Some days the news is so depressing that I wonder whether I'd be better off closing the apps and ignoring it.

Not that there's anything particular about today's news. Budget fights, ugliness towards the Haitians, more proof that our system is failing us in all sorts of ways (healthcare expenses, inability to hold Trump accountable, and of course the raging pandemic). There's compassion fatigue and people are exhausted - and often grieving.

What's even worse is that far too much of the focus on things that are only making everything worse. The stupidity. It astounds me. (Vaccines in salad dressing? Really? Do you hear yourself?)

Yes, I know that sounds like the exact same complaints someone from the other side would make.

I don't want to talk about it, as it's getting harder and harder for me to care about their opinions too. (There was a NYTimes article I haven't read, because I don't really want to give them the click, but it seems to be discussing why and how men without a college education are getting left behind, and like... it is really hard to care. They still have so many advantages, and they could have supported systems that would have helped them. Helped all of us. And instead they've doubled down on insanity, and somehow we're still supposed to care about them rather than all the harm their insecurity has done.)

But railing about all that foolishness wasn't why I wanted to write this.

It's more... I dunno. I'm tempted to try to ignore all of it, really. But I don't think it ultimately helps.

Or rather, I think it's a bit like sticking your head in the sand. You might be able to pretend things are fine, for a while. You may even be lucky enough to spend your entire life thinking that.

But I do think there's an observable, objective truth. And pretending that everything is fine - when it clearly isn't - just leaves you at the mercy of others.

Hmmm.

That's not quite the tone I wanted to get at.

I've been thinking a bit about hermits. Ascetics. People who give up on society and go live a simple life in a cave or a desert or something. 

And there does seem to have been some value in that? I am not honestly criticizing the people who have made that choice. Sometimes it's important to make space for yourself, to gain perspective... and there's a rich history of meditation and other traditions associated with all of that.

But.... it's somewhat easy to do certain things when you're living in a way that is designed to encourage that. It's a lot harder to find that sense of inner peace when you're dealing with the typical modern life, with all it's demands and distractions.

Easy to sit in a cave and talk about how we should love one another, or the universe or God is love. Less so when there's some idjit who just cut you off in traffic, and you forgot that thing, and you have twenty different things to do before it's time to figure out dinner and maybe (just maybe) get twenty minutes to yourself before heading to bed. (I am somewhat lucky to have more space to think about certain things, but that also comes at a cost. As in, if I'm reading a book and typing a blog post there are other things I'm not doing. And while I've enjoyed working from home, I totally understand how much more challenging that can be for parents whose children are either remote learning or too young for school.)

It seems to me that someone who can maintain that inner peace while dealing with all the usual stresses is probably a bit more solid in their beliefs than someone who only achieves it through isolation and cutting themselves off from society.

I'm kind of doing that stream-of-consciousness thing though, and I'm getting sidetracked.

I'm more concerned about becoming a hermit because it seems like I'd be abandoning any effort at changing things. 

Plus it'd leave you unprepared and unable to do anything about other people's decisions.

That is... you might live peacefully for a while. Perhaps even get lucky enough to do so for the rest of your life. 

But let's say climate change is real. Eventually you will feel the impact of that, no matter how remote your cave. Maybe your cave is in a region that isn't badly affected, but then it might draw the people displaced from regions that are. Or you'll have to change your diet based off what starts growing in the new climate. 

Sort of the same thing with other potential disasters, like nuclear war and the like. We're increasingly interconnected, and you would have to go to great lengths to be somewhere NOT affected. 

Better to be involved, and help prevent any such disasters before they happen... then to ignore it all. Like what, you think the powers-that-be aren't insane enough to let such disasters unfold? The last couple of years have made it hard to believe any such thing.

So I don't think hermitage is really the answer. But I'm not really sure what is. I don't mean to dismiss the forces for sanity that do exist. They're out there, I see them...

It just feels like it's not enough. 

Is that how people felt during the height of the robber barons' power?

