Flip Side

One of the criticisms of then President George W. Bush, when Hurricane Katrina flooded a good chunk of New Orleans just about 20 years ago, was that he's deliberately quashed the Federal Emergency Management Agency response to the storm, out of a partisan desire to punish the residents of the city for, basically, not being Republicans.

It was a classic conspiracy theory, being a simple answer (President Bush is a mean-spirited partisan) to a complicated question (Why was FEMA apparently caught so flat-footed by the storm). It was a straightforward answer to a seemingly stark divide between people's expectations of what Federal disaster response should look like, and the reality of the aftermath of the hurricane.

Republicans in all levels of government rallied to the President's defense with shock and outrage that ranged from the apparently genuine to the openly performative. To the degree that the criticisms were perceived to be opportunistic and partisan, so did the rebuttals. But the general tenor was clear; it was unfair to presume that President Bush would be so crass as to deliberately punish Americans simply for being Democrats. Like most Presidents before him, he aimed to be seen as fair minded.

Contrast this with the current President, Donald Trump. President Trump is open in his opinion that the apparatus of government should be used to punish his political enemies. While he touted his crackdown on immigration into the United States, he's openly targeted it primarily at large cities in Blue states with Democratic mayors. His current plans to use the National Guard to police major cities names specifically large, Democratic cities with non-White mayors, and large Black and other minority populations.

And Republican officeholders defend this policy as justified. Sure, a lot of that defensiveness comes from needing to run for office again, and thus needing to court the votes of people who understand that the President can do no wrong, but it's a fairly stark about-face no matter how one looks at it.

Of course, the real problem is the potential precedent. Presidents, of course, don't need to be able to demonstrate that a predecessor has taken some action to justify themselves, but it certainly helps. And if Democrats return to power in Washington D.C. over the next election cycle (which seems likely, honestly), they're going to be under quite a bit of pressure from aggrieved constituents to give as good as they've gotten. And if Republicans (suddenly) see the light and start to espouse national unity, one can be sure that those words will fall on deaf ears.

But that's a problem for the future. Right now, President Trump is following his political instinct to search for conflicts, and then join what he thinks will be the winning side. And in the absence of external enemies, Americans tend to turn their drive for conflict against one another. Twenty years seems like a short span of time to go from decrying the very suggestion of this state of affairs to embracing it with open arms.

Even Changes

Colloquial English has a habit of affirming things through negation of the opposite. One example of this is confirming that someone is correct about something by saying that: "They're not wrong." But since one of the functions of idiom is to make language more random, the meaning completely changes if "even" is added to that sentence; "They're not even wrong," is a way of saying that what the person has said is so completely nonsensical that it can't even be evaluated as correct or incorrect.

 It's interesting, in part because of the shift introduced by a change in the usage of "even," which is already one of those words where the meaning can't always even be inferred by context. The difference between the role of even in various negations, like "it's not even raining" and "that's not even a smart idea" sometimes simply has committed to memory.

The use of even in "not even wrong" has been traced back to theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Pauli, who was said to have used it to describe reasoning so faulty or speculative that it couldn't be discussed rigorously or scientifically. In the 70 or so years since the phrase was first coined in German, it's managed to find its way into English where it's become something of a general-purpose putdown of a person's argument, especially online. Which is kind of too bad, because it's a useful phrase; there are a number of times when speculation about a topic gets a bit out of hand, and the resulting conclusions come across as being completely out of left field.

Object

In a conversation yesterday, the subject of "playing the 'victim card'" came up. I try to stay out of such things, because they're rarely productive, but I was thinking about it this morning, while running errands.

The Just World Hypothesis is alive and well in the United States, and a side effect of this is the tendency to look for ways in which people who have suffered misfortune had brought it on themselves. It's understood that when people attribute agency to others, they are less likely to have sympathy for those others. The "victim card" as it were tends to push back against this, mainly by attempting to avoid the attribution of agency. It is, basically, a way of saying "it wasn't my fault, I wasn't the person with agency."

Which, in all honesty, strikes me as a perfectly rational thing to do. But I think that it has its downsides, in the sense that it means that people cast themselves as being acted upon, rather than being the ones acting. And for a number of people that I've talked to, that tends to lead them to feel that their lives are chaotic, because other people/circumstances are calling all of the shots. I suspect that there is something of a balance to be found there, but I have no idea what it would be.

I try to maintain the idea that being responsible for something and being at fault/blameworthy for that thing are not the same, as I see this as being the antidote to the inverse correlation of agency and sympathy. But that's built upon the idea that sympathy for other people is, basically, free, and I realize that I'm not exactly in the majority with that viewpoint. The first time I encountered the idea that "no man, knowing good, does evil," it struck me as fundamentally true; I don't have any questions about the world where "evil" strikes me as a worthwhile answer. But there are many other people for whom "evil" is the answer to a number of questions.

And I think, bigger picture, that's the real point of "the victim card;" it's a ward against the perception that a person's fate is their punishment for not just wrongdoing, but for being a bad person on top of it. The attribution of agency is a vehicle for moral judgement, and perhaps one of the perceived benefits of the Just World Hypothesis is that those judgements can be made simply by looking at what has happened to a person. Which, perhaps ironically, means the judge doesn't have to accept that they were the agent of the judgement.

