Slices

So a lot is being made of the hostility, especially among younger people, to generative "artificial intelligence." There's been a tendency, especially among techno-optimists, to describe this as nothing more than 21st-century Luddism, but I suspect that's being too dismissive. (Mainly because most people today don't really understand what the Luddites were all about.)

The point behind automation is to create circumstances such that the returns to capital are increased, at the expense of returns to labor. So, even if the overall pie is made bigger, the returns to labor don't grow as quickly as the pie does, assuming that they grow at all. And for the person whose slice doesn't grow, the fact that the pie is itself is larger doesn't do them any good.

And while I'm not sure that a lot of people would describe things in that way, I think that this is what a lot of people are responding to. And the political class has, in general, been willing to buy into promises from the investor and owner class that wealth will be spread around, even when past performance hasn't borne that out. Some of it is wishful thinking, but I also think that the goals of communities, and the goals of individuals aren't always in alignment, and most politicians look to further what they understand the goals of the broader community to be. And since aggregate measure can often hide individual problems, this leads to a disconnect.

I don't think that this time will be any different from past engagements with technology; industries will position themselves as essential, and thus any pain borne by the public is better than the alternative... the Good Shepherd problem all over again. Perhaps this will spur the general public to greater involvement, but I'm not sure what's changed recently that would drive this.

Three by Three

Pew Research has published their most recent data on the political typology of the United States, which divides the nation into nine broad ideological categories, namely:

• No Apologies Right
• Faith First Conservatives
• Unconventional Right
• Pragmatic and Polite Right
• Tuned-Out Middle
• Order and Opportunity Left
• Left-Out Left
• Loyal Liberals
• Leftward Progressives

I find it somewhat convenient that there are four right-leaning types, four left-leaning and one rather disengaged one in the center, but I suppose that it makes things more accessible to people that way, given the degree to which many Americans understand politics to only have the single Right-Left dimension.

But, and perhaps this is simply more proof that I'm a nerd, the first thing that came to mind was a Dungeons and Dragons alignment chart, which also has nine types, defined in a grid having Good-Neutral-Evil on one axis and Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic on the other. Dropping Pew's "Tuned-Out Middle" into the "True Neutral" center box of D&D alignments is simple enough, but it become fairly complicated from there... Which type would map to Neutral Evil? Or Chaotic Good?

One could make a political quiz out of that itself... Give people the descriptions of the nine different Types, have them place them on an alignment chart and then see what their choices say about them, and their Type. Given that there are nine Types and nine alignments, I suspect that most people would seek to create a 1:1 correlation, but there's no reason why two or more Types couldn't share a single alignment. For people like me, who don't really believe that real world people ever genuinely qualify as Evil, they'd have to.

But I'm in the minority, I think. I'd be willing to bet that many Left-leaning Americans would have little difficulty filling the three Evil boxes on the alignment chart with the Right-leaning types from the Pew survey and vice-versa. And that there's useful (if perhaps depressing) information in that. Because part of the nature of high levels of partisanship, especially negative affective partisanship, is the view that people on the other side of things are the enemy. And part of the rationale that drives in-group versus out-group animosity is often the idea that the out-group is willfully, deliberately, perverse.

If, for example, a person who identifies with the Faith First Conservatives places themselves as Lawful Good, and slots the Left-Out Left into Chaotic Evil, that tells one a lot about how they view both groups. Them placing the Pragmatic and Polite Right into the Chaotic Evil box says something different, but just as enlightening, especially in a political environment where "having the right enemies" can be an important marker of group identity.

Limelight

One of the great things about just being out and conversing with random people is that one never knows that sorts of topics might come up. I had the opportunity to tell someone my theory on why people would set their resale prices for Trader Joe's mini tote bags (which are on sale again, by the way) at levels that no rational person would pay, and it spiraled into a conversation about the incentive structure of the attention economy.

My interlocutor was a bit conspiratorial for my tastes, but it was an interesting discussion nonetheless. I should come up with random things to talk to people about more often.

