Isolation vs. Overcrowding

 Is it more unpleasant to be together or apart? I think it's a spectrum, and individuals' preferences can vary widely on that spectrum. But there must be tendencies, averages. People who manage populations of humans should be aware of these.

I was looking today at pictures of prison cells from around the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Philippines
 

Also Philippines, inmates sleeping on a stairway:
 

According to the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners ("the Nelson Mandela rules"), indefinite or prolonged solitary confinement is a form of torture. They define solitary confinement as "the confinement of prisoners for 22 hours or more a day without meaningful human contact," and prolonged solitary confinement as any solitary confinement that lasts more than 15 consecutive days. 

I don't know about you, but I would prefer three months in the Denmark cell with a couple hours a day out for showers and exercise over three hours in one of those Philippines prisons. Even the Canadian cell would be more tolerable. All the others besides the Philippines look bearable to me, if I could have the room to myself. But I suspect that even in the Denmark room, if I had to share it with someone--even someone I liked--I would pretty quickly grow either irritated by them or afraid of them. 

This isn't because I've never shared a room. In Army Basic Training, I was in a room with 15 other recruits for 10 weeks, but we didn't spend our whole day cooped up in there together. In college, I was paired with a roommate, but we didn't spend much time together. I spent much more of my time hanging out in the room of a friend down the hall. But even we didn't stay there. We went for walks together, and we had lots of time apart. Even when I shared an efficiency (one room and a bathroom, no kitchen) with my girlfriend when I was 18, I still took walks by myself to the grocery store or with my college friends. If we'd been confined there for 22 hours a day having to watch each other use the toilet in the same room we slept in, we'd have probably been ready to kill each other.

In the Facebook group where I saw these photos, people were leaving comments about how some of these cells are superior to small apartments in various large cities that go for $1,000 - $3,000 a month, with many joking that they now aspire to be a Scandinavian criminal.

They're not wrong to make these comparisons. When I walk among the skyscrapers downtown, and I look up, thinking of small apartments crowded together and stacked up, row upon row for tens of stories, I'm filled with dread. It's a horror to behold! It reminds me of battery hen cages stacked up in egg barns, only worse.

Hangzhou, China

St. Petersburg, Russia

Columbus, Ohio, USA

In all of these, the greatest discomfort is the feeling of never having privacy, of always having strangers living just on the other side of your walls, floors, and ceilings. Even in a duplex or row house, where you might have the luxury of a yard and a porch, you still deal with this. They're just larger, more luxurious jail cells. I look at all these pictures, and the only real difference I see between apartment, dorm room, and prison cell is the rules and freedom to leave. The accommodations themselves are strikingly similar--four walls, a ceiling, and a floor, with space to sleep and sit, a toilet, a sink, electric lights, a window--all crammed together as tightly as possible without regard for the human need to have a bit of space between each other.

Today's suburban homes are scarcely an improvement:

Go out to mow the lawn, and everyone within a square mile hears it. Get a package delivered, and 50 otehr households know about it before you do. Drag your trash to the curb, and the whole street knows exactly what time you did so. Unload your groceries from your car, and anyone who looks out their window knows how much you bought and where you bought it. Not friends, but strangers, maybe even enemies, can observe you as closely as any stalker or detective without ever leaving their own home to do it. And people aspire to this! They call it "success" and "comfort" and spend half a million dollars for the privilege of being a fish in a bowl, up to their armpits in their neighbors' presence, having to ask strangers' permission to put up a decoration or cut down a tree. To me, this is punishment--the same kind as prison. It's just a question of degree. From my perspective, this suburban picture and the pictures of the Philippine prisoners are just different amplitudes of the same phenomenon, one that I find abhorrently oppressive.

So what's the alternative? The opposite, right?

But then we're told that loneliness is an epidemic, that isolation is unhealthy, that it's both a cause of and a symptom of mental and physical illness. We're told, "It takes a village," and "No man is an island," and all these other platitudes meant to convince us that sleeping with 100 criminals in a stairwell is preferable to the solace of quietude. I don't buy it. A person can feel lonely surrounded by a million strangers. But when those strangers are boisterous or bellicose, the only peace to be found is in getting away from them, out of sight and out of earshot.

But this can get lonely, and it also leaves one vulnerable. Roving bandits can easily prey on a hermit. We don't leave old people alone because they might slip and break a hip, or forget to turn the stove off. They need someone to keep tabs on them for their own safety. And so we withdraw from the teeming throngs of the unwashed masses and create remote, rural compounds that admit only the closest and most trusted friends and family, if we have the means. But others get the same idea, and soon the rural paradise turns into just a larger version of the rural subdevelopment. You might have a few acres between you and your neighbors, but you can't look out your window without seeing a dozen houses; can't open that window without hearing their music and conversations and motorized toys.

There must be a happy medium, a sweet spot, where we're just close enough together and just far enough apart...but I don't know what it is. I'm not even sure what it is for me, and I'm sure different people have different preferences. I suspect, though, that whatever the perfect distance is for our mental health, it's farther away than the engineers would like to put us for efficiency of materials used in building infrastructure. It'd no doubt be cheapest to house us all in a single, massive warehouse like broiler chicks.

