Which harms do we accept?

One of the amazing powers of social media is to amplify specific anecdotes, illustrating a dilemma by looking at how its' played out in various ways. The incentives of social media cause us to mostly see the inflammatory examples that align with our world view, as examples that don't align aren't ones we want to amplify.

Here's how this plays out in practice to further polarization: let's say a local business working with a dangerous chemical must safely dispose of their waste.  Uncontroversial, and the law passed because of many examples of businesses dumping waste into rivers, the public sewers, etc etc, causing harm. There were no counter examples of businesses saying they should be able to dump their waste unsafely.

It gets tricky when determining how to enforce the law. If we require businesses to attest they are acting safely, then we've created two possible fail modes:

• A business that isn't polluting (let's say the owner's mother died from that same chemical being used unsafely) might not know they need to attest and get penalized. Maybe they try to attest but they are sent the wrong form by someone in the city office. Now we have a social media story of harsh government regulations managed by an inept bureaucracy hitting a business owner for supposedly not caring about the chemical that killed his mother.
• A business might also get in the habit of filing the correct paperwork but whoever does so isn't looped into a change in the manufacturing process and some chemical is now being released, harming someone. Now we have a social media story about how the government forces people to prove they are poor to get food stamps but "just believes" anyone who says they aren't polluting.
• A more malicious example might be a business with overseas competitors not subject to the same laws thinks it has to dump the waste to remain competitive, and just starts doing so sneakily. Now we have a story about how capitalism and globalization are directly hurt people.

Let's say that because of these issues, we change the law so that businesses need to file public paperwork with notarized receipts proving the safe disposal of the chemical. Now we have a different set of possible fail modes:

• A business confuses its internal records about how much chemical was purchased vs disposed of and has to pay a big penalty even though it was disposing safely, just because the paperwork was wrong. This social media story is on people being punished for paperwork, not safety.
• The business closes because its no longer cost efficient to operate in the location where the chemical disposal is so expensive (because you have to hire a 3rd party to verify and audit the disposal). This sounds like government regulations killing jobs and American competitiveness.
• Even though all of the process is being followed, a new material happens to allow some of the chemical to leak into the product, causing harm to the public. This is two stories: businesses playing cavalierly with people's lives and the compliance process doesn't actually protect people, so why have it?

These fail modes can occur simultaneously. We can have one set of events circumstances that provides totally different lessons to different groups of people, just based on the stories that are broadcast into their social media feeds. The same business, the same chemical, can be a symbol of capitalism causing harm AND government causing harm. We then see people on the other side as denying the pain of the stories we've seen - even though they likely aren't aware of them, because social media didn't show them anything unaligned with their worldview.

And regardless, when we advocate for policies, we want to stop all of the bad things from happening, but regardless of what the laws are, we'll probably be hit by the same "sides" regardless of which path above is taken - so is there any reward for being thoughtful and trying to strike the right balance? Does social media anecdote driven politics care about thoughtfulness, or does it just bash policy makers regardless of what they choose?

Pictures of the WPA-era gym I used in elementary and high school

I saved these photos but have no memory of where they were from. I practiced high jump in this room and played cards every morning before 5th grade. The school system offices were above the lobby.  

Fifteen years since my friend and I asked seven members of congress about reforming the electoral college and were laughed off. Glad we asked that question, not glad Obama didn't push for real structural reform with his mandate.

 

On Reform

 I am a reformer. As we learn, we should continuously reexamine and rethink what we know and what we should do, based on the lessons of the past. When those processes break down, the pressures on the status quo end up being expressed unhealthily, and the status quo is often preserved unhealthily.

I'm not sure where that leaves me. There don't seem to be reform movements with potency, and the movements with potency seem more bent on destruction, which will cause harm and may spiral. On the other hand, maintaining what is with only minor changes, uncritically, on the theory that "we're the best you got," is also a long-term losing play.

We're not playing by the same rules anymore. Economic power, cultural power, people power, and political power are distributed unevenly and thus those with real, hard power don't appreciate their power, and think of themselves as victims or powerless, required to strike with hard force. We spend more time seeking and punishing heretics than winning converts.

We are mistaking how we see the world with how everyone should see the world - confusing attacks against a universal as attacks against our particular. We all seem to be supporting more and more state power, so long as it enables our causes and concerns - or supporting oligarchic power in opposition to the state. Neither is healthy.

In this climate, nuance and accuracy loses. Thoughtfulness loses. People in impossible situations get caught in a crossfire because that's just how it is, and those who seek to follow ethical and moral guidance are - slowly - punished when no one actually steps up to enforce guidance on those who seek infamy and harm as part of seeking their own success.

The body politic is sclerotic, and I don't know where to find the pacemaker.

