Apply Palm to Face

Wouter Zwart: Speaking of threat, at one point you mentioned in a debate that there are no-go zones in the Netherlands and that cars and politicians are being set on fire.

Ambassador Hoekstra: I didn't say that. That is actually an incorrect statement. Yeah, we would call it fake news.

Zwart: Is that fake news? Because that's what you really said.

Ambassador Hoekstra: No, it's not what I said.

Mr Hoekstra (on archive video): The Islamic movement has now got to the point where they have put Europe into chaos. Chaos in the Netherlands, there are cars being burned, there are politicians that are being burned. And yes, there are no-go zones in the Netherlands.

Zwart: You called it fake news, obviously... (is interrupted)

Ambassador Hoekstra: I didn't call that fake news, I didn't use the words today.

Zwart: No?

Ambassador Hoekstra: No. I don't think I did.
Trump's ambassador to Netherlands in 'fake news' blunder

This, I think, gets to the heart of a lot of issues between the citizens of the United States and their government: the idea that politicians (especially politicians that a given individual didn't vote for) are reflexive liars, with an aversion to the truth that rivals the fear of anaphylaxis.

I'm not sure if I'm impressed or appalled that Ambassador Hoekstra went into this interview so clearly unprepared to be called out on something that he'd said, and that no-one at the State Department warned him about this. Of course, 2015 was a long time ago, and politicians have famously poor memories when put on the spot. But this speaks to an inability to realize that he'd said something that might come back to bite him, especially given that he'd said it in a televised and recorded forum. Not to mention a certain carelessness about what he was saying in the moment.

And this issue with this, as far as partisanship goes, is then the reflexive reaction to this, which is to defend the politician as being a target of unscrupulous media types, rather than to say, "You know what? Ambassador, you're a great guy, but you're in over your head. Come home before you do some real damage."

There's also a critique of the American media establishment in this. Mr. Zwart had his ducks in a row before he walked into that interview and was prepared to back up what he was saying, where as outlets like NPR tend to allow the statement to pass, and then "fact check" it afterwards. This may be part of the reason that the Ambassador was tripped up - he simply wasn't expecting Mr. Zwart to be as ready for him as he turned out to be.

Hello, Winter

You Forgot a Bit

I came across a copy of Chris Hayes A Colony In a Nation and read it. It's a quick read, I was able to finish it during the gaps in my workday, and about a half-hour before going to bed. As the title implies, it's a take on the idea of colonialism, with the central premise being that poor Black and Latino (although the book mostly focuses on Black) communities are treated like colonies, and the analogy is made to the original 13 Colonies that made up the early United States. In this, is draws some interesting parallels between the way that modern America jurisdictions of various levels and the administration of King George III treated their colonial subjects.

It is, not surprisingly, a Left-leaning critique of things, although there are some practices that I was surprised that we don't hear more right-leaning commentators talking about. (It kind of reinforces the cynical "freedom for me, and none for thee" charge that is leveled against them.)

The one big miss that popped up for me is the very end of the book. In the conclusion, Mr. Hayes asks the reader to imagine a button that, when pushed, delivers a benefit to the person who pushed it, at the expense of someone else. He goes through a couple of ideas of what that benefit might be, and what it might cost the someone else, but the basic idea is the same. And, on page 216, he says of this:

And if the person sitting by the button is poor and desperate, I doubt we'd judge her if she pushed the button to feed her kids or get money toward much-needed medicine. But overall it's not okay, as a general principle, to impose random harm on someone else so that you can reap a reward. That's our moral commitment.

But as far as I'm concerned, it is okay. That's why people do it so often. Regardless of how unethical or immoral one might claim it to be, the fact remains that reaping rewards by imposing random (or quite specific) harms on someone else is a mainstay of cultures around the world and throughout history (and prehistory, for that matter).

So, is Mr. Hayes wrong about this?

Not entirely. I think, however, that he left out one tiny bit.

But overall it's not okay, as a general principle, to impose random harm on someone undeserving of it so that you can reap a reward.

There, as all the cool kids would say these days, I fixed it for you.

And I think that it's an important distinction; one that explains much of the way in which people actually behave. And the issue becomes that it's never particularly difficult to come up with a reason why someone else is deserving of the harm that is required to reap a reward. They're of the wrong social class, they're from a different place, they've broken this or that rule, they didn't defend us from some harm that someone else did to us, they don't follow the correct faith, their ancestors harmed our ancestors, they're simply inferior. Et cetera. The list is as long as the human imagination. And as varied as human deprivation.

Mr. Hayes notes that we'd refrain from blaming the poor or desperate. (I suspect that judgement would be very quick if the harm befell someone the judge cared about, however.) And that's the other side of the coin. People are quick to see themselves, as poor and desperate. Not as often as they're willing to see the person harmed as deserving of harm, perhaps, but more often than one might think is reasonable.