 

A thought on the intersection of language, politics, and respectability

 Conservatives don't mind being called conservatives. Even folks who aren't all that conservative, but who identify with that political alignment, are proud to call themselves conservatives. "Right-wing" is not a dirty word to them. They don't shy away from it. They've been calling themselves conservatives for well over a hundred years. 

Their opponents, on the other hand, slip around like weasels, reinventing and renaming themselves every so often. Social reformers of the mid-19th century were Victorian liberals. Then the modern progressive movement started around 1890, drawing largely from the socialist ideas of Marx and Engels. Many different socialist factions formed, openly and proudly calling themselves socialists. Then the Great Depression happened, and modern liberalism formed in reaction to it. FDR introduced the New Deal, stealing the thunder of the socialist movement in the United States.

In the 1940s, the Democratic Party--and the liberal movement itself--became strongly anti-communist and purged leftists from their ranks. This left the Left as fringe outsiders without representation. We at that point had two pro-capitalist, pro-business, pro-elitist parties in America--the Democrats and the Republicans. Until the Civil Rights Era, there was little distinction between the two parties. 

The Red Scare continued through the 1950s, but the Left still existed, mostly in the shadows. In the 1960s, the counterculture of rebellious youth embraced the Left, even to the point of supporting Maoism, and pushed back against "the Establishment," which included both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. They criticized Democrats for not doing enough to fight capitalism and racism. America saw the rise of militant leftist groups like the Black Panther Party and the Weather Underground Organization. 

But as the leftist hippies grew up, got jobs, and ran for public office, they voted Democrat and called themselves liberals. They still held the same political beliefs of equal opportunity and relieving poverty, but they became the new establishment. This was the new face of modern liberalism. 

Then in 1984, after the Republicans had used the word "liberal" to describe positions they'd supported for decades, Ronald Reagan reframed the word to refer to his ideological opponents. It became a smear word used by those on the right. With the ascension of right-wing talk radio in the 1990's, with personalities like Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy repeatedly using the word "liberal" to describe everything they found objectionable, it oozed into the vernacular vocabulary, and liberals started to feel attacked by the label. They started calling themselves "progressives" (as they had from 1900-1920).

Then the conservatives started sneering at all things "progressive," and that word was soon tainted with the same stench. Modern liberals needed a new word, but were having trouble coming up with one at that point. So in 2014, when Black Lives Matter popularized the term "woke," to describe what effectively was just social liberalism, the modern liberals latched onto that as their new label. And predictably, the conservatives turned that into their new swear word. Even things that had nothing to do with politics in any fashion--if conservatives didn't like a thing, they called it "woke" (much as teenagers had used the word "gay" a decade earlier). 

I think this is a funny dance, because we see it repeated with the names for the people the liberals claim to champion. Bums became hobos. Hobos became "the needy." The needy became the underprivileged. The underprivileged became the homeless. And now I'm seeing hypersensitive liberals think they're making something better by ordering us all to refer to the homeless as "the unhoused," which, of course, means literally the same thing.

The polite term for people brought here from Africa used to be "negroes." Then for about a century, they went back and forth between the terms "colored" and "negro" as being preferred, each time with the non-preferred one seen as being less respectful. In the 1970s, the word "colored" fell out of favor entirely, and by the 1980s, the word "negro" followed suit. They were replaced by "black." Then with the political correctness of the 1990s, we got "African-American," and even the people so named were getting tired of the name changes by then. After that came the more inclusive "People of Color." Before the ink was even dry on POC, it got expanded to the pointlessly redundant "BIPOC" (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), apparently just because academics didn't want to be caught using a term that was stale enough for the rest of the intelligentsia to have already adopted. It became fashion, a race to be the most avant-garde. The latest post-BIPOC trend I'm aware of is "Black," capitalized.

The funny thing about the renaming of that last group is that there's this phenomenon of erasure, where the namers publicly proclaim that the new name isn't new. It was first used hundreds of years ago, and you're just hopeless if you didn't know that it's always been the preferred usage all along. Also, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and we've always been at war with Eastasia. "Gaslighting" is the term for this, but in true gaslighting fashion, it's fashionable now for gaslighters to tell their victims that the victims are misusing the word and don't know the actual definition of "gaslighting."

Fools became idiots. Idiots became imbeciles. Imbeciles became "profound" and retarded. The retarded became the mentally retarded or "slow". The mentally retarded became the developmentally disabled. Then the developmentally disabled became the neurodivergent, "on the spectrum," and the intellectually disabled. No matter what you change the name to, though, people are going to hold the unintelligent in low esteem and use whatever name they bear as an insult. 

I don't think modern liberals are ever going to learn this lesson, though. They're just going to keep wearing a label until it's saturated with shame, then toss it out and put on a new one. Maybe at some point, we'll do a laundering of labels and start calling ourselves socialists again.

