Freedom To Ignore

So I found myself at the Reason Magazine website this morning, came across the following article: Bourgeois Libertarianism Could Save America, by Reason senior editor Brian Doherty. If you understand the broad strokes of American Libertarianism, once you've read the introduction to the piece, you'll pretty much know exactly where it's going to go.

And in such, it illustrates the primary problem that Libertarianism has with reaching outside of the relatively affluent, older and white base that it has. It often appears to openly pick sides. Mr. Doherty notes: "As this year's urban unrest has shown, police power in the conventional sense can't keep cities secure if even a small number of people are unwilling to play by the nonviolent rules." My question is this: Why does "urban unrest" show this? There's also an article from the December issue, titled "Predictive Policing or Targeted Harassment?" Why not use a police policy that a former officer describes as: "Make their lives miserable until they move or sue," as an example of being "unwilling to play by the nonviolent rules?" Why not use the murder of Matthew Shepard for that example? Even if, as some at Reason did, one decides that his murder was not motivated by homophobia but by a drug deal gone bad, that's no better reason for violence.

The irony here is that this is what Libertarianism is supposed to be all about. If one understands the Black Lives Matter and Anti-Fascist protests as being reactions to the activities of a State that is "recalcitrantly evil," then the way to end the "vandalism, arson, and assault against bystanders," is to tell people what they can do in order to be allowed "to possess wealth and space and to use them to offer goods and services for a price, helping others while peacefully bettering ourselves," in the face of a system that they feel deliberately deprives them of this, and that many Libertarians seem intent on ignoring.

The problem with Mr. Doherty's conceptualization of "boring old bourgeois Libertariansm: the lived philosophy of peacefully enjoying life and property while mostly minding your own business" is not that it doesn't leave room for "attempts to enforce orthodoxies of thought and expression, no matter how good the cause," but that it doesn't offer any responsibility to assist those who are subjected to such enforcement efforts. As someone "minding my own business" I am completely free to ignore people's pleas for justice. As much as "no justice, no peace" is openly extortionate, it is so because of the widespread idea that all that is needed for injustice to triumph is for enough would-be Libertarians to do nothing.

As long as bourgeois Libertariansm is viewed as the lived philosophy of treating violent interference with others enjoying life and property as none of one's business, it's going to have trouble gaining traction with the very people it claims to be attempting to appeal to. An insistence that if the state can openly oppress Dick without troubling Jane that Dick's response must also leave Jane untroubled presupposes that Dick needs nothing from Jane and Jane has nothing of assistance to Dick. So how, then, does bourgeois Libertariansm help anyone, if it's to be applied at the end of a chain of injustice, rather than the start?

Fill In The [Blank]

Riggleman, a nonbeliever who was then a National Security Agency defense contractor, had come along for the ride, paying thousands in 2004 to indulge a lifelong fascination: Why do people – what kind of people – believe in Bigfoot?
What hunting Bigfoot taught a Republican congressman about politics

I always find stories like this interesting, because they're basically about social acceptance of certain beliefs, yet don't usually come out an say it. When the question of "Why do people – what kind of people – believe in [Blank]?" comes up, the allowable topics with which one can fill in the blank are circumscribed. If you use "crypitids" or "aliens" or "conspiracy theories" to fill in the blank, you're okay. Slot "the Resurrection" in there, however, and you're asking for trouble, despite the fact that, generally speaking, that there's about the same amount of evidence for all of them and when it comes down to it, they'll all about the same thing: how people want the world around them to work and/or what helps them feel a certain way about themselves and their lives. Society, however, demands a veto on certain means at arriving at understandings of and feelings about the world, and covers this with "facts."

And like most cases that are heard in the Court of Public Opinion, the verdicts are wildly inconsistent. Mainly because "Public Opinion" is something of a misnomer, in the grand scheme of things. The public is not really that unified. And so verdicts are never unanimous and are consensus less often than might be supposed. Instead, a number of them are the work of vocal minorities who care enough to go to the mat for them. And since there is no requirement that these groups be in sync about things, a particular set of feelings about the world may pass muster, and another set be shot down.

The belief systems that people use to buttress their subjective experience of (or desires for) the world tend to be most successful to the degree that they are not subjected to rigorous tests of proof in order to be accepted. Sometimes, this means that they're allowed to live in the gaps that standard measures of proof or knowledge leave and other times they're simply granted blanket exemption. This is, as I understand it, generally based on how they prompt others to feel. A person who is actively worried by someone else's belief system is likely to demand a higher burden of proof than someone who couldn't care less. Of course, cost is also a factor, especially when it comes to things like conspiracy theories; the expected burden of proof for a belief system tends to rise as the perception that there are individual or group costs to tolerance or indifference rises.

People who tramp around in the forests of the Olympic Peninsula looking for Sasquatch are, for the most part, considered harmless (if somewhat gullible and foolish) eccentrics. The belief in a resurrected Messiah is broadly-enough held that's effectively the default; it's defectors who are considered somewhat dangerous. Again, however, for the most part, seeing the atheistic as active threats to society as a whole is considered an extreme position. Being alarmed over the spread of Q-Anon or the idea that President Trump had a lawfully-won election literally stolen out from under him is more threatening to people who don't believe it (mainly because of concerns over the actions that believer's might take). These factors, more than the beliefs themselves, could do with more news coverage. But I suspect that the topic isn't particularly interesting.