Why is it so frigging hard for the people willing to spend gobs of money on everything except loving thy neighbor and treating their employees with decency, respect, and a reasonable living wage that their priorities are not just wrong but that they're sabotaging themselves in the process. 

Why are so many of us forced to suffer because of these nincompoops?

Very Good Points

https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1438127210976718850?s=19

Disturbing Take - Wish I Knew If It's True

Saw this discussion on our foreign policy establishment. The picture it draws is... Not good. 

9/11

 I debated writing anything about 9/11 today, on the twentieth anniversary. My thoughts are, as always, complicated... and it also felt a bit performative and obligatory. 

So many people are sharing memes or posts talking about where they were that day, what they were doing, and how they felt. 

I'll probably do some of that as well, but all those thoughts and feelings are overshadowed by where we are now.

Twenty years later...

We left Afghanistan, a nation we invaded in the first place because of 9/11.

We are in the midst of a pandemic. One that has killed 220x more Americans than died during 9/11. 

And it doesn't feel like the world is better, or safer... but rather has grown increasingly more dangerous and darker.

I don't know how much of the latter is just... growing up, I guess. It could be it was always like this and I just wasn't aware of it.

It had felt though, for a brief moment between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, like there was hope and reason to believe we'd build a better future. 

It is harder to believe that, now. And I don't know how to convey that to the young adults (they're adults now! The children who grow up in a post 9/11 world). 

On 9/11, I was a junior officer at Fort Bliss, TX. In El Paso. 

I was driving to work when I heard it on the radio. I didn't believe it at first and switched radio stations, only to hear the same thing there.

My brother and I talked about how the impact differed... for him it was tragic, but he was in school at IU at the time and didn't really know anyone affected. The next day was pretty much like any other day for him.

I, on the other hand, saw an immediate change. Security to Fort Bliss immediately was ramped up, and the line to get onto base was looooong. They were now doing 100% ID checks (if your car had been registered and had the sticker, you hadn't needed to before. As an officer my sticker was blue, and the gate guards would just salute and allow me through) and random car inspections.

Even as we adjusted to those changes, a buzz went through our units. We all knew the US would respond somehow, and it was just a question of who'd be sent and when. 

I don't know how to convey to civilians what the threat of impeding war means when you serve. Of course there's the risk of death and injury, and you'd have to be a fool to truly wish for or want a war. (Not saying there aren't such fools, especially when young and convinced your invincible.) 

But at the same time, a peace time army is like a baseball team that constantly trains and never actually has any games. It's all training, and paperwork, and vehicle maintenance and more training and more paperwork and more training...

Peacetime service is actually rather boring. Well, not exactly. We do try to make our training exercises as realistic as possible, and you can definitely wind up in high stress and/or dangerous situations. But everything is just rehearsing and practicing for if or when it's needed, as well as doing the regular bureaucratic stuff that keeps equipment maintained, soldiers equipped, people promoted or disciplined, etc.

But 9/11 happened, and someone was going to be going somewhere, and that someone might be us.

That all seems clearcut and simple, but you can't really talk about Afghanistan without talking about Iraq. 

Even if you wanted to ignore all the bad decisions and problems of Iraq, you can't deny that Iraq drew off resources that could have been used in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan became the forgotten theater. 

Not by the soldiers sent there, of course. Not by the people living there. 

But Afghanistan got a fraction of the coverage Iraq did, as well as a fraction of the troops and supplies. 

It is impossible to imagine what would have happened if we'd kept our focus on Afghanistan instead of getting distracted by Iraq, but it's hard to believe we'd have been in the same place.

That's part of what was so annoying about all the negative coverage for our withdrawal...

You'd had twenty years to take Afghanistan seriously and do something different. Nobody was covering it, nobody was reporting it, the average American tended to forget we even had troops there. 

And now suddenly it's this super critically important place that we shouldn't abandon? 

Sure, whatever. 

There are still terrorist networks, and it's possible that we'll face another such attack because of the way we mishandled everything. 

But we need an honest and unpartisan look into just how we got where we are today, and I don't have much confidence that we'll see that. 