Some Thoughts on the Nature of Human Experience

 If there is one "spiritual" belief I have that I feel is worth sharing with the world, it is this: your last moment is your eternity.

Our minds sense time as linear, and the way we do this is by comparing one moment to others before it. Let's say we strike a note on a tuning fork, listen to it, and start counting, "1...2...3...4..." until we no longer hear the note. The moment of silence afterwards is different than when the note was audible. But even while the note was audible, there wasn't just a single moment. There was one where you were hearing the note and hadn't yet started to count. Then there was another where you heard the note and said, "One," and so on. There were many moments, all different, that all occurred while the tuning fork was singing, and they happened one at a time, in sequence.

Now suppose that while you were counting, you suddenly ceased to exist. No disembodied soul looking down at a corpse with a tuning fork in its hand, just POOF, you're vaporized into atoms incapable of thought or perception. It is my assertion and sincere belief that because your consciousness never experienced a moment beyond its last one, it has no perception of it being "the end." There was no experience of darkness or silence afterward. No "...three". It's just frozen there, unable to experience any such thing as "after."

The reason I use that illustration is because when you think of being frozen in some moment for eternity, you're probably thinking of something interminably boring, like being stuck in a waiting room forever. But the reason being stuck in a waiting room forever would feel boring--the reason it would feel like a long time--is because you'd have numerous distinct moments. There'd be one where you sigh, another where you look at the clock on the wall, another where you glance down at magazines scattered on a table, another where you look around the room, another where  you think, "This is really boring," and so on. While the waiting room and your presence in it would continue throughout, you'd really be experiencing many separate and distinguishable moments. The more of these you have, the longer it feels. Even if your body just froze in place in the waiting room, you'd have moment-to-moment thoughts. "What's happening? This is weird. Is everyone else frozen, too?" Many moments, all different, just like the numbers counted while the tuning fork is singing.

But I'm talking about being stuck in a single instant where your thoughts never change, because there's no space in which to think them. The movie reel just cuts off and there's not a single frame more. Your consciousness, from its own point of view, is frozen in that last frame because there is no "after." It experiences the last thing it's capable of experiencing as lasting forever.

I think this phenomenon is what underlies Christian notions of Heaven and Hell, and of the importance of dying in a state of grace. One does not wish to spend eternity experiencing terror or regret with no possibility of redemption in a later moment. It would be far better to see a light, feel love and acceptance, and believe that you're about to experience some great and unimaginable bliss, and have that be the last frame in which your mind is stuck for eternity.

You might say, "But you wouldn't experience anything, because there's no brain there to experience it." But you're thinking from the perspective of a third party there, an outside observer watching someone else die. Yes, it's objectively true that if brain activity ceases at 23:54:05, then there simply wouldn't be any thought, feeling, or experience at 23:54:06. But the mind that exists in that last frame at 23:54:05 doesn't know that and has no way of experiencing it. It doesn't even get to feel trapped, because that would require a separate moment to think about. It simply feels a neverending is, crystalized into the snapshot of a single instant.

What does it matter if you cease to exist in the next moment if you never experience that moment? If you experience, instead, a single, last frame that, from your perspective, lasts forever? If your experience of it is of it being eternal, then it doesn't really matter what comes after. You're not privy to it. 

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There is a belief, popular among many sci-fi nerds and gamers, that human experience is simply the brain receiving electrical impulses from various sensory nerves, and so we could be brains in a jar experiencing a computer simulation, and to us, it would be the same thing, indistinguishable from reality. And many of these folks are okay with this idea. Many even prefer it, wishing that they could just retire to being a brain in a jar spending the rest of their brain's natural life in a much cooler, more interesting simulation than the one they're experiencing walking around here in meatspace.

I think it's important we see this for what it is--the alienation of reality. 

Marx wrote of the alienation of labor--how workers don't get to decide what their work is or what purpose it serves, because all those things are decided by a boss. They just do a task that, especially in a factory, may seem meaningless all by itself. "Push this button, and then put the plastic thingy in the box." That's not an adequate purpose for human existence. Nobody wants to spend their life doing that and then have as their epitaph, "He pushed that button and put the plastic thingies in the boxes really well."

Here, we see people experiencing that same joyless disconnect, not just from their work, but from the experience of reality itself. They're caught in a loop of ennui, and would readily have their brains removed to be stuck in a jar if it meant that they could have a fantasy experience that felt real for the rest of their lives. 

I reject this notion, though, that all life is is the brain experiencing those nerve impulses. The reason those nerve impulses have value is because they're a reflection of the world as it really is. We get to experience reality in real time and interact with it. We've got front row seats to existence in the real world. The brain activity isn't an end in itself. It's a means to an end. The thing that matters is that we get to experience reality and have the chance to affect it. Simulations, whether through virtual reality or hallucinogens, is just that--a fake, a way to distract a brain and keep it busy and out of the way so that it can't make any real impact on other beings.

