No-Account

On a recent episode of The Rest Is Politics, Rory Stewart related the story of a Roman general who had given his army explicit orders not to engage with the enemy. The general's son accepted a challenge to single combat with an opposing champion, with the stakes being the field of battle. The son wins the single combat, and so the Romans win the day without needing to fight a pitched battle. The general executes his son on the spot for defying his order not to engage. Mr. Stewart told this story in the context of President Biden's pardoning of his son Hunter, in the service of making the point that the President should have held his son to a higher standard that he holds others to, even in the face of the understanding that Republicans were going to attempt to use Hunter as a way of attacking him personally.

All fine and good, but what's in that for the President? Mr. Stewart clearly respected the Roman general from his story, but of what use to President Biden would Mr. Stewart's respect be? Mr. Stewart is British, he can't vote Democratic.

And this raises one of the problems that one often sees in modern society: acting to appease one's critics rarely works, and it tends to do little to bolster one's allies. In the news recently has been the debate among the Make America Great Again/America First movement over the use of H1B visas to bring highly-skilled foreign workers to the United States and the accusations that the PayPal Honey browser extension has been stealing affiliate commissions. My initial response to these things was my usual one: If people feel that programs like the H1B visas or economic systems like capitalism are in place, deliberately or organically, as weapons against them, they aren't going to support them, and so the people who support these institutions have a responsibility to ensure that they're accountable to the rules. Sound familiar?

After a bit of thought it did to me, too. And I realized that I was holding on to an idea that I flatly believed didn't work. Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk have nothing to gain by aggressively policing the H1B visa program for fraud, or making sure that it hasn't become a way to justify neglect of the American educational system. Likewise, Mr. Musk and other staunch defenders of free-market capitalism have no incentive to come down like a ton of bricks on PayPal (which was presumably aware of Honey's business model when they acquired them) or Amazon (which likely inked a custom agreement with Honey, allowing them to act in contravention of their blanked affiliate program rules). Their supporters are simply going to resent the increased scrutiny and their critics are going to see their actions as further proof of their criticisms and demands for change.

The incentive structures involved tend to lead to an impasse, where the most rational action for a person to take tends to be whichever one they understand to be in their personal interests, regardless of their stated principles. In stories from ancient history, principles can always win out, and killing one's son when he asks for forgiveness instead of permission is the best course of action, because they're morality plays. If the morale of the Roman army immediately plunged, and it took a few decimations to get them to fight well again, that can be conveniently left out of the narrative, and the fact that the modern world has never been shown to work this way can be cast as a problem with modernity, rather than with the stories themselves.

But the fact that holding the things one supports to a higher standard of behavior, of evidence or whatever than other things is simply not a successful strategy on a day-to-day basis is a problem. It reveals the incentive structure that pushes people to adopt partisan viewpoints that don't allow for any internal criticism. Dirty laundry must always be kept hidden; because admitting to its existence is nothing more than a form of self-incrimination. Even if this removes the need to ever actually wash it clean.

Either Or

In Defining Deviancy Down, New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan made the following observation while referencing Wayward Puritans, a 1965 book by one Kai T. Erikson:

Despite occasional crime waves, as when itinerant Quakers refused to take off their hats in the presence of magistrates, the amount of deviance in this corner of seventeenth-century New England fitted nicely with the supply of stocks and whipping posts.

While the point of Defining Deviancy Down was to decry a greater acceptance of behavior that Senator Moynihan considered deviant, there is something to be said for this idea that he touches on in the beginning of his essay. Consider this excerpt from a recent article in The Week:

Part of the reason estrangement has become more common is the "changing notions of what constitutes harmful, abusive, traumatizing or neglectful behavior," said Joshua Coleman, a clinical psychologist and the author of "Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict," in his book. Coleman cited research that showed how the definition of trauma has expanded in the past three decades to include experiences once considered harmless. "The bar for qualifying as a trauma today is much lower," he said.
'No contact': Family estrangement on the rise for young people choosing peace

While there has been a significant amount of inter-generational warfare over whether Generation X was more resilient than Generation Z, or simply more likely to sweep genuine trauma under the rug, to go back to Mr. Erikson's thesis, there's a non-zero chance that a greater number of therapists, counselors and other mental-health professionals (and amateurs) has something to do with it. When I was in my mid-twenties, it simply wasn't as workable to be traumatized in the way that many younger people think of it. Accordingly, social structures were set up to support and encourage, working through things in a way that's considered to be self-harmful today. Likewise, the more modern push towards therapy, and the use of "therapy-speak" in everyday language would have struck my peers and myself as overly medicalized, and possibly even fraudulent. And there's a degree to which both of these attitudes are linked to the perception of the amount of competent assistance available. Back in the day, a low bar for trauma would have resulted in large numbers of people in seek of assistance from too few resources, while today, a high bar means that people would refrain from seeking out resources that are ready and waiting to assist them.

And both of these viewpoints clash with the idea that "what constitutes harmful, abusive, traumatizing or neglectful behavior" is objective, such that two notions that don't meet in the middle, such as Generation X's and Generation Z's, can't both be correct, even when viewed in relation to their own time periods. And this is what leads to the inter generational warfare, as my age cohort and my niece's each seek to claim the virtuous high ground for themselves.

Personally, I like to think of them as simply different. Yes, I think of myself as more resilient, and less likely to seek out resources than younger people. That adapted me to the world I was in, but I'm fortunate in the sense that it's not actively maladaptive for the world that I currently am in. I don't envy people who may have the misfortune to live in a time when the pendulum swings back in the other direction. After all, it's better to have resource and not need them, than to need resources and not have them. But for right now, perhaps everyone is okay. And that's good enough.