Great Expectations

Apple head of security accused of offering iPads as bribes for concealed gun permits. Shocking, I know. But, as is often the case, the headline paints a different picture than the text of the article itself:

“In the case of four CCW licenses withheld from Apple employees, Undersheriff Sung and Cpt. Jensen managed to extract from Thomas Moyer a promise that Apple would donate iPads to the Sheriff’s Office,” Rosen said in the news release.

An Ars Technica piece on the same story notes that this seemed to be a common pattern for the Sheriff's Office.

A June investigation by NBC Bay Area found that donors to Smith's re-election campaign were 14 times more likely to get concealed carry permits than those who didn't donate.
Apple security chief maintains innocence after bribery charges

I think that whoever wrote, and then whoever approved, the headline for The Verge understood that casting Mr. Moyer as the instigator would play better than "Sheriff's office tries to extract hardware from Apple head of security." The headline they went with confirms people's suspicions that corporate America is corrupt, in a way that a more nuanced reading does not. A headline casting the case as one of corporate corruption makes for better outrage mining and thus, shares and clicks.

The Verge, however, does not exist in a vacuum. It has an audience, and it has advertisers. And to the degree that it can deliver its audience to advertisers by playing to the biases of said audience, then that what writers and editors will be disposed to do; it's how they pay their bills. Whether the audience drives the media or the media drives the audience is an age-old debate. For people who feel that bias in media is the problem, there is often a perception of audiences as captive, and so if the supposed "élites" that run "the media" change the narrative, then the audiences would have no choice but to come along for the ride. But if we understand that The Verge and Ars Technica have different audiences, or, to be more precise, different expectations from their audiences, then the differences in their coverage make sense.

Click Here

The thing about the news business is that the product, for most people, is not very valuable. When I read the local, national or international news, I'm not doing so with an eye towards making some sort of investment that I expect to pay off for me at some point down the road. Sure, being informed is nice, but overall, it's as much about diversion as it is anything else. And so I'm not one to pony up for an online newspaper. I've thought about it, but generally, when I feel like paying for something, I'll buy a magazine from a bookstore. I prefer perpetual licenses to subscriptions that way. The upshot of this is that most news outlets rely on advertising to pay their bills. And that tends to mean clickbait.

What's interesting about this particular bit of clickbait is that the subtitle more or less immediately undermines it. While the top headline holds out the promise of a partisan fight, the subtitle is more in line with the article itself; it's not a pending Biden Administration that spells trouble for Coalstrip, Montana.

It's people like me.

I am, after all, one of the people who pays Puget Sound Energy to keep the lights on. (A job that they kind of suck at, to be perfectly honest.) And part of what is ailing Coalstrip is PSE's decision to accelerate the shutdown of two of the town's four production units. While I'm not a big environmental activist, I understand why a lot of people around here are. After all, the Sound is only a half-hour to forty-five minutes away from where I live. Coal might keep Coalstrip's doors open, but for a Puget Sound Area resident who is genuinely concerned about the prospect of sea level rise, renewables keep our feet dry. (Well, outside of the rainy season, anyway.) With both the Cascades and the Rockies between here and there, the sets of concerns are not the same. Coalstrip's mayor might have a valid reason to feel that PSE and other energy companies owe a softer landing to Coalstrip than what's being offered, but as one of the people who is going to wind up paying for it (after all, some of the "millions and millions" that he feels the company has made came from my payments), I'm a bit more dubious on what we owe them. After all, we paid them for their coal, presumably at a price high enough to allow for the "excellent schools, immaculate city parks and gleaming recreation facilities" the place boasts.

There's a lot more nuance there than "Could Biden's win doom this town?" suggests. And it all makes for an interesting read, especially for me, since I'm presumably a customer for the town's service. It's unfortunate that the BBC couldn't find something short that better directly carried the nuance that the caption hinted at. But that's the modern news business, it seems.

Think Fast

A week ago, Governor Inslee announced a second round of restrictions on gatherings. While it's not as severe as the set of restrictions that went into place earlier in the year, it has upended things somewhat. The last time I was at Costco, they were inexplicably sold out of Spam, of all things. I've given up on attempting to make sense of people's reactions. A lot of it, I would guess, comes from the surprise of it all. But, really, none of this should have been a surprise.

Not in the sense that people should have been expecting the Governor to stand up and make an executive order last week, but in the sense that this shouldn't have been a sudden executive order. Washington had established a phased reopening plan, with the idea that counties could move between phases as they were ready or as needed. And it was understood that infections would rise as fall and winter came on; there's a clear precedent for this, it's called "Flu Season."

So I'm not clear on why the state couldn't have published numbers well in advance laying out what they expected the numbers of SARS-2 CoV infections to look like, simply based on the seasons, and what excess over or under that would put a county into any given phase of being open. Then, as the numbers ticked up and projections were made, people and businesses alike could have made plans. The knowledge that increased closures would result in panic buying would have allowed retailers to lay in more stock, and the worrywarts could have gotten started on their retail therapy sooner.

I understand that the situation with the Coronavirus is supposed to be completely without precedent and sui generis, but it's basically just an infection respiratory disease. Sure, it's more random than a lot of other ones, but that doesn't mean that the response needs to feel random, too.