Because otherwise, I find, discussions tend to turn to things that cause people anxiety, and while it can be good to help soothe people's worries, sometimes it seems that it just reinforces those anxieties, or people become agitated if their concerns are not shared. Which I get; I understand the logic behind "misery shared is misery halved," after all. What I don't really understand is what I get out of my half-measure of someone else's misery. I'd rather take a stab at simply making them less miserable.

Which, like a lot of things, is more easily said that done. Now that I'm middle aged, I can look back on life and see something of a pattern. While people have always had worries about "the rich and powerful," there's been a general ratcheting up of who qualifies as that. The sorts of wealthy people that someone might tell you ran the world in the 1990s barely qualify as influential now; the bar for being "an élite" has risen much faster than the rate of inflation. Mainly, I think, because it tracks with visibility. Someone with the current equivalent of Bill Gates' fortune back in the day wouldn't command the same level of public attention that Mr. Gates did at the time, because they wouldn't be as close to the top of the list of wealthy people that one regularly hears about.

So now I'm curious about the role of visibility, and hence, the overall media landscape, in shaping people's general notions of who, or what, it running the show. I understand that my own limited media diet insulates me from a lot of this, but I'm starting to wonder if it plays a bigger role than I would have given it credit for. 

Worry, Worry

As with most technology, the problem that many people appear to have with generative automation isn't the technology itself; it's the idea that it's being deployed as a weapon against them by other people.

The United States is perhaps the worst place in the world for generative automation, because it's a society where circles of care tend to be small. If the negative consequences from the rollout of some or another technology don't land on the individual, their family or their friends, it's not of much concern. As is common, "not my problem" equates to "not a problem."

And I think that this is what's leading to the current wave of anxiety in the white-collar workforce. Blue-collar communities that have survived their own waves of downsizing, and the increased unemployment that came with it, aren't going to stand up for the same people who showed, by in large, little sympathy for them. And the investor class tends to see every dollar that goes to labor as a direct hit to their broader financial goals; and are willing to bet that enough of a customer base will remain for companies that layoffs will translate directly into increased returns.

And so people in technology are learning the lesson that so many other previously have learned; the United States believes that it can thrive even when fairly large segments of the population are barely (or not at all) getting by. Sure, the effect of ubiquitous automation may be an economic collapse that results in a repeat of the New Deal, but given the federal government's current willingness to fund subsidies with debt, that may not be as simple as people think it is.

Rejected

And the kind of helplessness that people feel, that leads to this kind of violence, is also unacceptable. And it's worth more scrutiny, from both the industry and our political leaders.
Nilay Patel. "Ronan Farrow on Sam Altman's 'unconstrained' relationship with the truth." Decoder with Nilay Patel. Thursday, 16 April, 2026.

Mr. Patel was giving an obligatory condemnation of violence, in response to the attacks on Sam Altman's home, which took place between when the Decoder episode was recorded, and when it was released. And I use "obligatory" here deliberately. Not in the sense that Mr. Patel felt some sort of pressure to make a statement that he didn't agree with, but in the sense that speaking out against violence is something that's expected. Mr. Patel had noted that the attacks on the Altman home didn't come up during the actual discussion with Mr. Farrow, and so it was clear that he was looking to head off criticism over that.

But what stood out for me was his labeling of a feeling of helplessness as "unacceptable." It seems that he was casting the blame for such emotions on the generative automation industry and the government, but the short statement that he made didn't offer anything to be done about it, other than have it scrutinized. Which is unlikely to happen. Because the kind of helplessness that people feel, that then leads to violence, has been around for quite some time. One wonders just what it would be about Sam Altman that would inspire people to look into it more deeply when the same people who Mr. Patel expects to do the looking have done such an excellent job of ignoring all of its previous incarnations. And the general public hasn't yet cared enough to punish them for it.

Because when people like Mr. Patel make the obligatory condemnations of violence, and advocate for someone (else) to do something about it, they tend not to offer an accountability mechanism to ensure that it's done. And maybe that's because, in the face of violence, they also feel a kind of helplessness, perhaps born of the realization that while they may have an audience, it's fairly tenuous. The public wants what it wants, and so while there are any number of people who will insist that the media leads the public, I'm of the opinion that the public more often leads the media.

