Put Me In, Coach

"It turns out that nearly half of that team doesn't think I'm okay to be white," [Scott Adams] said, adding that he would re-identify as white. "I'm going to back off from being helpful to Black America because it doesn't seem like it pays off," he said. "I get called a racist. That's the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you're white. It's over. Don't even think it's worth trying."

"I'm not saying start a war or do anything bad," he added. "Nothing like that. I'm just saying get away. Just get away."
Distributor, newspapers drop 'Dilbert' comic strip after creator's racist rant

Apparently, it hadn't occurred to Mr. Adams that "Black America" isn't a hive mind, and that some Black Americans are capable of holding a grudge.

Snark aside, Scott Adams' response to an opinion poll that asked: "Do you agree or disagree with this statement, 'It's OK to be white'?"; allegedly to assess Americans' embrace of "wokeness." And it illustrates something about the politics of White grievance; namely, it becomes aggrieved at the idea that others have grievances of their own.

It's more or less taken for granted for that for much of American history, many people would have wholeheartedly disagreed with the statement "It's okay to be Black." And, anyone who pays even occasional attention to news media in the United States would understand that there are people who would disagree with that statement today. Including one White man who decided to shoot as many people as he could in a Buffalo supermarket. In a nation where racial discrimination and animosity even persisted as public policy and law into living memory, why someone should be the least bit perturbed, let alone put out, by the idea that a pollster could find a few dozen people willing to own an opinion that White people are not okay is somewhat remarkable. Especially a person as insightful as Mr. Adams' work on Dilbert showed him to be. (Given the size of the Rasmussen poll, if they surveyed Black people in proportion to their share of the population, somewhere in the area of 34 people would have said it's not okay to be White.)

But this is part of how the current Culture Wars in the United States play out; with a bizarre insistence that a community of nearly 50 million people, many of whom have nothing more in common than related skin tones, come to a unanimous agreement that no trace remains of literally hundreds of years of various forms of what is now considered gross mistreatment. But I suppose this is what one should expect from a person who considers the Black population of the United States a "team," rather than a massive collection of individuals.

I understand the Conservative tendency to make the United States the hero of every story that they tell about it. The demand that everyone else make it the hero of their own stories is a little more difficult to credit. But they've gotten away with it for decades; it hasn't occurred to many people to argue it with them.

Inattention

So, over the weekend, the Department of Energy (not my first guess as to who would be investigating) came out with an assessment that the most likely cause of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was an unintentional release from a laboratory in China. However, their confidence in this conclusion is low.

The same people who shamed us, canceled us, & wanted to put us in jail for saying covid came from the Wuhan Lab, not wearing masks and saying masks don’t work, and taking and recommending ivermectin to treat covid are starting to say what we said all along.
Now do covid vaccines.

Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-Ga.)

Okay... except for the fact that there is nothing new here. There was already one intelligence agency (the FBI, as I've heard it) that concluded that SARS-CoV-2 most likely emerged as the result of an unintenional lab leak... and their confidence level is higher than that of the DOE.

One IC element assesses with moderate confidence that the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. These analysts give weight to the inherently risky nature of work on coronaviruses.

And this is public knowledge, because the intelligence assessment I just quoted from has been declassified. (And not from Donald Trump just thinking about it...) So why is Representative Taylor-Greene acting as if some new and shocking revelation had just been announced?

Most likely because she'll be able to rack up some political mileage out of it. Because, despite the fact that it takes about 20 seconds to find that the federal government believed that the evidence they had was "not strongly diagnostic of either hypothesis" (that the virus spilled over from animals or was being investigated in a lab and was released) and that nothing the DOE has to say changes that, I suspect that not many people in the United States are going to be bothered to do a bit of reading. Mainly because the response to SARS-CoV-2 is now a matter of politics and, more importantly, partisanship.

For voters in, say, Georgia's 14th district, it doesn't really matter whether Representative Taylor-Greene's Twitter post makes any sense or not. The activist Republican voters that she would need to survive a primary challenge have, as I understand it, already decided that she can do no wrong. The "rank and file" Republican voters have already determined that in a race between her and a Democrat, they're voting for her, and Democratic voters have already decided that she's the worst possible outcome and will vote for whatever Democrat is able to challenge her.

And so this becomes about people deciding that what they already understood to be true is true.

The level of partisanship, and negative partisanship, in American politics is a problem because it gives the already mostly passive electorate even less reason to actually pay attention to the context behind the things that people say. People simply nod their heads when someone makes a partisan attack that they agree with, and go on about their days.

Do You Want Libertarians?

Because this is how you get Libertarians.

Florida state Senate Minority Leader Lauren Book has filed a bill with a host of animal-welfare rules. Such as banning people from allowing their dogs to put their heads out of the windows of moving vehicles.

