Scrub-a-dub-dub

"LIV, Laugh, Launder: The Morality of Sportswashing" is one of a proliferating number of articles about the idea that the merger of LIV Golf, and the Professional Golfer's Association Tour, and how this is intended to burnish the image of Saudi Arabia.

Fair enough. I just have one question: How is this intended to work, exactly? According to Sports Illustrated, sportswashing is "the use of sports to present a sanitized, friendlier version of a political regime or operation." In "LIV, Laugh, Launder," the author defines it as "a practice used by states to launder their reputation and distract from less savory activities and human rights violations." Okay, but does that actually ever happen?

Who, precisely, forgot that Saudi Arabia has been accused of unsavory activities, including the out-and-out killing of a critic of the government, simply because they wanted to watch some golf on television? China hosting the Olympics didn't seem to make a dent in anti-China sentiment (deserved or not) here in the United States. Sure, there have been some statements from golfers that seemed to downplay Saudi Arabia's myriad failures to live up to what one might loosely call international standards, but I don't know anyone who takes their cues on human rights from golfers. Or Olympic athletes. Or professional sports leagues.

As I understand it, the problem with sportswashing seems to be that it gives people other things to talk about than what human rights and good government activists want talked about.

The goal of sportswashing is to reduce scrutiny applied to negative actions by essentially using sport as a distraction.

But this makes an assumption that I'm not sure is true; that absent this or that sporting event, the people who would have been watching or paying attention would have been examining the negative actions of the nation or organization that put on the event. It's true that when I'm watching, say, a rugby game (a sport that I immensely enjoy when I happen to catch it, even though I have no idea of what's happening on the field), I'm not looking deeply into the human rights records of whatever nation or nations the teams playing hail from. But I'm not looking into those concerns even when there isn't a rugby game on to watch. A rugby game is much more likely to come between me and housekeeping than it is to come between me and human rights activism. Mainly because human rights activism very, very, far down my current list of priorities.

And the people I know who are motivated to be activists for human rights or good government? They're so on the lookout for anything that may "distract" me (or others) from their cause that the only thing they have time for, when it comes to many sporting events, is, well, making accusations of sportswashing. So I'm not sure that sportswashing has enough real-world effectiveness to actually be a thing. It may be more likely that some people just like the idea of owning a golf tour.

Red, Blue, Violet, Yellow

So the Public Religion Research Institute conducted a survey, "The Politics of Gender, Pronouns, and Public Education."

The second section of the article asks: "Is Gender Binary?" Had they asked me, I think I would have answered: I don't know... Define 'gender'." Because this one of those things where I suspect it's important that everyone be on the same page as to the language they're using. As a cultural matter, I think that gender is binary, at least in the sense that American culture lacks anything like the "third" or other genders that some cultures do. "Non-binary" does not come across as a gender, in and of itself. At least as I encounter it, it's more of a rejection of the standard "boy/man and girl/woman" labels. It's kind of like saying something is neither red nor yellow - there is no word in American English that describes everything that isn't red and yellow as a single color. It's somewhat the same with non-binary. To say that an adult is neither a man nor a woman doesn't describe what they are, nor, at least in common usage, does it seem to be intended to. And in that sense, at least in the United States, gender is effectively binary, even if "none of the above" is an allowable answer.

Personally, I think that it would be useful for American society to have more than simply two genders; mainly because the boundaries of the genders seem to be shrinking, rather than expending. As such, the labels seems to hew closer to their common stereotypes than I recall them doing when I was younger. But even outside of that, it may make sense to have a social understanding that terms like "masculine" and "feminine" may not cover all possibilities. Sure, the two may be viewed as a continuum between two poles, but that makes the distinction necessarily one-dimensional. Perhaps that's not a good way to conceive of it. One could imagine adding some understanding of intensity; some people come across as so weakly attached to either gender that they're effectively neuter. And even in a binary, it's not always possible to draw sharp distinctions; some people really are androgynous. That would give us four.

Which, come to think of it, may not make a difference. Consider, for a moment, the idea that in the United States, we have a "two-party" system. But there are more than two political parties in the United States. There are a few "third parties." But their influence and reach is so small as to be negligible, and so everyone speaks of the United States as having only two parties. While not a binary in reality, it's a binary in effect, and thus, in language. I wonder of the politics metaphor isn't more apt than I first thought it. After all, "Independent" functions in much the same way as "non-binary." It marks a person as identifying as neither Democrat nor Republican, but isn't itself a party affiliation - in the American two party system, a Socialist and a Libertarian are equally "independent." (And equally irrelevant.)

And maybe that's what it's all about for many people. Are the people who use "they" as their pronoun, or say they aren't a man or a woman? Yes. Are they relevant to anything? Not enough to count. So 1 + 1 + X = 2, because no matter what the value of X, many people don't see it as any different from zero.

Roadblock

Axios posted an article this morning pointing to the oft-cited disconnect between people's understanding of their own financial situation (those people who rate their own finances as "at least okay" in the Federal Reserve's "2022 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking") and their understanding of how the national economy (those people who say that the national economy is "good or excellent").

In the piece, Axios shows a chart (a subset of some data in the survey results) that points to the idea that people's overall assessment of the national economy took a dive when the SARS-2 coronavirus pandemic broke out, and hasn't really recovered since.

What's interesting is the invocation of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.

It's hard to see what could turn sentiment around. That's largely because of Fed chair Jerome Powell, who doesn't want and won't allow some kind of economic boom — he thinks the economy is running too hot already.

