Did Not Expect the Relevance...

This article caught my eye, but given it was discussing a 17th century book about the son of Odysseus I was not expecting it to be so relevant to my recent post. 

While this quote is not quite as relevant, it fits some of my other posts.

"Fénelon’s Pygmalion also anticipates a central finding of modern scholarship on authoritarian rule: Hyper-concentration of power often leads to narrower advisory circles, distorted information flows, and increasingly brittle decision-making. The result is something of a recurrent paradox — even as personalist rulers become more powerful, they also become less capable of accurately perceiving the world around them." 

Where is the Love, IV

I feel like there's more I need to say on this topic, though the thoughts are a bit fuzzy and diverse. 

Blogging has always helped with that, so here we go.

First, I want you to take it on faith that every life is precious. Most people probably are nodding their heads in agreement, and yet there's a callousness to the world today that belies that. 

We do not act as though every life is precious.

And so I wanted to talk more about the example I used earlier in this series of posts, about anti-vaxers.

We have already seen cases of newborns dying of measles.

Oh, they fudge the data and try to obfuscate it with things like "they did with measles, not because of it!"

Or they'll try to say it was truly because of an underlying condition, as if adding a deadly disease on top of an underlying condition doesn't stress a body out and make it more likely they will die. (Plus there's that nasty fact that obesity counts as an underlying condition, so a good 40% of our adult population always has an underlying condition, and does that mean we can just ignore any death that comes their way?)

All of those arguments are pretty gross and disgusting, because they are all trying to make us pretend that these deaths were not preventable. That allowing treatable diseases to spread does not have any impact on how many people die.

Given how difficult it is to trace how a virus spreads, it is impossible to truly apportion blame... and even if we were, the ones most to blame are probably the ones who had direct contact with the children. Many of whom have probably suffered enough for the loss, to the point where blaming them just seems to be in bad taste.

And yet...

Some children have died who did not need to.

Precious children with their whole lives ahead of them. We have no idea who they could have become, and while the odds are they probably would have been average, isn't that still a life of value? Shouldn't we be upset at such a needless loss? Do we really want to callously and casually accept deaths like this?

While it is impossible to say who exactly is to blame, or how much they are to blame, and it might even be a bad idea to start talking about blame in the first place, I do think it's safe to say this:

We, as a society have failed those children.

Because it really isn't just one person's bad decision. 

Something like that doesn't happen unless a whole lot of people make bad decisions.

I say that partly because of the whole concept of herd immunity. One person who is unvaccinated is probably fine, if the rest of their community gets their vaccinations. Heck, that's part of how we protect newborns too young to get the shot, as well as people who for medical reasons can't get it.

It only becomes a problem when lots of people choose not to get vaccinated.

And why are so many people making such a terrible choice?

That brings us straight to the question of our day. Not just with vaccines, either. It's the same question I'm asking when I try to understand why Trump got re-elected.

And as I've said before, the answers are... unsatisfying.

Is it ignorance? Then why don't we, as a society, do a better job of educating people?

Is it gullible fools being led astray by immoral assholes?

Why are they so easily led astray then?

And why are these immoral assholes given free rein?

We again get to that complex relationship between the individual and society at large, to leader and led, to student an teacher. Where the individual does have a choice, does have a say, and can choose not to follow if they're being led in the wrong direction. And yet we can't honestly say that the context of their lives has no impact. That leaders don't influence them, that the media they swim in doesn't sway their choices...

And so I look at those who deliberately spread lies. I naturally can't get into their heads, can't see who is just a gullible fool and who is knowingly spreading lies...

But I think it's clear that at least some people are. That there are influence campaigns that spend money and resources to try and convince everyone that vaccines are dangerous (or that Trump is a templar for God, or other things that don't match up to reality if you question some of the crap getting shared on social media).

I made the comment about bearing false witness applying to misinformation because it seems to me that the Bible - and other religions - try to help us create a society that gets past our parochial vision.

That murder, for example, is terrible for society. Not just for big moral reasons, but because if someone can kill you to get what they want, then naturally someone else can kill them to get what they want, and basically we all end up living in a miserable society where we're never safe and can never be at peace.

Bearing false witness is similar. If someone can just make shit up to get you arrested, then others will do the same, and then we end up living in hell. We end up living, again, in a place where we can never be safe and never be at peace and always have to worry about who is going to make up lies about us.