Given that Florida is currently run by Republicans, this bill has more or less no chance of being passed. Which makes is highly likely that it's what termed a "messaging bill." What I'm less clear on is the message. Because it seems to be that Democrats are every bit as in love with controlling, intrusive government as they're stereotyped as being.

It's possible that there's more to this bill than meets the eye, or that someone could find a way to attach an amendment to this that would make it embarrassing for Republicans to vote against it. But on the surface, it seems to be little more than a means to more closely align Florida Democrats with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. And I don't see any real use in that.

This is, of course, a side effect of the increasing polarization of American politics. As one party or the other finds itself effectively shut out of the legislating process in some or another jurisdiction, their attention turns to virtue signalling. I'm pretty sure that Republicans here in Washington state do the same thing. It just hasn't happened to make enough of a splash for me to pay any attention to them yet.

I presume there are people in the Democratic activist community in Florida who support this sort of thing. They'll come out to help Senator Book win her next primary election contest, and this has the potential to leave Florida general election voters with a bad choice, who panders to the loudest voices among them, and a worse choice, who will simply ignore them in favor of the opposing partisans. The remarkable thing about this is that there is a sizable segment of the population for whom this is their preferred mode of governance. The government the public deserves, indeed.

The Long Form

I have a Label for posts on this blog called "The Short Form." It's a result of being out for a walk, and turning over an idea for a post in my head. Eventually, I'd turned it over so many times that I'd worn it down to the bare kernel of the idea. Finding that kernel succinct and to the point, I posted it, with a little commentary.

Many of The Short Form posts are images. I think because they take up more space that way, and so it didn't seem so much like simply skipping out on posting. In hindsight, I think that was a mistake, because, to a degree, The Short Form is a demonstration of what I wanted this exercise in weblogging to do - make me a better writer. And isn't being able to distill what could easily have been hundreds of words into two sentences a mark of a good (or at least decent) writer? But instead, it felt like a cop-out.

This all came to mind because I was reading a post on Aeon.co about keeping secrets. It's 3,400 words. But a lot of it could have been dispensed with, had the author started with this:

If you keep a secret entirely to yourself, then you are leaving yourself only one avenue to work through the secret, and that is in your own thinking. And, unfortunately, a mind unchecked by others’ reactions is more likely to develop unhealthy ways of thinking. The hard part of having a secret is not that we have to hide it in conversation, but that we have to live with it alone.

One of the best ways to reduce the harm of a secret is to talk to someone about it. You don’t have to reveal the secret to the person you are keeping it from, but I find in my research that discussing a secret with a trusted other can make the world of difference. Someone who will be kind, empathic and nonjudgmental will serve you well here.

To be sure, most of the article prior to this point describes the author's research, and after this point, it's about alternatives to having a trusted confidant. Still, the whole feels about 3,000 words longer than it needs to be to effectively make the author's points.

The internet is effectively infinite (especially when one doesn't have to pay for one's own server space). So I understand the lack of constraint that leads people, including myself, to be unnecessarily verbose. So maybe it's time that I put a little more work into employing The Short Form more often.

The Hard Part

File under: You don't say...

The Hardest Part Of Red Flag Laws Isn't Getting Them Passed

This, of course, is true of all laws. After all, the people who are charged with passing laws aren't the people who have to enforce them, or, normally, deal with the fallout. But the point of the article, which is that in order for laws to work, there has to be some trust by the community is well-taken. Or is it?

[Duke University School of Medicine professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences Jeffrey] Swanson told me the little data that exists suggests there’s racial bias in gun removal orders, with Black owners overrepresented.

The tensions between the Black community in the United States and law enforcement are well-known at this point. And part of the reason for this is that there has not historically been a high level of concern about whether the community being policed trusts the people doing the policing or the people passing the laws. Increasing the trust tends to come up in the context of increasing clearance rates through people being more willing to speak to officers after having been the subject of, or a witness to, a crime, but I have yet to hear of it being brought up in the context of the authoring, creating and enforcement of laws.

Which communities are presumed to need to buy into certain laws are which aren't speaks to the general understanding that many people have that certain biases, especially as pertains to race, are baked into the system. While I've often heard anecdotes that minority communities support greater law enforcement in their neighborhoods when there are spikes in crime, the broader question of overall trust is rarely brought up. I suspect that when dealing with something like extreme risk protection order laws, the primary people who understand themselves as potentially subject to the law have the political clout to have it rolled back if they don't believe in it. Communities that don't have the same political force are more likely to be simply steamrolled in situations of the lack of trust.

It's another side effect of the broad lack of unity in American society. To the degree that the White community and the Black community, or the Asian community or the Hispanic community are viable constructs within the population as a whole, where each is considered to have their own interests and challenges, separate from the others, there will be circumstances in which certain communities will need to be consulted under some circumstances, while others are not.