It's either pseudo-patriotism where people wave the flag and act as though any criticism is an attack on America, or it's a rejection of the notion that we could have done anything good. That it's all 'imperialist behavior' or aggression or whatever and that we should never have invaded in the first place. 

It seems to be impossible to find any sort of nuanced, knowledgeable analysis that doesn't ignore our mistakes but doesn't assume any action on foreign soil whatsoever is a mistake.

It's like all the problems with the Iraq news coverage all over again, and I'm heartily sick of pundits and decision-makers from both sides - left and right - who have such biased and flawed thinking that it's almost impossible to actually do things right.

Over and over and over again.

9/11...

I, like many Americans, was caught off guard. Had to ask myself 'why do they hate us'? 

And so I read, and studied, and learned that it wasn't actually some random act of madness. Learned more about how and why al Qaeda attacked us that day. 

I do not have confidence we've really resolved the root causes.

Also...

Even though the pandemic is not related to 9/11, the callousness and willingness to do nothing when over 600,000 Americans have died vs the demand for action when less than 3,000 did...

It's hard not to feel like we've grown more callous and cruel. 

So yes, 9/11... I remember that day. And I feel for all the Americans who lost a loved one.

I'm not sure I want us to 'never forget' though. Not when it's led us here, to the America of today. 

Emergencies

 Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of 9/11, which naturally brings up a lot of memories. We also had Biden give a speech yesterday, essentially pushing for vaccines or weekly testing... to varying degrees of approval. And word is that there's some sort of protest 'on behalf of those arrested after Jan 6th' next week. It doesn't seem to have gotten much buzz, and the worst groups seem worried about it being a trap by the Feds, so it may or may not amount to anything. (I'm hoping it won't, but as an indicator that these f*ckwits are still trying to cause problems, it's concerning.)

But I wanted to jot down some of the thoughts that have been flitting around in my brain, and I wanted to discuss emergencies.

There's a lot of weight to some of the concepts I'll throw out here, but in the interests of staying somewhat on topic I'll probably touch on them lightly.

I've written before about the difference in how decisions should be made when you've got plenty of time, vs when you're in a high stress situation where you have to act quickly. It makes sense for the military, as just one example, to encourage obedience and discipline. You don't have time to argue about which way to go if you're under fire, and sometimes even a bad decision is better than no decision. Especially if the unit moves in the same direction, and works together. 

But ideally? 

Well, I like my pizza analogy for a reason. If you have a small group of friends trying to order pizza, most people will try to find something everyone will eat. There's compromise involved, and some of the decisions may depend on who is paying for it and who is ordering, but for the most part a good group of friends will try to listen and respond to everyone's wishes. (And maybe people don't always get exactly what they want, but if they spend time with this group on a regular basis, then it's likely that their wishes will be catered to at some future time.)

This gets at the heart of my philosophy, if I were to call it that. "all men (and women, and non-binary... really all humans) are created equal". All have worth, and value. If you want to get religious, since I think a lot of this view came from my Catholic upbringing, you can say that "if God made this person and they're still alive by God's grace, then God must see something of value in them."

Which is... hard, sometimes. It's hard to remember humanity's inherent value when we see them doing things that we find outrageous. Awful. Mean and cruel. But God bless 'em, He seems to see something of worth even if I don't always. 

Deciding things that way might work in a small group of friends, though it can also be exhausting and time consuming and frustrating. Especially if people's tastes don't match. But the important part is making sure people know that their concerns matter. (And if they're overridden at that particular moment, it's not something that happens Every. Single. Time.)

That is, in a nutshell, what the social contract and democracy is all about. It's a way of letting a large group of people decide in a manner in which everyone has a say. It ideally has clear rules, consistency, and would avoid 'the tyranny of the majority' and various other pitfalls. (The concept of 'the greater good' has some weight, but you have to be careful since it's far too easy to justify forcing people to do things they don't want to. For the greater good. Really, the greater good is best served by also protecting individual rights and freedoms.)