Misinformation falls into that category for me. It's like poisoning the well. There's this whole 'wisdom of crowds' people have noticed, but that wisdom doesn't work if someone deliberately manipulates it to skew perceptions.  

So I keep coming back to 'them'. The people we all think are out there, even if it's hard to point to any specific one of them.

The ones who deliberately and knowingly lie. About vaccines. About climate change. About Sandy Hook.

And here is the challenge.

We're supposed to love our neighbor as ourselves. Supposed to love our enemies, bless those who curse us, and pray for those who mistreat or persecute us.

How are we supposed to love people like that, though?

It feels like a cop out. Like you're willing to overlook the very real harm done, like it doesn't matter.

That a young newborn baby needlessly dying of a preventable disease is nothing.

That these failures of society don't matter.

I will circle back to that, though.

Because there is something more to say first.

The ones I just described are easy to hate. But I think, perhaps, the call to love is because hating on them is a trap.

Or rather, it's dehumanizing them, just as they callously do others. 

It makes them sound like some cartoon villain. You can picture them twirling a mustache and laughing, or really just sitting in some smoke filled room laughing at the fools their preying on. (Or giving talks about how evil is actually good. Though why he thinks evil is "at least competent" is beyond me, because evil and incompetence seems to go hand in hand.)

But nobody is honestly that two-dimensional. Which means there is a greater challenge.

Why would someone think these things are actually good?

And, since "there but for the grace of God go I", what would make someone like me ever think like that?

When I think about it like that, I generally circle back to the same thing.

These people are absolutely terrified.

You laugh, I'm sure. It seems unbelievable.

But so much of what they do is about control. About trying to force things to go in a certain direction.

And while planning is important, and using the resources at your disposal to achieve your goals is natural, it seems clear to me that these people are taking that to a whole other level.

This is the part I need to take a moment and think about how to explain.

I have talked before about the importance of feedback, especially negative feedback. That we need our after action reviews in the military, for example. Because you can't excel, you can't improve, you can't grow to be better and more competent if you are unable to tolerate hearing when you screw up.

I say that, and I emphasize it, partly because I know exactly how hard it is to do. 

I know how bad it feels to head into your annual review, even when you know there can't be anything too bad to hear.

I know how a simple complaint from one of your employees can sound like an attack. Like they're saying you failed. (Even though they don't actually see it that way, and oftentimes just want to be heard. And might even have a great suggestion you can make happen.)

Maybe there are people out there who are bold and brash and can truly brush things off, but for me at least... that's not always true.

However.

I have also learned not to let that knee-jerk reaction control my responses. And I have learned that things are much better when I don't let that happen.

That that employee, for example, really did just want to vent. Or that if I don't take it personally and instead focus on solutions then we fix things and get better, and don't get bogged down in finger pointing and infighting.

This, btw, is exactly why we talk about toxic masculinity. Because that macho 'can't ever admit when they screw up' attitude means they're stuck hunkering down and getting defensive instead of fixing shit.

Screwing up is not the end of the world. You live long enough, and it's practically inevitable.

It's how you handle it when you make a mistake that really matters.

Let me add in one more little anecdote, because it fits the theme and highlights how the military tries to train us.

One of my instructors in ROTC had a cute little story, like many of the cute little stories leaders collect in the military, that may or may not be accurate but was meant to make a point.

A parable, if you will.

It was about how lions hunt. How one will face you and roar, and chase you into the rest of the pride lying in wait.

And the point was that when you're faced with that roar, you're better off turning around and facing that single lion then you are by letting it send you into the waiting jaws of the pride.

Basically making the exact same point about how to handle a mistake, or the roaring of an angry boss.

To bring this back to politics - if someone screws up, but they own their mistakes and face that angry roar, then they can recover and get past that. 

I know that seems hard to believe given what we've seen, but I think that's partly because people don't have the patience to let that process happen. 

Instead they always try to spin it or ignore it or manipulate things so that they don't ever have to own a mistake. Used to be we, as a society, looked down on that... but I guess the Trump-era proves that's no longer the case. 

The frustrating part about these assholes is that you can see how things compound. Because they never actually face up to their mistakes, never take responsibility or ownership, it all just becomes some big game of blame-shifting and finger pointing. Or distraction. Lots of distraction. 

