Pun Salad

The White House created a new task force on Thursday to combat online harassment, abuse, and sexual violence. The initiative was unveiled by Vice President Kamala Harris, who gave little indication that she understands the difference between preventing violence and deterring harassment, the latter of which is outside the government's purview.

"For far too many people, the internet is a place of fear," said Harris. "This affects all of us if it affects any one of us."

As drafted, AICOA is intended to prevent self-preferencing, whereby tech companies promote their own products or services to their users, on the grounds that it could "materially harm competition." For example, this would prevent Google from displaying Google Maps in search results, forcing users to take further steps if they would like directions to a particular place they had just searched for. Apple could be forbidden from pre-installing FaceTime or iMessage on its iPhones or told to open up its App Store to competitors.

Amazon, in particular, stridently opposes the bill. Earlier this month, Brian Huseman, Amazon's vice president of public policy, wrote that the company feels singled out as "the only retailer…covered by this proposed legislation." Indeed, the bill is written so narrowly that it only covers a handful of companies. Huseman writes that the bill would "degrade the value and quality of [Amazon] Prime" by forbidding the company from offering one- and two-day free shipping without allowing "other logistics providers" to fill those orders. Additionally, Huseman claims that the bill could "meaningfully jeopardize our marketplace" by subjecting Amazon to certain restrictions on usage of customer data that would not apply to "other retailers…such as Walmart, Target, and others." Per Huseman, "we believe…the real, unstated goal of the legislation" is to "hurt" Amazon.

Beyond being unfounded, concerns over limited competition and high ocean shipping rates from the OSRA champions are laughably hypocritical given their support for the Jones Act, a 1920 law that has restricted competition in domestic shipping to the point that industry executives have been able to engage in price fixing—a known anti-competitive practice. The OSRA, however, makes no attempt to open up the domestic shipping market to expanded competition.

The OSRA's gravest sin is that it buys into the mercantilist sentiment of prioritizing exports over imports. The bill prohibits "a common carrier, marine terminal operator, or ocean transportation intermediary" from retaliating against a shipper (the person or business that owns the products being transported) by "refusing, or threatening to refuse, an otherwise-available cargo space or accommodation; or resort to any other unfair or unjustly discriminatory action." The legislation requires the FMC to define "unfair or unjustly discriminatory action." But it may prove difficult to prove intent of retaliation, and businesses are (and should be) permitted to refuse service so ocean carriers should not be treated differently.

The left-right model ignores that politics is about many issues. Like every other realm of life, it is multidimensional, yet we describe it using a graph with only one dimension. It’s true that many Americans hold their views in packages that we call “liberal” and “conservative”—those who currently support abortion rights, for instance, are also more likely to support vaccinations, income-tax increases, free trade and military intervention in Ukraine. But the question is why. Why is there a strong correlation between these seemingly unrelated issues, and why do we find them clustering in patterns that are predictable and binary instead of completely random and pluralistic?

The answer is socialization. When the Democratic and Republican parties change (as they have many times), the content and meaning of their ideologies change, too, meaning that ideologues (“liberals” and “conservatives”) will change their views to stay in line with their political tribe. Social conformity, not philosophy, explains their beliefs. Those who refuse to conform and maintain their political views independent of tribe will appear to have “switched” groups—even though they stayed consistent while the ideologies changed around them.

9. Don’t forget that science is fallible

A lot of media coverage on science policy remembers that science is fallible only when it’s convenient for them. When they’ve proclaimed something as fact that later turns out to be wrong, then they’ll blame science. Because science is fallible. Facemasks? Yeah, well, we lacked the data. Alright.

But that’d be more convincing if science news acknowledged that their information might be wrong in the first place. The population bomb? Peak oil? The new ice age? Yeah, maybe if they’d made it clearer at the time that those stories might not pan out the way they said then we wouldn’t today have to cope with climate change deniers who think the media can’t tell fact from fiction.