That's easy to say, but a lot harder to put into practice. The point of all that, though, is that for the most part I do believe in the 'marketplace of ideas'. In the importance of persuasion to resolve our differences, and elections to show who cares enough, in enough numbers, to decide what we do. 

As part of our Great Experiment.

I don't like the tendency to think that one group of people knows best, or that we should ignore the masses because they're dumb and ignorant. Sure, if I think I know better it's tempting to dismiss everyone else as fools. (I use the term often enough). But deciding that you know best in such situations means ignoring the wishes of the majority of people who also live in this society. It means you probably ought to brush up on your skills at persuasion, and organizing, and getting out the vote. Even - or perhaps especially - if you think most citizens are wrong.

Seriously, we can communicate complicated concepts. And even ones that go against our immediate wishes. Just look at the success Republicans have had with persuading Americans - most of whom aren't even close to millionaires - to support their economic policies.

But this is in an ideal situation, much like the decisions made when you're far from the battle front and have the time to truly work out a good solution. (Perhaps not a lot of time. But in most circumstances delaying a decision in the Pentagon by a day or two won't have the immediate consequences it would have out at the front... and taking the time to do it right is worth it.)

But I mentioned 'emergencies', because the rules change then. Since I like using other examples before going into current circumstances, I'll use a city under siege. Back in the medieval era.

Back then, castles were strong defenses that couldn't be ignored... because if you left them behind you they might send out their forces to attack you from the rear. So what tended to happen is an army would besiege them, sometimes for years. And most of the time they fell either because of starvation and thirst, or betrayal from within.

Having an army outside your city is a pretty clear indicator that you're in an emergency, and there were things a city would do that they wouldn't otherwise. Like declaring martial law. Rounding up all critical supplies (food, metal for weapons and armor, etc). 

They would ration food, since they had no idea how long the siege would last and they'd all starve if they didn't.

And they would crack down on price gouging and war profiteering, because of course in a city under siege supply would shrink and demand would rise, and an unscrupulous merchant could make a lot of money charging people for rare goods.

I say 'unscrupulous' because for the most part everyone in the city is in it together. If the city falls the enemy forces would pour in, looting and pillaging and raping and killing. Merchants could lose everything, as could common laborers and armsmen and the lords and ladies in the castle. (Betrayal can come if one of them worked out a deal to save themselves... at the expense of everyone else.)

The rules change in an emergency, but there's also a clear indication of when the emergency is over, and when things can go back to normal. No army camped outside your walls? Then the emergency is over. 

Also... you should ration food because pretty much every able body might be involved in the defense, whether it's bringing water to the soldiers on the walls or helping pour boiling oil on the attackers. If you let normal market forces work, you may see a select few eat their fill while the people you need to help defend the keep starve... and starving people a) aren't going to do a good job of fighting and b) have more of an incentive to betray everyone in order to live.

In other words, merchants would have to be especially foolish or unscrupulous to protest when their goods are taken, their forced to sell at lower prices, and various other consequences of living in a castle/town under siege.

Some of the same dynamics apply to other situations, though perhaps not with the same threat of violence.

A shipwrecked crew, for example. 

And yes, a pandemic. 

The debate over mask mandates and vaccine mandates has me thinking about this, because in an ideal world I would love to respect the 'my body, my choice' argument, and to let people choose for themselves. I would also love to see persuasion used to convince people to do the right thing.

However, when hospitals are overloaded and people who don't even have covid die because there aren't any beds available, we don't exactly have time for that.

Your ability to act the fool ends when it gets other people killed.

Which is about where we are right now. 

The people who don't take covid seriously see all these as signs of tyranny. It's like they're in a castle under siege but can't see the besieging army. I don't find their arguments persuasive, because until hospitals stop being overwhelmed we're still in a crisis. (If we get the pandemic under control and politicians still try to enforce mask mandates or vaccine mandates then that would be a different story. But we're definitely not there yet, so their argument is moot.)

