The Devil Made Them Do It

I've heard it said that conspiracy theories provide simple answers to complicated questions. I don't know about that, a lot of conspiracy theories that I've come across are remarkably complicated. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that conspiracy theories provide simple villains and straightforward motives.

A former co-worker shared a link to a YouTube video that could best be described as nonsensical. Not in the sense that it flies in the face of accepted science or conventional wisdom, but in the sense that I couldn't really make heads or tails of what was being put forth. I think the idea was that the mRNA vaccines were some sort of toxin or were viral infections themselves, but I can't be sure. The poster, attempting to evade YouTube's efforts to suppress medical disinformation, was being quite cryptic. Or maybe I simply lacked the requisite background to follow her. In any event, the poster self-identified as a Christian, and so identified Satan as the source of the trouble.

I was raised Roman Catholic, although I never managed a sincere belief in God. What put the final nail in the coffin of what was basically paying lip service to a Faith that I never really felt was the question of Satan. I'd come to the conclusion that Satan was a scapegoat, sometimes, it seemed, quite literally, for the fact that people were sometimes just jerks. Once I'd decided to stop pretending I believed, I set both deity and adversary aside and went on about my business.

But while watching this video, it struck me that Satan was making one his occasional forays into everyday life again. After all, the whole Q-Anon conspiracy posits that a number of high-ranking Democratic politicians and their supporters are Satanists and indulging in that old bugbear of the ritual abuse, rape and murder of children. Despite having been there for the Satanic Panic over role-playing games (Dungeons and Dragons, specifically) in the early 1980s and the Satanic Ritual Abuse moral panic of the 1990s, I'd never really thought about how much real estate that Satan takes up in the American psyche. Like perhaps a lot of people who thought of themselves as educated and sophisticated did, I tended to see Satan as the province of people who'd been rendered backwards by being such devout Christians that they'd lost touch with the world around them. And that simply wasn't a large population of people, as I experienced things. At least not in the United States. Sure there were plenty of people who spent a lot of time worrying about Satan in places like Latin America and Africa. But these were places that barely had schools, and so it made sense. As I grew older, I started to understand that "Satan" could be a legitimate answer for some questions, even if I had come to different answers for those same questions; or didn't need answers for them in the first place.

But Satan can be a simple answer to what really is a complicated question: Why do people want to enact policies that the faithful see as not only harmful, but Evil? While the Salem witch trails had taught me to regard people "being in league with the Devil" as something between a joke and a tragedy, it occurs to me that there is a sincere belief in a divine conflict that has human beings fighting on both sides. Of course, that's likely not news to very many people, but I'd never really looked deeply at it until just recently. Because, well, the topic bears about as much on my daily life as fights between unicorns and dragons.

The term "American myth" is tossed about a lot, but never in terms of people's belief systems. Whatever the technical definition of "myth," the connotation of "ignorant and/or outdated false belief in something supernatural" renders the term offensive when used in reference to modern religion. But, from a technical standpoint, Satan is a myth, and one that does a lot of heavy lifting in people's worldviews. I wonder if that's appreciated in proportion to the impact that the belief in Satan has on people's lives.

Trust No One

A bit of simple, if fairly imprecise, math.

There have been about 33.4 million cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections in the United States to date. The most recent information I came across estimates the basic reproduction rate of the virus at about 2.5 with people remaining infectious for about 10 days or so. This means that over a 10-day period of being infections, that one sick person would spread the infection to two or three people. Although the math doesn't really bear this out. The 14 months or so the epidemic has been running in the United States would be a little over 40 10-day periods, and it only takes 2.5 to the 19th power to get to 36.3 million cases. So for all the surges and slowdowns that have happened, the disease hasn't actually spread as quickly as one might think.

