Respect the Establishment

The right to blaspheme is not a right most of us make much use of these days, and for excellent reason. In modern Western free societies, we take it absolutely for granted that nobody can enforce religious dogma on anybody else.
David Frum, "The Right to Blaspheme"

I disagree. The right to blaspheme is one that most of us don't care about because, as much as the United States is often described as a Puritanical nation, we simply don't give a rip about blasphemy. When Mr. Frum describes grabbing a consecrated communion wafer, breaking it, and tossing it to the floor as blasphemy, it was news to me, and I took four years of Roman Catholic theology in high school. For us in the 1980s (I graduated high school about three years before the incident Frum recounts) blasphemy was something that went out of style when the Crusades did. We'd heard of it, but I doubt that anyone in my graduating class, had you put them on the spot, could have told you how to commit it. Given that, it's easy for me "to imagine a more brutal affront to the most cherished beliefs of faithful Catholics." For me, Mr. Frum's focus on Americans' relatively non-existent concern with issues of blasphemy as means of making the point that we're not in the business of enforcing religious dogma demonstrates how an apples-to-apples comparison can be misleading. When we look at things that the Christian community does seem to concern itself with, we find a concerted effort to enforce religious dogma on others who don't believe in it - and the real difference between radical Islam and radical Christianity.

When one looks at efforts to restrict access to elective (and in some cases, medically necessary) abortions, or to stop/roll back marriage rights for same-sex couples, you see prominent conservative Christian groups leading these efforts, which are mainly aimed at altering the legislative landscape in the country. Yes, assaults and murders in the name of "pro-life" and/or "traditional marriage" are rare. But that's because most people in the United States are not in the business of deciding that if secular law and "natural law" come into conflict, that natural law needs rough men ready to do violence on its behalf. Which is something of a change from the first half of the previous century, when extrajudicial killing, to either supplement or supplant the legal system, was more en vogue. Yes, one can make the point that even staunch Christians put forward (supposedly) secular reasons for why abortions should be outlawed and marriage restricted to heterosexual couples, but this is because the United States is no longer at a point where blatant appeals to Christian teaching can pass muster as not representing "an establishment of religion." It strikes me that someone who understands the legalization of abortion and oral/anal sex as "dark, tragic pages in our history" or says that "Government Has No Right to Renounce its Natural Law Duty to Uphold Morality in the Pursuit of the Common Good" does not, in fact, "take it absolutely for granted that nobody can enforce religious dogma on anybody else." Their expectation that secular laws will enforce their preferred religious dogma seems pretty front-and-center.

It's true that American Christians are at peace with the idea that if civil/criminal law doesn't line up with their religious sentiments, they're simply out of luck. They blame it on "society," and go on about their business. Sure, some grouse when something tragic happens, blaming it in whole or in part on the United States not being Christian enough. But for the most part, there is a certain confidence that the divine can take care of itself, and while they'd prefer that secular law codes their dogmas into public policy, they see no reason to use violence to support that preference.

But I also think that Americans simply don't take it as personally as some people in the Islamic world do, in large part because Americans don't feel terribly marginalized on the basis of religion. There is some complaining about Christians being the only acceptable targets left in the United States - but men, women, Hispanics and likely goldfish complain about the same thing. Coupled with the typical American's ability to ignore most of what's happening in the world at large and our general lack of concern with religious issues this lack of feeling directly assaulted likely goes a long way to explaining why no-one freaks out (assuming they even know what's going on) when someone desecrates the host.

There is a desire for legally-enforced lip service to particular understandings of Christianity. It's simply aimed in a different direction than that of radical Islam.

But Not TOO Good

[...] I thought that [Janet Yellen] was stating the obvious. I thought we knew for a while that the stock market has been feeding off this low interest rate policy, and that they were excited and rallied on the fact that this was a lukewarm jobs report, which means that [a] rate hike could be pushed out even further I think is evidence that, you know, there's some credibility into what Janet Yellen is saying.
Nela Richardson, "Marketplace" for Friday, May 8, 2015

When people grouse about the America economy, one of the complaints that comes up quite often is about "Capitalism," or, rather, what people understand Capitalism to be about. One can argue about whether or not people understand Capitalism or economics more broadly, but the actual problem can really be boiled down to a very simple issue: divergent incentives. The quote from Nela Richardson illustrates this. Investors liked the 223,000 new non-farm jobs for the month of April because it was good, especially compared to the 85,000 or so jobs created in March. But they also liked it because it wasn't great - the unemployment rate is still high enough that there's little upward pressure on wages, which would, in turn, boost inflation, and lead to the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. And when money costs more, the profits from that money are lower.

