Category: Thoughts

Remember The Origins

Etymology fascinates me sometimes. I’ve been mulling over a poem, for example, about dead metaphors that are actually pretty creepy if you think about them hard. If you’ve ever trained a dog on a short leash, you’ll know what level of control it means to say a person is kept on one.

But the political season also gives us etymologies that are also revealing. Like Lee Atwater’s explanation of the origins of keywords like state’s rights, small government, and so on:

The entire social and political platform of the right in America today is basically a re-branding of overtly racist policies. It’s got a different label, but the contents are still the same.

Don’t forget where your words come from.

Exterior progress continues

The fascia/soffit area is now all closed up on the side of the building, and the rotted wood around the windows has been replaced. The shingles are off on half the front of the building, and new housewrap has been applied. Next steps, presumably, are replacing the missing/rotted wood around one or two more windows on our half of the front of the building… and continuing this process all the way around. And then on to basement, heating, and plumbing.

Soffits and side windows closed back up … Front windows still to go.

A photo posted by Aaron Weber (@aaronsweber) on

//platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js

On Lying to Children

More than a few parents think this whole “Santa’s Watching” thing is creepy. I’ve probably said it before, but I come down firmly on the side of lying to your children about it. When they figure it out, children learn that adults are not to be trusted and that imaginary beings are not out to help them.

This Elf on the Shelf trend that’s been going on for the past few years is an especially good brand extension not despite but because it prepares young ones for a nightmarish surveillance state.

This is all standard good parenting, as far as I can tell. Even our most saccharine advice authors agree with me that pet ownership is an important childhood lesson in death and suffering, in the same way that you make them do busywork in school both to keep them out of your hair and so that they’ll learn early on that life is a series of tedious tasks performed in exchange for symbolic pieces of paper.

Hair Teeth and Eyeballs On Easy Terms

Over Thanksgiving I flew down to Richmond and rented that epitome of “perfectly adequate transportation appliance,” the Chevy Spark, to go visit my parents. I didn’t opt for the upgrade to the fancy satellite entertainment system, so I got to listen to local radio the whole way.

And on Richmond’s best source for hip-hop and R&B I heard an ad for a beauty supply shop featuring two women talking about getting a great deal on hair extensions. At least half the airtime was given to talking about how you could get low low payments when financing your hair, even if you had bad credit. I know that it gets super expensive but holy crap, when the beauty supply shop is selling weaves on credit, your economy is in a bad place. And what happens when some of the clients inevitably can’t pay? Does someone come and repo the hair?

I sort of forgot about that until I saw this article in the Guardian about how Americans can’t generally afford to die, and so we’re all crowdfunding funerals.

And of course first example is a young man who actually did have life insurance, which would normally cover this sort of thing, except that his death is still in litigation: he was arrested, hogtied, and suffocated in police custody, so insurance may not actually be available for his family.

I don’t even have a conclusion here. It’s just awful.

Metaphors Matter

Metaphors matter. They make abstract ideas comprehensible. They frame conversations – the way a picture frame sets the borders and shape of the picture it contains. They’re hugely useful, but you have to realize that they’re not perfect, and understand their limits.

Politically one of the most commonly misused metaphors is a household budget. Balancing a government budget ought to be the same, right? But it isn’t. A government has greater control over its income and a much larger time horizon than a household and that affects decisions in very serious ways. A household can spend more than it makes over the course of a day or a week and then even it out at the end of the month with no problem. A corporation usually aims to do that over the course of quarters or years. A government can do that over the scale of decades or longer. That’s a huge difference and it matters to policy and to human lives. If I refused to buy groceries today because I don’t get paid til next week, I’d go hungry for no reason. If the government refused to feed the poor this year because tax receipts are down, lots of people would go hungry for no reason. But for some reason people claim that balancing a government budget is just like balancing a household budget. You can see the similarities, but a metaphor is not a perfect mirror.

Similarly, governments don’t compete like businesses, and “we need to make our country competitive” is a hugely misleading statement. If I develop a hotel/casino (ahem) and someone else does the same thing across town, then their gain is my loss. In that situation, it makes sense to try and steal customers away from the other casino, keep their staff out, and so on.

Better to compare governments to your neighborhood. When Mr. Jones next door gets a raise at work, I’m not angry. I try not to be jealous either. I want him to succeed! We’re in this neighborhood, this world, together, but too many of the “run government like a business” types think that others must fail for us to succeed. That’s simply untrue, and a business-mindset metaphor makes it easy to believe it without even thinking about it.

Nothing against blowflies

I get that the free-rider problem is a real problem in all societies. We can’t support an infinite number of free riders, I know. And I acknowledge companies that offer benefits to spouses and dependents have the right to limit those benefits to just the spouses and dependents they originally specified. And I get that nature abhors a vacuum and that an organism will adapt to fit any niche available.

But if you are a smart and enterprising human being, and you see a system that’s broken and full of perverse incentives, what’s the correct and moral response? Do you work to fix the system? Or do you insert yourself into the system and try to capture some of those perverse incentives for yourself?

A fly must lay its eggs, and an egg needs a place to hatch into a maggot, and if that’s the torn flesh of a host organism, well, that’s how nature works.

But most humans have choices about how they want to survive. And if you make the choice to be the parasite because it’s faster and more profitable than cleaning the wound, than maybe you need to take another look at your soul.

Then again, we’re all parasites in one way or another. Free riders morally or economically or both. Nobody pulls all the weight all the time.