes. Politics the world over produces example after example of this, and it has, for pretty much the entirety of human history (and a good stretch of time prior to that).

For someone who wants to see a golden age of human cooperation and prosperity, this is clearly a sub-optimal state of affairs. And it's not rocket science to understand why. The misery and suffering that humans routinely inflict on one another in the name of marginal gains here or there comes across as utterly pointless. (Now, to be sure, that depends on one's understanding on what it means for something to have a point, and that's really what it at issue here.) But still, this is the way that humans tend to be wired, and there was a point in time during which this not only made sense, but was important to the survival of the species.

And for all that people will concede that point, the follow-on tends to be, "Well, it's time for humanity to evolve beyond that." Which is fine, except for the small problem that this isn't how evolution works. And it never has been. For all that, the idea that human beings should simply be different than they are, and so the change should just happen strikes me as a surprisingly common one, especially in left-leaning political and social circles.

To be sure, I think I understand why. It's not like it takes much to get people to concede that there's a lot about humanity that they would like to see done away with (although what exactly the outcome of that would, or should, be tends to be open to debate). It's easy to look at a massacre and say "we should be able to do better than this." But the reason we don't "do better" is that the underlying reasons for human behavior are varied and complex, and wrapped up in a lot of factors that are much more resistant to change than they are often given credit for.

It's entirely possible for evolutionary pressure to do away with the human propensity for intra-group infighting. But it takes more than wishing to bring that pressure about.

Unhealed

The Week has "A complete timeline of Kanye West's antisemitism fallout." It's pretty much a recap of the past month of West/Yeezus/St. Pablo/Yeezy/Ye's (or whatever it happens to be now) railings against the Jewish population of the world and the scramble of various large companies and well-known brands to put some distance between themselves and Ye (which is apparently his legal name now), so as to avoid being tainted by him. If you didn't find any of this interesting enough to follow in real time, there's nothing really of interest in the article.

What's most interesting about it is what isn't present; any mention of his mental health. Although like any number of other people with mental disorders, he doesn't see himself as sick, and often says so. Apparently this is enough for people to treat him as if he's simply being a jackass, as opposed to someone who's suffering from a genuine disorder.

In general, there appears to be a dislike of acknowledging people as mentally ill. I think it's because it makes them less culpable for their actions. But it strikes me that there's something off about ignoring mental disease or defect because it's viewed as an impediment to pointing fingers, or punishing someone. If, as is seems the case, Ye is actually sick, simply telling him to knock it off isn't going to help. He shouldn't have the be shuffling down the street, drooling on himself or think that he's literally the Messiah for people to understand that.

Foggy

If all one knows about a particular person or group of people is what one has been told by that person's or group's critics, then one likely knows very little about that person or group, regardless of how much information one has been given.

This was driven home to me recently in a conversation with a Christian who was convinced that they understood exactly what I thought about certain issues and what my ethical lines (or lack thereof) were, because the atheist worldview had been explained to them in detail by their pastor.

"Have I met your pastor?" I eventually asked, in an effort to create an opening for the idea that it's exceedingly difficult to create an accurate description of a complete stranger. But my interlocutor was having none of it. Either the pastor's depiction of me was correct, or I was calling the pastor a liar. Rather than call the man deceitful (which part of me feels that I should have done), I simply walked away from the conversation.

This disinterest in understanding how other people understand themselves, in favor of falling back on what is best described as secondhand information, strikes me as a commonplace reaction these days. Perhaps it's a reaction to the idea that "To understand all is to forgive all." Back when I was in school an acquaintance told me that the upshot of that aphorism was that those who should not be forgiven should not be understood. (Personally, this strikes me as being born of the idea that forgiveness is a gift that a wrong party gives the transgressor. Being of the mind that forgiveness of others is a gift that one gives to oneself, I have no problem with understanding.) But it's more likely simply an expression of faith in the people who tell one things. The Christian I was conversing with had much more faith in his pastor than they had in me, even when the topic was me. The idea that I was either in denial or deliberately lying was more palatable to them than the idea that their faith may have been displaced.

The 12th of Amnesia

I have the sneaking suspicion that anyone who thinks that this is what September 12th, 2001 was like missed the day itself, too.

I understand the idea of nostalgia for a time in which Americans didn't seem as petty and divided. But that's mostly a misrememberance of a fictional time. Because while Americans are fairly regularly divided, those divisions are rarely petty.