And the public doesn't really have a problem with helplessness leading to violence, so long as it's directed somewhere else. Mainly, I think, because people don't see any other options. While Luigi Mangione is quite some distance from being a hero to the general public, there wasn't much in the way of condemnation for the killing of Brian Thompson on the grounds that it had foreclosed on, or even ignored, some better way of dealing with the problem. And so while Mr. Thompson's murder didn't solve anything, it did give people the idea that "one of the bad guys" had received what was coming to him. And, I suspect, had Mr. Altman been killed when his home was attacked, the same sentiment would have surfaced.

I don't think you can win [the War on Terror]. But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world.
President George W. Bush. (NBC's "Today" show, 30 August, 2004.)

Creating conditions so that those who use violence as a tool are less acceptable requires large-scale disapproval of violence for its own sake, rather than out of disapproval for the specific ends to which violence (or terror) is being deployed. Even when those ends are punishing wrongdoers or acting in perceived self-defense. Violence of the sort that gains some level of public acceptance tends to occur when someone sees it as a reasonable response to the other person's actions (or inaction). It's rare for people, even a minority, to celebrate escalation. And the angrier and more upset people are, the less likely they are to see any given level of violence as an escalation.

I think that Mr. Patel's call for "industry and our political leaders" to scrutinize a general feeling of helplessness that then comes to be seen as the result of aggression against people, and therefore, a rationale for violence, may let the public off the hook, out of an agreement with the idea that most everyday people are, in fact, helpless. And maybe that's the problem that needs solving. But I think that the general public will need to be the ones who solve it. Which, when social trust is remarkably low, it something of a tall order. But trust is, in a lot of ways, a choice. So maybe step one is convincing people to make different ones.

Altared State

But to me, the thing that I take out of that is that there are gamblers who, for whom sports betting is their religion, right. They equate their sports betting communities and behaviors to kind of religious, a religious experience. Like, it is part of; it is their community, their identity, it's who they are. And I think that's a social catastrophe in the making, right. Like, sports betting, whatever you think of it: maybe it's a vice that needs to be much more heavily regulated, maybe if you have a more Libertarian approach, it's a fun hobby that a few people will, you know, turn into a bad thing in their lives, but for most of them it's, you know, a source of enjoyment. Um, it should not be central to who you are. It should not be a religious experience. And if it is, I think that it's that much more dangerous as a phenomenon.

McKay Coppins. Plain English With Derek Thompson; "The Casino-ification of America"

As someone who isn't religious, and has little use for concepts of meaning, the immediate question that this raises for me is why one source of community and identity is necessarily better or worse than any others. After all, one could make the point that religion can be either a vice or something enjoyable that a few people will turn into a bad thing in their lives. What is it about sports gambling, in and of itself, that means that when people make it central to who they are, that it's more dangerous than religion, when people make that central to who they are? I've seen people neglect things they claim are important to them, like family, friends or career, in the service of becoming closer to their idea of the Divine. I've seen people give away their money until they were impoverished, tolerate remarkable levels of what would otherwise be considered abuse and even kill in the name of their faith. Why is that no dangerous?

It strikes me that anything can become important enough to a person that it becomes dangerous; that it becomes something that they, and some number of the people around them, would be much better off had it never entered that person's life. And it's the effects that it has on the person's live, not the thing in itself, that is the dangerous phenomenon. The person who is willing to trade their material well-being for community and identity has a problem, regardless of the specific thing that they've latched onto while seeking community and identity. Whether that's a connection to the Divine or an expensive hobby is beside the point.

Derek Thompson, the host of Plain English, is fond of saying that dystopias don't come from bad ideas, they come from good ideas taken too far. I believe he makes the point twice in just this one episode. Giving the things that are important to one a pass may be a good idea, but it's one that's easily taken too far. Because it prompts one to stop looking at the actual things that are being done, and the effects that they have, and instead to focus on what's doing it. It's prejudicial in the same way that judging a person guilty on innocent based on who they are, rather than what acts they have committed, is. And it doesn't take much for it to be just as corrosive.

