Trivializing COVID19

I see a lot of people relentlessly trying to trivialize the danger of COVID-19. They're clearly doing so for ideological reasons, which is fine, except that they spout pseudo-scientific b.s. to obscure their ideological reasons.
 

What's noteworthy is that you don't really hear doctors and nurses in hospitals or nursing home staff trivializing the virus.

What you do hear is medical professionals and care staff talking about how bad it is in the hospitals and nursing homes, not only in metro NYC but also here in upstate. They use words like overwhelming, exhausting and unprecedented, even those who've worked during previous pandemics. They're not saying "it's just like regular flu season." They're saying it's worse than during AIDS. 

Maybe this is a terribly mainstream belief, MSM sheeple that I must be. But the people who are on the front lines of this and have actual scientific training from real schools might, just might, actually know what the fuck they're talking about better than someone whose "expertise" changes (impeachment last month, epidemiology this month, chem trails next month) based on whatever is trending on Youtube at the moment. Or maybe not. Maybe those LPNs risking their lives for $16/hr are just part of the Grand Conspiracy too.

Historically, Americans have always lurched through extremes where we go back and forth between fetishizing science uncritically to rejecting it entirely. We're obviously in the latter period right now. Take a swig of Clorox if you disagree.

When I lived in West Africa, a Guinean friend of mine who was a chemistry teacher told me something I never forgot: "Science without conscience will be the ruin of Mankind." This is not about rejecting science. It means assessing it with a critical eye based on the intersection of ethics and actual scientific principles. But we Americans never seem to be mature enough as a people to master this nuance.

Skepticism vs cynicism

Skepticism is the principle that you should not automatically believe every opinion, theory or informnation that you come across. It's the principle that you should try to verify data as best you can and independently assess opinion and theory. Skepticism means you don't assume something is true or sensible until you can conclude it to be so via critical thinking.

Cynicism is the principle that you should automatically assume as false or dishonest every (or most) theory, opinion or data that you come across. It's the principle that anything that doesn't correspond to your existing beliefs cannot possibly be demonstrated as true or sensible no matter what. Cynicism is as much an antithesis to critical thinking as naivete.

Skepticism is necessary to have a functioning society and be a functioning adult. Cynicism is corrosive to both.

Why I wear a mask

I've seen several local businesses posting something like "No mask, no entry, no exceptions." And it always provokes howls of outrage from cable "news" addicts denouncing the business owners and those who follow their rules as submissive slaves and sheeple. 

They're a private business. They can make you wear a mask any time they want, pandemic or not, governor's orders or not. You step on their property, respect their rules. Get over it or leave.

 Listen, wear a mask in public. Don't wear a mask and deal with the consequences. That's your choice.

I choose to wear one. Not so much because I'm that worried about catching it, even though I'm in a higher risk category. I do so out of respect for my neighbors.

Out of respect for the underpaid cashiers and stock clerks who deal with hundreds or thousands of people coming in, some of whom are no doubt sick and many of whom do not respect social distancing. I'm sure most of workers have their stress heightened just a little bit every time they see a customer without a mask. This is not the job they signed up for.

Out of respect. for senior citizen shoppers who no doubt share that fear.

Out of respect for the doctors and nurses and other medical personnel who having working straight out with no break for a month. Out of respect for their family members that they barely see anymore.

Out of respect for everyone who wants this pandemic to subside sooner, rather than later.

If you think your governor is Hitler for issuing restrictions and that he's trampling on your God-given right to get a haircut that our Founding Fathers fought for, fine. That's your right.

If you think the business owners doing this are idiots because they don't realize this is all a hoax like you learned from Fox News or YouTube Medical School, that's your right.

If orotesting that makes you feel like Rosa Parks, congratulations. That's your right.

Go ahead, break your arm patting yourself on the back. The first responders will treat your broken arm anyway. But bear in mind, they will be wearing masks too.

But don't crap on people who think they're part of society and choose to respect their fellow community members. That's our right.