So yes, I do support mask mandates. And vaccine mandates (though offering to let people remain unvaccinated so long as they get tested on a regular basis is better, I think.When there's not a clear reason for enforcing something against people's will it's better to respect their autonomy. And if they're stubborn enough to get tested every week rather than vaccinated then so be it. They still shouldn't be going out and about, and definitely not masked, but whatever. People are worked up and emotional and it's not ideal but makes sense.)

It is... frustrating. I empathize with the people who are fed up. It's a lot of work to keep reminding myself that everyone has value... even the fools making terrible decisions right now. 

Some of them are family. Not my immediate family, thank God, but family nonetheless. And while I don't like seeing them parade their ******* foolishness on social media, I don't really want them to suffer for it. 

And I don't think they deserve the worst consequences (especially when some of the problem is that they're foolish enough to trust the wrong sources, or are shaped by the opinions of those around them.)

On Shaping Public Opinion

This was thought provoking, and I may come back to write more about it.

Or not. (Various ideas have flitted by for posting, one of which related to how we interact with the news and media we encounter, but it's late. I won't go into it now, and as other topics have also been flitting around I'm not sure I'll write about this one when I finally set fingers to keyboard). 

Liberalism

 I've been thinking about how Putin said liberalism was 'obsolete'.

Okay, more seriously I was thinking about how there seems to be a concerted effort to undermine liberalism, and while he's not the sole person behind it I'm sure he's part of it.

And I understand why Russians would dislike 'the West'. I understand that after two major invasions of their country they really wanted satellite nations as a buffer, and there was the whole NATO thing, and they feel threatened... (I don't claim to understand it at an expert level, but I get the broad brushstrokes)...

But I don't really see what that has to do with liberalism, or why Putin takes issue with it. You could even argue that the problematic parts of 'the West' aren't their liberalism. It's more the imperialism, colonialism, and non-liberal elements that are softened by liberalism.

But that term gets thrown out a lot, often as a dirty word, and I decided to actually look up the definition. (I kind of get confused about liberal vs. progressive vs Democrat vs whatever other term is used for various factions on the left. So much of them seem interchangeable, but they're clearly not. At least, not to the people arguing over what the Democrats should do.)

Here's the definition that most closely fits how I understood it: "a supporter of a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise."

I suppose the vitriol is reserved for the other definition: "a supporter of policies that are socially progressive and promote social welfare."

I don't really see why either of these deserve so much hatred, though I suppose the second one is just a handy way of describing whoever conservatives (who don't want to promote social welfare, apparently. And oppose progressive policies on principle) hate.

But let's go back to the first one.

Individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.  

That sounds very American to me. As American as apple pie. Like, I have a hard time understanding how anyone who considers themselves a patriot would say that they don't support these things.

Individual rights? Like freedom of speech and the right to bear arms?

Civil liberties? Also includes freedom of speech, right to assembly, right to a fair trial, and more.

Democracy? I can't not believe that supposedly patriotic Americans have actually started using the 'we're a republic, not a democracy' line. I mean, it's something I've known for decades... 

but only because it had been the sort of nitpicky thing political scientists cared about. It's not exactly one or the other, or that having one means you can't have the other. We're a republic, yes. But we use democracy to choose who represents us. And democracy is a very important way of choosing who represents us. 

They should represent the will of the people. There's a whole very long history behind all of this. The social contract, the importance of having a government that governs on behalf of all its citizens. I don't understand how you can claim to care about Western values and history and ignore some of it's better achievements. 

The problem is that these people don't seem to care about the social contract or the will of the people when said will might go against what they, personally, want. (Do we really have to prove all over again why minority rule is so bad?)

Free enterprise? Liberals aren't against capitalism. Not by this definition. Now, we can go into the second definition (progressive policies and promotes social welfare), but that's the sort of thing I'd expect to get resolved in a healthy fashion. Through debate and elections. 