So I don't see the rationale for why some things "should" be religious experiences and other things "should not." If a career can be central to who a person is, why can't a hobby be, as well? Now, to be sure, gambling on sporting events strikes me as much more likely to lead a person to places that they will find both highly unpleasant and extremely difficult to extricate themselves from, than something like say, being a Certified Public Accountant. But that has little to do with one's ability to build one's community and identity around them.

But it's easier to decide that the downsides aren't worth the benefits for activities than it is to sort out who will, or will not take something and go off the rails with it. And it's easier to see the downsides, and to decide that they outweigh the benefits, for things that the person doing the judging does not find to be important. For my part, I don't really care which altar someone worships at, if it brings them what they're seeking from it. And when it doesn't, when it demands more than it can give, all altars are equally dysfunctional.

Group Think

I was reading "Reclaiming Democracy From the Market," with MIT economist Daron Acemoglu sitting down to interview Harvard political philosopher Michael J. Sandel. Professor Acemoglu opens with:

From our conversations, and even more from your books, I have the sense that you see political philosophy as not just an inquiry into abstract concepts or a search for absolute truths, but as part of an ongoing dialogue with society about how we should organize our collective life, what we should value, and what we should resist.

This raised an immediate question for me: Who is the "we" Professor Acemoglu was referring to? Sure, one can make the case that it simply refers to "society," but even then, there is a question, because it's unlikely that a society is going to be unanimous about its values and the like. But just as importantly, how does "society" represent a "we" in a way that "the Market" does not, if they are the same people?

At one point Professor Sandel notes:

But even if the wealthy paid their taxes, they might still enjoy a kind of honor, prestige, and esteem that is out of proportion to the value of their contribution, especially when compared, say, to teachers or caregivers.

Okay... so? Honor, prestige, and esteem, unlike something like attention, are not rivalrous; I can give as much prestige to people I decide to, without reducing the amount I have "left over" to give to other people. So why does there need to be a society-wide dialog as to how much any given person is valued.

This is why I'm dubious of ideas, like those of Professor Sandel, that imply that certain choices should be collectively, rather than individually made, when all that really comes down to is some number of individuals deciding that their choices should trump everyone else's. Because, at least as I understand it, markets do represent a kind of social choice; it's simply emergent from a number of individual choices rather than a large group deliberation. So what really does deliberation create that can't otherwise be obtained? Certainly not unanimity. True, collective action gets a group around collective action problems, but even that's different than presuming that this creates some sort of unity.

And I think that this is what kept nagging at me as I read the interview... the idea that some sort of problem-solving solidarity would emerge without any mechanism being proposed for how that would happen. "Democratic deliberation" may be a great thing, but it's not magical. It can't bring together subsets of the populace who are actively at cross purposes with one another, or create enough of a scarce resource to share between people. Granted, markets don't necessarily do any of that, either, but I'm not sure they purport to.

This isn't to say that markets are necessarily better solutions to social problems than democratic deliberation (although they tend to be faster to operate), but in a way that's the point. There are problems, like what happens when one group considers the actions of another group to be an active threat to themselves and/or their interests, that neither institution is well-suited to solve. 

Bugging

I set out, every year, to have my taxes completed well in advance of April 15th. And this year, I thought that I'd gotten quite the jump on it. It had been a week or so since I'd received the last of the forms I needed, and I sat down to get everything squared away. Only to run into an obstacle at the last moment.

Namely, that there was a bug in the H&R Block software that I was using for tax preparation, and it was convinced that I'd left a field blank, even while it showed me the value that it had calculated for the field. I went back to that section of the data entry process, and tried it all again, only to encounter the same error. And the error prevented me from e-filing the documents. Which wasn't, in and of itself, a huge problem. After all, I could just as easily have printed everything out, and dropped it into a mailbox.

What bothered me about it was that this was a fairly serious problem, that prevented the use of one of the primary features of the software, and is was present in the production release. And it pertained to a situation that was not new... people could just as easily have encountered this problem in previous years, so this was a failure in a system that had worked previously.