Progressivism used to dominate rural America

A friend of mine asked me to read a piece entitled What Liberals Don't Realize from the website Quora. There were definitely chunks of it that made me roll my eyes. Slog through it because there is also some good stuff in there.

The general lack of interest of left-of-center folks in the realities of rural and small town America strikes me as not just ignorance, but willful ignorance. This comes across to folks who live in places lke my hometown as outright contempt. This is an issue I've been calling attention to for a long time.

Progressive discussion is so urban-centric that it makes itself seem irrelevant at best or alien and hostile at worst in much of the country, even though many of those policies would help people in places like where I live.

People in rural and small town America aren't stupid. But if only one side is engaging them, no wonder the other side gains no traction there.

Progressives need to stop treating this part of the country like an afterthought and speak directly (and listen to) rural and small town Americans if they ever want their policies to gain traction.

***

 The prairies - now solidly red - used to be a hotbed of rural activism. Witness Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter With Kansas? 

In the Midwest, the fusion of the urban labor movement with the interests of rural farmers was a key coalition that made the progressive movement so powerful in the early 20th century. In fact, the blue outfit in Minnesota is still known as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party.

I was looking at the 1912 presidential election, at the height of the progressive movement. There was a Progressive candidate (Theodore Roosevelt) AND a Socialist candidate (Eugene Debs). The pair did very well in more rural states: South Dakota (55% combined), Washington (48%), Nevada (44%), Montana (41%). 

Because of progressives' self-defeating tunnel vision, such numbers seem inconceivable today.

How bad governance botched needed bail reform in New York

The shambolic implementation of needed bail reform in New York is a great example of the state government's dysfunction and how its abysmal processes lead to embarrassments like the governor admitting a law needs revamping only a few days after it takes effect.

Far from being a new development with the Democrats taking control of the state senate, this has been the depressing status quo for decades.

Some of the good things are being misrepresented by political hacks or flat out misunderstood by well intentioned folks, no doubt. Some of the reforms were needed. Some were bad ideas. Some were good ideas badly implemented. 

But why was this reform implemented so chaotically that the governor is conceding the need for changes only a week into the law's existence?

The process.

The reforms weren't passed via the normal legislative process that first world governments use to pass important legislation. Which is by holding hearings seeking feedback from all of the stakeholders, using that feedback to make tweaks to the initial bill and get rid of previously unforeseen consequences and then holding a public debate and vote on the stand alone bill.

Instead, the reforms were shoved into the unrelated budget with no separate debate while constituents were focused on the countless other things that might or might not end up into the budget.

No democracy. Whatever the legislative "leaders" and governor agreed on. The other 221 legislators are useless. This is nothing remotely close to the good governance that candidate Andrew Cuomo promised us in 2010.

The tactic of shoving policy into the budget, used on many issues, is designed to shield the other legislators from constituents opposing or questioning whatever is being passed. It's designed to protect rank and file legislators from having to do their job.

 

Process matters. And the state's processes have always been horrible. It takes good ideas in principle and ruins them in implementation. Even the good laws that come out of Albany seem to arrive despite the process not because of it.

Why climate activists have been failing and how they can succeed?

I'm a big believer in the premise that people who want to effect real change can't just tell people to say no. You have to offer them something to say yes to. In politics, something, no matter how awful, nearly always beats nothing: witness Trump vs Hillary. The nihilistic Republicans vs the corporate Democrats.

I've been thinking about this is relation to denial of the reality that climate change has been massively accelerated by human activity.

 I think that most climate change denialism is not really based in actual belief that there is no human component. Most don't reject the science because they actually disbelieve it. They do so because accepting the science would imply action... action that might well be, in the short term, nothing less than self-harm. Climate change activists given little thought to addressing this narrative.

Such denialism is largely based on the belief that getting rid of - or at least shrinking the fossil fuel industry -  will cause major economic damage, given the absence of other jobs to take their place. This is not, in fact, an irrational fear. 