Three stories on how we view peoples' words

 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/us/mimi-groves-jimmy-galligan-racial-slurs.html

“I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” Mr. Galligan, 18, whose mother is Black and father is white, said of the classmate who uttered the slur, Mimi Groves. He tucked the video away, deciding to post it publicly when the time was right.

Ms. Groves had originally sent the video, in which she looked into the camera and said, “I can drive,” followed by the slur, to a friend on Snapchat in 2016, when she was a freshman and had just gotten her learner’s permit. It later circulated among some students at Heritage High School, which she and Mr. Galligan attended, but did not cause much of a stir.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/kyler-murray-helen-andrews-shame-mob-america-intolerance/

When you think of the sheer vindictiveness of what happened to Oklahoma quarterback Kyler Murray, it takes your breath away. On the very night of his greatest career triumph, a reporter dug up his old tweets (composed when he was a young teenager), reported on the most offensive insults, and immediately and irrevocably transformed his online legacy. Now he’s not just “Kyler Murray, gifted quarterback and humble Heisman winner,” but also the man who was forced to apologize for his alleged homophobia. And for what purpose? Which cause did the reporter advance? Where was the cultural gain in Murray’s pain?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/evangerstmann/2019/10/22/n-word-firing-shows-that-zero-tolerance-means-zero-common-sense/

It is hard to imagine standing in the shoes of Wisconsin’s West High School security guard Marlon Anderson. An African American father of four, he generally had positive relationships with the kids at his school. But one day a student, also African American, got teed off at him and called him a bunch of names including the n-word. Anderson retorted “Don’t call me [that word]” and used the word himself. As a result, he was fired last Wednesday pursuant to the school’s zero-tolerance policy.

Anderson, who is diabetic, not only faced lost wages, but also faced losing his family health insurance. He posted on Facebook: “The reality is that I did not just [lose] wages but also benefits. Most importantly we will soon be without health insurance.”

Anderson tried to get his job back but was told by the principal that under the school’s zero-tolerance policy for racial slurs “context or circumstances” don’t matter.

A political path towards violence

In March 2016, I published America is on a political path to violence and the events of this month have reminded me of all of the warning signs we already had, tracked here. Now we have a definitive timeline of the violence at the capitol, dedicated to stopping the legal counting of legal votes, premised on lies.

I mourn that we're still on this political path. The task of our leaders should be to stop it.

Highway to Hell: A Trip Down Afghanistan’s Deadliest Road

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/afghanistan-war-taliban-kabul-kandahar-road-1112819/

Since becoming one of Afghanistan’s first female mayors, Ghafari has survived multiple assassination attempts, including one in March, when gunmen sprayed her Toyota compact with bullets in Kabul, missing her fiance’s head by inches. After months of ignored requests, an armored vehicle was provided by the cash-strapped government. “If the Taliban get the chance, definitely they will kill me,” she says. “I’m on their blacklist.”

Slight and poised, with a midnight-blue headscarf and oversize glasses, Ghafari is just 27 years old. She is a bold testament to how far Afghan women have come since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion that ousted the extremist Taliban regime. As a child, she was forced to attend a secret school for girls just to get an education. In the post-Taliban era she has thrived, earning a university degree in economics and launching a U.S.-funded radio station in Wardak aimed at women. In 2018, President Ashraf Ghani chose her over 137 other candidates — all of them male — to be mayor of Maidan Shar, the seat of a strategically important province bordering Kabul where the Taliban enjoy support. “All I had was my talent and my education,” says Ghafari. “Nothing else.”

Trump's extraordinary efforts to overturn the election: A timeline

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/1/23/2011339/-Trump-s-extraordinary-efforts-to-overturn-the-election-A-timeline

Even as the votes continued to be counted in the early hours of Nov. 4, one thing became obvious before dawn: Joe Biden was going to be the next president of the United States. Though networks were extremely slow to acknowledge Biden’s wins across Rust Belt states, every model showed that Biden was going to win decisively in Minnesota and Michigan. Though Donald Trump had a large early lead among votes counted in Pennsylvania, it was easy to see from the make up of those votes that this was going to change. The closest of these swing states, Wisconsin, had already been called by the Associated Press. While it would take all the way until Saturday before networks made the final call, really the only thing in doubt by that point was the exact size of Biden’s victory.

But well before the final calls were made, at 2 A.M. on Nov. 4, Donald Trump had already made it clear where he was going. Trump appeared before the nation and said, “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment for our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election.”

Since Trump is constitutionally incapable of admitting a mistake, but only responds to errors by doubling down, everything that happened after that might have been predicted. Even so, the catalog of actions Trump took in an effort to subvert democracy is astounding.

