Bring a Torch

As the hashtag MeToo movement continues to line up and bring down targets, there have been complaints, of varying levels of reasonableness that it's becoming something of a witch hunt, and will end up with some number of men going down for offenses that they didn't commit. And there have been just as many rebuttals to that line of complaint, also with varying levels of reasonableness.

I, of course, having nothing better to do, have also come up with some thoughts on the matter, namely: Yeah? So? What were you expecting?

There are some seriously flawed systems of justice in the world, and the Court of Public Opinion is among the worst of them.It has poor to non-existent standards for evidence, sentencing guidelines that are wildly arbitrary at best and doesn't recognize any right to effective counsel. And that's just a very short part of a very long list. And MeToo is just another division of the Court of Public Opinion. So why expect it to somehow be better at dispensing justice that its parent?

There is a component to many people's understanding of justice that is about the restoration of a sense of power in one's life. As many forms of victimization directly attack people's sense of being powerful, justice that attacks and injures accused perpetrators salves it. And in doing so, becomes a form of power itself. And in the end, power isn't really power if it can't be abused. Not to say that power must lead to abuse (although there are any number of examples that would point to that being true), but that the potential for abuse is a central component of power.

So why not expect the power granted by the MeToo movement to wind up in a certain amount of abuse, and why think that MeToo's supporters should be above participating in that abuse, intentionally or otherwise? The cynic in me thinks that a lot of the concern comes from people who have never really had to deal with the arbitrary nature of the way justice is applied. Consider Harvey Weinstein. Despite the sheer number of allegations against him, he hasn't actually been criminally charged with anything, as I write this (although that might change before too much longer). And a lot of the high-profile men that have been brought down by MeToo could otherwise have been considered untouchable under normal circumstances. While they may not have been at the level of being able to stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot someone, they had enough social currency to shield themselves from the consequences of bad actions for years. (Note that this is not to say that everyone who has thus far run afoul of MeToo is guilty - having the ability to get away with something is not the same thing as getting away with something.) And given that MeToo, like the Court of Public Opinion overall, tends to take a dim view of due process, it's not hard to imagine that someone who was heretofore shielded from the vagaries of the legal system could suddenly find itself in the crosshairs.

As an Black man in the United States, I grew up with well-meaning relatives constantly warning me that the criminal justice system would just as soon put me away for life as look at me, and if that meant needing to come up with fabricated evidence for fictitious charges, then so be it. And while that's a view that may be extreme to the point of cartoonishness, the fact of the matter remains that fairly or not, being Black in the United States carries with it a higher degree of the risk of incarceration than some other groups, even accounting for differences in the actual rates of criminal behavior. Who wouldn't appreciate not having to deal with that?

Fair a place where pigs go to earn prizes, and that's simply a fact of life in my world. The choice as to whether or not to hold people accountable for things is related just as much, if not more, to how people feel about themselves and the person in the dock as it is to what that person may have actually done. Perfect justice, or even a reasonably close facsimile, requires, in most cases, far more knowledge that most of us can actually have of events that we weren't a party to. And for all of the rules, processes and procedures that they may (or may not) have in place, formal systems of justice are typically only perfect to people who are convinced that they'll never be on the sharp end of them. And MeToo is not a formal system of justice. It's an expression of anger, hurt and frustration. And to expect anything approaching objectivity and rationality from a process driven by emotion is inane.

So MeToo goes hunting witches and decides that being burned is the best proof of guilt. So what else is new?

Announcement of Spring to Come

Idjits

Okay, let me get this out of the way right now, so people won't think that I'm being remiss. Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) is an idjit.

Right. Now, on with the show.

Speaker Ryan ignited a coffee-cup conflagration when he Tweeted the following: "A secretary at a public high school in Lancaster, PA, said she was pleasantly surprised her pay went up $1.50 a week... she said [that] will more than cover her Costco membership for the year."

Cue Democrats, advocates for low-income earners and other varieties of left-learning Americans jumping on the speaker.

But, okay, as I stipulated at the top of this post, let's say that Speaker Ryan (or someone on his staff) made a colossal public relations blunder (hence, idjit) in celebrating Julia Ketchum's modest change in circumstances. While it allows the opposition to enthusiastic virtue-signal to the choir, it basically misses the entire point.

As I understand it, Speaker Ryan's Tweet was inspired by this article by the Associated Press: "Tax bill beginning to deliver bigger paychecks to workers," which quotes Ms. Ketchum, and a couple of other people, making positive comments about the greater take-home pay they are seeing as a result of their employers implementing new guidelines on tax withholding put out by the Internal Revenue Service.