Meanwhile, shit still isn't getting fixed. It's even farther from getting fixed than it was before. 

They even seem to think that the only reason things aren't working out great is because of 'enemies' or other people, not realizing that quite a lot of it is self-inflicted. And that they were never going to succeed so long as they kept 'spinning' failures and looking to manipulate information instead of actually getting back to truthfulness instead of truthiness. 

 

 

 

 

Operation Blooming Onion

 I had some other ideas percolating, but saw a video I wanted to discuss in more detail first.

A long time ago, I was a young junior officer sent to Iraq. What some of you may not know is that there was this push for privatization, to the point where we had big defense contractors who took on jobs - like hiring cooks in the dining facility - that used to be done by US soldiers. While you can have a very long discussion on that, and whether it's a good idea or not, that's not what this post is about.

Rather, I wanted to talk about how so many of those cooks came from third world countries. The business logic is obvious - if you get a defense contract for a ton of money, but you hire workers who see a low wage (like $5/hr) as good pay, then you can pocket the rest.

You can even, maybe, find workers willing to work for less. For example, at one point the contractors were primarily from the Phillipines or other such places, then the next day there were was some sort of change and most of them were from the Congo.

My contract job in Iraq after I left the military was primarily about vetting such third country nationals. Trying to find reports that might refer to them, so I could identify security risks.

There was always a concern about an 'insider threat', especially in Afghanistan. Though that primarily referred to our local allies rather than the third country nationals. Still, there was a risk there, too.

I don't remember exactly where or when I learned about what I'll discuss next. I primarily heard about it more as illegal activity we (rightly) tried to stop when we discovered it, but the thing is that workers like this are vulnerable.

You bring them to a foreign country, to a place where they don't know anybody and don't know the language, and if you're particularly an asshole you can confiscate their passport and hold them in bad conditions and they don't exactly have a lot of options.

I have learned about that happening in other places, too. Saudi Arabia, for example, with all that oil money flowing - hires third country  nationals to do all the grunt work they don't want to. 

And those workers are also vulnerable, and you can easily find similar stories.

At some point I got curious about some bigger picture things. Anti-terrorism, of course. But terrorists often make their money illegally, which got me looking into organized crime. And modern slavery wasn't too far of a stretch from that.

And so I learned of Brazilian charcoal makers. Of workers brought to a remote site to produce charcoal, except then they are told they owe money for the transportation. And of course for the food and sleeping places they require, and it's again in a remote place where they'd have to trek through jungle if they ran away, and it's a system ripe for exploitation and abuse.

Or brickmakers, I think in India, where the 'debt' that they are never paid well enough to clear, is passed on to their children. Children born into debt for something they never really benefited from, who are not taught math and don't really know enough to realize how predatory the system they're born into is. Even if they seem to be able to do well - for a time - there is always some crisis or need that drives them further into debt.

A health issue, one that requires medicine. Their employers/creditors might loan them money to get through the emergency, but if you try to leave or find something better suddenly that debt is called in. All at once.

It functions kind of like Company Towns, and the company grocery store, which has a bad reputation for very good reason.

This isn't just something that happens in remote places like Brazil or India, either. Nor is it always trans-national crime, like the story of the scam center in Indonesia. 

Workers in situations like this are, again, vulnerable. They might even wind up conscripted to fight for Russia (which, frankly, if Russia has to go to this length to 'win' they should just accept that they have lost. If you can't carry on your nation's fight with your own people then you're basically a zombie and should be put out of your misery). 

Even that isn't the whole of it, though. Sometimes the exact same systems appear much closer to home. Like the recent human trafficking case in our own state of Georgia. 

The reason I posted about this is because I saw a video talking about that, and it added another layer to what the politics of undocumented immigrants is all about.

Let's step back for a minute though. Because I wanted to talk about something else I've seen. I work in the tech industry, and there are a number of highly educated workers who immigrate here for jobs on one of those visas. H1 I think? Our immigration is complex and a real pain to navigate (almost like they're trying to make it difficult or something. Oh wait...)

And for workers like this, losing their sponsorship is a huge concern. If they want to stay in the US they have to have a sponsor, which means it's not very easy for them to just quite a company when the work environment is bad. They always have to have something else lined up, or they risk being deported.

