Debased

One example includes a tweet from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and an interview from Kanye West that baselessly argue the vaccine would be the "Mark of the Beast," or a biblical reference to a societally restrictive scar imposed on people by the Antichrist.
Influencers played outsized role in pushing anti-vax conspiracies

First off, just as a point of accuracy, the mark of the beast is not, in Christian mythology, "societally restrictive." Quite the opposite; it's seen as the ticket to being able to freely trade. In Rome, only official coins could be used for trade, and, one theory puts it, certain Jews saw this as the mark of the beast, as they considered Roman Emperors to be agents of evil. Early Christians continued this, and it made its way into the book of Revelation. In any event, the Axios story literally has it backwards.

But more importantly, what would be a legitimate basis for a story concerning the supernatural? As far as most non-Christians are concerned, of course the arguments from Representative Greene and Kanye West are baseless; non-Christians (more or less by definition) give no credence to the Biblical prophecies in Revelation, or to Christian eschatology more broadly. Not to mention that for non-Christians, the Antichrist is basically irrelevant.

"Baseless" is becoming a go-to criticism, as it implies that something should not be believed, but without needing to go our on a limb and directly label it as either mistaken or deliberately untrue. In that sense, it's become what could be called a "lazy" way of attacking something. But it's also become something of a media buzzword, and, as such, is only trotted out under certain circumstances, more or less independently of the nature of the thing in question. Consider the idea that almost all faith, especially of the religious sort, is technically "baseless." That's part of the definition of faith; if it could be conclusively shown to be true, one wouldn't need to take it on faith. But for a media organization in the United States to openly describe the idea that Biblical prophecy was coming to pass in the world as we know it to be baseless would be regarded as a blunder of the first order. High-level executives would be called to account by religious leaders and politicians alike for the perceived insult to the faithful.

The partisan way in which the term "baseless" has come to be deployed is starting to rob the world of a formal meaning, and replace it with "things people say that we're so feed up with we can't even be bothered to refute it anymore." Which, on its own, is fine. It's just a part of the evolution of language. But it's also part of what makes a lot of the news that's available to the public the domain of political "hobbyists." When media parrots this or that fraction of public opinion back to the people who hold it, no education or enlightenment is part of the process.

A Shot In The Dark

One of the primary reasons why the "debate" on access to guns in the United States never goes anywhere is that it tends to be argued on primarily ideological and mythological grounds. Russia has a quite large, and quite competent, army. An armed Ukrainian public can certainly make a long-term occupation of the country difficult, but that's not the same as making it either impossible, or unfeasible. After all, Russia lies on Ukraine's eastern border, and in Ukraine's eastern provinces, there is quite a bit of support for closer ties with Russia, if not outright annexation. This isn't another Afghanistan.

On the American political Right, there is the idea that the armed citizen, standing up for themselves can take on anyone's soldiers on an equal footing. That's a fantasy. Even the American Revolution, which is often viewed as an example of what patriotic citizens can do, was fought with the open assistance of other rivals of Great Britain. And part of the reason why the Confederate States of America were unable to force the Union to recognize their secession was other nations were reluctant to come to their aid.

In the end, yes, it's not really possible to subdue a population in which every man, woman and child is prepared to die fighting than to live under the rules of an occupying power. But when was the last time that happened? During the Second World War the United States was supplying the French Resistance with weapons, yet the country still required an Allied invasion to liberate it. And the German government supplying weapons to its citizen did nothing to prevent the Allies from invading and partitioning the country between themselves.

The Second Amendment was written at a time when it wasn't presumed that the United States would have a full-time, standing, army. If a nation is calling up citizens to form a military in times of need, it makes sense for those citizens to have regular access to weapons; it allows them to train (since an untrained citizen, armed or otherwise, can be more of a liability than an asset) and it makes it more difficult for an enemy force to capture the local supply of weapons when they aren't all stored in one place.

But the idea that "Russians don't have a prayer" simply because of the distribution of guns to the population of Ukraine is a fallacy. Were it that simple, President Volodymyr Zelensky wouldn't have been looking for more direct military defense assistance. But memes are designed to be punchy, not realistic.

Easy Answer

You may have seen this picture before. Or one like it. Someone posted this sign a couple of miles from where I live back in 2009. There was another sign like it, which read "Cut Spending," just down the street from me. And as someone who always carries a camera around with them, I took some pictures. After I posted some of them online, they popped up all over the place. Every so often, I look around for them. One was even used by The Atlantic. Or at least a crop of it was.

Turns out there's a thriving industry of businesses that take photos from the internet, modify them in some way, then sell the modified photo as their own work. It's a hazard of posting photos on Flickr. Or anywhere online, really.

But that's beside the point.

The point that I wanted to make here is that being anti-taxes is easy. Normally because most people who are anti-taxes are really anti-money-going-to-people-they-don't-like. People advocating for cutbacks in services that they actually use and value is fairly rare. Or, as the saying goes: "There's government spending, and then there's my government spending." And so people fight over whose ox is going to be gored.

There is an easy way to lower tax burdens, and most politicians have figured out what it is; simply borrow the money. Citizens receive the services they want and avoid taxes they don't want. At least for a time. Although, to be sure, it might be quite a long time. And it may turn out to be sustainable. A change in the economy might generate enough revenue to retire debts that previously lacked the funding sources to properly service them. It's a gamble, but gambles sometimes do pay off. The question here is how many people understand that they're rolling the dice?

