Think What You Will

In the aftermath of the blowup between President Trump and President Zelensky (I never know if it should be one "y" or two) the competing partisan narratives are lining up to do battle. Pointlessly, in my opinion, as no matter what happens, few, if any, minds will be changed.

People believe the things they do because those beliefs work for them. Those beliefs don't have to work for, or even be intelligible to, anyone else. If someone's understanding of what went down today is directly a function of whether their preferred party is in charge, it's not that they succumbed to willful delusion, it's that it helps make the world an understandable place, where the effects that they're interested in directly flow from the causes they pay attention to. But more importantly, it's not any different for the person who follows the fundamentals and sees the cause and effect that way.

About the only thing that a genuine understanding of causes and effects brings is an ability to predict the future with reasonable accuracy when given enough information. And most people don't do that. And they don't care that they can't. Because so few other people care. If people can make one inaccurate prediction after another, yet still show up on the news because they're good for a catchy soundbite, people are going to understand that there aren't really any consequences for getting things wrong. And so they believe those things that bring them comfort, or pleasure, or whatever other feelings they're chasing at the moment.

I tend to be of the opinion that there's nothing wrong with that, but, well, that's because it works for me... I don't see most people's beliefs as being relevant to my day-to-day life, and that gives me a certain amount of leeway to allow people to believe whatever they want to. After all, I might have problems in life, but the various things that people believe that I find to be bizarre are not among them. I've learned that I don't have to care, and that gives me the freedom to allow people to think as they will.

But I understand that this is only a contingent fact, it could have been different, and at some point in the future it might well be. But for now, it's a certain level of freedom from anxiety about what people think. So I'm going to enjoy it, while it lasts.

Or Not to Know

Our Representative held a telephone town hall recently, and in attendance was one of the area's Trump supporters. When she was given the microphone, she claimed the problem with the mostly Democratic crowd was that they weren't clued in to Donald Trump's "plan." She was convinced there was a plan, and she told everyone that she trusted the plan, even though she didn't know enough about it to explain it to everyone. The next day, social media was having a field day with her, at least locally, with all of the standard name-calling and casting aspersions on her intelligence for believing in such a risible idea as Donald Trump actually knowing what he was doing. Clearly, several people proclaimed, she'd fallen for misinformation.

Which makes her, as near as I can tell, a lot like many other people one can think of. The modern information environment is full of things that are a) completely false, and knowingly concocted by people who intentionally lied and b) utterly inconsequential to the lives of the people who believe them.

For all that people felt that believing in a Trump "plan" was a bad idea, the fact that it wouldn't end well for the believers was, effectively a matter of faith. And as far as I'm concerned, it's a misplaced faith. Sure, every so often there's someone who does something, stupid, illegal and/or otherwise self-injurious because they place their faith in the wrong person, but the reason why "misinformation" persists as well as it does is because it only rarely exacts a price from the believers.

Big picture, believing in a candidate for President is small potatoes. There are much bigger things that people believe in, such as the Earth is flat, or that an international "Élite" cabal is after their children, that strike many nonbelievers as outright lunacy. But outside of damaging the odd personal relationship, people's live continue as normal. For all that people may see many of the misconceptions that people have about the world as actively dangerous, for the people who believe them, unneeded stress may be the only real downside. Q-Anon, for instance, doesn't electrocute people who turn out to be wrong about what they think they know. Home wiring, on the other hand, does.

And this might be part of why the "misinformed" carry such worry for those people around them. People believing in Donald Trump's plan back in November have enabled very real consequences for any number of people, whether they are immigrants who now live in fear of a raid that will result in their being imprisoned and deported, or government workers who face being tossed out of the jobs into an employment market that shows a depressed demand for labor. And sure, some of these policies will come back to bite some Trump voters, in the same way that Helen Beristain learned the hard way back in his first term in office, that when the President said that he'd deport people in the country illegally, he wasn't going to make exceptions for the families of people who voted for him.

But for the most part, political miscalculation is free. And when something is free, there tends to be a lot of it.

Doing the Job

I was thinking about the Yale article that I wrote about last week, the one that was titled "Study: Americans prize party loyalty over democratic principles." There's a short description that follows the title: "Given the choice between preserving democratic norms and achieving their ideal policy goals, many Americans would opt for the latter, new research suggests."

It occurs to me that one can rewrite that into a more general principle, namely: "Given the choice between privileging a specific tool and accomplishing the task they set out to complete, many Americans would opt for the latter, new research suggests." Framed that way, it's remarkable that anyone, let alone some 3.5% of respondents, prefer the former.

My general listening habits when it comes to political podcasts leans left of center. Five Thirty Eight Politics is in regular rotation, and I listen to The Rest is Politics from time to time. Not because I'm really that much of a lefty (Alistair Campbell drives me up the wall), but because I like learning about politics (and polling) and right-leaning media tends to lean very hard into Culture War issues that I have zero interest in. National Public Radio podcasts are much less into that sort of thing and even they tend to spend more time on them than I have time for. In any event, one thing that I've noticed (especially from the aforementioned Mr. Campbell) is the tendency to reject the idea that liberal democracy is a means to an end. When it is treated as such, it's often described as a wonder tool that will magically solve everyone's (legitimate) problems. But more usually, it's treated a something along the lines of either an end in itself, or a moral imperative.

