Equinox Moon

It has been unseasonably warm and sunny in the Seattle area recently. But clouds are moving in, so today wasn't great for lunar photography.

Fortunately, I took some shots yesterday...

I normally shrink these down so that the long edge is 1500 pixels, just out of habit. But I didn't cut this one down quite so far, to preserve some of the details. It's somewhat softer than I'd like; I don't think that I've learned the correct technique for lunar photography.

It's Okay If It's Him

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella recently said: "Hate and violence have no place in our society." His post on LinkedIn garnered tens of thousands of Likes and hundreds of comments. It stuck me, however, that if you were to observe people's day-to-day actions, one could easily come away from that with the understanding that those words are something that people say, and that others support, because this is what is expected of them, and not because they actually believe it enough to work for it.

On Last Week Tonight recently, John Oliver did a segment on Public Shaming. And kudos to him for not simply coming out against the practice, but owning up to his own support of the tactic: "When it's well-directed," Mr. Oliver notes, "A lot of good can come out of it." (That good, apparently, being the opportunity to take pot shots at Tucker Carlson.)

But this strikes me as the way people tend to understand hate and violence; they're okay, so long as they are "well-directed." And few people see themselves as misdirecting their anger. An article in Slate magazine effectively holds up one Will Connelly, now known as "Eggboy" for smashing a raw egg into the back of an Australian lawmaker's head, as a hero. The reason for this is that his target, Queensland Senator Fraser Anning, is anti-Moslem.

“The real cause of the bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place,” Anning said in a statement. Anning also tweeted:  “Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?”

Of course, a mass shooting, and a random egging are not the same thing. And the point here isn't to imply that they are. But here in Washington state, coming up to someone and hitting them on the back of the head is considered a form of assault, even if not a very serious one. (Other jurisdictions may consider it battery, instead.) "Hate and violence" aren't limited just to actions that are directed at people with sympathize with and reach some arbitrary threshold. And that's what tends to make denunciations ring hollow; a general willingness to be selective about what's bad and what isn't.

Floating Away

They Can See You

President Trump's idea of media bias is a simple one. "The ('mainstream') media" doesn't like him, and so it deliberately publishes slanted, hostile stories to defame him in the eyes of the public, yadda, yadda, yadda. It's a simple and tidy narrative, and one that plays into the victimization narrative that has been built up by the President and his most ardent supporters. Not to mention a fair number of his critics.

But as I understand the world to work, media bias in the United States is much more about identifying an audience and giving that audience information that buttresses their preexisting beliefs about the world. While this practice is often cast as something between "irresponsible" and nefarious, I will again quote On the Media's Brooke Gladstone:

Still, the [New York] Times positions itself as the paper that favors information over narrative; the "facts" over the readers' assumptions, emotions, and values.

It's journalism's first giant step towards and unreachable goal--because it's unprofitable to ignore your readers' emotions, assumptions, and values.

And it's impossible to ignore your own.
The Influencing Machine. p.98.

And when dealing with "free" (read: advertising supported) news and commentary media (the two are quite different, for all that they aren't always distinguished from one another) the problem is compounded. Firstly, by the fact that in an attention economy, attention must be attracted. Outlets are competing with one another for eyeballs, and if the cost of attention is catering to audiences' emotions, assumptions and values, then that's a price that outlets have to pay. Secondly, because people rarely turn to freely available sources such as this to make decisions that they understand have serious consequences for them. And so the relative cost of being mislead, and thus the incentive to avoid the outlet in the future, is low. This removes a source of evolutionary selection pressure that would push outlets in a more "factual" direction.

I mention all of this because I was reading a story on NBC News concerning the fact that IBM was using millions of photographs from Flickr as part of its training dataset for facial recognition software that the company is working on. The general gist of the story is as follows: IBM is using photographs of people without the permission of either the subjects or the photographers in work to train its facial recognition software to better recognize women and non-Whites. This is bad, because oppression.