Think Positive

I was listening to an episode of the "Checks and Balance" podcast from The Economist where the topic was Affirmative Action in the United States.

My general opinion is that Affirmative Action is something of a bad policy. Not because it can't do as it's intended to do, but because the intention itself is off-kilter. The answer to one group of people hoarding opportunities is not to break their stranglehold on it in favor of allowing members of other groups to hoard opportunities, too. And the reason is because that becomes a matter of redistributing wealth. And it's not possible to redistribute wealth without, at the same time, redistributing poverty. And the newfound recipients of poverty (and those who fear that they will be) will start fighting to not have to accept it.

So the answer to hoarding opportunities is to grow the available pool of opportunity rapidly enough that it outstrips the would-be hoarders' ability to lock it away from others. The problem that the United States has is that it ignores opportunity hoarding, because of a pervasive narrative that opportunities can be created at-will by anyone who is willing to work hard enough. In this understanding, rags-to-riches stories are treated as the sort of thing that everyone can aspire to and the systemic barriers that locked certain people out of them are things of the past. But at the same time, actively assisting people in making these sorts of things happen for them is viewed as suspect. The person who needs help to be successful proves themselves unworthy of success. And it is in that gap in the system that opportunity hoarding thrives. Most Americans are not invested in each others success, seeing it, I believe, as a threat to their own.

But being invested in the success of others is the way out of the Affirmative Action dilemma. And it may require a reworking of the definition of success, from something that benefits the successful person at the expense to those around them to something that benefits everyone, and thus, is worth sharing. (Too many people posit that their success benefits those around them primarily as a way of arguing that it makes up for their unwillingness to pay taxes.) Once the United States is at a point of collaborative, rather than competitive individualism, it becomes more likely that the opportunity hoarding that drives the need for current Affirmative Action policies will lessen.

Invaluable

Because someone must die for a transplantable heart to be made available, there is rightfully an ethical imperative to ensure that the ‘right’ person receives the organ.
Richard Gibson “The Heartless Matter of Organ Transplantation and COVID Vaccination”

The “right” person, huh? And how on Earth is that determined? Mr. Gibson suggests that “it is simply a matter of maximizing outcomes and minimizing risks,” and “getting the best ‘value-for-money’.” But then he goes on to suggest that some failures to minimize risk are less salient than others. Not being vaccinated against the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a legitimate reason to be denied an organ. But putting oneself at risk by engaging in extreme sports is not. But if it makes sense to say that a person who is vaccinated against the virus is a much less risky investment than an unvaccinated person, why shouldn’t the hobbies of the extreme sportsperson be taken into account?

There is, in my opinion, nothing wrong with creating some sort of risk criteria when deciding how to distribute a scarce resource, especially one that some group of people need to ensure their continued survival for a time. By the same token, there’s nothing wrong with deciding, as the person or persons in control of a scarce resource, that it will go to people whose values best align with one’s own. But using one as a cover for the other strikes me as disingenuous. I tend to be of the opinion that people are generally partisan and arbitrary; they make decisions based on what they understand their interests to be, and then attempt to slot them into a greater framework. Not out of dishonesty, but out of culture and upbringing. I don’t believe that I’ve ever encountered a person who adopted an ethical viewpoint under which the decisions that they were accustomed to making on a day-to-day basis were considered wrongful without some explicit desire to change those decisions.

While there is something of an understanding that all human lives are precious beyond measure, in the everyday world lives are worth the resources that people are willing to marshal to protect and extend them. Mr. Gibson hints at this when he notes that the people who die while waiting for organs to become available to transplant are “deemed less worthy” than those who are given organs. A bit earlier in the article, he was more direct: “Some people are more deserving of organs than others.”

But what makes one person deserving and another not, at the end of the day, are the triage decisions of the people in control of the procedure. Those they prioritize to save become more deserving. Those that must be deprioritzed become less worthy. So why not own those decisions? If not being vaccinated is automatically too risky to be allowed to receive a transplant, but endangering one’s life out of a sense of sportsmanship doesn’t upset the ‘value-for-money’ calculation, why not just own up to the idea that the final decision has more (or less) to do with factors other than a “simple” years-of-life determination?

There is no way to distribute a scarce resource in such a way that those who receive less than they feel they need (or nothing at all) will be forced to concede that the distribution was “fair.” When it comes down to it, “fair” often simply stops having any meaning to the person being told that they’re going to die due to being the 11th in line for 10 life-saving transplants.

The idea that “there is rightfully an ethical imperative to ensure that the ‘right’ person receives the organ” presupposes that there is one “right” person every time there is an organ to be received. That there is some calculus that can be done that consistently places one person on top of the heap. But people have never worked this way. It has never been possible, as near as I can tell, to boil ethics down into a form of mathematics. The difference between 2³ = 8 and prioritizing one set of patients over others is that 2³ = 8 is always free of any value judgments.

Of course, the thing that I’ve realized while writing this is that even the expression of values is driven by values. People hide their value judgments because they understand that being seen as free of them is valued. I value openness, so I prefer people to wear their values on their sleeves. I wonder how well that irony is appreciated.