One of the problems that people have with modern capitalism, at least as they often encounter it, is that there always seems to be a drive to cut as many corners as possible, in the constant quest for marginally better shareholder value. Almost to the point where poor quality becomes an end in itself, something that investors affirmatively look for, as a guide to where they should place their assets.

I think the problem that institutions have in the United States, whether it's capitalism, or something like the press, is the the people who run them don't see their long-term health as enough of a benefit to themselves (or anyone else, for that matter) to look after it. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that when people come to the conclusion that capitalism runs primarily on rent-seeking and exploitation, that they're no longer going to support it. But if the time horizon is always the next quarter, and no farther, the idea that in ten years, or even five years, people are going to turn on this system becomes a problem for later. So why not continue to squeeze the orange has hard as one can?

In the story of the goose that laid golden eggs, the moral is often taken to be that the greedy killers should have been happy with what they were getting, rather than hoping for a single massive payday. But as I understand the tale, their problem was that they fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the goose. And I think that this is what's happening now. Investors fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the society that they rely upon for their investments to be worth anything. And so they're going to be surprised when it can't, or won't, support them any longer.

Generation Narrow

I was watching YouTube over dinner, and "the algorithm" suggested "Psychology of Gen X." Being a member of "Generation X" myself, I decided I'd have a watch, and see if I recognized anything of myself. I'm of the opinion that age cohort, as the informal groupings known as "The Baby Boomers," "Generation Z" et cetera are known have become the new Zodiac; clustering broad swaths of the population together and assigning them a pithy list of traits seen as so universal that all members of the group may as well be the same person, just with different haircuts and outfits.

What made "Psychology of Gen X" slightly different than the other profiles that I've come across now and again was that it didn't simply list random traits... it attempted to explain them. It was all very surface-level; the video is, after all, only eight minutes long, and so there wasn't much room for specifics.

But even with that, I quickly realized that the video was really seeking to explain the White, middle-class, urban/suburbanites that I grew up around. Very little of the video seemed relevant to the lives of my cousins who lived in the poorer neighborhoods of Chicago. It was taking the kids from Stranger Things and extrapolating out from them to all of the millions of people born in a 15-year period.

And realizing that gave me a bit of insight into the Trumpist/Make America Great Again movement: of course they see themselves as the legitimate Americans, they see themselves in the broad generalizations that people make about the United States. Sure, Psychology of Gen X did as much to leave out rural Americans from Appalachia as it did Native Americans, but its viewpoint was very much White and male, and there was no indication that it even understood that other people existed, let alone had something worth mentioning to contribute to the experience of being "Generation X." (And that leaves aside the fact that the age cohorts are often taken as worldwide phenomena.)

Part of it seemed to stem from the fact that it was short, and the fact that the channels seems based in the United Kingdom could also play a part, but a lot of just seemed perfunctory. If you've seen one video claiming to explain the psychology of a given age cohort, you've seen them all, and this one was no exception. The stills that played in the background to illustrate the narration were of the bland, generative automation-created style that's come to typify artwork that needs to be done, as opposed to illustration that really adds to the experience.

And a quickly-made, short video about a group of people is going to focus on the mainstream, because that's what there's time to do. And this wasn't a video for Gen X, to lay out the breadth of the cohort... It's a video for today's young people, to offer an easily digestible explanation of their parents, and other older people they encounter at work and in other aspects of their lives. The fact that it only deals with a minority of the overall group would be lost on many of them.

Not that I expect that the target audience would be fooled into thinking they had the complete picture. They likely understand as well as anyone else the difficulties of cramming decades of people's lived experiences into 8 minutes. But it's one thing to understand that one is seeing snippets of the lives of a certain group versus seeing a slice of nearly everyone's lives. That important distinction struck me as missing, and when it did, I realized how many other times it hadn't been made.