It's one thing when we're talking about highly educated individuals who are well-payed and who work in urban environments.

What this video shows, though, is that that same dynamic is in play with documented agricultural workers. Ones who are often not well-educated, aren't paid as well, and are often working in remote rural areas. Like farms.

The part that was new to me, then, was that apparently undocumented immigrants had a much easier time of leaving crappy work environments. And that the push to hire them as H2 (? I can't remember the exact form, but it's a different type of work visa than the tech workers have) is essentially a way of locking them in and controlling them.

Like those immigrants with their passports confiscated, stuck in inhuman and abusive situations, with no way out.

That in some ways the war on undocumented individuals is also about trying to gain control.

And this is the part that really sticks in my craw.

Because while of course I, like others, prefer low grocery prices and cheap food, I don't want it built on such a horrible system.

I don't want it to be done by exploiting people and forcing them to work in abusive and crappy situations.

I get, sometimes, why people just want to tear the whole thing down. 

We should be valuing our people, paying them well, and if that means higher grocery prices then the people buying those groceries should be paid well enough to afford it.

And you all know what economists say will happen next. That doing so would just cause inflation, and prices would rise everywhere, and we'd all be stuck in basically the same situation.

But... that's only the case if businesses keep raising prices in order to keep their profits. 

If they're reporting a record year in earnings, then it's clear that some of that profit could have gone towards making a more sustainable system.

They just don't want to. (And then they wonder why socialism is appealing to so many people, or why 'eat the rich' is a slogan, or why there is such dissatisfaction and disgruntlement.)

I think we all know this, it's the tension underlying so many of our issues today. 

I just don't know how we can fix it when the people benefiting from it are using every resource at their disposal to prevent exactly that.

And so we stagnate. So we ossify. So the system breaks down. 

And we keep wondering what straw is going to break the camel's back.

 

Fascinating and Thought Provoking

https://www.humansontheloop.com/p/rent

Fits the Last Theme

Love is definitely missing here, and what perversion to twist the words of the Bible around like this. 

https://ewerickson.substack.com/p/the-midwestern-fuhrerbunker-driving

Sometimes... 

I think people are just looking for an excuse to hate. Even better with a side of moral justification.

Where is the Love, III

 I saw something today which reminds me again why I am struggling to love my neighbor.

Let me back up a second.

I periodically cross check posts I see on Facebook - like a post claiming that feral cats were feeding mice to a mountain lion in a junkyard, supposedly so the mountain lion would deter people.

I don't know if you should sit down for this, but it was fake.

Not true.

I've checked a couple of other posts like this, especially those cutesy little political memes, and frankly you're better off assuming they're all false.

Don't trust anything you see on social media, not unless you see the same information coming from a more credible source.

And what is a credible source? While there are guides online, this is another thing that has been politicized and people will pick the guide that lets them continue believing what they want, so I'll give you a few heuristics.

Your source needs to have consequences for making shit up. The media, for example, will put their spin on things and may influence our views by deciding what to report in the first place, but for the most part if they say "a person was shot" then they have done their journalistic duty to verify that a person was actually shot. And if they didn't, they will be discredited and can lose their jobs. And since there are news agencies across the political spectrum, if media on the right and the left are saying something happened then it's got a pretty good chance of being true.

The framing and spin is an entirely different thing.

Ideally, your source will also be easy to verify. Like, scientific and academic studies will often give you the details of exactly how they collected their information, what processes were used to analyze it, etc.

Scientists are human too, so there's still room for bias and human error to creep in, but in theory someone else could do the same study or analyze their data and come to the same conclusions.

So my first two heuristics are this - consequences for lying and transparency about the source data.

I'll throw in a third one, though there are people pushing misinformation who will deliberately falsify this, so it's not the most useful one - the report will reflect the complex, messy, and contradictory elements of reality.

I got that description from The Hedgehog and the Fox, and basically what I mean is that reports and studies that are trying to be accurate are going to read like they were written by a Fox. There will be caveats, there will be references to how statistically significant something is, there will be words of caution against using the results for things beyond it's scope. If the report was created by someone concerned with giving you a real result, they are not going to simplify it into a tldr like a Hedgehog. Unless they're turning it into one of those cutesie memes for social media, of course.