And so you have tension in incentives. If too many people are able to find new jobs, the cheap money from the Federal Reserve goes away. So while investors want people to be working and generating income, they don't want the general public to be doing well enough that the returns from capital drop. It's no surprise that people distrust Capitalism.

Carry On

A pretty good distance from Wal-Mart.

A random observation:

When I was a child, my grandmothers had small carts that they would take with them to the grocery store. Large enough to carry maybe four paper grocery bags, the carts were useful in trundling purchases back to the house or to the bus stop. And when you weren't using it to carry groceries, it folded up and could be placed out of the way. When I drive by bus tops near stores today and see abandoned store carts there, I wonder what ever happened to those small personal carts. A quick search online reveals that they're still available, but I rarely see anyone ever use one.

To be honest, I almost never saw them outside of urban neighborhoods like those my grandparents lived in. They seem to be non-existent in the suburban cities in which I grew up, and now live and work in.

I don't know how much stolen or damaged shopping carts cost stores to replace. Although I suppose it's more accurate to as how much they cost us to replace - stores likely simply pass the cost along. I can see the logic for an urban shopper to not spend the money - if they can lug their groceries to the bus stop (or their home) in the store's cart, why spend the money to have a cart of one's own? After all, there will be other cart thieves, so it's not like prices would be lower or anything.

But this sort of cost shifting, and the justifications (Rationalizations?) we make for it, seem to be indicative of our society at large. The perception of one's own poverty drives choices that are individually rational and largely invisible, but aggregated over time, become expensive for everyone involved.

Out For a Bite

A rabbit, out for breakfast in the morning.

Beware

The difference between saying:

• A woman who places herself in a situation where she may be vulnerable is unwise.
• A cartoonist who drawings cartoons depicting (let alone interpretable as disrespectful to) the Prophet Mohammed is unwise.
• A Black American who is contemptuous or disrespectful to police officers is unwise.

and:

• A person who leaves the door to their home unlocked when they go out is unwise.

is both simple and complex at the same time.

All four of these admonitions are similar in that they tell someone not to do something that there is no prohibition against, as a precaution against another party choosing to engage in what we understand to be an illegal act - sexual assault, religious violence, police brutality and burglary are all crimes. The point that it seems (or simply is) unfair for a person to need to refrain from lawful activity to protect themselves from unlawful activity is well taken.

But burglary is indifferent to race, creed or gender, and thus not freighted with overtones of oppression, control and historical injustice. And it is that freighting, moreso than the perceived unfairness of it all that leads to the first three risking the label of "victim-blaming" in a way that the fourth does not. Rapists, religious fanatics and law-enforcement officers are expected, within circles that empathize with the broader groups to which they belong, to be simply responding to a perceived opportunity and/or provocation in a way that burglars are not, while this is not to say that people don't make excuses for burglary suspects, the argument that a burglarized person brought the action upon themselves is much rarer.

We are all familiar with the idea that our choices and actions have consequences. And we are capable of discerning the differences between intrinsic consequences (like being burned by a hot stovetop) and imposed ones (such as going to jail after a burglary conviction). But in situations were a person behaves in way that another person finds inappropriate, and thus worthy of sanction, they often tend to muddy the waters by referring to imposed consequences as "natural," when they are sole result of the choices of another.

• A man may chose to rape a woman who has not placed herself in a situation where she may be vulnerable.
• A religious extremist may chose to murder a cartoonist who has not drawn a depiction of the Prophet Mohammed.
• A police officer may severely beat a Black American who has not been contemptuous or disrespectful.

Or:

• A jury or judge may convict a person of burglary who has not burglarized a home.

Like "A burglar may chose to burglarize a person who has not left the door to their home unlocked," all of those statements have constituencies that fundamentally believe them. But they also understand their safety and well-being to be predicated on others sharing in that belief in the way that someone who understands that burglary as driven by the actions of burglars does not.

The problem is that there isn't a good way to make the point that it's possible to insulate oneself against the decisions made by others in a such a way that it cannot be mistaken for making the point that one shouldn't do things the speaker disapproves of. And this is because that determination is made by the listener and not the speaker. "A person who brings home items of dubious provenance is unwise," can just as easily be taken as "There are things you can do to protect yourself against legal errors" as it can that "People who are convicted of burglary brought it on themselves." Especially when historical precedent is involved.

Problems of human communication are difficult to solve, especially so when they are laden with history and emotion. But this is not to say that they are insoluble. Only that understanding requires a lot of work, perhaps more than we are accustomed to.