Presumably this is because Chairman Powell is of the impression that an economic boom would raise demand more than it would raise supply; this, in turn would place upward pressure on inflation. Which is understandable; there's simply no immediate evidence to support the contention that this is the thought process. Axios doesn't offer any; and it's unclear if the Axios reporter himself believes that Chairman Powell is wielding some sort of deliberate veto of an "economic boom" or if this is supposedly what the public believes. There's no mention of Chairman Powell in the survey results, or at the link in the Axios article, leaving the source of this particular data point a mystery.

Part of it may be the way the economy is generally spoken of. Interest rate increases are designed to make the cost of money higher, which should lead to decreases in borrowing-supported demand. And since one of the drivers of inflation is a high demand and low supply, lowering demand should bring prices down.

In any event, I'm dubious on noting that Chairman Powell appears to have some sort of personalized control over the whole of the American economy in the way mentioned. It seems to be a recipe for the blame game, which rarely serves anyone well.

Soundproof

A former manager of mine shared a post from one of their contacts on LinkedIn, which, in turn, was a reposting of another social media post. I was tempted to say that I would spare readers the details, but I'm not sure that it's a good idea. So, understanding that I take a risk of setting a bridge on fire, here is the original post.

Rule number one of social media, according to another person I used to work with, is that whenever a post outrages you, it's a bad idea to act on that. Which I think is good advice; outrage mining is a thing for a reason.

The table shown, helpfully labelled as Table B2, comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Productivity and Costs report, First Quarter 2023, Revised. The revisions in that particular table are what are called the R2 revisions, and are generally released around 130 or so days after the end of the Reference Quarter. In this, case, October through December of 2022. Contained in the full report is a link to a helpful explainer: "Revisions to BLS quarterly labor productivity estimates: How large are they?" That (quite long) article notes:

The R2 estimate is released at the same time as the prelim estimate of the following quarter, because the R1-to-R2 revisions are generally not large enough to warrant a separate news release. Subsequent revisions to the R2 estimates, such as those due to the BEA comprehensive revisions to the national income and product accounts, can be large and can occur long after the reference quarter. Thus, the estimates are never really “final.”

Faked data, indeed.

The easiest way to get someone to believe something that isn't true is to start with something that they believe is true, especially when they don't know much about the subject as a whole. In this case, that the media is somehow colluding with the Federal Reserve Bank to trick people into believing that interest rate hikes are necessary, when they actually are not, based on data that can be fairly arcane, and most people don't pay any attention to.

To be sure, I don't pretend to understand all of the data that the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes. After all, my day job doesn't require that I understand any of the data, and while I can be something of a data nerd, this lies outside the standard range of my hobbies.

But I have come to have something of a sense for hyperbole when I stumble across it. (Or, as I sometimes do, go looking for it.) The original post, from "Wall Street Silver" takes a single table from a government report, links it to perceived recollections of media reports from three or four months ago, and uses that to bolster a narrative of media complicity in government malpractice, for an audience that dislikes what they understand to be the media establishment, and views the current administration as hostile to the national (as in their) interests. And, like a lot of conspiratorial thinking, it offers an easy and simple answer to a difficult and complicated question.

When people speak of threats to American democracy, from both the Left and Right, this is the sort of thing that may not receive as much air time as perhaps it should. While I understand the focus on potential political violence, and hence the constant attention to the events of January 6th, 2021, the decline of social trust that lead to the demonstration, riot, insurrection or what-have-you is less attended-to. It's all fine and good to go on and on about echo chambers and the like. But without an understanding of why people come to see their echo chambers as welcoming and comforting places, it will continue to be difficult to coax people out of them.

Unbalanced

I spent some time, while driving from and to work over the past couple of days, listing to an audio version of David Brooks’ most recent column in The Atlantic: “The Outer Limits of Liberalism.” The podcast, hoping, perhaps, to put a much finer point on it, is titled: “The Canadian Way of Death,” perhaps because so much of the beginning of the piece is devoted to Mr. Brooks’ complaints about Canada’s Medical Assistance In Dying (or MAID) laws. To make a long story short, Mr. Brooks contrasts what he calls “autonomy-based liberalism,” which he clearly feels is a both misleading and broken, with what he terms “gifts-based liberalism,” which he presents as something of a panacea to many social problems, not the least of which being people perceiving themselves as having the freedom to end their own lives.

Personally, I take mild exception to Mr. Brooks attaching the label of “gifts-based liberalism” to his ideal form of liberal thought. The gifts are secondary, it’s the obligations that go with them that Mr. Brooks really feels are central. Accordingly, I’m going to use “obligations-based liberalism” to describe it, instead. Besides, it makes for a much clearer opposition between the two.

In the end, I see nothing really wrong with “obligations-based liberalism,” in and of itself. But I think that Mr. Brooks, as proselytizers are wont to do, massively oversells it. While he sees the excesses of “autonomy-based liberalism” as those of a good idea taken too far, he doesn’t acknowledge that “obligations-based liberalism” is subject to the same problem. Which is why the liberalism of personal autonomy is a thing in the first place. This does make a certain amount of sense, however. For Mr. Brooks to point out the potential excesses of the liberalism of social obligation, he would need to risk the ire of those who support the idea, while earning little to no good will from those who oppose it.

And so he’s left to pretend that there is no balance between the two to be struck. Society should simply use its ability to impose obligations on others (for the gifts those people have no right of refusal over) and individuals should surrender their autonomy to those obligations and burdens, because since the people in Mr. Brooks’ anecdotes who follow that path have great outcomes, the same will certainly be true for everyone.

And this, I suspect, is more of a problem than the excesses of either variety of liberalism; the simple fact that we live in a world in which being open and honest about the downsides of the things one supports is considered to be somewhere between stupid and treacherous. And so many people limit themselves to preaching to the choir, while those outside the congregation consider them to be foolish or dishonest.