The class divides in the United States are fueled, in large part by a group of people, on the one hand, who feel that they have earned their advantages by their own virtue and being rewarded by a just universe, while on the other hand, people feel that the rightful wages of their hard work are stolen from them by people who are able to extort benefits through having been given the upper hand.

More than Christians simply believing that they are mistaken in their rejection of the divinity and messiahship of Yēšūaʿ of Nazareth, Jews have to contend with a sizable minority of Americans who believe that they are scheming, grasping cheats and thieves; again, taking the rightful wages of others hard work to enrich themselves, and clannishly locking other people out of positions that would allow them to better their material conditions, if not outright controlling hapless world leaders and preventing them from acting in the interests of the people they are supposed to be championing.

Likewise, Republicans and Democrats don't believe themselves to have different means towards achieving the same broadly-desired ends. Rather they have come to regard one another as Evil, and the intentional enemies of what is just and beneficial. For example, Republican voters often feel that Democratic efforts to control firearms is a cynical plot to render the public unable to fight back against tyrannical government, while Democratic voters are quick to believe that Republicans seek to install themselves as a permanent minority government in the service of further consolidating wealth in the hands of the business class.

Even the Chick-fil-A versus Nike comparison ignores deep differences in people's basic understandings of right and wrong. Chick-fil-A's corporate values are heavily influenced by the Baptist religiosity of its founder, which had lead the company to take direct stands against expanding the rights that society grants to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and other groups identified as "Queer", while Nike has publicly moved in the opposite direction, coming out in support of LGBT+ Pride activities and dropping endorsements of celebrity athletes that made disparaging remarks about queer people. Both sides have their defenders and those factions are sincerely convinced that the other is decidedly wrong, if not actively malicious.

And these are only four of the ways that Americans have come to regard one another as not only wrong, but either unintelligent, credulous or deliberately immoral. The entire list is remarkably long.

So even without those specific factors, for September 12th, 2001 to have been a day where "what matter more was what united us, than what divided us," it would have needed to be utterly unique in the whole of American history. Because "what 'divides' us" is a very, very, deep well. Not even the Second World War was able to completely suppress the American tendency to see those noticeably different from themselves as "the other," and use that "other-ness" as a justification for taking advantage or withholding what people wanted for themselves. It was, and still is, going to take much, much more than a small bunch of religious fanatics to bridge those gaps. Sure, they managed to stake up some of center stage on the Fear and Loathing chart, but they never owned all of it, and they didn't hold their position for very long.

But, let's say, just for a moment, that this halcyon view of September 12th, 2001 actually did reflect the truth of that day. Let's say, just for a moment, that Americans were willing to wave flags, be Americans and hug together, despite their differences. A brief papering over of the myriad fault lines of American society is not, and will never be, a substitute for learning how to disagree without devolving into prejudice, disdain and hatred. A one-day pause in the habit of regarding others with a combination of rage, anxiety, ignorance and distrust, born shock and terror is nothing to be longed for.

People can miss what they believed September 12th, 2001 to be, because even while it was supposedly happening, it wasn't valued. And its currency has only dwindled since then.

Just Say It

Still, I'm not going to lose my running mask just yet. Not because I'm "addicted" to the pandemic, or distrust the science or advice of the CDC — on the contrary, I'll be the first to explain all the ways we know running outside without a mask is safe. But I first started wearing my mask outdoors as a courtesy, a signal to my neighbors that I cared about their health and was taking precautions to keep them protected. As we begin rolling back pandemic restrictions and resuming "normal life," I'm not quite ready yet to stop sending that message.
Jeva Lange "Why I'll keep running with my mask on"

While I certainly understood Ms. Lange's motivations, I do feel that her take on this contributed to the overall "public health theater" aspect of the way that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been handled. The expectation that everyday people can't understand the nuances of the situation that they live in, and thus symbolic reassurances that don't actually improve the situation are helpful, leads to a state in which signalling takes on an outsized importance.

But that signalling also sends a message. For Ms. Lange, it's that she cares about her neighbors. However, just as with any other message, once it's out there in the world, the sender has no control over what it actually communicates. And a culture of wearing masks communicates that people should see themselves as a hidden danger to others and others as hidden danger to them. While it's true that covering one's mouth and nose can decrease the chance of direct person-to-person transmission of the virus, the reason why ubiquitous mask-wearing was mandated was that it's possible to not have any symptoms of the disease, yet still be contagious. The risk of miscommunication isn't necessarily a reason to change one's behavior, but understanding the potential for it is helpful, as it reduces the temptation to confidently state other people's understanding of the world around them.

