The Unwatched Watchman

Andrew Sullivan notes the illiberalism of a plan Ibram X. Kendi puts forth to eradicate racism, and links (through an earlier piece of his) to Mr. Kendi's idea for an "Anti-Racist Constitutional Amendment," as follows:

To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals. The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials (with “racist ideas” and “public official” clearly defined). It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.

I admit that I find it somewhat strange. "[F]ormally trained experts on racism and no political appointees?" Okay, but who is going to determine which of the many such experts would be allowed into the Department? And how is politics going to be kept out of that process?

Mr. Sullivan notes that while Mr. Kendi writes within a Liberal order that would not criminalize his work, that he calls for "an unelected tribunal to police anyone and any institution from perpetuating what he regards as white supremacy." I think that Mr. Sullivan overstates things somewhat. As noted above, the Department of Anti-racism would concern itself with matters of policy, rather than individual thought on the part of the public. It's not quite an Orwellian Ministry of Equality, even though if allowing "racist ideas" to be published falls into the category of either public or private racist policy, one can understand how it could easily be perceived as such, even if it never manages to get there.

But this is the thing about a dictatorship of the just. Since the just are in charge, it can't really go wrong. It's effectively a more humanocentric version of the Kingdom of God. While many Christians, especially Catholics like Mr. Sullivan, don't see the Kingdom of God as being the divine equivalent of a literal temporal monarchy, the general idea is that God would be in charge, and everything would be good. People would have better or even perfect lives, because the bad parts of people would be neutralized. And because God is, in Christianity (and Judaism and Islam, et cetera), the ultimate Good, there would be no need for oversight. And I think that this idea appeals to a lot of people. The idea of being watched over and protected by someone who one doesn't need to watch in turn. A good shepherd who doesn't wear wool or eat mutton; or act on behalf of people that do.

Mr. Sullivan says that in this form of critical theory, "there is the permanent reality of the oppressors and the oppressed." But I think that what's really being noted is the permanent reality of unequal power. And power can be used for good or evil, oppression or equality. The "Anti-Racist Constitutional Amendment" presumes that power can be harnessed in such a way that it can be given to good people to do enduring good, and protected from capture while not needing to be accountable to anyone. Divine kingdoms make this presumption, too. When people try to sell me on the Kingdom of God, one of the things that they're pitching is the understanding that the imbalance of power will always on the side of right, even if there's no-one checking up on it. The Department of Anti-racism is different mainly in the idea that it has a much more limited portfolio.

The thing about Liberalism, and I suspect that this is what many people object to about it, is that it presumes that however long it takes to get to the goal, that's okay, even if "however long it takes" is forever. Believers in liberalism often oversell its promise. It can't guarantee a specific desired outcome, especially within an arbitrarily defined timeframe. It can give people leave to investigate what one finds good, but it can never compel them to adopt it. But a dictatorship, especially one of the just, can. And while some people are content for that dictatorship to come in the next life, others have shorter time horizons.

Figuratively

[Joe Biden is] going to do things that nobody would ever think possible because he’s following the radical left agenda. Take away your guns, destroy your Second Amendment. No religion. No anything. Hurt the Bible. Hurt God. He’s against God. He’s against guns. He’s against energy, our kind of energy.
President Donald Trump. Burke Lakefront Airport. Cleveland, Ohio. 6 August, 2020.

This strikes me as a prime example of the sort of statement that people point to when they say that President Trump should be taken "seriously, but not literally." The idea that a Biden Administration could decide, on its own to repeal, or even simply ignore, the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution is ludicrous on its face. And what could a Biden Administration possibly do to "hurt the Bible?"

Taken literally, the President's remarks make no sense. Taken as "Joe Biden is a radical leftist who will threaten the things that are important to you," however, and they're rational. It's the same argument that candidates for President always make. The number of dangerous radicals who have managed to land in governors' mansions, state legislatures and Congress is off the charts, according to the people who have run against these supposed enemies of all that's good and right in the world. The fact that none of the winners were able to destroy the nation has gone unnoticed by the political class thus far. Of course, a significant portion of the voting public also appears to have not gotten the memo that the Republic is unlikely to the done in quickly, and so they're still susceptible to scare tactics on the part of their chosen politicians. Because while the audience for President Trump's comments might understand that a President Biden wouldn't be able to simply outlaw religion out of the blue, they do believe that he'd be able to implement policies that would injure them to advance "the radical left agenda," even if exactly how he might do that is currently a matter of imagination.

Sign Language

So I've been seeing these anonymous signs popping up around the local area. I live in the suburbs of Seattle, where the Republican party is sort of out in the wilderness. And that fact lends these signs a certain air of desperation. What makes the signs interesting are the clear double meanings. US being "us" and "U.S." and "right" being Republican, or politically Right, but also meaning "correctly."

The signs have all of the hallmarks of being amateur, beyond just the lack of attribution. There is quite a bit of white space, that should be used to make the text larger; the signs are difficult to read at typical roadway speeds, and the underlining of the "R" is nearly invisible from a moving vehicle. I'm curious as to who placed the signs, whether it's a lone Republican voter looking to push back against the relentless Democratic-ness of the near-Seattle suburbs or a group looking to soften the image of the party. Either way, such participation is useful in representative government. We'll see if it inspires anyone else to follow suit.

Mistaken Mischief

For Graham Ivan Clark, the online mischief-making started early.

