One Of Us

I read part of an essay on Aeon, titled "The lethal act." The subtitle lays out the premise: "The Buddha taught not to kill, yet his followers have at times disobeyed him. Can murderers still be Buddhists?"

I have to admit that I lost interest and didn't finish reading the piece. Mainly because, I think, I'd already arrived at an answer: Of course they can. There are any number of rules-based philosophies in the world. Rarely, if ever, it is considered the case that violating even important rules is a complete disqualification from considering oneself an adherent of said philosophy. And in those cases were it is disqualifying, it tends to be because the the number of rules is very, very, small, such that they define the philosophy in and of itself. For example, one cannot both be a vegan and regularly choose to eat chicken sandwiches.

Of course, I'm not a Buddhist myself, and am not particularly well-versed in it. Perhaps the prohibition against killing is central enough to Buddhism that it does become the de-facto defining characteristic of the faith. But I've always understood Buddhism to be much broader than a particular stance on the value of life. I've always understood most religions to be rather complex in the way they look at, and interact with, the world, and defying attempts to boil them down into two or three things (let alone one) that people must always strive for. This may be a side effect of the fact that for a lot of philosophical viewpoints, religious and otherwise, the central tenet of the practice is fundamentally impossible. To use the example that I'm most familiar with, there is a general sense in the Abrahamic religions that one is called upon to be like God. But God is omniscient and omnipotent, two characteristics that human beings cannot realistically aspire to; and the remainder of God's divine attributes flow from those facts about it. So any quest to be like God is more or less immediately doomed to failure; this is not seen as being an impediment to being appropriately or properly Jewish, Christian, Molsem, Baháʼí or what have you. So I don't see why a failure to be like the Buddha should be considered much of an impediment, either.

But beyond the philosophical aspects of it all, a lot of these things are as much communities as anything else. I know a lot of people who are political partisans, and, as anything who has studied partisanship in the United States can tell you, consistency is not a requirement. Considering that even knowing and understanding a party platform falls, for most people, somewhere between entirely optional and a complete waste of time, adhering to a set of rules clearly isn't very important: so long as the group accepts how one behaves, that is. And I think it's the same with Buddhism. They're a community as much or more as they are followers of a religion. And as long as they have the support, or even simply the understanding, of that community, I'm not sure the rest of it matters.

Irregular

I was getting caught up on my podcasts, and was  listening to "Checks and Balance: Donkey years" from the Economist.

Charlotte Howard: Idrees [Kahloon], you've written a cover for us over the summer about the way Democrats talk about social issues; so beyond abortion, this sort of broader "wokeness" within the Democratic party. Have Republicans been successful in painting Democrats as culturally "out of touch" or focused on the wrong things; issues that regular voters don't really worry about? Or has the center of gravity in political debate really shifted from anything related to wokeness and cultural stuff back to the economy.

Mr. Kahloon's response was interesting. He talked about Democratic candidates who described themselves as Socialists, "Defund the police," what James Carville calls "faculty lounge talk" and gender inclusivity as things that Republicans were keen to talk about. But of those topics, only "Defund the Police" has anything to do with "being woke." Not that people understand "Defund the Police," either.

Because later, I was listening to "The Issues Worth $9 Billion In Ad Spending" from the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst, said that attacks against Mandela Barnes for supporting "Defund the Police" were inaccurate. Host Galen Druke pointed out that Mr. Barnes was in favor of moving funding from police to social workers and other services, such as crisis intervention/violence interruption. Which is pretty much the definition of "Defund the Police," regardless of whether Mandela Barnes has used the term directly.

Mr. Rakich noted that the popularity or unpopularity of the policies behind "Defund the Police" depend on how pollsters ask the question. Which is reasonable, but if people don't actually understand what the original policy description was, does that really make a difference.

My takeaway from all of this, as a Black American is that a major part of the problem that "Black America," as a population of people, has with advocating for its interests is a fundamental inability to shape and communicate perceptions around those interests. Staying woke, Defund the Police and Black Lives Matter all have this problem, in the fact that they have become cudgels for Conservative Whites to beat up Liberal Whites, rather than language for Black people to tell one another to remain aware of racial prejudices/biases, to advocate for reducing the law-enforcement response to disordered (rather than illegal) behavior and to hold themselves up as deserving better than to be treated as expendable props in public safety theater.

As much as I disliked "woke" as a term, and felt that "Defund the Police" was more or less asking to be misinterpreted, opening these up as fronts in the Culture Wars does a disservice. And the fact that the people for whom these issues are important were completely unable to prevent that demonstrates the degree to which Black Americans are sidelined in political discourse. Because aren't Black Americans who understand (correctly or not) that they live in a culture pervaded by racism "regular voters" too?

