Alone Time

So I came across a post on LinkedIn of a bearded man wearing a shirt that read: "Hunt your local pedophiles" and holding up a handwritten a sign with the following:

This is the USA. There is no one Coming to our rescue if things go sideways. No one will be resupplying us. No one will airdrop food, ammunition, medicine. There is no place to escape to for freedom. This is it!

As might be expected, this sparked people to loudly agree or disagree in the comments. But the partisan sniping kind of missed the broader point. While it's common for people in other parts of the world to look at the individualism of Americans and shake their heads, this guy and his sign explains it all. It's a simple matter of the perception that no-one else cares about things that are important.

On the one hand, the United States may well have to go it alone if things "go sideways" enough that the nation is in real danger of being overrun by a hostile foreign power. But that's because it's difficult to imagine that most other nations would realistically be able to stand up to a nation that was able to decisively win against the armed forces of the United States. The air superiority that this hypothetical hostile nation would need to have would render airdropping supplies to beleaguered American citizens a difficult undertaking. Likewise, it's doubtful that Canada or Mexico would be able to protect American refugees if the invaders wanted to pursue them.

But the sentiment of the sign is that there is a peculiarly American understanding of "freedom" that other nations aren't interesting in fighting to maintain, and wouldn't be willing to offer fugitive Americans in the case of an armed conflict on American soil. But even to the extent that it's true, it's more a symptom of the American Right's contempt for other nations than it is anything else. If we understand the sign holder to be referencing the "Culture Wars" in the United States morphing into an actual armed conflict, that the Right were to find itself on the losing end of, it makes sense that foreign powers would be unlikely to mobilize to the rescue Trumpism. They'd likely have their own issues to be concerned with. And big players, especially China and Russia would be too busy stoking the flames of conflict for their own purposes to be bothered with helping either side. And as for, say, Western European nations, why would they be interested in assisting a side that holds them, and their values, in open contempt? Okay, so their may be some nations that hold the American Right to be their natural allies. None of the ones that come immediately to mind strike me as being able to project force across oceans.

The American Right sees itself as assailed on all sides because the sense of threat is useful for binding people together. This isn't anything new or different. To go back to Russia and China, both nations have official narratives that cast the United States as a hostile and evil power that requires everyone in the country to band together to resist. It's a common way of looking at the world.

Nations tend to have one common reason for not concerning themselves with what happens to people in other nations... they don't see paying the costs of intervention as in their interests. That tends to be true in international conflicts, and it's nearly universal in intra-national conflicts. It's even true within nations. Black lives don't seem to matter in the United States because the deaths of people like Trayvon Martin or Sandra Bland didn't make a broader difference in the lives of public. Their deaths were individual tragedies, but not national losses. The same could be said of partisan America. While a wholesale killing of one group or another would be a national tragedy, the rest of the world would go on as normal.

The world looks upon the man holding the sign and asks why they should be in any hurry to come to his rescue... what would be in it for them? And sometimes, that's the problem with being "exceptional." It's too easy to put oneself in a position where others don't really need anything from one, or at least not enough to spend resources on one's behalf.

Round and Round

I recently moved to a new home (the reason why posting has been so uneven recently), and yesterday, I spent a few hours in the Zen pursuit of baling sheets of bubble wrap back into large rolls, so that I could more efficiently pack them into empty moving boxes. The original plan had been to offer them as recycling, but it turns out that the city in which I now live considers bubble wrap to be trash. And I'm sure that plenty of people would agree with them in that assessment.

It is possible to have bubble wrap recycled, but that means taking it a good distance to one of the places that will accept it, and then paying for the privilege. And what this tells me is that bubble wrap is, in fact, trash. Or, to be more precise, it lacks economic value as a material with which to make other things. Like, for example, more bubble wrap.

And this, I think, is part of the reason why recycling is not really a worthwhile strategy, from an environmental standpoint. New materials are still cheap enough that it's less expensive to extract them, and use the pristine resource for manufacturing. And so there isn't a workable reverse logistics chain to have items returned for processing. And if people are going to have to pay to return items to be reused, most of them aren't going to bother. Personally, I haven't made up my mind if it's worth it to me to go through the work to offer the materials for recycling. And the main reason I'm considering it isn't the environment; it's that I'm not really in the mood to sit on the stuff until I manage to throw it all away piecemeal. I could get rid of it all at once, by driving it to a dump and paying the facility to take it, but if I'm going to do that, why not have it recycled? Of course, the most likely answer to that question is that it won't be recycled no matter where I take it. The only question is whether anyone pretends that they're going to do something other than drop it into a landfill.

And this has always been the problem with recycling broadly. Certain resources are valuable enough and/or easy enough to work with that reclaimed materials will result in a clear cost saving. For everything else, it takes some sort of intervention to make the numbers work out, and those interventions pretty much always result in an increase in prices that otherwise brings no immediate value to anyone. Without a way to change those economics, it seems unlikely that recycling will ever be as ubiquitous as some people would like.

