Envisioned

So the other day, I saw a social media posting from a young person who was upset about being called a "lady," several times that day. She was born female, and certainly looks the part, but is genderfluid and prefers to be perceived as masculine.

Part of the issue, according to the post, was a fear of standing up for their desire to seen as masculine and not as a woman. But there's another side of it, that resonated with me from my own experience, and that's just the difficulty of linking anything about oneself to how other people see you. People see the world in a combination of the way they've learned to see it, the way it's been described to them and the way that works for them. And other people fit within that. It's an impossible thing to wish away, no matter how much one want to be seen in the way one sees oneself.

It took me a long time to learn that. Granted, the disconnect between the way people saw me and the way I saw myself had nothing to do with gender. It was a simple matter of being Different when I didn't want to be. I move in circles that are predominantly White - and that means I stand out immediately. When there was a large team meeting at work, and people came from all over the Americas to attend, it was immediately obvious to everyone there who I was the second I walked in the room - after all, I'm the only Black guy on the team. I, on the other hand, was working to match people with their voices or pictures that were often several years old. It was stressful and it brought back that feeling of being Different that had so haunted me when I was a child. But I'm more or less okay with it now, because it's not going to change.

It did take me a while to get there, though, and so I sympathize with other people who see themselves one way, or who want to see themselves one way, and are constantly reminded that they aren't seen that way by the people around them. It's going to be tough going for a while. But it will, like all things, subside.

The Return of Winter

Winter stopped by yesterday. But it didn't stay, as it had other places to be.

Somewhere along the way, Blogger/Google/Alphabet managed to lose this picture. And, despite the fact that I doubt anyone comes to this little part of the World Wide Web, I put it back anyway. Just in case.

Feelings and Data

So over the weekend, someone posted a graphic of a social media post by someone who I presume is a women's advocate. The general gist of their argument was that American women were less concerned with possible violence on the part of immigrants and refugees because of the much greater likelihood that violence would visited upon them by an intimate partner. In other words, American men were a much more immediate threat to American women then foreign-born men are. In the service of this point, the advocate noted that 1,500 women were murdered by their partners every month. That number struck me as high, so I did the math, and that gives an annual number that turns out to be greater than the overall murder rate of the United States. So I expressed curiosity about the nations covered by the numbers, reasoning that it must be a larger area than just the United States. Another commenter on the thread then made the point that even if the number was much lower, it still represented too many people murdered by someone they should be able to trust.

This represents for me the unhealthy relationship that we've created between our subjective understanding of the world and the objective "facts" about the world. I had attempted to take pains to not say that the concern that many women have about violence from their partners is misplaced. After all, for instances where the relationships (or lack thereof) between murdered people and their killers is known, a large number of the murdered are acquainted with their killers. And in about 10% of murder cases, the crime is a man killing their partner. (A number which leads, I learned, to estimates of about 1,500 domestic murders a year in the United States.) I had been attempting to limit my questions to the mind side of the equation, but the follow-up comment that I received was squarely aimed at the heart aspect of the issue, lest I undermine it with my question.

A lot of topics have this dynamic, and we tend to miss it more often than not. This morning, I noticed that someone had posted an article about President Trump (once again) referring to "the media" as "dishonest." This time, the allegation was that stories of terrorist attacks in Europe were being covered up. Donald Trump being Donald Trump, the allegation of media malfeasance had been made without support evidence, and in the social media post, the poster attacked this, and added their voice to the chorus (although perhaps choir is a more apt metaphor) of people accusing the President of open deceit. But this strikes me as a "minds" argument, when President Trump was more speaking to "hearts." For some number of people on the American Right (and it is these people, I suspect, who are the intended audience of the President's comment) Islamic terrorism is high on their list of troubles. And they feel that "the media," having tarred them as "deplorables," are willing to (literally) sacrifice them in the name of an Elite liberal do-gooder project to bring foreign-born poor to this nation to help themselves to its resources at the direct expense of the Working Class. But in order to make this more palatable to Peoria, the fact that some of the poor that the liberal experiment are designed to help are actually murderous jihadis is either ignored, or decried as racism and bigotry. Of course, to be sure, it's not as if people suspect that all of the would-be immigrants, travelers or refugees are dangerous; the M&Ms and Skittles memes are fairly clear about that. But they're also clear that even one instance of "poison" is too many. (There is a certain irony to the fact that, given Americans' tendency to use violence as a problem-solving tool, people moving to the United States are presented with a bowl of candies that has its fair share of toxic individuals. "Safer than where you came from" and "safe" are not the same.)