It might also bring a certain openness to other possible messages. Running without a mask on is unlikely to communicate to everyone who sees Ms. Lang that she's uncaring and incautious. There will likely be some who would see that as a sign that the messaging on the current public health understanding was getting through to people or that being outside doesn't carry the same level of risk as other activities.

In the end, message by signalling is imprecise. Granted, imprecision is a fact of life. One can walk up to someone and speak one's mind and the other person might still not be 100% clear on the meaning of one's words. But part of public health theater is the understanding that simply giving people information is ineffective. But I don't know how accurate that understanding is. When there's no reason to treat a person jogging on the sidewalk as a significant risk of infection, then perhaps it's best to be up front about that, and start making it clear that this is a situation in which an abundance of caution, and certain precautions, are not warranted.

What's In a Name?

In news that should surprise no-one who has actually met a human being, people named Alexa have been the targets of consistent bullying, such that the popularity of the name had plummeted and parents are renaming their children. Of course, children being bullied or harassed because of their names is nothing new. Children are often no less desperate to find meaning in their lives by making themselves out to be better than other people than adults, and if a name offers an avenue of attack, it's going to be exploited. Part of the reason why one sees #peopleareawful so often is that they start young.

And so while I understand the complaints of parents, who would like for Amazon to alter the devices default wake word, the chances of that are slim. Mainly because the branding that Amazon has already built up around the devices is likely worth billions, and between members of the public calling for some consideration and shareholders looking for value, it's a given which of those groups Amazon is more beholden to.

Not to mention the fact that the damage has already been done. The name "Alexa" will be toxic for people for generations to come. Any move by Amazon to change the branding now would likely result in anger among the public, as well as shareholders, as people who have come to enjoy their Alexa units, and their names, accuse the complainers of ruining a good thing through being unwilling to take being treated as something less than human with a smile. For all that the United States is considered a wealthy nation, it's people are often unwilling to suffer the loss of even items of trivial importance. Leave them no other choice and one will have a front row seat to #peopleareawful. So while it would be a gesture of goodwill (and an expensive one, at that) I don't know that it would actually fix anything.

In the end, I suspect that the people behind the name "Alexa" in the first place didn't really understand what they were letting people in for. With any luck, this will be a learning experience, although it's unlikely that there will be another entrant into the voice-activated assistant market for a while. Microsoft's Cortana system (which eventually became an unfortunate naming choice for other reasons) never really caught on, and while I could see a Chinese company taking a shot at it (using their protected home market to catch up technologically), I think that concerns about the Chinese Communist Party using it as a tool for direct espionage would limit adoption in a lot of Western nations, if it wasn't simply banned outright.

It's too bad. Alexa is a nice name. But sometimes we just can't have nice things because that takes more cooperation between people than is realistic.

What's Love Got To Do With It?

The article started thusly: "Sara met her future husband when she was 18. He struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, but Sara thought marriage would change him for the better. It didn’t."

Why, I wondered, did she think it would? And "Sara" isn't alone in thinking this way. An acquaintance of mine that I've know for some time also has the understanding that marrying "the right woman" would be the solution to aspects of his personality and behavior that he finds difficult. I'm just as unclear on why this seems to be the best solution to him, too.

To be only slightly snarky about the whole thing, I'm not always sure what two happy, well-adjusted and high-functioning people receive from being married. The idea that marriage can fix preexisting addictions or other conditions that have otherwise withstood the relationship itself (not to mention all of the other connections of a person's life) strikes me as odd, even though I perfectly understand the public commitment aspect of the entire enterprise. I also understand the idea that making a public commitment to self-improvement can be a driver of said improvements. But most people aren't really all that good at living up to a commitment, just because they made it in public... otherwise, one suspects that there would far fewer failed marriages.

But this, I suppose, is the thing about not being anything approaching a romantic. For me, outside of the massive cakes and the intricate bridal dresses, a wedding is simply another ceremony, not much different than a graduation or a ribbon-cutting. They're simply life events, rather than life-changing events.

But it's not as if the belief that marriage can change a person markedly for the better is rare. Holding on to that belied serves a lot of people, and it must be serving some of them quite well, otherwise, they wouldn't so readily teach it to others. And I don't want to rain on that particular parade, even if there seems to be difficulties at the end of it for most people. But still, it's something that I'd like to understand more about, even if only to understand if people find it to be worthwhile in the end.