Right Minds

In a speech to employees at the State Department, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson openly said what a lot of people have suspected has always been true: That the security interests of the United States take precedence over asking other countries to adopt American values when the two come into conflict.

Despite this being little more than the United States aligning its rhetoric with its practices, this shift in tone has alarmed some human rights watchdogs, who feel that the United States is lessening its commitment to global human rights. Part of the concern is that nations that are already dismissive of human rights concerns will become even more willing to contravene them, if they understand that the United States is moving them to the back burner.

The question that this raises for me is a simple one: Where does the perception that governments around the world look to the United States for guidance (or how much they can get away with) on human rights issues come from? The missile strike ordered against Syria for the use of chemical weapons against the civilian population took many people by surprise precisely because it was unusual. The President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, had no problem with telling President Obama to go to Hell when criticized about the number of extrajudicial killings he sanctioned in his war on drugs, drug users and drug dealers. While he's now been invited to the White House to meet President Trump, it seems unlikely that he was reining things in before this, simply because of the United States' official disapproval or fear of intervention.

America's traditional approach has been to use the rhetoric of moral absolutism but to act pragmatically, while the rest of the world gazes at our hypocrisy with slack-jawed astonishment.
Eric Posner "Convictions - Simple Answers to Complex Questions" Slate Magazine, Monday 7 April, 2008

One presumes that the world's human rights abusers recovered quickly from their astonishment, because American rhetoric around moral absolutism has rarely moved the needle. The United States tends to care about trade and security, and rarely do human rights concerns bear directly on those aspects of American foreign policy. Rather, they were often used as a critical talking point, a way of calling out nations on the world stage. This is not to say that the United States has never taken human rights seriously, but serious consequences for violators, simply for being human rights violators, seem pretty thin on the ground.

It seems that what's at work here is people taking international "Whataboutism" more seriously than perhaps they should. While it's true that other nations are often quick to criticize the United States for not practicing what it preaches, they rarely bother to do the work to take the high ground themselves. Rather, their criticisms come across as more, "I know you are, but what am I?" And the nice thing about claiming that only the perfect can criticize is that since no-one is perfect, no-one is ever in a position to criticize. Nations ignore human rights - or what activists and advocates consider human rights - because it's in their interests: economic, military, political et cetera, to do so. And the United States has rarely, if ever, placed human rights above those issues itself. If a nation is sanctioned for human rights violations, it tends to be a safe (though not guaranteed) bet that, as far as the United States is concerned, it isn't a significant trading partner, it's not of any strategic importance and there isn't a powerful domestic constituency staring down their members of Congress. Especially if they're being sanctioned solely for human rights violations.

So while I understand the desire for the United States to be a moral leader on issues like this, I don't understand the apparent perception that it already is. The facts on the ground don't seem to support it.

Pilchuck

Caring

In the end, I think the problem with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is wrapped up in the nickname "Obamacare," in that is has become much more about people's opinions of President Obama than it ever was about the processes and finances of health care.

And in a lot of ways, people's opinions of President Obama weren't even about the person of Barack Obama. Instead, they were about an understanding of political philosophy and ideology. To the degree that President Obama was a symbol of a certain type of progressivism and social consciousness to people who supported him, he was some mix of a caricature and nightmare vision of the same to his detractors. And whatever the views were, they were buttressed by a combination of confirmation bias, cherry-picking and, when needed, outright fabrication.

As a partisan matter, the debate about "Obamacare" never had anything to do with health care in the United States. Instead, it was about the interlocutors' competing visions of right and wrong. And perhaps that explains both the flaws of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the American Health Care Act - vision statements rarely have to line up with the reality on the ground.

As I see it, the vision put forward by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is one of shared responsibility. People, by virtue of being people, have value and worth, and a responsibility to help each other recognize that value and worth through staying healthy. This is more or less in line with how I understand the Liberal worldview more broadly. Life, when left to it's own devices aims its slings and arrows with abandon, striking some down while sparing others and the role of the collective society is to mitigate against that randomness - not for the sole benefit of those who receive aid, but for the greater benefit of the whole. On the other side of the coin, the vision of the American Health Care Act is...

Hmm. Maybe it's too early to say. On its face, it seems like a repudiation of the ACA's shared responsibility vision. Which would make sense, as the American Conservative worldview tends to see itself as an antithesis of American Liberalism. From where I sit, it postulates that life's slings and arrows are predictable in that they are earned - they are the results of choices that people make for their own benefit, and those self-serving choices should not be financed by involuntary donations from the public at large. Mitigating against those effects encourages moral hazard, as losses are socialized, yet gains are hoarded. Letting the world work as it does is not for the sole benefit of those who do well, but for the greater benefit of the whole... Sound familiar?