But about a year ago, things were ramping up and governments were taking action. Masking requirements were set to go into effect (despite the fact that formal masks were next to impossible to obtain), there had been stay-at-home orders and businesses had been ordered to close. Even though the number of infected people wasn't that large, even as a percentage of the population. If even 25% of the current total are currently infectious, that's still about one in forty people. A year ago, to be where we are now, the numbers must have been fairly small. Still, the general mindset was that people who might be infected, and infectious, were to be treated as if they were infected, and precautions were to be taken. People were expected, if not required, to treat anyone who didn't live under their own roof as not only a threat to themselves, but to their broader families and social groups.

Given that, I wonder why it seems out of place for police officers to do the same; understanding that anyone they deal with might be a threat and therefore interacting with them as if they were an immanent threat until they were certain otherwise. Of course, part of the broader problem is that officers, as a group, tend to be selective with this; if officers used lethal force in every situation in which the rules allowed them to do so, the number of injuries and deaths would likely be some multiple of what it is now. And the disparities in whom lethal force is used on are fairly clear. But still, if it's understood that American society generally tends to work under an ethos of "threatening until proven innocent," then it only makes sense that police officers, who are, after all, also members of that same society would approach things in that manner.

And while the point can be made that police training reinforces the understanding of being surrounded by threats, the rapidity with which that attitude was adopted nationwide once the pandemic broke out would seem to indicate that it's a more generalized thing than just being a matter of training. People quickly internalized the "stranger danger," and even now that things are calming down, it's proving difficult for some people to let it go. It is any wonder that people who are taught to understand that they're dealing with the most dangerous elements of society are also jumpy?

Well, Isn't That Sweet

 "What happened when two strangers went on vacation together." Well, pretty much exactly what one would expect: they hit it off, started dating, married and had children together. I'll admit that when I clicked over to CNN after encountering the headline on Google News I was hoping for something more interesting, but didn't have high expectations. And yes, I realize that I likely shouldn't have had any expectation of anything different when there was a potential feel-good love story, however simple, on offer. Although, I understand that this is mainly because it was in the Travel section. Had it been in the Crime section, it would have been a completely different, if still utterly predictable, story.

So my question is this: Was the story of Rodrigo Leal's and Irma Cáceres' meet-cute one of the better alternatives that CNN had for a positive news story, or simply one of the easier ones? And what I mean by "better" here is not was it a "better" news story, because as far as I'm concerned, the story is of absolutely zero news value. But does it best meet whatever goal CNN has for these sorts of stories? Without knowing that goal, I have no real means of addressing the question, which is why I'm curious about it, but I suppose that all I'm left with is conjecture. It's more or less understood that many people find the news depressing. I suspect that it's sort of calibrated that way from the outset. There's not much in the story of a man who throws his infant son at police officers in an attempt to escape pursuit that's going to lead anyone to feel better about the state of the world. And there's no reason for this to even make the front page of Google's U.S. coverage other than the point-and-stare aspect of it. "Random guy with criminal record endangers child in failed attempt to escape police." That's what qualifies as national news? This happened in Florida (go figure). Of what possible relevance is it to me, here in Washington. I'm pretty much as far away from this as one can be without leaving the contiguous 48 states. This is little more than criminal-justice gossip column material. Likewise stories on District Judge Roger T. Benitez's decision that the California Assault Weapons Control Act violates the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution tend to be more about the partisan reactions to the decision than the legal reasoning behind it. And for media outlets that appeal to generally left-leaning audiences, as CNN does, one can guess how that's turning out.

So the supposed antidote to the relentless negativity of the news is for random love stories to be elevated to the front page. And if the goal is to make the point that not all of the news is bad, that's reasonable. But with all of North America to work with, the best that could done was a story of two people meeting that wouldn't even make for an engaging romantic comedy? (One shudders to think of all of the contrived complications that screenwriters would feel compelled to add.) Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for the Leal-Cáceres family and all, but this seems like something that happens more or less every day.

In the end, there's nothing wrong with stories of people finding love, even if I'm dubious that they rise to the level of international news. They strike me as fairly clear examples of news as narrative, where the narrative is that beautiful things still happen in the world, but even that doesn't really strike me as news so much as it does a momentary reprieve from media outlets seeking clicks and attention by portraying the world as going to Hell in a handbasket. It becomes fluff designed to cushion the perhaps unnecessarily sharp edges that tend to come with information about the world.