By the age of 10, he was playing the video game Minecraft, in part to escape what he told friends was an unhappy home life. In Minecraft, he became known as an adept scammer with an explosive temper who cheated people out of their money, several friends said.
From Minecraft Tricks to Twitter Hack: A Florida Teen’s Troubled Online Path

But offering to sell a digital artifact to someone for $50 dollars and then disappearing with the money without delivering isn't "mischief" or "a trick." It's fraud.

And this article gets at a lot of what I think started the original push for Black Lives Matter. It's something that's been lost in the current environment of protests and clashes with authority, but it's important nonetheless.

There are a lot of differences between wealthy people and poorer people that aren't immediately obvious. One of them is the way they commit crimes. Now, it's not for me to say that Mr. Clark actually carried out the frauds that he is accused of in the article. For all we know, someone just wanted to get their name into The New York Times by showing themselves to tagnentially related to someone who made the news. After all, it wouldn't be the first time. But let's presume for a moment that he is guilty as accused. This is the sort of thing that simply goes without investigation. It's not hard to find people complaining about being scammed in this way, and asking if they should notify the police, and the answer is almost invariably: "Go ahead, but nothing will be done." It's taken for granted that any given police department lacks the time, manpower and/or expertise to investigate such things.

Robbing a convenience store or a gas station, however is another matter, even though it's pretty well known that the sums that the thieves make off with are often barely higher than what Mr. Clark is accused of stealing from one person. There's a certain conventional wisdom that holds that these sorts of hold-ups are ludicrously ill-advised, because they come with risks completely out of proportion to the amount likely to be gained.

But a kid whose family is unable to afford a computer that can run Minecraft doesn't have the wherewithal to steal money from fellow players. A lot of "white-collar" sorts of crimes are unavailable to them. And so they become the ones that the police are investigating, arresting and booking into jails. And the resources devoted to them are, in a lot of ways, a decent part of the reason why more affluent youth can cheat people out of the price of a digital cape without fear of being investigated. And because they have to commit their crimes in person, they're much more likely to be clearly (if not always accurately) identified, and this has the side effect of making their cases easier for prosecutors to win.

Before Mr. Clark found himself in jail in connection with a bitcoin fraud backed by gain access to Twitter's customer service tools, he'd been accused of involvement in multiple schemes, from false offers of desirable Minecraft usernames, to the heist of more than three-quarters of a million dollars in Bitcoin. But there were no consequences. Even when effectively caught with 100 stolen Bitcoins, there was no arrest, no charges filed. There's no way that a person could participate in the theft of more than eight hundred thousand dollars of physical commodities and be let go without further engagement from law enforcement, minor or not.

The story on Mr. Clark in The New York Times reads as a recounting of a person who has done bad things, rather than the story of a bad person. Contrast that with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton's "superpredator" comments from 1996:

We need to take these people on, they are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators. No conscience. No empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way but first we have to bring them to heel.

Now, granted, 1996 may as well be ancient history, so I don't quote Secretary Clinton as a means of making a direct current comparison. But the general thrust of Secretary Clinton's remark, that these are bad people, and controlling them is a more pressing need than understanding how they arrived at where they have, is still pertinent, because, generally speaking, people who commit crimes that are broadly considered frightening are held to be worse people than those who don't.

And that takes us back to Black Lives Matter. Because of the wealth gap between Black and White people in the United States, Black youth are more likely to be poor. And this means that they are more likely to commit poor person crimes. And although not all poor person crimes involve the face-to-face threat of violence (419 scams, for instance, are also poor-person crimes) those that the public is most attentive to do. And while Secretary Clinton had called for superpredators to be brought to heel, there is little remorse if they happen to be killed in the process. But since more affluent youth are less likely to be considered dangerous, violence is not considered necessary to deal with them.

For being involved in a federal crime, Mr. Clark was not arrested. He considered this a "second chance," one that he apparently went on to squander. But had he been involved in street level drug dealing or robbing gas stations, being caught would have been more more likely to lead to charges, closing off most of the second chances that he and people like him are often granted.

Working the Refs

While looking for new podcasts to listen to, I came across FiveThirtyEight, a site that I'd managed to forget about, despite Nate Silver popping up in various places from time to time. In fact, I'm not actually sure what prompted me to remember the site, and look there for podcasts, but, in any event, it's given me a new source of both reading and listening material. One of the features present on FiveThirtyEight are their chat transcripts, from the site's Slack page. A couple of days ago, a new chat went up, titled: "Trump Can’t Postpone The Election, But He Can Delegitimize The Results."

What made this an interesting read was that there wasn't a formal definition of "delegitimize" given at any point; the four interlocutors defined it for themselves. The definition they appeared to be working with was effectively: "convince people that the election results had been deliberately falsified." And in that sense, the headline is correct, President Trump can convince people that the election results are illegitimate.

But convincing people of something is not like making a table or driving a car. The person being convinced has something of a say in the matter, and what I was disappointed to find missing from the discussion was mention of the audience that the President would be attempting to reach with complaints about the conduct of the election, and why that matters. After all, there were people who understood the election of George W. Bush in 2000 to be illegitimate. The public, even when they strongly believe in a particular politician, are not puppets to be controlled by that person. They're going to decide for themselves whether to believe accusations of fraud, and how to respond to them. And so, in the end, whether President Trump claims that an electoral loss is illegitimate is beside the point. Understanding the likely responses to that on the part of the public is where it's at.