Over-the-Counter

I find conspiracies fascinating for what they tell us about people. But it turns out, the reactions are also pretty telling. I was listening to the radio a while ago, and one of the presenters really hit on something; conspiracy thinking as a form of self-medication for a pathological world. And so I was kind of surprised when the discussion turned to solutions, and there was no mention of addressing that pathology.

I get that it's difficult when the remedy that people are flocking to seems dangerous, especially to people who aren't taking it. And that's perhaps why so little progress is being made, because it's easy to become caught up in policing people's reactions to their fears and anxieties. But if we want people to stop self-medicating for their feelings of disenfranchisement, powerlessness and social mistrust, the alternatives either have to do a better job of helping people feel better and/or actually ease the underlying causes of their anxiety.

It's sort of like being sick. Let's say that I'm taking a naturopathic remedy, which makes me feel better, but there are some side effects. And then I meet someone who tells me that the remedy is bunk, and I should be taking 50 milligrams of Dystopamine HCL twice a day. When I ask "Oh, does that work?" they say, "No, but it's FDA approved." It's attempting to counter unsafe, but effective, with safe, but ineffective.

The degree to which people sympathize with the plight of the self-medicating depends, I think, on whether they see the diagnosis as genuine, a misdiagnosis, hypochondria or deliberate malingering. And that assessment, as I understand it, is often driven by partisanship or other affinities. Many people in the Black community, for example, are put out by the fact that War on Drugs tended to focus on those drugs that Black people took, while the high levels of opioid abuse were seen as having causes other than weak wills on the part of the White people that became addicted. And while this is likely as much (if not more) a function of the societal distance between White and Black people in the United States as it is overt racism, the difference is still noteworthy.

And while with conspiracy theories, the medications are metaphorical, rather than literal, a similar dynamic is as work, as people give passes to those they identify with, at the expense of those they don't.

Show Trial

Due to the nature of congressional partisanship, a nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States will only proceed to having a hearing if the votes are already there to confirm them. This creates a process in which the nominee is effectively little more than a prop in what is supposed to be their own job interview, but is actually simply an opportunity for members of the Senate to signal their virtue to the activist voters they rely upon to remain in office.

And there is nothing wrong with activist voters. The problem, to the degree that one considers it a problem, lies with the indifferent voters whose interest in the election goes little farther than the partisan identity of a given candidate. Activist voters can be relied upon to vote for the policies, or at least the attitudes, they want to see from government, and will withhold votes from a candidate who is too moderate for their tastes. But less engaged voters will sit out the primary contests, and if a general election candidate is more extreme than they might like, well, they're still better than whomever is running on other parties' tickets.

For several years now it's been more or less clear that the Supreme Court of the United States is not there to interpret the Constitution. Rather, it's there to go along with whatever interpretation that members of Congress have decided is accurate. Such is the prestige of the role that many judges are willing to overlook that (and perhaps they even believe that they aren't intended to be partisan hacks), but I wonder if that will hold up indefinitely.

But the pull to the extremes that activist voters have induced in members of Congress has come to mean that voting for a candidate advanced the other party is quickly becoming a messy form of political suicide, thus rendering the process of hearings moot. Why bother to debate when the votes are already graven in stone before the first words are spoken?

Winning

While I'm on the topic of investing, I find it interesting that people who are fully aware of the idea that not all financial investments will pay off may not see social or personal investments in the same way. I've written before about the idea that what many people see as grit or perseverance may be more accurately be described as trust. And so this raises the question of whether or not people who have turned to crime or other disapproved means of supporting themselves are wrong to distrust the system.

Personally, I tend to see a certain level of distrust in society, and the promise that "working hard and playing by the rules will lead to success" to be justified. While I don't deny that it's worked out (reasonably) well for me, that's not a sign that it's going to work for everyone. After all, everyone isn't me. But I think that some of what drives a certain understanding that the system will work for everyone who engages with it in good faith is that it allows for a level of cost-shifting. If grit and hard work are seen as guarantors of success in life, then there is no reason to pay costs associated with creating a better society; society must be just fine as it is.

For me, the idea that society needs no improvements for more people to have better outcomes flies in the face of reality as I understand it. But I don't really fear the costs of making it better. After all, it's a "pay me now, or pay me later" sort of situation; the bill is going to come due at some point or another, so why not pay it now? But I also understand that my own position in life, despite the work that I've put in, has an element of good fortune in it. Rather than having simply created opportunities for myself where none otherwise existed, I've been able to find and take advantage of opportunities in the world around me; which necessitated someone else not being able to do so.

With some further good fortune, I may be able to create opportunities for others. But I don't begrudge them not waiting around for me to manage it.