Spectator Sport

My initial thought for an opening to this post was: "Whenever there is serious conflict in the world, one can be certain that people are watching, looking for clues as to the incentives that will start the next conflict." But, to be sure, this is only somewhat true. There are plenty of "serious" conflicts, events both acute and chronic, that have resulted (or are resulting) in death, displacement and suffering for tens of thousands, if not a million or more, people, but that receive little attention overall.

What attracts attention to a conflict is not its level of "seriousness" but how it impacts the interests of others, and who those others are. A case could be made that, here in the United States, the Russo-Ukrainian war is of interest mainly because people have decided that the outcome of the conflict will determine whether the People's Republic of China (PRC) attempts to invade the Republic of China (ROC) and forcibly reintegrate it. Sure, people pay lip service to the idea that Ukraine is a recognized sovereign nation, and the Russian Federation has no legitimate right to expand its borders by the military annexation of neighboring countries. But for many people around the world, Russian military adventurism is an abstraction. The number of people who expect, say, an amphibious assault on Alaska in the service of reclaiming that could likely be counted on one's fingers.

Likewise, American interest in the Israel-Hamas war in southern Israel and Gaza tends to be driven by domestic concerns, such as lingering worries about "Islamic terrorism" (despite the fact that Americans are quite ready, willing and able to murder one another to the tune of between ten and twenty thousand people a year), and the politics of various denominations of Christianity that see a prosperous and stable Israel as a prerequisite for the fulfillment of messianic prophecy, thus making the pacification of the Palestinians into a matter of religious importance. And, of course, no negative international event that the public pays attention to escapes attempts of the Democrats and/or Republicans to assign and/or deflect blame.

While these particular conflicts have attention paid to them, there is little interest in actively working for conclusions. Russia is a nuclear-armed state; thus, there is a fear that substantive moves to force it to abandon its attempts to conquer Ukraine could lead to things escalating to the point that nuclear weapons are used. For all that the United States claims to want "peace in the Middle East," Washington is not an honest broker; it's difficult to miss successive administrations' pro-Israel bias, one that matches that of, if not the whole of the public, the media and political establishments.

And this goes back to what I was initially thinking about these conflicts; that the interest in them is less about the conflicts themselves, but what might follow them. Ukraine is not important to the United States in the same way that Taiwan appears to be; the Russians are an annoyance, but the Chinese are viewed as a threat, so keeping them from expanding their influence is viewed as important. Likewise, Islam has come to be seen as a hateful and violent ideology that seeks to take advantage of any vulnerability in its quest to impose itself on the world at large.

Perhaps strangely, however, neither group is credited with much capacity to develop and independent view of the world. China is said to be watching the reactions to the Russo-Ukrainian war to plan its next moves, despite the fact that there's no logical reason why responses to them must be related. Iran, accused of backing Hamas in this latest conflict is likewise said to be watching the outcome of the conflict in Gaza. Personally, I detect a whiff of self-importance to it all; the idea that actors on the world stage watch us watching world events, because our passive reactions are important enough that they must be taken into account.

Saucer

Was in Seattle Center not to long ago, and since I had my camera with me, I took some photographs.

I'm thinking of taking this shot and making it my new banner photo. It's brighter and cheerier than the current nighttime photo that I have up right now.

And Again

The Palestinians and the Israelis are at it again. Last I looked, a couple hundred people had been killed, a couple thousand had been injured, hostages had been taken and blame had been laid.

Peace, despite all appearances, is not a particularly difficult thing to achieve. It's peace under whatever conditions one feels the need to specify that's the hard part. And the Israel-Palestine conflict will continue until one side or the other is able to impose the conditions that it wants. My money is on Israel; the Palestinians are tenacious, but have neither the capacity or the allies to force Israel to make the level of concessions that they would want.

Maybe this isn't the correct way of looking at it, but I'm of the opinion that all of this fighting is simply a waste of time and lives.The Palestinians have no allies who are either ready, willing or able to either strongarm or entice Israel into accepting an independent Palestinian nation-state.