Hurting People's Feelings Online Has Been Illegal in Ohio since 2016

    In a recent conversation on Facebook, I was talking about how the values and policy positions of conservatives and liberals in the United States (as those terms are used in the United States) have gotten all jumbled up. In the 1970's and '80's, when I was a kid, it was the Republicans (more generally, "conservatives") who were perceived as being stuffy and authoritarian. They were bullies who demanded conformity with their Puritanical values of hard work and the vilification of everything pleasurable. They were associated with censorship and being tough on crime. The Democrats (more generally, "liberals") were the opposite. They were the hedonistic, drug-using, free-love hippies who would champion freedom of expression even for people they disagreed with. They were always sticking their necks out for idealistic causes, and usually getting cracked over the head for it by conservatives.

Starting around the 1990's during the Clinton administration, these roles started shifting. The conservatives still believed in what the conservatives had always believed in, but now they saw themselves as the plucky, persecuted underdog. The liberals still saw themselves as champions of the marginalized, but they abandoned their principle of equality, opting instead for a double-standard straight out of Animal Farm that said some people were more entitled to equality than others. Whereas the liberals of my youth would say that even neo-Nazis were entitled to free speech, the new ones are very selective about which people they see as worthy of having rights and legal protections. It used to be that the Republicans were racist and the Democrats promoted colorblindness. Now the Republicans preach colorblindness and Democrats favor doling out privileges by race and separating school children into "affinity groups."

Along with this jumbling of value, the two sides also adopted each other's tactics. The liberal "cancel culture" of everyone who doesn't toe their ideological line is nothing but their own rehash of earlier conservatives' "black listing" of suspected communists and others accused of "un-American" activities. Conservatives, on the other hand, have adopted the weaponization of victimhood, first promoted by liberals as "non-violence" and made famous by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. It's not that today's conservatives are pacifists--they bring rifles to protests. But they understand the mechanics underlying victory through non-violence: you appeal to a mass audience and depict your opponent as a ruthless bully who has abused you mercilessly and unfairly. You appeal to their sympathies by exercising hypo-agency, making yourself seem helpless against the overwhelming power of your opponent, the Big Bad Meanie. That used to just be a liberal tactic. We know it from the Civil Rights Movement, where calm, very reasonable-sounding people would passively walk or sit while red-faced, enraged police would attack them in front of news cameras.

I saw a comic strip today where a conservative was employing this strategy. I won't share it here, but it presented itself as being helpful advice to flashers who want to expose themselves indecently. First it showed the "don't" method. A man in a trenchcoat opened it, exposing himself to a horrified woman and child. The woman called him a pervert. In the next frame, it showed a police mugshot of him holding a sign saying that he was charged with indecent exposure. Then it showed what it said was the proper way. The same man, now naked except for a Pride flag draped over his shoulders, exposed himself again to the same horrified woman and child. Once again, she called him a pervert. But this time, in the final frame, it showed her in the police mugshot, holding a sign saying she was charged with hate speech and homophobia. 

Conservatives find this a compelling narrative. It's red meat for people who feel unable to express their disgust and hatred without suffering consequences. But do those consequences actually include criminal prosecution? In the United States? I've heard about people getting (usually light) criminal sentences in the UK and Canada for what amounts to politically incorrect speech. To an American, it's alarming to see how frequently Britons are punished for things they share online that wouldn't even raise an eyebrow here. I thought, then, that this cartoon was a lot of pearl-clutching over nothing. 

And this is a topic I thought I knew something about. I used to be a university police officer, and when I went through the police academy in 1997, there was a newly added section about hate crimes. At the time (and my understanding was that that's still the case), all a "hate crime" consisted of was something that was already a normal crime, but the sentence was more severe if there was evidence that the victim was targeted for being a member of certain protected classes of people. So, for example, it was already illegal to beat up a person, but if you beat up that person because of their race or religion, you'd get additional penalties tacked on to the normal penalties. That's all a "hate crime" was in the United States, at least in Ohio in 1997. 

It's also worth noting that--again, at least in 1997--LGBT folks were not one of the protected classes in Ohio. When we each had to pick a research topic for this section and make a presentation to the class, I chose this exclusion and used my presentation to call out the homophobic insensitivity I had observed within the class from both students and instructors. My wife at that time was bisexual, and I had other friends and family members who were gay, bi, or trans, so I was keenly sensitive to the fact that the law offered them no special protection. Under state law, at least, they could even be fired from their jobs or denied rental housing on the basis of their sexual orientation. 

While working as a campus police officer, I kept up on intelligence on hate groups, relying largely on the ADL (the Jewish Anti-Defamation League) for information about white supremacist groups in the United States. If I saw posters around campus that were clearly meant to intimidate a group of people, I took it down and wrote an incident report. If I saw posters or other literature meant to incite hatred of a group based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion, it wasn't a crime, so I didn't remove it, but I still made a note of it and built a body of evidence in the event that we needed to prosecute one of these hate groups for a crime in the future. And as far as I'm aware, I was the only cop in our department doing this. There might have been one or two others. Notably, both of those two were liberal, gay, and women. I was the only straight, white guy in the department who bothered taking any action against these hate groups. Even before I'd attended the police academy, I was involved in the struggle of neo-pagan religions to get proper acknowledgment from the government to be protected from persecution by police and legislators. 