But here's the thing. Neither side is willing to credit the other with looking out for the greater good. Rather, each sees the other as cynically invoking the public's welfare, while seeking to enrich their friends and favored benefactors. (I, anecdotally, blame the abortion debate, which strikes me as one of the first controversies to directly insert the concept of "evil" into a policy debate.)

For Republicans, President Obama, from the outset, was a figure to be distrusted. Not because he was secretly a Manchurian Candidate - a Kenyan-born Moslem who sought to undermine the United States to honor African anti-colonialist sentiment, but simply because he was a Democrat who ascended to the White House after the disastrous onset of the "Great Recession," something that Republicans at the federal level were mostly unwilling to accept responsibility for. They feared a hard left turn in American politics, driven by a crisis that they felt must have been brought on bad acts by government.

Primed to distrust "big-government" solutions to problems, especially those they felt were caused by government in the first place, Republicans in Congress were perhaps also primed to see the concessions that President Obama offered to their sensibilities as a trap. And so, while many people noted the similarities between the Affordable Care Act and a plan pushed by Governor (and candidate for President) Mitt Romney, it can be argued that the American Right smelled a Trojan Horse.

In the end, many critics of the Affordable Care Act wanted it to fail. Not because they wanted people to suffer without health care, or even that they felt the price was too high; but because they saw it as intentionally bad for the very people it claimed to protect - not to mention their constituents, in whom they'd stoked distrust and motivated skepticism.

I will be unsurprised if, regardless of how it turns out, the American Health Care Act doesn't meet the same fate. For all that it's Republican boosters will enthusiastically tout it as a cure all to everything that ails American health care, the fact remains that it's unlikely to tackle the difficult economics, perverse incentives and slapdash legislating that created the system we have now. A dedicated refactoring of the system, and the laws regarding it, would be a difficult undertaking and likely a thankless one at that, as change creates losers, and losers birth opposition.

As long as American politics consists mainly of mutually antagonistic factions who see each other a moral and mortal enemies, the animosities stoked will become an impediment to lasting progress. There will be change, and counter-change, as each side seeks to undo what the other has done and replace it with something more to their liking, but that's a different beast than actually creating solutions.

Hook, Line and...

Because I've purchased things from Amazon, they have my e-mail address. And in an attempt to drum up business for The Washington Post, which they now own, they've been sending me a "complimentary daily newsletter." Which is good - I'd hate to think that I might have to pay for unsolicited e-mail marketing.

Today's e-mail was titled "Most Read from The Washington Post: Before Michelle, Barack Obama asked another woman to marry him. Then politics got in the way." A lot of the other headlines were no better.

This one Clinton quote shows why her supporters hate the media

These YouTube parents pulled disturbing 'pranks' on their kids. Now, they've lost custody.

On the one hand, I get it. After all, it's called "clickbait" for a reason. And The Washington Post doesn't strike me as being any less reliant on a constant stream of eyeballs than any other outlet. But on the other hand, I guess I never really figured the Post was in the market for the sort of reader who chases clickbait. Of course, all this means, most likely, is that I don't really understand people's reading habits on the Web. I'm beginning to suspect that clickbaid headlines appeal to a much broader section of the public than I would have guessed prior to Amazon's new project to clutter people's inboxes. And, to a certain degree, I suppose it makes sense. While I tend to shy away from obvious clickbait, I've learned to have a certain suspicion of headlines in general, given that they are rarely written by the authors of the articles they advertise. And, obviously, wonky headlines don't alter the underlying information in the stories themselves.

I've come to associate clickbait headlines with unserious reporting - the fluffy, gossipy end of the human-interest spectrum - the sort of thing that one reads to waste a few minutes, rather than to become informed about the world. And so one thing that interests me about The Washington Post adopting the style is that it's a push back against that. It will be interesting to see if they stick with it - if it works, I presume they will.

Mayday, Mayday

I'm not the sort to concern myself much with protests. I don't live or work in Seattle proper, so protests are really only an issue if I go downtown to see one. But it's May 1st again, and that means protests in the city. It seemed that this year that antagonistic groups of protestors outfitted themselves with Go-Pro cameras and set out to provoke those they disagreed with into starting fights - no doubt to gather footage that would show the Other Side behaving badly.

Ah, to be young again. Now that I'm a grown up, I don't have that kind of time to waste anymore.