Note that is about tax withholding, not tax rates. That's an enormous difference, one that Speaker Ryan doesn't seem to appreciate. And neither did the handful of people quoted in the Associated Press article, all of whom seemed to see the money as available to spend in it entirely. But that presumes that their tax liability decreases by the same amount or more. So while Ms. Ketchum might be seeing $78 a year in lower withholding, unless her tax bill declines just as much, she's going to wind up giving some of that money back - either as a lower refund or writing the IRS a bigger check. And if that happens, and she's not prepared for it, it could be a problem.

Many American's really don't understand how the tax system works. This may be why 44% of respondents told Pew that the complexity of the tax system bothers them a lot. And not understanding the difference between paycheck changes due to withholding and changes due to actual changes in their tax liability is pretty clear indication that people don't understand their taxes.

You could, if you choose to, lay some of this at the feet of the press. The headline of the AP article is designed to grab attention, and discussion of the possible downsides of lower withholding (which, after all, is a "pay me now, or pay me later" sort of deal comes after the positive quotes. And you could blame politicians if you choose. One would think that Speaker Ryan's office would know the difference well enough to understand that lower withholding is not the same as lower tax bill.

But the fact of the matter is that very few people care about such things. I've seen a lot of people giving the Speaker grief about his holding up such a paltry sum as if it were life-changing, but pretty much nothing about the difference between a withholding change and a liability change. It's just not "sexy" enough. Maybe Speaker Ryan isn't the only idjit.

Light Lifting

How common is self-checkout shoplifting?

If anonymous online questionnaires are any indication, very common. When Voucher Codes Pro, a company that offers coupons to internet shoppers, surveyed 2,634 people, nearly 20 percent admitted to having stolen at the self-checkout in the past. More than half of those people said they gamed the system because detection by store security was unlikely.
The Banana Trick and Other Acts of Self-Checkout Thievery

No surprises there. But I found this bit to also be interesting:

In their zeal to cut labor costs, [a 2015 study conducted by criminologists at the University of Leicester] said, supermarkets could be seen as having created “a crime-generating environment” that promotes profit “above social responsibility.”

Maybe it's just me, but I'm pretty sure that people have prioritized their own personal benefit and profit above "social responsibility" long before supermarkets decided that every checkout station being staffed was cutting into shareholder value. And this isn't because people have something against social responsibility (which is one of the weird terms that seems like the mating call of a left-leaning European academic) but because personal benefit, profit, getting ahead in life or whatever you chose to call it have always been pretty much everyone's priority. The issue isn't that people place profit above responsibility - it's that responsibility is a means and profit is often an end. So when responsibility seems like the best way to a better life, people will chose that; when "gaming the system" (or out-and-out theft) seems to be the best way, then it becomes the means of choice.

It's been pointed out that the social contract, in many cases, really works on the "honor system," and that the main benefit of many rules (and security measures) is to keep honest people honest. One of the things that we learn from the idea that “Anyone who pays for more than half of their stuff in self checkout is a total moron,” as one Redditor put it, is that respect for honesty may be less common than we might like to think.

Distressed

To borrow a phrase, it's often hard out there for a heroine. If a character is going to menaced, kidnapped or even murdered for no other reason than to spur the protagonist into action, they're likely to be female. There are a series of age-old tropes about this that seem to exist in an unbroken line from Ancient Greece to next years Oscars' season.

Of course, a lot of it is simply a function of the understanding of gender roles. Men tend to be larger and stronger than women, and many times, leery enough of a fair fight that they're not all that keen on picking on someone their own size. And that meant that the villains of a piece would often go after women, who were commonly portrayed as being unable to effectively fight back. The degree to which this is an accurate reflection of reality varies somewhat. It was often portrayed as being a function of biology, when it was also just as likely a function of society.

But back when I was taking creative writing classes in college, I learned that there's also a matter of expectations in all of this. Picking on someone less capable than oneself is often considered a marker of evil, and in this, women (and children) for that matter were not only targets due to an overall understanding of their own weaknesses, but of the weaknesses that they highlighted in the characters that targeted them. To this day, we regard tragedies that befall mixed groups as more, well, tragic, than those that befall only men. A terrorist attack where the numbers of women and children are killed will almost invariably result in those numbers being part of the news coverage of the event. A serial murderer who preys on women, regardless of how little society appeared to care for those women when they were alive, is regarded as more of a monster than one who preys upon men.

And this makes its way into fiction. A character who attacks a woman or child is immediately seen as worse than one who does not. Jabba the Hutt from Return of the Jedi speaks to this in a way - while he was something of a bad guy for his treatment of Han Solo. Carrie Fischer is often (accurately or not, I do not know) quoted as saying his death came about due to his treatment of Leia. And on the flip side, a character can be a cold-blooded murderer, yet somehow a scruple against killing women indicates a spark of nobility.

And so there is the ironic happenstance that the Woman on a Pedestal and the Damsel in Distress are linked; enough so that getting rid of one means getting rid of the other. And while that linkage may not preserve the tropes forever, it certainly puts the brakes on the decline.