Henry Aaron did as much as anyone to redeem the South

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hank-aaron-did-as-much-as-anyone-to-redeem-the-south/2021/01/22/6eeb8242-5cec-11eb-8bcf-3877871c819d_story.html

Long before the television impresario Ted Turner marketed the Atlanta Braves as “America’s Team,” Atlanta had no big league team at all. There was no Major League ballclub anywhere in the Deep South as of 1964, the year three disappeared civil rights workers were found buried in an earthen dam in Mississippi. The city dangled a new stadium, lavish TV rights, parking receipts and the generous patronage of Coca-Cola to attract a franchise.

The Braves of Milwaukee took the bait, which meant that Henry Aaron of Mobile, Ala., was headed back to the South. I’m going to call him Henry in this column because that was the name he preferred, as opposed to “Hank,” a nickname attached to him by a PR man who thought White fans might find it friendlier. A giant on and off the field, Aaron died on Friday, a few weeks shy of his 87th birthday.

How did he feel about the move? As you might expect: “I have lived in the South, and I don’t want to live there again,” Aaron said in anticipation of the Braves’ 1966 debut in Atlanta.

Transitioning from private to public sector: Lessons learned from those who experienced it

https://medium.com/project-redesign/transitioning-from-private-to-public-sector-lessons-learned-from-those-who-experienced-it-5991c7c870f2 

Urgency, good. Rushing, bad.

• Be humble and curious. Take the time to learn what’s going on, how things work, and what has been tried before. Invite people to coffee.
• Don’t rush it. Don’t expect to transform an organization in a short tour of duty. Government operates slowly for good reasons. “Fail fast” is irresponsible in this environment. You’re there to move carefully and fix things.
• Pick a doable thing out of a larger problem that you can clearly define.

Close elections

In 2020, if Trump had flipped 10,342 votes in Wisconsin, 5,890 votes in Georgia, and 5,229 votes in Arizona, he would have won the electoral college while losing the popular vote by 7.01 million votes.

In 2016, if Clinton had flipped 5,352 votes in Michigan, 11,089 votes in Wisconsin, and 23,383 in Pennsylvania, she would have won the electoral college while winning the popular vote by 2.95 million votes.

The Vietnam War

During quarantine, I've slowly made my way through the Ken Burns Vietnam War documentary originally aired on PBS in 2017. (in Vietnam, they call it the American War)

It's a remarkable work, and I learned some things about American failures that hadn't come through in past reading:

• Mistake #1: The origins of the war came in Vietnam's nationalist struggle against brutal, terrible French colonizing forces. Hồ Chí Minh actually quoted the US Declaration of Independence in his own Declaration, and had sought connections with the US in 1946. We had the chance to bring Vietnam into the US sphere of influence, but working with a communist was too hard for the US, so we sided with the doomed French and therefore set ourselves on the side of the colonizers.
• Mistake #2: In 1954, we interfered with the peace process and fair vote that was about to go to the communists (because of mistake #1) and set up a southern government that would forever struggle with foundational legitimacy.
• Mistake #3: the person the US installed to rule was hyper-oppressive, though thanks to mistake #2 he was set up to fail. We had Ngo Diem assassinated and continued to treat Vietnam's successor governments as puppets.
• Mistake #4: because of mistakes 1-3, the South was not able to stand on its own against the north, causing the US to continuously, subtly slide deeper and deeper into a conflict without a winning strategy.
• Mistake #5: the government knew this, but kept it quiet in order to win the 1964 election for Johnson in a big way (arguably enabling Medicare and Medicaid to exist today)
• Mistake #6: when quietness was no longer an option, the US government lied as part of its losing war strategy, creating victories by manipulating metrics and body counts
• Mistake #7: the basic tactics of the war destroyed American troop morale (fighting for pointless hills, supposedly to keep violence out of the cities), because thanks to mistakes 1-5 eventually being understood, and mistake 6 destroying trust, the government lost its effectiveness to prosecute the war.
• Mistake #8: the failure of these tactics and failed military leadership created the conditions for the US to commit terrible massacres.
• Mistake #9: the US (specifically Nixon) lied to the South Vietnam government about its commitments to support that government and broke its promises by writing checks congress would not cash (thanks to mistakes 6-8)
• Mistake #10: the US failed to keep its promises to individual South Vietnamese to whom we owed debts of honor to evacuate, and even blocked for a time immigration of Vietnamese people to the US who had no viable life in Saigon.

I also learned about some failures on the part of peace activists:

1. Visiting Hanoi and swallowing propaganda whole that covered the North's violations of human rights and massacres
2. Raising the Viet Kong flag in protest marches, a force that was actively killing South Vietnamese civilians
3. Spitting on troops that had served their duty honorably, who had no ability to influence policy

I also think the US today is still stricken with the failure to resolve Vietnam. That led to the rancor of the 2004 election, and to much of the tension today between people of a certain age.