I feel that one of the areas that climate change activists have failed is in developing alternative economic opportunities for people who work in fossil fuel industries or who live in regions whose economies are dominated by said industry. Or rather, in pushing politicians to do the above. This is indispensable to softening opposition to needed environmental actions. Instead, climate change activists have largely opted for the tactic of shame and that's clearly not enough.

People aren't going to voluntarily abandon their way of life and their often already meager wages for the vague promise that maybe some unknown alternative economic sector might be realized at some indeterminate point in the future. 

They see how the deindustrialized northeast and midwest have largely been left to rot.  And it's wholly irrational to expect them to do so. And wholly counterproductive to shame them for not doing so.

Climate change activists need to recognize that those affected by their desired shrinking of the fossil fuel economy are real people with real bills to pay and that if they want those people to go along with serious action to repair the climate crisis, activists have to ensure they have some other way to feed their families.

Are Democrats really stupid enough to delay the impeachment trial?

Let's be clear. Impeachment is a political act. The impeachment of Donald Trump is a political act. The Republican impeachments of Democrats Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson were political acts. In those two cases, all votes to remove the president from office came from Republican senators.

That impeachment is a political process is what the authors of the Constitution intended. That's why impeachment and its resulting trial are conducted by politicians, not judges.

But it's hard to imagine the Democrats would be so incredibly stupid to follow this advice (I almost am hestitant to say it because they tend to take such things as a dare). The guaranteed

Republican response is fairly simple: "Democrats claim that Trump's presidency is a mortal threat to our republic but are indefinitely delaying the trial that might remove this supposedly mortal threat from office. This proves that impeachment was just a sham designed to embarrass him" (as though he doesn't do that to himself on an hourly basis). Trumpists couldn't hope for a better script, one that, for once, is actually truthful.

We all know the Senate is going to acquit him no matter what. Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham have already promised publicly that the Senate jury will not conduct a fair trial. And they're not going to vote on any of the countless bills the House has sent them.

But Democrats still have to go through the motions of trying to remove Trump, otherwise what was the point? It wouldn't be any different than the pointless "censure" that they gave to Bill Clinton.

This cockamemie idea is neither good for the country nor good politics.

The Trump regime is not 1984. It's much more clever than that

In terms of obscenity, this photo of President Trump with an infant survivor of the El Paso massacre is fairly minor in the whole scheme of Donald Trump's moral crimes - to say nothing of his legal crimes. But it's emblematic of his sociopathic regime. (You can't called it an administration because governance is not its point)

Trump may not be particularly smart in the intellectual sense but his instincts for advancing his own personal self-interest is nothing short of malevolent genius. Long before he entered politics, he was a great con man.

The malevolent genius of his regime is its full scale assault on the senses. It's one moral outrage to disgust honest, decent Americans after another. You're not even done reeling/raging about one scandal and another pops up.

The children in cages meant we stopped talking about the avalanche of impeachable offenses. The gun massacres meant we stopped talking about children in cages. The Epstein death meant we stopped talking about violence. The ICE raids is Mississippi meant we stopped talking bout the Epstein death. The green card rule changes meant we stopped talking about the ICE raids. Declare open season on the bald eagle and other endangered speices and we stopped talking about the green rule changes. Pervert the Statue of Liberty Poem and we stopped talking about the attack on endangered species.

This would be enough for two years to stagger a normal nation. In America, this is just the last 10 days.

In a column for The Guardian in 2017, Aldous Huxley's son pointed out that Trump's regime was not Orwell's 1984. It was his father's Brave New World.

I'm not quite sure how an opposition candidate breaks through against this relentless, overbearing obscenity but  I'm certain Trump is hoping he gets a corporate centrist help his con job along.

During the last round of GOP primaries, Trump bragged that he could stand in the middle of Manhattan and shoot someone and he wouldn't lose any voters.

That might be the only thing he's ever said that we ought to have believed.