But I know that things change, and the information I had might have become outdated, so after seeing that cartoon, I wondered what the Ohio Revised Code actually has to say today about hate crimes. Can a person be criminally charged just for saying something someone else doesn't like when the "victim" is a member of a protected group? I Googled "ORC hate speech" and was directed to Section 2927.12 Ethnic Intimidation. Per my earlier understanding, it just adds enhanced penalties to people who commit other crimes against people based on those people's race, color, religion, or national origin. It also applied specifically to only five other crimes--namely, Aggravated Menacing, Menacing, Telecommunications Harassment, Criminal Mischief, and certain subsections of Criminal Damaging or Endangering. 

I read these sections, and I was disturbed by something I saw there, which prompted me to write this. Section 2917.21 Telecommunications Harassment, subsection B, paragraph 2, says:  

"No person shall knowingly post a text or audio statement or an image on an internet web site or web page for the purpose of abusing, threatening, or harassing another person." 

They offer no definition of "abusing" or "harassing." That's wide open to interpretation. By my reading, that outlaws the posting on the internet of every political cartoon or any criticism--legitimate or not--of any individual who claims to feel "abused" by it. If so, that puts us into the realm of UK libel law. In the US, for an accusation of libel or slander to be sustained, it must be proved that the statement was both injurious and untrue. In the UK, it only has to be injurious, and they don't care that it was true. So if, for example, you're a daycare worker who's accused of molesting little kids, and I get on the internet and say, "Don't take your kids to this person's daycare. They're accused of molesting little kids," you could sue me for that in the UK and win. You could sue me for it in the US, too, but once I demonstrated that the statement was true--not that you actually molested anyone, but just that you've been accused of it--the case would be thrown out, regardless of how much money I had cost you. (There might be grounds there for "defamation of character," but let's not get too far afield with tangents.) 

My point here is that in the US, you traditionally don't get into trouble for saying things that are true, whereas the standard in the UK and commonwealth countries has been based on how much damage the statement causes, regardless of the truth. As far as I know, the US is uniquely dedicated to freedom of speech in saying that there's no legal penalty for speaking the truth, even if someone else doesn't like it. People like me who make a habit of saying true things that some people find upsetting have sanctified this freedom and clung to it desperately. But now, apparently, Ohio has done away with this freedom, effectively saying that it's illegal to post something online that hurts anyone else's feelings in any way. You can still say it to their face in person (at least as far as 2917.21 is concerned), but you can't post it online. They just made this change on August 16, 2016. Prior to that, it said no such thing. 

According to Ohio law, a violation of 2917.21(B)(2) is a first-degree misdemeanor on the first offense, and a fifth-degree felony on each subsequent offense. If I'm reading this correctly--and the only way I couldn't be is if there's a definition elsewhere in the ORC or a court precedence that defines "abuse" in some way that excludes shitposting on the internet--pretty much 80% of social media users (if not more) in Ohio are felons. We're way beyond someone calling for death to this-or-that ethnic group. If you write some true statement about your ex that they find hurtful, you're a felon. If you write that some politician is an idiot, and they feel it's "abusive," you're a felon. (Okay, a misdemeanant if it's your first and only time.) I find this troubling.

No, I don't know of a single case of anyone ever actually having been prosecuted for this, but the fact that any one of us could be is cause for concern. So is the fact that, rather than being some archaic law that just got forgotten, this is something our elected lawmakers purposely added to the law a little less than eight years ago. Why did this happen? And does it actually mean what it appears to mean? Is this simply a case that some bumble-mouthed legislator wrote something more expansive than he meant, and a bunch of inattentive legislators and the Governor signed on without reading it thoroughly? (That happens disturbingly often.) Has this come up in the courts at any point in the past eight years? What was the outcome? Maybe we have a reader better versed in the law who can comment and clear up these questions.

Kroger Tightens the Noose on Poor Columbusites

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

 ~ 4th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America 

In Columbus, Kroger grocery stores started a new policy of searching shoppers as they leave the stores. To my knowledge, they're not physically patting down people's bodies (yet), but they are inspecting receipts and carts, and, presumably, may be searching bags as well.

They're not doing this at all their stores, though--just six. Which six? I made a map. Never mind the heart with the pink-and-purple sunset thing (I live there) or the heart a bit to the west of that (a Chinese restaurant I frequent.) Interestingly, when I opened Google Maps and put in "Kroger", it showed many locations, indicated by red markers with shopping carts (and, oddly, one Aldi location--not even the closest one), but did not show two of the locations where the searches are being conducted--namely, the Hilltop location on the far west side near 270 and Broad, and the South Side location near High and 270. 

Notably, that South Side one is right next to a Wal-Mart that's being shut down, and very near to what had been a riverside encampment of indigent people until Columbus Police evicted them last year. Also last year at that same Kroger, a shopper was beaten to death by teens who'd been ejected from the store by security.