But that is all backstory, and that's backstory that I want you to understand because - as I mentioned in another post - we are now six years after Covid first hit, and we can see the actual evidence for how effective the Covid vaccines are.

Barring some decades long consequence that we haven't seen yet, the evidence is clear. If you take the county vaccination rate and compare it with the death and hospitalization rates, people who refuse to get the vaccine are for more likely to die or be hospitalized than those who do not. 

You might even see one talking about the vaccine causing heart problems, but in true hedgehog fashion it also notes that getting Covid without the vaccine is even more likely to do the same. (It also talks about the likelihood of that happening, but I'll leave it to you to decide if even a 0.006% chance is more than you want to take, especially when getting Covid unvaccinated carries a 0.06% chance of doing the same.)

But if that's all true, then why do we keep seeing anti-vax sentiment?

And not just for the Covid vaccine, now we're seeing people upset about measles and TDAP and all sorts of vaccines that were commonly accepted when I was growing up.

So this is where I'm going to throw out a little conspiracy theory of my own. One that I hope is not true, hope that anyone involved with would have had the courage to speak out against, but one that fits the evidence better than the rampant misinformation I keep seeing about vaccines.

That conspiracy theory?

They're trying to kill you.

Sure, some people are easily manipulated or gullible fools who honestly believe that vaccines are bad for you. 

But I do not think these beliefs would persist for so long, with so little evidence, if there weren't interested parties pushing these beliefs for reasons of their own.

Ones who know better, who know that the vaccines work, and are trying to convince people they don't anyway. 

What do they get out of convincing a mass number of people not to take one small action that would easily prevent disease and death?

They get disease and death.

It's not just that they're parties to mass murder, though. Or rather, they're not trying to have indiscriminate mass murder.

It's mass murder that is targeting the gullible, the poor, and the disadvantaged.

Take Trump's recent push to change the MMR vaccine schedule, breaking what had been one shot for Measles, Mumps, and Rubella into three separate vaccines.

I was kind of wondering at first why they were even doing this. As in, why are they using up precious political capital to push for this? Especially with the situation in Iran, and Trump's constant attempts to waste government resources on unnecessary monuments and renovations? Why take time from blaming his enemies and threatening Canada and Greenland to push for a change that isn't actually about dropping the vaccines entirely? Just breaking it up into three different ones?

But if you look more closely, you'll see that this change is far more likely to hurt people who are poor and disadvantaged.

If  you have a hard time affording a trip to the doctor, or if you have difficulty getting time off work to go to the doctor, then the more visits you have to make the more likely that you're not going to do all of them.

Maybe you would have been protected from mumps, measles, and rubella if you got one MMR shot...

But taking time off to get the mumps shot, and again later to get the measles shot, and again to get rubella... 

and then do it all again, because most of these take multiple doses to be fully effective.

That change means it's far more likely that some people will not be fully vaccinated. And that 'some people' is most likely going to be poor people. Or disadvantaged people, since the same logic holds true for people with handicaps.

Now, I say this is all a conspiracy theory because we haven't actually had anyone outright say that's the goal here. And I think it would take multiple people working together to push for this. Or rather, multiple people 'in the know'. I don't think it would take just one person manipulating some gullible fools. 

And I like to think that if there are multiple people involved, that there would be at least one person who would realize how absolutely evil it is, and would speak up. 

In case I need to explain why this is evil - not getting fully vaccinated doesn't just threaten the health of the person who isn't vaccinated. It also reduces the effects of herd immunity, and puts at risk all the people who legitimately can't get vaccinated. That newborn who died of measles? The baby was too young to get vaccinated. People with weakened immune systems can't get it. So not getting vaccinated doesn't just put yourself at risk, it puts all those other people at risk, too.

Which means if there is a group of people deliberately pushing anti-vax views, they're a party to mass murder. 

Since nobody has publicly come out and admitted as much, I put this firmly into 'conspiracy theory' territory.

But every time I see some anti-vax nonsense - especially when it comes from family members that I don't want dying from something easily preventable - I feel anger and hatred at whoever is knowingly and deliberately pushing this crap.

One of the ten commandments prohibits murder, and while the commandment prohibiting false testimony seems focused on lying in court I think that commandment was because you can't build a very good society if people will lie and make up false testimony in order to get rid of their enemies... and I think if the ten commandments were written today it would also prohibit deliberately spreading misinformation.