To a degree, the Executive Order that President Trump signed that barred entry to the United States to all refugees and to travelers from seven Moslem-majority nations was more than a security measure. It was also a rebuke of the previous administration, if an unspoken one. The travel ban halted people who had been cleared by the Obama Administration, while a halt only to processing permissions to enter the nation wouldn't have. So there is a case to made for the idea that the Trump Administration is indicating that it felt the Obama Administration was effectively being lax in its stewardship of public safety. It's not very difficult to argue that an immigration and refugee resettlement pause, with time to review and, as required, revise policies, could have been carried out without blocking people who had already been cleared. It only makes sense to effectively revoke previous clearances if one suspects that they the process that granted them was completely inadequate. And this would fit in with the idea (among others) that the American Left was willing to deliberately (if not openly) overlook a certain amount of danger in order to hand out benefits to poor people from abroad, while allowing businesses to reduce Middle America to destitution.

And that emotional understanding of the world is not going to be undone by attacking President Trump's command of, or apparent disrespect for, the facts. Talking to the mind means little if your audience should be the heart. And in cases like this, it simply cements the very ideas that critics seek to dislodge. Because challenging President Trump on the facts is not the same thing as refuting his appeals to the feelings of his supporters, and, as near as I can tell, it's often perceived as attacking him because he backs up and confirms his supporters, who feel themselves targets of contempt for hostile leftist "Elites."

Whether or not Hearts and Minds campaigns are workable is a topic for historians. From my vantage point, they haven't seemed very effective when employed in war. But they acknowledge the two factors that have to be taken into account. Which is more than we've understood in the culture war.

Balance

Misbehaved

It has become common for people to react to protests that they disagree with for partisan reasons with the statement: "We didn't behave this way when X happened," or some variation thereof, where X refers to some past event that they have determined is roughly similar to what the current batch of activists are protesting, but went against the critic instead. The idea is that the critic and their faction were more tolerant of political setbacks than their opposition.

This often sparks criticism when it can be shown that there were, in fact, protests of a similar sort when event X happened. And since digital cameras and camera phones have been a thing for nearly the past two decades, there is often an abundance of photographic evidence of that fact. And this triggers that most common of modern political epithets: Liar.

But I suspect that critics of protests are less likely to be denying the reality of past actions as they are the legitimacy of present ones. Because I'm not sure when people make statements like this, that seems to completely ignore relatively recent history, that they are indulging in a convenient or fabricated amnesia. Instead, they are speaking to the justifications of the parties involved. Although it's relatively easy to delve into the minutiae of a given protest and make points such as whether or not traffic was snarled, windows were broken or rocks were thrown, most "we didn't behave this way" statements and other criticisms don't make the attempt to parse things out that finely. And on social media, a lot of the criticism is directly aimed at the protesters themselves, and attributes to them any number of negative character traits. And so the point becomes not what was done, but whether or not it was justified. And in a partisan era, who is doing something and why they are doing it are often conflated.

What we often tend to think of as ironclad, universal rules are, in practice, riddled with loopholes. After all, "You will not kill," tends to have exceptions for self-defense, defending others, wartime, executions, fleeing felons and anyone sufficiently frightening. And in a society torn by factionalism, we are much more likely to accept a mitigating circumstance when it is offered by someone of our own faction, and see it as deceit in service of excusing murder when offered by someone of an opposing faction. This self-righteousness tends to grow in proportion to the enmity between the factions, as that same enmity tends to push us towards seeing opposing factions as perverse, rather than principled. And this leaves aside the tendency to deliberately shelter our own guilty and prosecute opposing innocent when we seek to make people's understandings match the reality we believe we inhabit.

And in the end, the problem with self-righteousness is that it doesn't tolerate self-reflection very well. We don't like to see ourselves as wrong (let alone perverse), and so we don't step back from our positions far enough to be able to evaluate both them, and our opponents', at once. If something happens that allows us to see others as less wrong without seeing ourselves as more wrong, that might prompt us to accept what others are doing. But if we have to admit to having behaved badly ourselves, we're less likely to want to see others as better than we already do. And so we set ourselves apart from them by claiming that they have done we we would never contemplate.