Okay, And...?

Corporate Landlord Evicts Black Renters At Far Higher Rates Than Whites, Report Finds. Hmm. Okay, let's read the article and see what it says.

It's unclear why the report on Pretium's eviction filings apparently found an even higher disparity — more than four times the rate in mostly Black counties as in mostly white counties.

What good is a study that doesn't provide any information that helps contextualize the finding? This article is something of a missed opportunity, mainly because it reads like a press release from the outfit that put it out. "PANDEMIC EVICTOR: Don Mullen’s Pretium Partners Files to Evict Black Renters, Collects Billions From Investors" seems like the sort of thing that's calibrated to get a response, as people on the prowl for racial injustice pick up on the headline, but without any real information beyond the raw numbers, I suspect that there's a different story here.

Presuming that the story that NPR opens their piece with is accurate, one could make the case that Pretium Partners companies are pretty quick on the trigger to evict people from rented homes, but maybe the real story here is the lack of money available to Black renters to weather job losses and other emergencies. Of course, either way a story like this tends to be journalism about problems, but if the focus is on why Black renters are in less stable positions, rather than "Private Equity Bad," perhaps it can inform policies that might be helpful in improving things.

The thing about human interest stories with clear villains is that they pretty much write themselves. Single mother with a child in school versus an evil private equity company that's bought up houses and is now kicking people out of them as quickly as it can is a simple narrative and will easily appeal to the left-of-center National Public Radio audience. But it's the sort of piece that allows people to mistake anecdote for useful information and righteous anger for actually doing something.

Beware Falling Objects

The local CBS affiliate ran the following story. "More reports, video show uptick in heavy objects being dropped from downtown overpasses onto I-5 traffic." And that's about it. If you actually read the story, there isn't much more information than that. There are a couple of personal testimonials, we're told that the police arrested, and then released, a guy who said he was homeless, and that's about it. You can watch a video of a Lime e-scooter being dropped from an overpass onto southbound Interstate 5 near downtown Seattle, but there's no actionable or even genuinely informative content to be found. Okay, so there's an "uptick." What had the rate been, and what is it now? What's being done about it? The Seattle Police Department knows what's happening, and at least one short-term arrest had been made, but is anything else in the works? Is there anything that people can do? It seems unlikely, but otherwise, what's the point?

People dropping scooters and rebar onto the expressway while there's traffic on it is bad. And the case can be made that drivers should be aware that there may be falling objects crashing onto the road, or their vehicles, while they're driving. But there's little more than a scare story here. It's the kind of thing that garners clicks and shares (which is how it first came to my attention), but the overall effect is to drive fear and worry. It's the kind of thing that people point to when they talk about the collapse of society or are seeking to demonstrate that mankind has become so sinful that the end of the world would be a welcome development.

One of the problems that arises from the news having become a form of entertainment is that it's judged by how well it validates its viewers' understandings of the world. As people feel the world is more dangerous, news stories that validate that perhaps seem more credible than the alternatives. And the sense that it's a problem that some or another authority needs to deal with leaves people with, I think, a reduced sense of agency. While Solution Journalism can devolve into vapid "feel good" stories (especially when there is a focus on children and/or trivial situations) the overall concept, that of presenting as newsworthy what actions are being, can be or have been taken to improve things seems that it would be very useful. And stories that give people some sense of scale are also useful. One of my general gripes with the coverage of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is that there was almost never enough information in standard news stories to adequately access the risks involved. This is the same. Without any real idea of the frequency of incidents, it's hard to know if one should do things differently or what level of urgency an official response might require.

But I don't think that anything more is being asked of the news. I suspect that this is the first thing that needs to change. But, like a lot of things, it's difficult to change alone. Maybe it would be worthwhile to see what the market for change looks like, and go from there.