Some experts and activists argue that this is not just an infringement on the privacy of the millions of people whose images have been swept up - it also raises broader concerns about the improvement of facial recognition technology, and the fear that it will be used by law enforcement agencies to disproportionately target minorities.

This "Oh, no! Big Brother!" theme is the central pillar of the article. And while I do have some questions about the facts as laid forth in the piece ("scraping" is not the same as receiving a published dataset), the piece's main draw appears to be the an appeal to a fear of the marriage of Jim Crow to a technologically driven surveillance state. The oppression-industrial complex at work.

The marrying of IBM's allegedly bad means of obtaining the photographs used in its dataset and the presumed bad ends to which government would put accurate and precise facial recognition struck me as playing directly into the emotions, assumptions and values of a generally left-leaning audience that is distrustful of both power in the hands of private entities and of government agencies insufficiently committed to the proper understandings of social, gender and racial justice. And it is in this sense that the piece struck me as biased. It doesn't come across as a hit-piece; there are no direct allegations that IBM is intentionally assisting a government that is up to nothing good. But the fueling of the creeping fear of a White male police state, instituted as a bulwark against progressive social change, can also be seen as bias, because the fears of "experts and activists" do not constitute facts.

Journalism, especially once one goes past the local scale, has always struck me as a generally left-leaning profession. It's often forward-looking, ostensibly public-serving and there's rarely any money in it. Not exactly a draw for the traditionalist crowd. But that left-leaning nature sets up an echo-chamber with left-leaning audiences, a symbiosis that rewards the parties for creating and being the audience for information that advances a particular set of preconceptions. And it works this way not because catering to to a particular set of emotions, opinion and values is bad, but because the constituency for emotion, opinion and value-neutral information is too small to drive the attention economy. I'm not sure I see that changing.

Chicken Dinner

Woody Johnson, the United States' ambassador to the United Kingdom told the BBC that post Brexit, that the United Kingdom should change their food-safety standards to allow in chicken and beef grown in the United States. Currently, the European Union does not allow it, because producers use processes that are not allowed there.

In the grand tradition of the Trump Administration, Ambassador Johnson told the BBC that the United States has the lowest levels of food poisoning, a claim that the BBC was quickly able to debunk. "So the US has four times as many confirmed cases of campylobacter per thousand people as the UK - and twenty times as many cases of salmonella," they reported. And when told that farming organizations in the United Kingdom believed that animal welfare and environmental standards in the United States were lower than those in Europe (one wonders how they could have possibly come to that conclusion...), Ambassador Johnson suggested that some sort of anti-Americanism in the European Union was at work.

Now, I'm not a particularly adept salesperson; I find that I have to really enthusiastic about a product or service to have any chance of selling it to someone else. But it seems to me that when you have a situation in which people have doubts about the product they're being asked to purchase, arguably false statements and conspiracy theorizing are unlikely to land a sale.

It's likely easy to understand what American agricultural businesses aren't keen on the Europeans' food safety rules. My personal bet would be on the idea that food production in the United Kingdom and European Union uses food safety procedures that would be expensive to implement nation-wide, and even if some producers were using them, a certification process would also be expensive.

But one of the things about trade is that it's the exchange of things that both sides want or need. Ambassador Johnson appears to be banking on the idea that British shoppers will set aside whatever concerns they may have if lower-priced American meats show up in their grocery stores. And he is likely right about that to a certain extent - there will always be people who are willing to take on a certain level of risk for the chance to eat better or otherwise improve their material standards. And it's not like the general public in the United States has been up in arms over the approximately four per thousand people who come down with campylobacter or salmonella-based food poisoning in a given year. (Although salmonella warnings in produce seem to be happening with somewhat greater frequency.) So, dodgy statistics or none, the overall claim that meats created in the United States are safe is a reasonable one.

Still, if you want someone to buy something that they don't need to buy, it must be on their terms. I suspect that the United States would be better off acknowledging that.