Teetering

 "I don't know" what Newsom is "trying to do," said Fox News host Trace Gallagher, but it "comes across as childish." Given the longstanding rumors of Newsom's 2028 presidential ambitions, if he "wants an even bigger job, he has to be a little bit more serious," said Fox News host and former George W. Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino.
Newsom's trolling roils critics and thrills fans

I've never been clear on why The Week seems to think that balanced political coverage seems to be just reporting what the various partisan cheer squads have to say about something. Of course Fox News hosts think that Gavin Newsom is being immature or unserious. Projecting disdain for whatever Democratic politicians are doing is effectively their whole job. If Trace Gallagher or Dana Perino honestly thought that Governor Newsom asking more like President Trump was an idea that would actually pay off, they certainly couldn't say so on air; there would be a revolt among the Republican faithful who have been shown willing to punish Fox News before when it didn't toe the party line. So why are necessarily partisan television hosts making predictably partisan comments considered newsworthy?

While the answer could be that The Week is primarily a UK publication, whose base readership might not be well-versed in American politics, it seems to me that a framing that educates those readers in the general partisan biases of news organizations (or perhaps, their audiences) would serve them better. I doubt that it's an unfamiliar concept; I've been given to understand that there are partisan news outlets in the United Kingdom, just as in the United States. (Although, to be fair, I don't read enough of The Week's UK coverage to know if they treat their partisan outlets in the same way they cover the ones stateside.)

But then, I alluded to audiences before, and that's a tougher nut to crack. Fox News has its deep-seated partisan bias, because the audience that it has cultivated over its lifetime is very much Republican, and for them, it doesn't feel like a bias. Just like for many people who consider themselves Left-of-Center, "reality has a liberal bias," or least that's how the saying went back in the day.

And this can result in news outlets judging things by who is doing them, rather than the thing being done. So Fox News hosts call out Governor Newsom as childish and unserious, while Slate writers level the same charges at President Trump. Because Fox's Republican-dominated audience and Slate's primarily Democratic one have made making those charges part of the price of watching or reading. And the advertisers, the people who really pay the bills at the end of day, want to make sure that their material is getting in front of as many eyeballs as it possibly can. And no-one is making a name for themselves by graphing out where they spend their money. And no one is selling advertising space by noting the public's role in all of this.

Complaint Department

I spend a good amount of time on LinkedIn. I tend to check it at least once a day, to keep up with friends and former co-workers, and simply to get a sense of what things are like. It's mostly a white-collar platform, and so it's only a slice of the broader picture, but it happens to be the one I spend most of my time in, so it's useful.

There are a lot of posts that are, for lack of a better word, affirmational. They tend to affirm what the author believes their audience, or the greater LinkedIn community, understands to be true about the broader world. This has meant that, for the past couple of years, there has been a steady stream of posts about remote work, and why any business that hasn't fully embraced the work-from-anywhere ethos is run by idiots who are destroying their company.

Today LinkedIn "Suggested" (a.k.a. dumped into my feed) a recruiter telling a story of two engineers who were told by their manager when they started that the roles would be fully remote only for: "Both got yanked back to the office with zero warning." For this recruiter, the problem was the company not keeping it's promises and going back on commitments.

But companies don't make binding promises or commitments to employers by having their managers tell them something. They write them into contracts. Because businesses are like everyone else; sometimes, they have to respond to changing circumstances. And sometimes, those circumstances can be something as trivial as a new executive, with a different outlook on things.

Commitments, promises, vows or what have you, come a few basic varieties, but I'm going to talk about two of them here. On the one hand, we have accountable commitments. These are the ones that come with consequences for violating them; anything from a loss of reputation where it counts, fines or, in serious instances, even people going to jail. And pretty much the one thing that all accountable commitments come with is documentation; somewhere, you can find the terms and conditions, even if they're arcane and hard to parse. (This is, after all, why mankind invented lawyers.)

The other sort of commitment that's relevant here is aspirational. In effect, the party making the commitment hopes they can keep up their end of the bargain, but if they can't, then c'est la vie. They alter the deal, and get on with things. This is not to say that there wasn't a genuine effort made, or that it was all a sham from the beginning, but these are the sorts of things that often come down to verbal agreements, and understandings between people who aren't in a position to agree to accountability measures.

And as far as I'm concerned, a manager telling a candidate "Yes, this is a fully remote role," is fully aspirational. It's the sort of thing that only really remarkable employees are ever going to have formally written into an employment contract, especially as an individual contributor. Because it's the sort of thing that companies don't want to be legally held to when things change. Even if that change is simply a new executive. And employees should understand this. Because it's a common occurrence. There's more labor, especially in the United States at the moment, than there is a need for, and that means that employers don't have to make accountable commitments over things like remote work in order to find people. And that gives them a level of flexibility that they value.

In the end, the recruiter who made the post went on to warn businesses that employees were paying attention to how well they kept their commitments, and would talk to one another. Accordingly, businesses that didn't clean up their act would face reputational damage. Just not in this case. Because, as in most instances of "bad employers who want people in the office," no names were named.