It hardly seems the sort of thing that justifies the hatred and knee-jerk reaction conservatives use. (I've seen takes that focus on extreme opinions on said progressive policies and use it to claim modern liberals have given up civil liberties and democracy... but in my lifetime none of the people pushing those ideas has gotten into a position to truly threaten that. Conservatives don't see it that way, I know. But no... your children are not being indoctrinated by 'liberal' professors and your concerns about 'cancel culture' are highly exaggerated. There's always edge cases, doesn't mean that's the reality for most of us. Plus there's the problematic way that their efforts to control the narrative lead to the very same suppression of ideas. Like trying to outlaw teaching true facts about our history, just because they make white people look bad. Apparently we can't handle learning the truth.)

I think what shocks me is this.

I knew there was a lot of debate over those edge cases. Over 'political correctness', or now 'wokeism', or 'critical race theory'. But every time I see a story that seems concerning - by which I mean it's not overhyped and overexaggerated, and you have to wonder why the hell anyone thought it was a good idea - it generally gets a lot of attention and then gets fixed. Or we learn that there was more to it than that, and maybe it actually was a good idea. Either way, it's not going to destroy America.

But overturning an election? Voter suppression? Creating a system that caters to a minority and ignores the wishes of the vast majority of Americans?

That will. That absolutely will. 

I don't understand how people who claim they value 'freedom', claim they value America, claim they love our country... can then turn around and justify putting in place a system that will destroy all of that.

Do the morons arguing that we should forcibly remove elected officials who don't do what a small minority of the people who elected that official want honestly think that's freedom? 

That's basically what the brownshirts were. They use violence to suppress dissent... and you can't do that and claim to care about the rule of law and democracy. Not with any integrity.

The reason we use elections to settle these issues is that it's a hella lot better than deciding by whoever is the most violent. Once you open that door, it's not long before the people who disagree with you follow your lead and do your same, and we degenerate into infighting and possible civil war.

It's a terrible idea, and the people behind it are terrible people. I don't care why they think it's justified. Whatever it is, they are wrong. 

Anyways, you really have to wonder why there's such a concerted effort to undermine liberalism. What's so scary about it? What are you offering that's better? 

Because all I'm seeing are forces hell bent on forcing us to prove all over again how terrible authoritarianism and minority rule are.

Minor Update

 I suppose I ought to post something about Texas (or the flooding on the East Coast, and climate change. Or the continuing toll covid is taking on us. The world is such a mess.)...

but tbh it kind of snuck up on me. I didn't really know anything was going on until I started seeing stuff on Twitter, hours before the legislation went into effect.

And I don't want to downplay the damage this will do... but I'm also kind of curious about who's going to be the first to try the snitching part of it out.

Because here's the thing. 

You can put laws on the books, but that doesn't mean people actually act like they exist. 

Take sodomy laws, which are still on the books in some states. Has anyone actually tried arresting someone for breaking them? In the last decade?

I imagine most people a) don't even know if someone is getting an abortion and b) probably aren't going to report it if they do.

Which means the first attempts to actually put this in practice are probably going to be edge cases. Probably either some abusive man who impregnated someone and is upset they're getting rid of the baby (some really do try to tie their significant other to them that way. Like the one who tried giving a woman I knew fake birth control pills. Or that whole 'stealthing' BS) or some terrible arch-conservative parents willing to put their daughter (or trans-son, it's possible) in jail. Because they've bought the BS about abortion being the same as murder, and consider their child a murderer. (Overlooking the role they probably played in creating that situation, since such parents probably also didn't want their children taught about contraception, and taught their children that unmarried sex was a sin and therefore made it far more likely that the child hid their sexual activity from them and didn't take precautions.)

So it's a mess, and y'all can read about it on the news, but I don't really have a lot to add on it.

Oh, except that I saw  a headline today that captured so much of what most of us hate about MSM. It said "Texas law could flip script on abortion politics, with Democrats eying gains". 

As if that was the most important and relevant thing here.

Perfect example of 'horse race' reporting, and how damaging it can be. (Perhaps the article itself handled it better, but with a headline like that I wasn't interested in reading it.)

Anyways, I was mulling over something else and will post about it shortly. I just didn't want to start today's blogging by ignoring the news of the day.