And maybe that's the problem that "democracy" has. I've noted a couple of times now that Rory Stewart from the The Rest is Politics has pointed out that if people are becoming wealthier under an authoritarian regime, they tend not to bemoan the lack of democratic institutions, and that such institutions had lost their association with prosperity. But it doesn't make sense to hand someone who wants to cut a board a hammer, and expect them to whack away out of loyalty to the item at hand.

Among the Democrats I know, there's something of a tendency to chalk former Vice President Kamala Harris' loss in November to factor like racism and sexism. But I never really felt that she was offering solutions to people's problems, unless their problem was specifically the idea that Donald Trump would return to the White House.

I understand the media types who understand liberal democratic norms to be of the utmost importance to them. But, Thomas Nagel aside, most people don't see the needs of others as binding  moral imperatives on themselves. Even if they see their own needs as requiring that others alter their lives.

For democracy to be people's number one choice, it has to deliver what they want. 96.5% of people would rather achieve their ideal policy goals than simply have a specific type of government. So rather than wringing their hands at people's pragmatism, the proponents of liberal democracy have to start ensuring that it delivers the goods.

Two Plus Two

I was browsing LinkedIn and came across the following set of headlines in the "LinkedIn News" feature.

It's an interesting disconnect. The point of the Trump Administration sending Elon Musk into aggressively (indiscriminately?) cut headcount and expenses in the Federal government is, supposedly, that overly high spending on wasteful, fraudulent and/or abusive line items is a drag on the broader economy. The Federal workforce is supposedly so bloated and inefficient that one can simply fire large numbers of people, and not really impact the functioning of the place in any way. Now, we know that last bit is somewhat off, since there have been at least two agencies where there's now a scramble to undo Mr. Musk's "management by random acts of chainsaw" approach.

But the disconnect between the headlines in red and those in blue is what stood out for me. The central promise of the Trump White House is that all of the things they are doing are going to lead to a greater demand for domestic labor, and accordingly, more and higher-paying jobs. So why aren't we starting to see that happen? It's understood that business and investors are, generally speaking, reactive to changes in government policy that they understand will be beneficial to them. Consider investor's recent moves concerning Mr. Musk's X, which may have managed to increase its valuation by a factor of 5 since the fall:

Investors betting on X are probably making a gamble on its leader, not its business — similar to how Trump’s financially struggling social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group (parent company of Truth Social), has a market value of more than $6 billion, even though its revenue for all of 2024 was just $3.6 million.

In other words, Mr. Musk is close to the President, and investors think that Mr. Musk is going to be able to parlay that into profitability for X that they will be able to share in, even though X's revenues are nowhere near the levels that they were at when Mr. Musk originally purchased Twitter. And investor confidence in Trump Media & Technology Group speaks for itself.

 So if investors are willing to put money in to X and Trump Media & Technology Group based simply on the fact that Donald Trump is President and Elon Musk a "Special Government Employee," why aren't investors expecting that the Trump Administration's actions will buoy and broader economy. I suspect it's because they aren't stupid. They understand the potential downstream benefits of investing in Elon Musk and Donald Trump as people. The companies are merely the vehicles for that.

President Trump's early moves in the White House aren't designed to drive aggregate demand in the economy. And the people who understand that, people for whom acting on faith has higher costs than they're willing to pay because they are judged directly on the financial performance of their investments, are behaving accordingly. President Trump and Elon Musk may promise viable returns; but they're not setting the United States up to follow in that.

Deliverance

So according to FedEx, I have a package coming today. I was dubious about that from the start, but sometimes, people surprise you.

A little while ago, I went to the FedEx website, and dropped in the tracking number, and the site once again confidently told me that I should expect my package by end of day. Which is remarkable, considering that it doesn't show as being out for delivery yet. The last time the package was scanned was four days ago in Maple Grove Minnesota. Now, this isn't a problem, it's nothing that I need to have today, and not having show up until Monday, or later during the working week, means that I'm more likely to be here at the house when it arrives.

But it's curious that FedEx systems seem unable to adjust to this new reality. If this goes anything like past packages I've received, the website will insist that the package actually is due to arrive today, until "end of day" comes and goes without the box having actually been placed on my doorstep. Then, and only then, will there be a recalibration. The delivery date will be in Limbo for a while, since the package won't have been scanned into a local facility. In fact, according to the tracking site, it doesn't even show as having left Maple Grove. It could be sitting forgotten in a corner, for all the site shows.

Granted, I'm not a software developer with a background in logistical systems, but it seems to me that it wouldn't be difficult to program a system to look for discrepancies like, say, a package that supposedly due to be in the suburbs of Seattle at the end of day, but was last scanned some sixteen hundred miles away. It shouldn't take an advanced generative automation system, running on top-of-the-line GPUs, to determine that maybe the package isn't where it needs to be, and that something may have gone wrong.

While the ethos of technology innovation has often been summed up with Mark Zuckerberg's admonition to "move fast and break things," it seems that's what's often in play is "move fast and skip the boring stuff." Which I get; keeping the lights on and doors open is the uninteresting part of business. Why lock down the basics when there are profits to be chased on the cutting edge? But the public doesn't see the innovations until they're released; the clunky public-facing systems are people's everyday reality, and an untrustworthy website doesn't do much to inspire confidence in the broader service. Big players in an industry seldom concern themselves with making the small parts of the day-to-day operations look good. Because it's never seen to matter. That is, until it suddenly becomes important. At which point, it's often too late to fix it.