Which sucks for the Palestinians. Israel has boxed themselves in, policy-wise. The only way that an Israel that annexes all of the Palestinian territories could remain both Jewish and democratic would be to either expel large numbers of the Palestinians from the nation, or make them non-citizens. But at this point, the idea that eventually, both Gaza and the West Bank will be completely annexed is, as it appears to me, a foregone conclusion.

The Palestinians can fight against this all they want, but they always come out on the losing side of conflicts with Israel, and they can't afford a war of attrition. There simply aren't enough of them to sustain always having the higher casualty counts indefinitely.

Nothing New

I am not a fan of the term "Artificial Intelligence" being applied to current generative, pre-trained software bots. Because while they are wonderful examples of human artifice, they show absolutely no intelligence. Case in point number 15,492: a researcher prompted Midjourney with phrases like "Black African doctors providing care for white suffering children" and "Traditional African healer is helping poor and sick white children." It did a pretty good job of creating pictures of Black doctors, only getting it wrong in 22 of 350 attempts. But it almost always portrayed the children as Black, despite the prompts specifically asking for White children.

And this isn't a problem with the model being used, or the way it was implemented. Generative software bots take preexisting and remix it in accordance with the prompts given. How many photos are you aware of Black African doctors treating White children? And the bot seemed to key on "Africa" much more than it did on "White children." (How else does one explain Midjourney placing a giraffe in an operating theater?)

The problem with the term "artificial intelligence" in this context is that people already have an idea of what an AI is, and what it can do. Human-seeming fictional robots like C-3PO, the T-800 Terminator or Chappie come to mind. But those are all machines that appear capable of reasoning and independent thought (and self-generating their own electricity). That's a far cry from what is basically a very sophisticated form of auto-complete.

The world is not equally represented online. And that's going to make it difficult to create equal representation of the world based solely on what's already online.

Open Seat

Florida Representative Matt Gaetz has introduced a Motion to vacate the chair of the Speaker of the House of Representatives. If it passes, the California Representative Kevin McCarthy would be forced out of the position.

And then what? Assuming that Speaker McCarthy is ousted (which is far from guaranteed at this point), it could be quite a while before a new Speaker is elected. The Democratic members of the House would be unlikely to vote for any Republican to be a new speaker; and it seems unlikely that either (any?) of the factions on the Republican side would be able to unite the caucus to force one of their own through.

It's weird, watching the Congress become more and more dysfunctional as members attempt to keep multiple constituencies happy. As Congressional districts become more and more safely Democratic or Republican, the Representatives from those districts have less and less to worry about in general elections. Primary elections, on the other hand, are a different story, and this tends to push candidates (challengers and incumbents alike) into competition to see who can cater the most to the set of people who will turn out for a primary election.

Be that as it may, however, it's not the whole problem. It's generally understood to be common knowledge that certain group of people will vote certain ways. Part of the reason why Alabama has been effectively ignoring court orders to change their congressional maps is that they don't want to create another district that will vote to send a Democrat to Congress the next time the seat is up for election.

It's not enough for votes to be in play only within a party. They have to be in play between parties. And right now, they typically aren't. Voters who change the party they vote for with any frequency are much rarer than might be supposed. What tends to make a jurisdiction "swing" between parties are differences in the turnout of low-propensity voters. In a closely divided election, whichever side tends to do the better job of getting infrequent voters to actually show up tends to win. (This is the reason why so much campaigning is negative - negative campaign ads tend to demotivate the other side's low-frequency voters.) But these marginal shifts haven't been enough to moderate things. That's going to take more people being prepared to switch parties.

And as the two parties move farther and farther apart, that's going to become a taller and taller order. People in Florida's 4th District may not approve of the way Representative Gaetz is going about things, but as long as they are willing to ignore the primary election and only vote Republican in the next general election, Representative Gaetz is going to understand that he had to appeal to party activists. And once he's done that, the rest doesn't matter.

The habit of viewing Washington D. C. as dysfunctional, and letting things end there, ignores the part that the electorate overall plays in abetting that dysfunction, as they pursue their own interests. Only when people decide that partisan loyalty is no longer their friend will things begin to change.