Distracted

There was a post on LinkedIn this morning, claiming that when wealthy people complain about wokeness (the fight over which is pretty much over, I think) and gender issues, they're attempting to "distract" people from "something." (As an aside, one would expect that people would be clear on just what they thought this "something" was.)

What I find to be interesting about this is that no-one ever says that they didn't deal with what they understood to be the real problems in their lives because they were "distracted" by what other people were telling them were their problems. I've certainly never been in a situation where I didn't understand that something was a problem for me, because I was too busy being upset over something someone else told me to be upset about. Unless, of course, you ask the person who was telling me what they thought I should be upset over... They tended to be absolutely convinced that I didn't understand my own problems.

Part of the situation, I think, stems from the fact that there are certainly a lot of people out there who do better when certain very wealthy people do better. And if they understand that what bathrooms people use mean that the values of their stock portfolios are going to drop, they might feel they have an interest in making sure that people use the correct bathrooms. I don't know anyone like that, but I presume that they could be out there. Stranger things have happened, after all.

But I think what's really going on is a combination of confirmation bias, and appeal to authority, which has become mixed in with people's self images. For a person who understands that wokeness is simply an inversion of historical forms of prejudice and discrimination, "the first shall be last," so to speak, it's not surprising that they see that as a threat to their interests, especially people who see the economy as a zero-sum game. Lydon Johnson may have said: "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair," but for many people in the United States, programs like Affirmative Action felt like punishments directed at them, and they didn't see themselves as the guilty parties of past injustices. And so when a person who has "made it" comes out and says "woke ideology" is an obstacle to success, that feels like validation from someone who should know.

Opportunities often come at a cost to someone. And for most of American history, the opportunities afforded to straight, white men, came at a cost to gays, non-whites and women. mainly because of the perception that heads of mainstream households were both more in need and deserving of them, and the fact that in times of scarcity, the people in charge of doling out resources tend to end up with the most of them. As long as terms like wokeness and diversity, equity and inclusion come across as simply coded terms for "payback," as in making the mainstream bear the costs of opportunities for others, they're going to frighten people. And fear has a way of commanding people's attention.

Hey. Listen.

"This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wakeup call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives," Livelsberger wrote in a letter found by authorities who released only excerpts of it.

[...]

A law enforcement official said investigators learned through interviews that he may have gotten into a fight with his wife about relationship issues shortly before he rented the Tesla on Saturday and bought the guns. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation.
The soldier who died in Cybertruck explosion wrote it was intended as a 'wakeup call'

If anyone at the Associated Press, or NPR, noted the irony, it didn't make it into the article. But news sources know where their clicks come from... offering random, and sometimes completely irrelevant, details about events to the public. And so they're willing to print information from someone that they directly say shouldn't be giving that information to them in the first place. Just to pad out a story a bit more before the broader public loses interest.

I could go back and rehash what I was saying a week and a half ago about there being more interest in the murder of a child beauty-pageant contestant from nearly three decades ago than there is in say, fiscal policy, but even dead horses deserve a break now and again.

So instead, I'll see if I can make a coherent point about all of this using former President Jimmy Carter. President Carter was, in my estimation, the last, and perhaps the only, scrupulously honest man to have lived in the White House. What this meant in practice was that he didn't sugar-coat things. And while he may have had other shortcomings as the Chief Executive of the United States, I think that one of the lessons that politicians learned from his example was never to follow it.

While I'm pretty sure that the United States, as a nation, is not unique in this, it's fairly obvious what messages the population, as a whole, want to hear. Donald Trump rode his willingness to convey those messages back to the White House, even when it's pretty clear that he couldn't have been sincere about all of them, and some of them practically require rewriting the laws of economics as we currently understand them. But they lined up with what enough people understood to be true, and want the future to look like, that it lead to electoral success. President Biden did the same thing before him, and we can go on and on. And it's the same with Congress. The body as a whole has a poor approval rating, but people tend to think their own Representative and Senators are doing a pretty good job (as long as they're of the correct party, anyway).

Master Sergeant Livelsberger was attempting to foment a Republican revolution within the United States, calling on "Fellow Servicemembers, Veterans, and all Americans" to "be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary." It's a stereotypically simplistic answer for things, but the underlying sentiment, that there are serious problems with the United States that are being ignored and that the public is somewhere between complacent and complicit, is perhaps more common than it's being given credit for.

President Carter made the point that the United States had serious problems, and look where it got him. Not because of the message itself; there's no shortage of people who are willing to say there are problems. But because of the implication that the solutions wouldn't be easy or inexpensive. The letters that the Las Vegas police have released seem to point to the solution being as simple as chasing Democrats out of national government and going back to the 1950s. Nothing more than several days of inconvenience and ignoring several decades of social change. But no real mention of the blood, sweat and tears that would be required. The things that people seem to shy away from when there's anything else on offer.

Because, I suspect, they feel they've earned their leisure. And they'll turn a deaf ear to anyone who says otherwise. And I'm not going to exempt myself from this. I'm not exactly a fan of the higher tax rates (and accompanying lower standards of living) that would be required to sort out the nation's finances. I'm simply resigned to the fact that it's something that must be done, and soon. But I'm not dumb enough to think that it's an attractive way of looking at the world.

And Around

Another New Year's Day in Seattle.