Perhaps the reason Google didn't show me those two locations is because they're farther away from my home than all these others. Anyway, I've market with black diamonds the locations where the searches are being conducted. As a sidebar, note the lack of Kroger stores close to my home, contrasted against their relative density elsewhere. There used to be another, that we visited frequently, near the yellow circle with a white start that's partially covered up by the sunset icon, just northwest of my home. That was the Northern Lights Kroger on Cleveland Avenue, near Innis, just a few blocks north of North Broadway. That one and the old one on Morse Road were both closed down and replaced by a new, larger store on Morse Road, roughly across the street from the old location.

 Readers familiar with Columbus will look at this map and immediately see a pattern. Many who see that pattern will tell you that this policy is racist, as the neighborhoods where the searches are being conducted are largely occupied by black residents, while the locations that aren't violating their customers' Constitutional rights are in predominantly white neighborhoods. They would look at this and claim that this is a racism problem. 

As with most such claims in 2024, this is close, but misdirected. The management of Kroger isn't targeting people over their skin color. They're not stopping blacks at the suburban stores. This isn't about race. It's about class. Yes, many of the residents in the neighborhoods with the searches are black, but nearly everyone in those neighborhoods is poor. Many of the shoppers in the unsearched neighborhoods are white, but nearly all of them are of a level of affluence that affords them the opportunity to live outside the poor neighborhoods.

You might (rightly) say, "Hey, wait--they're doing this at the Bexley Kroger! Bexley isn't poor!" That's right. Bexley isn't black, either. (It's about a quarter Jewish.) But that store exists on the edge of Bexley, at the border of the Near East Side (Old Town East/King-Lincoln District). It's across the bridge from Bexley, as though Alum Creek is a moat protecting the rich people on the hill from the rabble below to the west. As such, despite its proximity to Bexley, it's one of the locations serving poor, inner-city residents.

The other Kroger stores that those unfamiliar with Columbus might see as serving "the inner-city" that aren't conducting searches are the ones serving Upper Arlington, Grandview, and Clintonville. The annual median household income in Upper Arlington is $144,705. In Grandview, it's $100,833. In Clintonville, it's $94,850. In Linden, where I am, by contrast, it's only $36,498. That's per household, not per individual.

My point here is that the population being bullied by Kroger is especially vulnerable to such harassment. They're the least able to take their business elsewhere because they're less likely to own a car, and because "elsewhere" is so much farther away for them. They're more likely to be walking, riding a bike, or traveling by bus to do their grocery shopping, which means they're also more likely to be transporting their groceries in large, durable bags they bring with them--the very sort of bags these Kroger stores are prohibiting. 

It may be the case that Kroger is actually losing product being smuggled out the door in large bags. If that's the case, they could easily resolve that issue by offering a bag check service at the door. They're not going to do that, though, because it would require hiring a person. And that brings us to the real issue, here. Walk into any Kroger store in Columbus, and you'll see many checkout lanes, all closed. They typically might have one or two registers--if that--staffed by a cashier. The only other points of sale open will be self-checkouts. Even then, half the self-checkout registers may be closed, because they don't employ sufficient staff to babysit all the machines. Depending on the time of day, it's not unusual to see shoppers lined up halfway through the store waiting to check out.

Presumably, customers using the self-checkout are, whether intentionally or by accident, failing to scan some of the items in their carts, and so the stores lose money when those customers wheel their carts out the door without paying for everything they're taking. 

Is this only a problem at the six stores I marked with black diamonds? Are we to believe that the shoppers at these stores are uniquely incompetent at ringing up their purchases? Or uniquely dishonest? Or is it simply that Kroger would do this at all stores if they thought they could get away with it, but won't dare try it in the neighborhoods where lawyers live?

"So what," you may be saying, "Costco and Wal-Mart have been doing this for years. They're not violating anyone's rights. They have a right to keep their stuff from being stolen."

First off, Wal-Mart doesn't require a receipt for exit. They just want you to think they do, and hope that you don't know your rights. They place a "door greeter" by the exits and have them request to see your receipt, but they generally don't try to stop every single shopper, especially when it's busy. It's kind of random. But more importantly, though some of the receipt checkers can be quite assertive, they don't actually have a right to stop you. The things you purchased are your property every bit as much as the clothes you wore into the store are. You don't have to provide documentation to prove the ownership of the socks on your feet, and legally, you're no more obligated to provide documentation of ownership of the merchandise in your bags. 

Rather, if the store security ("Loss Prevention Officers") want to stop you on suspicion of shoplifting, they have to have probable cause. That is, someone has to have seen you stealing something, and you have to have actually taken it out the door for it to count as theft. Then they can stop you and detain you for the police. Until then, all they can do is watch and follow you. They have no right to accost you and demand that you submit to a search. 

The reason Costco and Sam's Club can get away with this is because they're private clubs. When you sign up for a membership, you sign a contract agreeing to allow them to search. You don't have to sign this, but they don't have to let you be a member, either. In a place that's open to the public--like a grocery store that's not a private, member's-only club--shoppers have the same 4th Amendment rights they could expect if they were walking down the street. Private companies don't get to act like police, stopping you and conducting non-consent searches, and all without a warrant. 