While much has been made of the fact that so much of American history is focused on the White middle and upper classes, I'm not convinced that the idea that this means there should be a greater focus on other people has really sunk in. I doubt that the person or people behind this particular Psychology Simplified channel set out to ignore the lived experiences of most of Gen X. When one's making short videos on an every-other-day basis, there likely isn't a lot of time for deep research without a fairly extensive team; and while the video does cite references, there aren't a lot of them, and nothing about any cultural differences in the experience. (Okay, granted, I don't often have a lot of citations here, but Nobody In Particular is intended to be about the United States as I experience it, personally.) So it's understandable that for someone like me, who lived through the time period in question, a lot would seem to be missing. But there are people for whom the narrow focus reinforces an understanding of themselves as the center of the world.

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. 

Wishcraft

A question, that I wonder about sometimes. 

Given the degree to which the public in much of the developed world (and especially the United States) seems willing to support policies that are based on little more than wishful thinking, why would anyone expect that politicians drawn from said populations to be exclusively the people who don't?

While the Trump Administration is often a fairly clear example of governance by wishful thinking, the main difference between the current President and his predecessors is really simply a matter of how often his preferred outcomes seem to be completely at odds with the facts on the ground. Because honestly, President Biden wasn't anywhere near above wishful thinking, either.

But there's a constant undercurrent, at least in the media, that people should (and often do) vote for people who approach the world clear-eyed and rationally, rather than with the same emotional attachments that the voters themselves have. Even when it seems pretty clear that policy matters are being decided on emotional considerations, the idea that the people calling the shots somehow know better is always in the background.

It's true that not everyone thinks of the world in terms of "this is what I want, so there must be a low or no-cost way of bringing it about." But I don't know that it's reasonable to presume that no one in the political class would be drawn from that group. Especially when it's connecting with people, rather than a firm grasp on the likely outcomes of policies, that tend to drive people's voting patters; especially the marginally-attached "swing" voters whose choice to show up or not on Election Day tends to drive the outcomes.

President Trump is unusual in the sense that he's often very public with his apparent belief that things his voter base think are easy actually are easy. He's aided in this by the devotion of said voter base; this allows him to scapegoat the Democrats, the "deep state" or what -have-you whenever things actually turn out to be difficult. So he doesn't have to fall back on "things are complicated" when policies don't produce the claimed results. But he's not unique in thinking that policies that could come across as obviously flawed were going to be winners.

After all, he's a member of a public that tends to see the world this way, and likes to see their worldview mirrored back to them by their elected officials. 

Mischaracterized

It's not hard to come across a lot of people writing about character; about how "character is what people do when they believe no one is watching," or how "when everything else fades, character is what remains." Perhaps this is just the cynic in me, but I think that most people's discussions of character leave out what may be its most important trait: that it's built on trust.

People speak of character as if its rules are expressions of high virtue, rather than simply an imposition of authenticity. Because for many people, their "character" comes out when they aren't afraid of being judged for what they do... or who they are. At the root of a number of dissertations on character is the simple idea, as Professor of Business Psychology Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic noted in an article on leadership, that there is an "obligation to others overrides the right to just be ourselves."

And I suspect this is why when so many people name names when it comes to those they find to be of bad character, the people they call out are those who have come into a position where they no longer need to have obligations to others. They can indulge their authentic selves because the society around them isn't in a position to punish them for it. And so character stops being an expression of principles; rather it's a recognition of one's interests.

Because the demands of character aren't simply those of the law; they are also those of propriety. It's about people "adjusting [their] behavior to meet situational demands and gratify others." And there is nothing wrong with conforming one's actions and demeanor to those of the people around them. When in Rome, doing as the Romans do, is not a crime. But I find the lack of willingness to speak about the demands that it makes on people to be insidious.

Sure, there is an assumption of moral realism built in to the concept of character; the idea that the norms one ascribes to the concept are genuine facts about the universe, and not mere conventions born of the arbitrary nature of society. But I think that there's also a level of fear there, a worry that those who understand that they need not follow the rules (those who are unafraid of others) will be unconstrained in a way that places one at risk. It's a fear that's overblown, I think, born of a tendency to worry about those who don't worry about what one thinks of them. In that sense, letting go of a focus on character may be a worthwhile step in seeing, and accepting, people for who they really are, rather than who one may want, or need, them to be.

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.

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 the 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.

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.

Last Act

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recoil

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

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

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

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

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

By Association

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slow Burn

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

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

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

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