Hollowed

I was reading yet another article where the author focused on what they called an "empty promise." The term "empty promise" is a common one, referring not simply to a commitment (real or implied) that someone does not believe will be kept, but one that should, as a matter of morality or ethics, be kept. Of course, there is also a matter of relative importance. Most divorces, after all, render the vows the couple took "empty promises," yet that generally doesn't rise to the level of the common usage of the term.

The definition creates a contrast with a fulfilled promise, and that's the way many people typically understand it. A "promise" becomes "empty" once it becomes clear to someone that the perceived commitment that underlies it will not be kept.

But maybe it's more accurate to see all promises as empty at the start. Fulfilling a commitment is never as simple as making it. After all, talk is cheap, right? Rather than starting from a presumption that every promise made can be carried out, it may be better to evaluate what it would realistically take to do so; and therefore if people are being requested to make commitments that it's unreasonable to believe will be carried out.

A lot of promises remain "empty" simply by virtue of the fact that the party making the promise is not the party responsible, or empowered, to fulfill the promise. And it's easy to sign others up for things that it's unrealistic to ask of them.

Treating all promises as empty at the start, as something to to be filled, may help to drive an understanding of just what it being committed to, and who is being called upon to make that commitment. Which may not result in more promises being honored, but it might result in people counting on fewer of them. Which is useful enough, in its own way.

Off With Their Heads

The Google app that comes with Android phones is basically a portal to click-bait, celebrity gossip and low-end lifestyle content. It's rumored that there are ways to train it to serve up items that one finds useful and interesting, but I suspect that they would take more time than I am willing to devote to the project, given my results thus far.

In any event, I was attempting to sift through the banal flotsam that it had presented me, when I came across the "headline" that "Miss Argentina and Miss Puerto Rico reveal they secretly got married." Given the source, I immediately suspected that the headline wasn't all it was cracked up to be; while the implication was that the two beauty pageant contestants had married one another, I figured the actual situation was that they were simply married, and thus had been ineligible for the "Miss" appellation that these pageants require. Something of a scandal in pageant circles, sure, but not really a big deal.

For once, my reflexive cynicism led me astray, and it turned out that Mariana Varela and Fabiola Valentin had married one another. The headline had been genuine celebrity gossip click-bait. The internet was abuzz with stories of the two women. And one of those stories featured this photograph:

Who shows photos of a married couple from the neck down?

Hmm... I wonder who the target audience was?

I don't consider myself a feminist by any stretch of the imagination, but even I found this to be beyond simply poor taste. Sure, Mesdames Varela and Valentin are attractive women. They were, after all, at one point selected by some or another panel of judges to be among the most beautiful women in their home nation/territory. And there are certainly legions of "thirsty" men (and likely more than a few women) who are desperate for anything they can get of their bodies. But catering to that desperation in this way; by literally reducing the two to their bodies, feeds into an idea that considering their bodies to be the only thing worth valuing about them is legitimate.

To a degree, of course, this is kind of the whole point of the beauty pageant business; holding up a standard of femininity that pretty much begins and ends, with physical attractiveness. But at least the women are allowed to show their faces.

It's the common problem with any sort of attempt to drive social change on behalf of a group of people; self-advocacy is almost always necessary, yet almost never sufficient to bring about the desired end goal. Action needs to be broader than that.

To be sure, the whole story is, in a lot of ways, simply a chance for people to ogle two attractive women, and be titillated by the fact that they're less than entirely heterosexual. Former beauty queens marry all the time; winning national, or international, pageants doesn't come with a contractual obligation to remain single (and thus available for people's fantasies). I don't recall the last time I heard about such an event, let alone having Google decide that it was important enough for one of the very limited slots in their phone app.

Unhealed

The Week has "A complete timeline of Kanye West's antisemitism fallout." It's pretty much a recap of the past month of West/Yeezus/St. Pablo/Yeezy/Ye's (or whatever it happens to be now) railings against the Jewish population of the world and the scramble of various large companies and well-known brands to put some distance between themselves and Ye (which is apparently his legal name now), so as to avoid being tainted by him. If you didn't find any of this interesting enough to follow in real time, there's nothing really of interest in the article.

What's most interesting about it is what isn't present; any mention of his mental health. Although like any number of other people with mental disorders, he doesn't see himself as sick, and often says so. Apparently this is enough for people to treat him as if he's simply being a jackass, as opposed to someone who's suffering from a genuine disorder.

In general, there appears to be a dislike of acknowledging people as mentally ill. I think it's because it makes them less culpable for their actions. But it strikes me that there's something off about ignoring mental disease or defect because it's viewed as an impediment to pointing fingers, or punishing someone. If, as is seems the case, Ye is actually sick, simply telling him to knock it off isn't going to help. He shouldn't have the be shuffling down the street, drooling on himself or think that he's literally the Messiah for people to understand that.