Kroger's way of getting around this is to put up a sign by the front door claiming that they "reserve the right" to search. You can't "reserve" a right you don't have in the first place, and Kroger appears to be relying on the people in these poorer neighborhoods to not know any better, or at least to be less willing to put up a fight. When this does inevitably wind up in court, I expect that Kroger's lawyers will argue that when customers entered, they were knowingly agreeing to the conditions set forth by Kroger when it placed a sign by the door. The sign might as well say, "By walking through this door, you agree to waive your Constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure, unlawful detention, and self-incrimination."

I used to shop at the Morse Road Kroger regularly. It's close to my kids' schools, so it was convenient to stop there in the morning after dropping them off. But I won't be returning to this store while this policy remains in place. Furthermore, I don't think I'll be going to the bougie Krogers in the suburbs, either, because I don't want to financially support the company while they're treating my neighbors this way. I'll go to Sav-a-Lot and Costco.

"But Costco does this, too! What's the difference?"

The difference is that Costco actually offers me something in exchange for suffering this indignity. They give me steep discounts on gasoline and prescription medicines, discounts that I've calculated more than pay for the membership. We buy $4.99 rotisserie chickens there, seasoned and cooked, for less than it would cost me to raise a chicken. They're so cheap, we use them as cat food and keep a couple in the fridge as a staple to use when planning quick meals. They have big hot dogs and a refillable soda, together, for $1.50. (And you don't even have to be a member to buy them.) They sell huge slices of pizza for $1.99. You could sit there all day sipping your refillable soda for something like 69 cents without even being a member. And members can browse through the store grazing on samples of everything from lobster-stuffed pasta to veggie burger patties. You can have a light lunch just from Costco samples if you're open to trying a variety of new things.

But Kroger? Naw. Kroger's offering the same shitty service, the same do-it-yourself everything with long lines (now longer just to get out the building), and they want to treat me like a criminal? No thanks. Oh, I forgot to add--these aren't geriatric door greeters checking the receipts at Kroger like at Costco and Wal-Mart. They're armed, uniformed security guards, making the whole encounter feel even more like being stopped by the police. I'm not faulting Kroger for having armed security. In recent years, their rent-a-cops have been involved in a number of shootings fighting robbers and other violent people, usually in the parking lots. What I have a problem with is them using these guards to bully lawful shoppers who have no choice but to comply if they want to eat.

Equality within Inequality

 I recently saw on Quora that someone had shared this image (from Twitter, I guess):

 

 

 

 

 

The person sharing this on Quora remarked, "A little too passionate but he has a point."

I responded:

Too passionate? Society literally disposes of low-achieving men--on the battlefield in wartime and through homelessness during peacetime--and you think it's inappropriate for him to have feelings about that? Then you're the problem he's talking about.

For most of human history, we lived like all animals live. We made our homes and gathered food and other resources from our environment. Our only responsibilities were to our loved ones--our children, wives, parents, siblings and their children, maybe others whom we took in out of pity or relied on for mutual care. The only “achievement” was keeping everyone safe and fed.

The greatest advance in this was agriculture. Now instead of endlessly roaming to find food, we could make a cozy home and have the food grow right outside our door and produce a surplus. But that also meant people started getting possessive about land. Eventually, all the land was claimed, so now we had some wealthy people who owned land, and other people who had none. The landless people's only options for survival were to violate the claims of the landowners (stealing, poaching, squatting, war) or to go begging. The landowners exploited the desperation of the beggars and made them work to make the landowners richer.

From that point on, we've had an ethical double-standard. We see the wealthy as being entitled to idleness because they “earned” it somehow, even if that's just by being born or “chosen by God.” Everyone else--at least all the non-landowning men-- are seen as being born into debt, owing the world their best effort. “Pull your weight,” we're told. “Contribute to society.” We're assigned that role, and if we don't fill it, we're literally just garbage to be buried. Even then, the men tasked with burying us resent that we didn't arrange to have it done ourselves.

The reason “hitting the wall"--losing one's youthful, feminine beauty at around the age of 35–40--is such an existential crisis for a woman is because at that point, if she hasn't already claimed a role as a mother or won the attachment of a husband who will always love her and see her as being his to care for, all that's left for her is the life of a man. Up to a point, she could rely on neotony (the resemblance to a child) to cause people to involuntarily feel protective of her. And once she reached a certain age, she was also seen as having utility as a sex partner and a mother. But once she hits the wall and nobody wants to have sex with her anymore, if she hasn't cemented her position as wife or mother, all she has left is business, just like the men.

If, like the men, she spent her youth pursuing achievements at work, then she'll be able to support herself into old age just like a man, but will likely feel an instinctive yearning, a regret for never having had children. If, though, like so many women, she took her privilege for granted and failed to plan ahead--if she just partied and hopped from man to man through her 20's and 30's without ever having children or settling down into a committed relationship--she's going to be unprepared to support herself for the rest of her life.

