The Path

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to success in modern life is a sense of futility. If one is going to put a lot of time and effort into doing something, it helps to trust that it will pay off. (This is something that I find to be missing from a lot of talk about "grit." "Grit" in the face of certain failure is viewed as quixotic, rather than determination.)

One area where I see a sense of futility consistently at play is in left-leaning politics here in the United States. Broadly speaking, the American Left has, among its policy priorities, maintaining or restoring access to legal abortion (and contraception more broadly) and reducing (if not eliminating) the access to personal firearms. These are areas in which they've faced opposition from the American Right, and, broadly speaking, the Right has been winning this contest. It's likely that, despite rhetoric about allowing states to decide their own abortion policies, that when Republicans take control of the House of Representatives, someone will float a bill to criminalize abortion nationwide, and some of the very people who claimed that it should be a matter for the states will vote in favor of that. (They'll have their perfunctory responses to the knee-jerk accusations of hypocrisy at the ready, of course.) And it doesn't even require having paid any attention at all to the "debate" concerning gun control in the United States to realize that it's going nowhere.

The general reason for this is the phenomenon of the "single-issue voter." While these groups of people are minorities of the overall public, they have the ability to make it difficult or impossible for people who don't toe their lines on their favorite causes to be elected. Make them unhappy, and they walk away. And there's always someone who will rush in to tell them whatever it takes to obtain those votes. And if they want to stay in office, they're forced to walk the walk, at least enough to avoid leaving room for someone to challenge them on the basis of greater adherence to the party line.

The American Left has no such groups of consistently motivated voters on its side. And I think that they've mostly given up on attempting to cultivate them. Which I will admit that I find to be strange. Because the current strategy of appeals to majoritarianism (when it suits them, anyway) and the ideals of democracy aren't getting them anywhere. So, for instance, while there are a number of people on the Left who object the idea of billionaires in concept, as a matter of both ethics and economic justice, the chances of altering the business regulatory environment to eliminate the economic incentives that create the consolidation of wealth are functionally zero. There's something telling about the fact that it was considered more likely that disaffected right-leaning voters in the United States would manage to install a government that would dismantle America's republican form of government during the most recent election cycle.

The question of why the Left tends to be more focused on the idea that "somebody needs to do something," and holding street protests to that effect, rather than coming together as a block of voters and emulating the tactics that the Right has successfully deployed again and again is "above my pay grade," as they say. I suspect that it's another facet of the broader coalitions that make up the American Left. It's hard to get half a dozen people to all agree to what they want on a pizza. Getting a few million people to all agree on political priorities is no easier. And I think that this is the part that's become lost to a sense of futility: the idea that a set of priorities can be created, and the boxes ticked off one after the next. The American Left has the population needed (although there may need to be some shuffling of where people are actually located) to push through legislation on guns, abortion, billionaires or what have you. They need to trust one another to go down the list, rather then people bailing out once their pet project has concluded. This, perhaps, would give them a greater sense of the power they could wield.

In Their Corner

The Economist Asks: How could Ukraine win the war?

Which is a good question, if one that I wouldn't expect a podcast to give a workable answer to. Not because it's the sort of thing that would be beyond a podcast, but because the answer would constitute at least somewhat valuable information. In other words, if the answer was "the Ukrainians could win by doing X, Y and Z," it's a pretty safe bet that the Russians would obtain that information, and, if they found it credible, move to close of the possibility of Ukraine doing X, Y and Z.

As a result, Anne McElvoy's conversation with the former commander of the United States Army in Europe, Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, comes across as more of a cheerleading session than a layperson's introduction to the strategy and tactics of repelling an invasion.

General Hodges saw a lot of factors working in Ukraine's favor, one of which was that people in the United States wanted to see Ukraine win, and this was likely to mean that support for military aid in Congress would continue. This, I think, may be a bit of wishful thinking. (But then again, there is a remarkable amount of wishful thinking when it comes to foreign policy, I've learned.) Not because the public of the United States doesn't, for the most part (after all, there are a few Russia boosters, here in the States, for various reasons), wish Ukraine well, but wishing someone well, and working to ensure they are well are not the same thing. The question is not whether the people of the United States have a favorite of the two warring sides, but how much in the way of both resources and risk that they're willing to put on the line.

Just Like the Rest of Them

In the wake of the rather spectacular collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX (an abbreviation, it turns out, of "Futures Exchange") I suddenly started hearing a lot more about the philosophical concept of "effective altruism." I'd heard of effective altruism mainly through having heard excerpts of philosopher Peter Singer making the case for it on various radio shows and podcasts. Having a passing interest in philosophy, I'd also read a few articles on the topic here and there. For me, the main things that I understood about effective altruism were the concepts that everyone's well-being is of equal value and that giving should be cost-effective. The stereotypical example of this would be if I could alleviate the hunger of three families in the United States by giving $100 over some period of time, but that same $100 could alleviate hunger for 10 families of equal size in Bangladesh, I should give my money to a charity that alleviates hunger in Bangladesh. Likewise, if charity A can feed 5 people for set time with a given amount of money donated, while charity B can feed 6, then I should donate to charity B. By making these sorts of calculations, driven by whatever data is available, one can be most effective with one's charitable giving.

All in all, I hadn't put much thought into effective altruism, and so was somewhat surprised to find that news outlets were running story after story on it, based mainly on the fact that FTX co-founder and CEO Samuel Bankman-Fried was a committed effective altruist. Despite the inference being about as logically fallacious as they come, there seemed to be a rather intense questioning of whether effective altruism was all that it was cracked up to be, given that Mr. Bankman-Fried was a) a backer and b) apparently wildly dishonest and/or unethical in his business dealings. It all struck me as more than a little suspect. Republican operatives seeking to link Mr. Bankman-Fried to Democrats, and framing the entirety of the Democratic Party as dishonest on that basis, was also a straight-up logical fallacy, but an expected one; American partisan politics more or less demands that the political parties claim that any malpractice by anyone even tenuously associated with the opposing party be held up as evidence that the whole party is run by criminals and fraudsters.

