Unhoused

A man, and his dog.

Seattle has a fairly substantial population of homeless persons, and that number seems to have grown recently despite the eviction moratorium that was put in place during the pandemic. To be sure, the moratorium has ended, but the homeless population was already rising.

What's to be done about reveals a classic case of people wanting solutions, but not wanting to pay for them themselves. Many people in the area have done fairly well for themselves in terms of increasing the equity in their homes, and there really isn't much of anything to be done about homelessness that doesn't reduce the values of people's homes, given that, when it's all said and done, what we're dealing with is a matter of supply and demand.
 

Up A Notch

[Oxfam] believe[s] that this growing economic divide is leading to death – from starvation, from lack of health care, from climate disasters, from gender-based violence exacerbated by financial pressures.

To describe these consequences, they use the term "economic violence," a term used in academic circles to describe the harm caused by, for example, taking away someone's income or damaging their property.
Oxfam says the rich got richer in the pandemic, and the wealth gap is killing the poor

It would have been nice for National Public Radio to state which "academic circles" they were referring to, but I know better than to expect that by now. In any event, I decided to look up "economic violence," because the term is new to me, and I've learned that when punchy new language comes on the scene, it's not always being used in the spirit in which it was coined. I found a definition in the European Institute for Gender Equality's "Glossary of definitions of rape, femicide and intimate partner violence," and that lends it more context than the NPR mention did.

Proposed definition of economic violence
Any act or behaviour which causes economic harm to the partner. Economic violence can take the form of, among others, property damage, restricting access to financial resources, education or the labour market, or not complying with economic responsibilities, such as alimony.

Personally, it strikes me as an over-broad definition of "violence," but I can understand the viewpoint, as the document seeks to catalog the ways that people do injury to one another in the service of gender-based violence.

I wonder, however, about the escalation in rhetoric. While definitions of violence have expanded to encompass fairly minor acts, such as "a verbal insult," I don't think that the common conceptualization of violence had caught up to it yet. That is, the mental picture that people have of violence is narrower, and more severe, than the conceptual space that many definitions of the term have sought to fill. At least here in the United States, anyway. Perhaps people in Europe have a broader understanding that takes into account that anything from skipping a child support payment to outright warfare all count as violence, and so there's a need for greater nuance than the word alone can provide.

I'm somewhat bummed that I came to a fascination with the way language evolves so recently. I wish that I'd paid more attention to linguistics when I was in high school and college. But, latecomer or not, here I am and one of the nice things about watching the evolution of language is that there isn't a bad seat in the house.

I don't know how long this will be top-of-mind for me, but I think I should keep an eye on terms like "economic violence," and see how they propagate through societies. I suspect that its inclusion in the NPR piece will lead to it popping up in other areas, especially if NPR's audience starts to expect to see it in other outlets they frequent. And given the partisan nature of discourse in the United States, it's likely to be enlisted in the Culture Wars. But only time will tell.

Not This Again

I wanted to write something today, but couldn't think of anything interesting. Not that there aren't interesting things going on in the world, but I couldn't think of anything insightful or interesting or thoughtful to say about them. Everything I thought of was something that I'd said before.

And I wonder if there isn't a larger insight into the world in that. That, as individuals, maintaining the level of personal change and evolution to consistently see the world with fresh eyes is difficult. I know, or at least I think I know, how I see the world, and what I understand its fundamental nature to be. Whether I'm correct in my perceptions is another thing, entirely. And I suspect that in order to test my theories, I'll need a better sounding board than my own thoughts.

But perhaps this is where all of the posts and things that I've written in the past could come in handy. I know that I tend to repeat myself; making points that I've made before or quoting old statements when they seem useful. But maybe the time has come to revisit some of the things that I've written in the past, and use those as challenges to myself in the present.

I know, for instance, and I no longer use the Label: "Rampant Idiocy" for posts, because I've decided that I should stop calling other people stupid. Perhaps it's time to look back at those posts and explore those topics without the sneering and snark that I first approached them with. There are worse ideas, I suppose.

It's one of the pitfalls of attempting to be a long-term blogger without really understanding the art and the science of being a writer. Granted, the point behind this blog was to help with that understanding, but maybe this isn't the sort of thing that one becomes proficient in from being self-taught.

Das Jerk

For University of California Philosophy Professor Eric Schwitzgebel, some people's actions concerning the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic earn them the label of "jerk."

I have a theory: Jerks are people who culpably fail to appreciate the intellectual and emotional perspectives of others around them. Let me unpack this a bit.

Jerks fail to appreciate others’ intellectual perspectives. Those who disagree, they see as idiots. They don’t recognize that their preferred opinions might be mistaken. They have no interest in exploring alternative views. Conversation aims at winning, or embarrassing another, or simply announcing the truth they know. Listening with an open mind is for other people.

Fair enough. I suspect that many people know the type and would agree with the good Professor that the label of jerk applies here.

And in the interest of helping readers to stay within their ethical responsibilities to their fellow people, Professor Schwitzgebel offers four guidelines on how not to be a jerk:

• Be open.
• Adhere to rule and custom.
• Be willing to compromise.
• Don’t inflict unusual risks or costs on others without their consent.

So far, so good. But there is also this:

And some perspectives are too foolish or noxious to deserve appreciation—for example, the perspective of a neo-Nazi. Sympathetically understanding Richard Spencer’s politics is optional.

Sigh. And it all looked so promising...

Not that I'm of the opinion that neo-Nazis are great people. But the carve out, that intentionally failing to appreciate the intellectual and emotional perspectives of another person ceases to be culpable when that other person is bad, opens a yawning chasm of a loophole in Professor Schwitzgebel's theory of jerks, and as is common with Nazi comparisons, nothing is done to close it.

It is, generally speaking, a given that neo-Nazis are foolish and/or noxious in the extreme. That's why they're so commonly held up as the example of How Not To Be A Good Person. But they aren't the only foolish or noxious people in the world.

Professor Schwitzgebel makes the point that:

If someone thinks—however falsely, in your opinion—that your breathing maskless puts their life at risk, you can pull up your mask out of politeness and in acknowledgement that you might be wrong.

But what if I consider that opinion to be so false that it lands squarely in the category of foolish? Am I then entitled to blow them off without being culpable? I mean, if I decide that someone is just being unintelligent or is secretly a control freak who enjoys bossing others around, aren't recognizing that my opinion may be wrong or listening with an open mind optional?

My point here isn't to make a slippery slope argument that one starts with being rude to Nazis, and the next thing one knows, they're rude to any and everyone. It's that no-one understands themselves to be a jerk, and the loophole explains why. When people refuse to be open, adhere to rules and customs, enter into compromises or avoid saddling others with unusual risks or costs. they do so secure in the understanding that they're on the right side of things.

What makes someone a jerk is the subjective determination that the people they were being jerks to shouldn't have been lumped in with the foolish or noxious. But when those aren't objective determinations, whose opinion holds sway? Using Nazis as the point of comparison doesn't answer that question. It simply avoids the conflict. But if there is going to be an understanding that certain people don't warrant the respect that others are due, the understanding of how to draw that line needs to be shared. And therefore it needs to be discussed. And references to Nazis, either neo- or original, are seldom conversation starters.

Noncommittal

The Week's Damon Linker asks: "Are Republicans the only ones abandoning democracy?" He then references a Ross Douthat column in the New York Times that points fingers at everyone.

I have trouble understanding how this is news.

There is a degree to which one can understand that in a Democracy, the populace determines what they will do, or not do, by a majority vote. But one can take that a step further and say that the populace determines what, for them, is right or wrong, ethical or unethical, by that same vote. I can think of very few people, regardless of their political leanings, with whom this sits well.

And to the degree that any given person believes that some outcomes are simply off-limits, no matter how many people vote for them, they are skeptical of mass democracy. The primary factor that drives the current debate about the topic now is that Democrats believe, with some justification, that in a nation that lacked the tools of gerrymandering and restrictive rules concerning voting, they'd be better placed within the halls of power than they currently are. Former President Trump's protestations that the 2020 election was rightfully his come across as somewhere between sour grapes and the scheming of a thwarted thief.

But I generally find that it isn't particularly difficult, for any given person, to find some electoral outcome that they believe is both plausible and unacceptable. Mr. Douthat's observation, as related by Mr. Linker, that liberal and progressive America believes that some areas of governance should be handed over to experts and the public kept out of it likely occurred years ago to anyone who has been paying the least bit of attention.

In practice, I suspect that fewer people are committed to democracy than they are convinced that, left to it's own devices, the public will generally agree with them on those things they understand to be important. And so they will never be forced to choose between following the expression popular will and their living their convictions in daily life.

What threatens democracy in the modern United States, more than anything else perhaps, are the monstrous caricatures that partisans draw of one another. The more that political opponents view each other as willfully perverse to the point of deliberate evil, the less likely they are going to see the prospect of an electoral victory by them as something with low enough stakes to be allowed to stand. And democracy demands that the losers in any election see that defeat as having less-than-existential stakes for them. When a commitment to democracy is seen as anywhere between a vow of continuing poverty and signing one's own death warrant, defections are going to become more commonplace. I would have thought it was understood that there's nothing particularly partisan about that outlook.