Meanies

"Sad day for affirmative-action advocates," the DeSantis War Room account tweeted.
Trump, DeSantis praise Supreme Court affirmative action ruling

This is the sort of thing that makes being engaged in politics difficult. Generally speaking, I'm one of those people who is often described in the media as "moderate," when "idiosyncratic" may be a more accurate label. When I've taken political alignment tests, I tend to come out in the area of Libertarians; which makes sense. I'm all for limited government, am socially liberal and not a defense hawk.

This tends to align me with the Democratic Party, since they reliably check one of the three boxes, as opposed to the Republicans, which usually checks none of them. Still, I don't want to become a committed partisan. Mainly because committed partisanship is how one ends up with people like Donald Trump at the top of the party ticket. And people like Governor Ron DeSantis as his primary challenger.

For me, DeSantis comes across as rather Trumpian; he simply trades incompetence born of an active disinterest in the job for a level of petty vindictiveness. As much as I think that affirmative action as it is implemented in the United States as attempting to solve the wrong problem, the people who back it are well-meaning. Sniping at them comes across as mean-spirited. And it shouldn't take needing to co-sign someone's mean-spiritedness to have political alternatives in this country.

Inattentive

I tend to avoid following the news very closely. Mainly because I can get away with it; neither my job nor other aspects of my day-to-day life require me to keep up on current events. A vague understanding of how the news media works as a business and a general sense that keeping up with the news is a poor way of maintaining a positive outlook on the world don't help. Be that as it may there are some stories that there simply isn't any getting away from; they dominate the headlines for a time, and so even a limited news diet will result in encountering a fairly substantial amount of information about them.

The sinking of a fishing trawler laden with migrants attempting to reach Europe was one such story, even though details were always in short supply, so the coverage, at least as I encountered it, tended to focus on the personal stories of the survivors of the sinking or the families of those presumed dead. So was the disappearance and rescue efforts associated with the OceanGate submersible Titan. Now, while much as been made of the level of coverage given to the search for Titan, OceanGate Incorporated is a local company, and that may have amped things up for this media market.

In any event, it's now become fashionable to compare the level of coverage, and thus "attention," that was devoted to the two stories. The general gist of things is that governments and rescue services put much more time, energy and effort into the search for the wealthy passengers of the Titan than they did for the women and children who went down with the unnamed fishing trawler.

The front pages the past few days have been dominated by the search for the missing sub, said Josie Naughton, co-founder and CEO of Choose Love, a U.K.-based nongovernmental organization supporting refugees around the world.

She said thousands more articles appeared to have been published about the submersible than about the migrant boat, “yet, it’s 100 times as many people who are feared to have lost their lives and these people, they were forced to flee their homes, they were looking for safety.”

A tale of two disasters: Missing Titanic sub captivates the world days after deadly migrant shipwreck

Whether Ms. Naughton's assertion is true, I have no idea. I'm not that good at Google. But I do understand that it's a testable thesis. From time to time, I encounter a story that deals with the number of news stories that have covered a particular event over time. So why not check out that statement, and see if it holds up? Of course, some context would be needed, while I'm not sure than anyone is keeping a specific count, there are perhaps some 20,000 news sites in the world. If a tenth of them published three stories about the search for the Titan, and only two about the fishing trawler while everyone else remained balanced, that's "thousands more articles" right there.

And this points to the problem with asserting that one story or another has received more attention than another story deemed important. How is that measured? Accusations from activists and campaigners notwithstanding, the two stores are not an apples-to-apples comparison. Sure, one can make the point that the resources deployed to search for the Titan should have been deployed to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean, but Coast Guards are national resources; they aren't controlled by the United Nations. It's unlikely that the United States Coast Guard could have made the crossing in time to do anything other than look for bodies. And to say that the Greek response should have matched that of the United States is to presume similarities that are unlikely to hold up.

Was the response to the trawler full of migrants all that it could have been? Based on the limited information that I currently have, I suspect not. But if there is objective fact there, then the information to back it up should be made available. It can be pointless to ask people to do better when the scale that they're being graded on hasn't been shared. Phenomena like Missing White Woman Syndrome have been documented over the years with a number of studies, and a news story on the topic can be reliably expected to lay out the findings from at least one of them.

If this a case of the world caring more about some people than others, it should likely fit into a similar pattern; one that can be demonstrated. Being able to present the evidence is the first step towards creating change.

Holding the Bag

Sunday is my day for grocery shopping, so I went to the store this morning. Washington state, in an effort to increase the use of reusable bags, has banned most businesses from using single-use plastic and requires that they charge for paper or more durable plastic bags.