So to summarize - I think anyone who knows vaccines work and tries to convince people they don't have broken two of the ten commandments and will be dealt with by God however he deals with such sinners.

And I don't know how to love neighbors like that. 

 

 

Where is the Love?, Part II

 I realized my last post is... incomplete. Let's see if I can organize my thoughts a little more, and explain.

 In my last post I said:

...sometimes the most loving thing you can do is make it clear that certain behavior is unacceptable.

 I feel I need to explain this a bit better, though as always it's complicated.

First - people naturally get defensive when they get negative feedback. All too often it feels like an attack, even when it's not meant to be.

Yet we know that top performers need it. That honest feedback is how we improve. That, for example, a star athlete that never has a coach point out where they can move more efficiently will never reach their full potential.

This is part of why in the Army we always had After Action Reviews (AARs), where we were supposed to note what went wrong, what went well, and what we can do better next time.

To get that top performance, you need a certain level of maturity and understanding from all the parties involved.

The person hearing a critique has to be mature enough that they don't take it personally. That people are not saying "you're a failure", but rather are giving them critical insights that they can use to do better.

The person giving the critique has to trust that their critique will be taken as intended, too. Because if they think the person they're critiquing will feel attacked and get defensive than they may create an enemy they didn't need to.

That's part of why good leaders absolutely have to set the right tone. They have to make it absolutely clear that they want the unvarnished truth.

More importantly, they have to demonstrate, over and over again, that they really mean it.

Because if they react poorly even once - everyone who saw that or heard about it is unlikely to risk telling them the truth a second time.

 At the same time, I use the word 'critique' because it absolutely should not be an attack, or personal. It's the difference between "that was foolish" and "you're a fool".

These are all things we generally suck at, tbh. All too often people stifle themselves until they can't any longer, and then when they speak it's a storm of emotions and everyone winds up feeling angry and hurt.

Sometimes it seems like it's an impossible thing, if not for the many real world examples where I see people doing better. 

But let's get back on track.

It's hard to explain how or why this can work to people who have significant experience with it failing, especially when we're talking about human interactions. Body language makes up 80% of that, and people are often not self-aware enough to realize what signals they are sending. Which is why someone can claim that they are being calm and logical, while the other party sees them getting defensive and angry.

However, if you figure it out, miracles can occur. Because in some ways we all crave having a true friend. 

Someone who knows us inside and out, sees us with all our strengths and weaknesses, and loves us anyway.

And when someone is able to offer feedback, loving feedback, that doesn't carry an undertone of attack implying that "I hate you for doing this" or "I can't love you when you do this", then it's more likely to be listened to and heard.

It's moments like that which make people truly feel connected, and as studies repeatedly show - human connection is the primary source of happiness.

To expand on this a bit more -

This is why there's such a trope of the 'poor little rich boy'. Over and over again it seems like the rich and powerful just naturally find themselves surrounded by 'yes men'. And women. People who don't give honest feedback, who hide away their true opinions and true selves, because their position and power comes from pleasing that person. They have to make a very concerted effort to prevent that, and not everyone understands why it matters or how to do it - or even has the maturity to do so.

So we see the rich and powerful start living in bubbles, surrounded by liars and sycophants, and they lose touch with reality. 

Negative feedback is watered down or even hidden away completely. Nobody wants to tell them that their idea or project isn't working out.

And I think, on some level, the rich and powerful feel this. They know that these relationships are empty and hollow, the junk food of the soul.

(I will not claim all of their relationships are like this, though. I hope they've got at least one good one somewhere).

 You and I can say the things we wish they would hear, but they have no reason to trust us or believe us, and have a whole posse of people willing to soothe away any doubts. Tell them that "it's just sour grapes". That they're special - smarter and better than the rest, and that the opinions of nobodies don't matter.

I'll also admit that they're not always wrong. Not so much about the 'smarter and better' because really, arrogant much? But there are people who are just jealous of success, and will criticize and tear you down.

Which is another reason why it's so important to have those trusted relationships. They can help you sort out what's valid and what isn't.

Anyways, I could go into the things I personally wish they would hear, but... it feels like quite a bit of this blog has already done that. 

Actually give a shit about people - not just your privileged buddies. Everyone. And if you're not mature enough to listen and learn, then quit trying to control everything. 

You're just making things worse.