And this ties in to the overall theme of the book. After all, Mr. Hayes attributes King George's heavy-handed tariff enforcement in colonial America as a way of replenishing the depleted royal treasury after the Seven Year's War, rather than (as it often seems we're taught in grade school) any sort of personal malice. (Although it's likely that he saw the colonies, with their smuggling and other tariff-dodging, as wretched hives of scum and villainy.)

Mr. Hayes idea, that we consider victimizing one another as wrong across the board, is an ideal. And in that, lip service may be paid to it, but it's not often the reality. Understanding the pieces that bring it into line with the world as we experience it, makes it easier to understand how it's actually lived, and perhaps why it's lived that way.

Laboring

"So, there was something about growing up black in the United States and then bearing a child that was associated with lower birth weight," says [University of Illinois at Chicago neonatologist Richard] David.

What is different about growing up black in America is discrimination, says David.
How Racism May Cause Black Mothers To Suffer The Death Of Their Infants

But is that the only thing that is different? While I understand that between questions about housing, income, health habits and discrimination, that the understanding of discrimination may be the best predictor of very low birth weights for newborn babies, correlation doesn't always prove causality.

Racism and discrimination have become our "Get Out of Blame Free" cards, when perhaps what we need to do is be less willing to shoulder blame in the first place. We often feel a need to be on guard, or take responsibility for what comes next, and maybe that's unhealthy for us.

The point of the NPR article is that the stress caused by racial discrimination may be causing the high rate at which Black women in the United States lose their infants. But that begs this question: Is racial discrimination the ONLY cause of stress in the lives of Black people that other people don't have to deal with? Technically, the NPR article gets around this by not openly stating a causal relationship. But the lines are wide enough to read between. And that's kind of a shame, because given that a causal relationship is not established, there could be other factors at work.

One very important issue when it comes to racial discrimination is that it may or may not be possible to determine discrimination when it happens. There was a study, which I can't seem to find online for love or money that noted that when Black people went to a business (I believe that auto dealerships were the subject in this particular case) that even though they believed they were being treated perfectly fairly, they didn't receive the same level of service as White people coming to the same dealership.

And this idea, that one can't always detect when one is the subject of racism, may contribute to the stress, because it drives a constant uncertainty. Sure, this person that you're dealing with seems perfectly nice and cordial. But maybe they'll just fooling you, and actually dislike you, or won't give you a fair deal. There may be wisdom in second-guessing every interaction that you have with someone, but let me tell you, it can be tiring to never be able to feel comfortable around people who are not like you.

And one of my experiences of growing up Black was the constant warnings that one should never be too comfortable around White people.

My parents were fairly conservative, so they never talked about sex with me. Even when my lack of a dating life led them to worry that I might be gay, they simply asked me outright "Are you gay?" rather than ask potential uncomfortable questions about my sex life. So I remember the only piece of dating advice that my father ever gave me. "Stay away from White girls," he said. I figured I knew where this was going. One didn't have to be particularly astute around 1990 to understand that hostility to interracial relationships came from all corners. But, as usual, my father threw me a curve ball when he informed me that the reason was that White people, effectively, universally hated Black people. "And a woman who will sleep with someone she hates," my father warned me, "will sleep around on you in a heartbeat."

And this idea, that White people (or White Americans, at least) were universally racist was pervasive in my extended family. Sure you had to deal with them, but you could never, ever, really trust them. And that feeling that no matter where you went, there were people out to get you, drives an anxiety all it's own. I drove up to northern Minnesota once, and was so nervous about stopping at a McDonald's to eat that I positioned myself near a large window, with my car just outside and chair within arm's reach, ready to make a break for it at the slightest sign of trouble.

[Samantha] Pierce remembers her mother warning her early on in her childhood that she would have to "work twice as hard to get half as much" as her white counterparts, she says.

My mother had a variation on this phrase. And and it was something that I found quite stressful; the idea that I would have to work four times as hard as everyone else, just to keep up. Eventually, I had to say to her, "Mom, do you understand how demotivating that is?" She didn't and I don't think that anyone else in my family did. It was just reality as it occurred to them. But it's a reality that leaves no room for trust or safety.

I'm not surprised that Black people find life in the United States stressful. But I wonder how much of that stress originates within us.

Taken

One of the projects that my father had on his plate when he died was a foolproof system to prevent hacking of online transactions and financial data. Now, while my father had been a systems analyst going way back to Assembly language, he wasn't a computer security researcher. And this lead to some speculation that the lawyers he was paying to help him prepare his patent of the holy grail of online finance were fleecing him. And while I'm sure my father had thrown that money away, I'm less sure that he was being intentionally conned. After all, the lawyers by father was working with likely knew a lot less about computers than my father did. They were lawyers, after all, and my father was the computer expert with the impressive résumé. It's highly unlikely that they could have found the flaws in my father's plans for this. I'd been working in technology for more than a decade and a half when my father explained it to me, and my objections were based more on the understanding that my father claimed to have single-handedly solved a problem that thousands, if not millions, of people the world over had yet to crack, than being able to tell him specifically where the scheme fell down.