I tended to prefer paper to plastic long before this happened, and being the forgetful sort, had built up a modest stock of paper bags, which I now use to avoid paying for new ones. Some of these bags are several years old at this point, and they have drawn comments from store employees. A common comment is that the older bags are better made, and hence more durable, than the current bags.

And this makes a certain amount of sense. A store that's giving away free paper bags with every purchase is incurring an expense; every time that a customer reuses a bag, that's one less that the store has to part with. But when a store is effectively selling bags to customers, when a customer reuses that bag, the store misses out on a small amount of revenue that's nearly all profit. And so why spend money on better quality bags?

None of this is meant to be an argument against the state's policy. After all, people were terrible about making sure that the plastic bags were properly disposed of. The reusable bags, however, are a slightly different matter when compared to paper, but it is what it is. But while the lowering of bag quality was certainly an unintended consequence of the policy, I suspect that it shouldn't have been an unexpected one.

Frozen

The price sign from a now-defunct [Royal Dutch] Shell station in Kenmore, Washington, perhaps a mile and a half down the road from an old home of mine. Given that current gasoline prices are some two dollars a gallon higher than this, it's clear that it's been closed for some time. (Mid-2020, at the latest, it turns out.) The vandals who worked over the actual pumps have so far not damaged this sign, and as long as someone is still paying the electricity bill, I suspect it will continue to advertise a price long past.
 

Most of the People, Most of the Time

In a recent episode of Freakonomics Radio, Slate legal reporter Dahlia Lithwick makes what I think is an often-overlooked observation about the business of news:

One of the things that worries me about journalism as we are practicing it now is the monetization of scaring people, right? If you scare people’s face off, they will click. And we know this. But also, I think the commodification of: “I will find out what your anxieties are, and I will feed you a thousand things that will convince you that they’re coming for that.” That is part of the business model here.

As generative "artificial intelligence" has rapidly become a more and more commonplace tool for doing all sorts of things, journalists and media outlets have quickly realized that stories noting how the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse (terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers, depending on who you ask) could us "AI" to wreak havoc generates precious clicks. They're aided and abetted in this (or maybe they're simply being used) by law enforcement, who have come to realize that if they scare people's face off, they just might pay a modicum of attention for a moment or two.

Which brings us to an article in Axios on "How AI is helping scammers target victims in 'sextortion' schemes." (Why "sextortion" is in quotes, but "AI" is not, is something of a mystery.) Not that the headline is accurate; internet thieves aren't using the tools of technology to target people; but rather to make it more likely the people they target will pay up. And since the Horseman being referenced here is child pornographer-adjacent, there is, of course, a "won't somebody think of the children" angle.

"The question becomes, 'How do we develop a law now that's going to protect children 10 years from now?'" [Amanda] Manyana said.

If that's the question, we're in trouble, because it completely misses the point.

Sextortion schemes have typically worked in a few different modes. One popular one was to convince some horny young adult male to send pictures to what they thought was an amazingly attractive woman that 1) they just happened to stumble across on the Internet and 2) was immediately into them, but needed photographic evidence of how hot they were. The amazingly attractive woman would then suddenly (and pretty much inevitably) turn out to be an extortionist, who then threatened to release the photos to all of the mark's online contacts if not paid. The mark, who apparently had been telling everyone they knew that they'd taken an ironclad vow of chastity and moved into a monastery, would pay up to avoid being outed... as a horny young adult.

The addition of "AI" to the scheme ups the ante somewhat, because now, it's supposedly easy as pie for an extortionist to scrape the internet for pictures of random people, and use that to create believable video of said random people in sexual acts. So laws. Must. Be. Passed.

But the underlying problem, which never seems to come up in any of these articles, is somewhat different. If some unknown party sent you a sexually explicit video out of the blue, claiming it was of someone you knew, why would you a) believe them, and b) seek to confront, or even punish, the person in the video based on that alone? As the Axios article points out: "So-called 'deepfakes' and the threats they pose have been around for years." So why do people think that they should act on anything they see? Especially without making at least some effort to corroborate it?

While much has been made of people's willingness to use motivated reasoning to find reasons to disbelieve what is likely accurate information, because it conflicts with what they want to be true, there is also the problem of people's skepticism being behind the times.

What frightens people into paying extortionists who claim to have explicit photos or videos is the sense that their denials to people who supposedly love, or at least like, them will fall on deaf ears because some shady character on the Internet shows up peddling evidence that undermines what turns out to be a shaky believe in that person's worth and/or worthiness. There isn't a law that will protect people from that for 10 minutes, let alone 10 years, in a society where the constant perception of scarcity often means that supposed evidence that disqualifies people from aid or opportunities is seen as a helpful tool for making hard choices significantly easier.