And recognizing that partisan aspect to things allowed me to better understand the interest in effective altruism. There are three major schools of thought when it comes to normative ethics: deontology, utilitarianism/consequentialism and virtue ethics. Virtue ethics, because it doesn't tend to deal directly with determining how a person should act in the moment, is often shunted to the side in any number of discussions, leaving a perhaps more familiar deontology versus utilitarianism divide. A divide, it turns out, that can be just as partisan as Republicans versus Democrats. Effective altruism is generally seen as a utilitarian/consequentialist viewpoint, focused as it is on basically doing the most good for the most people, and therefore leaving certain people with a valid claim to be "moral patients" out in the cold. To use the example I cited above, the three families in the United States. If I chose to give $100 to charity B in Bangladesh, and feed perhaps 12 families there, the Americans go hungry, for no other reason than they live in a nation where it's more expensive to feed them. They might argue that there are valid reasons for casting aside equal consideration of interests, and there are a good number of philosophers who agree with them.

Overall, I am under the impression that utilitarianism is the subject of quite a high degree of distrust from people who are not themselves utilitarians. At least, here in the "industrialized West," where incomes and standards of living are fairly high, relative to the rest of the world. And I think that this distrust is playing out here, as critics of effective utilitarianism seek to undermine the idea by linking it to someone now widely understood to be a bad person. Philosophy is subject to human nature, too, I suppose.

No Trace

[A.J. Jones, Starbucks' executive vice president of communications] also claims that the union's stipulation of wanting to observe proceedings violates the National Labor Relations Act, which prohibits the recording of bargaining sessions.

The union has refuted this claim, saying that it wants union members to sit in on the [Zoom] call, not record it.
Why are Starbucks workers striking?

And how would the Starbucks Workers Union propose that members be prohibited from recording the proceedings? There are any number of ways to make a video of what's happening on a computer screen. Sure, the Union could expel anyone who released a recording, but that's closing the barn door after the horse has gone off and founded a cryptocurrency start up. For the Union to claim that members observing the call would be stopped from recording it is either hopelessly naive or openly disingenuous. Just because someone lacks access to the Record function built into Zoom does not mean that they have no ability to make a viable recording of the call.

While I understand that unions are meant to advocate for their members, the assumption that all approximately 7,000 people in the Starbucks Workers Union are either too ethical, or too tech-illiterate, to figure out a way to record a Zoom call without anyone knowing that they've done so goes beyond simple advocacy. It's possible that the Union's leadership are themselves lacking in the sort of technological savvy that would give them an understanding of how a call might be recorded, so, for the sake of argument, let's give them the benefit of that doubt. In that case, why not ask Starbucks why they determined that members observing the call carries a risk? (Personally, I suspect that Starbucks hasn't granted the Union the benefit of the doubt, and I'm not at all surprised by that...)

The adversarial nature of the relationship between the people who work for companies and the people who own and manage them is tailor-made for this sort of thing. The Union has no incentive to believe that it would be trivially easy for any participant or observer on a Zoom call to record it, and Starbucks management has no incentive to believe that the leadership of the Union is dealing in good faith. And once neither side has an incentive to see the other as being an honest partner, things quickly fall apart.

Law of Rules

It's a stereotype that Conservatives care more about rules, law and order than Liberals do, at least here in the United States. This stereotype is mostly one of branding; the Rule of Law tends to be employed as a punishment for being frightening and/or unpopular as, if not more, often then it is used in response to misbehavior. And people of all political persuasions tend to have a greater interest in rules that protect their interests than they do in rules as a general concept.

And so it was that left-leaning media outlets spent a lot of time openly fretting and clutching their metaphorical pearls in the run-up to the recent mid-term elections, when it looked like devotees of former President Donald Trump and the "Stop the Steal" mythology might carry the day and install themselves as Secretaries of State and other elections officials in jurisdictions dotted around the nation. The clear concern was that such people would actively interfere in elections, pushing the nation towards "autocracy" and away from "the rule of law."

But I think that human nature is something of a constant, and so it was that National Public Radio published an article with the headline "The U.S. moves to shield Saudi crown prince in journalist killing." The article, sourced from the Associated Press is basically a litany of activist complaints about the fact that the Biden Administration has concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is entitled to the same sovereign immunity for lawsuits in American courts that any other head of state or head of government would be. The end of the article points out speaks about some of the details of sovereign immunity, but, for the most part, the article comes across as outrage mining.

I'm not sure, however, what there is to be outraged about. Sovereign immunity is not a new concept, nor is it a particularly contentious one. The fact that it gets in the way of Crown Prince bin Salman being hauled into an American court does not change that. People being of the opinion that the Crown Prince is an oppressor and tyrant is not a valid reason for the current Administration (or any other, really) to decide that the precedent of sovereign immunity should be thrown out, or even that an exception be made in this particular case.

This is the primary driver of "threats to the rule of law;" the idea that sometimes, the letter and/or the spirit of the law come between someone and the outcome that they understand themselves to be entitled to. Whether that is considered a good a bad thing often rests not on an understanding of the law and its purposes, but on who a particular party is more sympathetic to, or which interests are being served. It does little good to wring one's hands about the decline of lawfulness, when one is only concerned with the laws that are found to be to one's benefit.