This is why women used to be treated as property. Girls' parents felt a duty to ensure that their daughters would be provided for even after the parents had died. They'd arrange to marry her off to a man who would take good care of her so she wouldn't be fated to end up as a 60-year-old washer woman someday. It's why ancient Hebrew scriptures command a man to marry his deceased brother's widow and for a rapist to marry his victim. It was all about making sure that women and children were provided for in an age before the welfare state and child support enforcement.

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First- and Second-Wave feminists felt that the height of achievement in the realm of sexual equality was to open all of men's jobs and spaces to women--to enable women to live as men. This is the goal of a spoiled girl who has no idea what it means to be a man, or the goal of a lonely, middle-aged woman who finds herself suddenly having to support herself in a system of restricted options. Now they're pushing affirmative action, trying to propel girls and women into STEM fields that most of them don't even want to work in, just because men still dominate those fields.

This is short-sighted. As the Twitter poster said, it only focuses on the winners among men. Trying to make the male experience the new default for women ignores what awaits men who don't succeed. These feminists see themselves as expanding opportunities for women, when what they're really doing is throwing them out of the frying pan and into the fire.

And really, there's a new milestone down that road that most women aren't interested in reaching--the equality of a woman fulfilling the role of family breadwinner and supporting her stay-at-home husband. Providing men with the privilege that women are tossing away isn't something most feminists show any interest in. It was thought, during feminism's Second Wave, that this would be the natural result--that there would be less class division because there'd be no reason for women to have to "marry up." They could marry purely for love, without regard to a man's level of achievement or wealth. It didn't happen, though. Instead, it appears that hypergamy is hardwired into women's instincts. A high-achieving woman sees her pool of eligible partners as consisting only of men more accomplished than herself. A woman who becomes an acclaimed neurosurgeon will look up the social hierarchy at the chief surgeon or a Surgeon General or some other person who "outranks" her. She won't consider the advances of someone she sees as her inferior. The higher up the ladder she climbs, the more people who get tossed into that bin labeled "inferior."

Rather than trying to hack our way through short-sighted attempts at sexual equality within a system of class inequality, it seems to me that it makes more sense to get to the root of the problem with the goal of getting back to the equality we enjoyed before people started owning land. If we determine that that's a genie that simply cannot be placed back in the bottle, and finite global wealth for which we all must compete is a reality that's here to stay with us forever, then we need to devise a system that eliminates inequalities among men, instead of just ushering women into that same cage match and calling it Utopia.

Babysitting ourselves

"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, and that public opinion expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters."

    ― Winston Churchill

 

"The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject." 

    ― Marcus Aurelius 

 

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

    ― Lord Acton

If it is true that power corrupts, then it follows that placing power in the hands of the entire populace will cause the entire populace to become corrupted.

    ― Me

 

Majorities can choose evil. They have done so, are doing so, and likely will continue to do so in the future. Humans, whether pursuing selfish interests of misguided notions of doing what's best for everyone, often choose actions that result in harm, whether by design or as an unintended consequence. That's true whether we're talking about one, lone dictator or a mob of millions of them. Political philosophers over the ages have argued over whether it's more moral to entrust power to the ignorant masses or to an elite few (or one) who are seen as being best qualified to rule. I contend that neither of these options addresses the fact that neither of them prevent whomever is eventually appointed from committing evil. If a government is engaged in ethnic cleansing, it makes little difference whether the public voted on it or whether it was the idea of a popular autocrat.

Once the capacity to commit evil is mitigated, then we can dissect the finer points of how power should be distributed, but I consider that question to be irrelevant until we first deal with the a government's capacity to do evil. That should be our priority. Whether we're to have an emperor or a senate or direct vote by every citizen, we must have a system for safeguarding the innocent. 

To that end, the founders of the United States wrote the Constitution, devising a system of checks and balances so that no one person or group of people would have an undue amount of power. And then, as an afterthought, they added the Bill of Rights, to drive home the point that the government was not to be in the business of molesting the people. It was a nobly conceived, but impossible task. A machine is only as good as its weakest part, and a machine meant to thwart evil is bound to fail if it's made entirely of people who are all free to choose evil. There's no point having multiple branches of government to keep each other in check if they're all in cahoots. That's just a good ol' boy system with extra steps. Telling a bunch of politicians to keep an eye on each other is like telling a bunch of nine-year olds to babysit each other. It doesn't work.

But of course we have to put people in these leadership roles. What alternative is there? Computers? Someone has to program the computer and tell it what the parameters are, what principles to hold sacrosanct and how priorities should be ranked. If we leave that to AI, there's no telling what sort of glitchy nonsense it might come up with. Without the capability for a human override, we're entrusting our fate to something that thinks people should have seven-fingered hands. With it, we're back to just trusting people to make the right choices. 

I'm sorry, I don't have a solution to this dilemma. I don't know that there is one. But if we're to govern wisely, we must at least be mindful that this dilemma exists. There is no form of government--not even democracy--that completely prevents the possibility of a government doing evil.

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed