Covid Politics Is The Worst Politics

 Recently, the virologists (?) at the Department of Energy have said with "low confidence" that Covid escaped from a lab in Wuhan. The "lab leak" hypothesis has been circulating since 2020, and while there are some important points to be made regarding keeping viruses safely behind locked doors, on a fundamental level it doesn't really matter if it was a lab leak or zoonotic crossover in a market. It could conceivably matter if China was engineering a bio-weapon, but there's zero evidence for that. Covid hurt them as much as it hurt anyone, and it would be a pretty crappy weapon at any rate.

While a lab leak could have implications for how secure bioresearch facilities should be, the idea that "liberals" routinely denied that it could have been a lab leak isn't really true. It's always been possible, if less likely than a market crossover. As Yglesias points out, Trump was rhetorically racist in his usual way, but he didn't really call out the Chinese government over a possible lab leak. 

The issue isn't whether we should be studying coronaviruses - we obviously should be - but how secure those facilities are. China's steadfast lack of transparency means we won't know and won't know whether they have taken appropriate steps - if it was a lab leak - to correct any lapses.

All of this gets filtered through the puke funnel of conservative PWN THE LIBTARDS nonsense so you get shit like this. Because the DOE says it might have been a lab leak (not "it was definitely a lab leak") we get the usual idiots saying that this means that masks and vaccines were wrong, too. There was a similar meta study about masking being ineffective at stopping the spread of Covid. The study actually said that mask mandates tended not to work in places where they were poorly enforced, like, you know, America.

I mean, in that Campos post, they actually say they were right about ivermectin. They use the rhetorical sleight of hand whereby the possibility of a lab leak being correct means that public health officials were lying about everything else.

The simple truth is that conservative politics has now devolved to a place where their primary position is to oppose whatever "liberals" want. Cleeks Law rules us all.

This inevitably makes their positions stupid and incoherent.

The Collapse of Elon Musk, An Ongoing Series

 I'll let the inestimable Albert Burneko take it from here.

East Palestine

 Josh Marshall, again, hits on the perfect strategy for dealing with the East Palestine rail accident. Republicans are trying to turn this into another culture war bullshit theater, and while we might live in a "post-truth" world, the facts here pretty straightforward.

- The GOP has consistently undermined efforts to regulate industry.
- Trump bragged about gutting regulations that might have prevented the accident.|
- Ohio's Republican governor has not asked for federal help.
- Legislation is needed to prevent future accidents and hold major corporation liable for the harm they cause communities.

As Marshall notes, having a piece of legislation in hand - now, not after hearings - allows for the Democrats to point to a specific bill. If the GOP won't vote for it, why not? In particular, this would give important leverage to Sherrod Brown in 2024. He's a left leaning populist and taking on the rail companies is a surefire winner for him.

Republicans don't want to rein in corporate greed. I think even most WWC voters grok this. Highlight it. Make them disgusted with the GOP. They may not vote for you in 2024, but they also might not vote at all. Also, the GOP is a post-legislative party. They simply don't have the capacity to write good legislation that wasn't churned out by ALEX or the Federalist Society. Rub it in their faces.

More On The Pandemic And Its Discontents

 I read the whole Times piece from yesterday's post.  As I got to the end, this bit hit me hard:

These confessions came alongside periodic expressions of hope that things would surely have to change; that amid all of this, we, as a society, couldn’t ignore our many injustices and baseline dysfunctions any longer. The willingness to see that dysfunction, and to mark its distance from our ideals, seemed itself constructive, even momentous. “I think we needed to see how ugly it was in order to realize what were we really dealing with,” one man said.

And now, three years later? I’m wary of even typing that last paragraph. As new “post-pandemic” norms assert themselves, there’s pressure to regard that sense of empathy unlocking, of possibilities opening up, as squishy and naïve. It seems to be yet another aspect of the pandemic that a lot of people don’t really want to talk about anymore, part of the overall fever dream from which society is shaking itself awake.

“I often think about all of this as anticlimactic,” Swidler, the sociologist, told me. She was genuinely surprised: At first, the pandemic seemed to create potential for some big and benevolent restructuring of American life. But it mostly didn’t happen. Instead, she said, we seemed to treat the pandemic as a short-term hiccup, no matter how long it kept dragging on, and basically waited it out. “We didn’t strive to change society,” she told me. “We strived to get through our day.” Marooned in anomie and instability, we built little, rickety bridges to some other, slightly more stable place. “It’s amazing that something this dramatic could happen, with well over a million people dead and a public health threat of massive proportions, and it really didn’t make all that much difference,” Swidler said. “Maybe one thing it shows us is that the general drive to normalize things is incredibly powerful, to master uncertainty by feeling certain enough.”

This hit me because of the idea from sociology that we define ourselves by our constant interaction with others. I am a father, a husband, a friend, a coach, a teacher, a customer, a foe. The pandemic unmoored me, in particular, from being a teacher. My mother died (not from Covid) was I still a son? Was I a teacher if my "teaching" was an imperfect muddle of Zoom classes and hybrid "learning."

But my hope - and I think the hope of many others - was that after the trauma and dislocations of the pandemic, we would use the opportunity to create newer and better institutions. I mean, shit, we are no better prepared for the next pandemic than we were in 2019. Arguably, we are worse off, because of the vicious polarization that crept into pandemic mitigation. If avian flu jumps into humans, we will be powerless to stop it, because we are "beyond" our tolerance to take basic steps to face an implacable virus.

In particular, I was hoping that the nature of my profession might use this dislocation to change. Instead, the worst parts of my job have often be exacerbated - top-down decision making that makes my job tougher, an administration increasingly divorced from the realities of classroom teaching and the state of young people today - and the best parts have been made harder.

Near the end, the author concludes:

In this view, one remarkable thing about the archive at Columbia is that it chronicles how society confronted a new source of suffering that seemed intolerable, and then, day by day, beat it back just enough to be tolerated. Over time, we simply stirred the virus in with all the other forms of disorder and dysfunction we live with — problems that appear to be acceptable because they merely inconvenience some large portion of people, even as they devastate others. If this makes you uneasy, as an ending to our pandemic story, maybe it’s only because, with Covid, we are still able to see the indecency of that arrangement clearly. We haven’t yet made it invisible to ourselves. Right now, we’re still struggling to stretch some feeling of normalcy, like a heavy tarp, over the top.

That said, it’s not inevitable that this is the end of the story. We tend to gloss history into a sequence of precursors that carried society to the present — and to think of that present as a permanent condition that we’ll inhabit from now on. We have started glossing the pandemic in this way already. But because we don’t totally understand where that experience has delivered us, we don’t know the right gloss to give it. I would argue that if you have the feeling that we’re moving on from Covid, but it doesn’t feel as if we’re moving in any particular direction — as if we’re just kind of floating — this is why.

"Normal" had been defined earlier as what we can safely ignore. "Novel" could be dangerous, both as a novel coronavirus or a novel person or experience. We crave "normal." We may think of ourselves as individuals or iconoclasts, but ultimately, we need the security of "normal." When Covid stripped that away from us, we hoped that the "new normal" would be an improvement. 

Instead, we rushed to conclude the abnormality of the Covid Era. We rushed past the opportunity to make things better - especially in terms of work and what it means to us.

This isn't the fault of Joe Biden or even Donald Trump. Nor is it - I imagine - uniquely American.

We caromed from Covid to George Floyd to January 6th to Ukraine to inflation...everything continues to move under our feet. So we rushed past whatever opportunities Covid gave us to restructure "normal" only to find that normal itself isn't there anymore.

Pond Scum

 Ron DeSantis is the worst.

Just the worst.

The Other Long Covid

 Interesting rundown of how the pandemic unmoored many of us. By reducing our contact with work and other social constructs, it dislocated us from parts of our identity. I wonder if that fed into the subsequent "quite quitting" phenomenon. You had constructed an identity around your work, your work went away, and when you came back, you realized your identity had been ruptured somehow.

That's not quite how I feel, but there's clearly a disconnect between my previous and current feelings about being a teacher. "Your job doesn't love you back" is perhaps too pithy, but it seems like a lot of people have discovered that they aren't happy being treated like a cog in a machine when they were exposed to a yawning spiritual void in the midst of the pandemic.

Gotterdamerung

 I'm not sure the Russian - and more specifically Wagner - form of warfare is sustainable.

Russia has a history of absorbing great hardships in defense of its country. It does not have a history of absorbing great hardships in the conquest of another country.

(Headed to a wrestling tournament. Probably be offline for a couple of days.)

DeathSantis: Dangerous, But Unelectable

 I like this take from Florida Woman (not really) Betty Cracker: Ron DeSantis' basic pitch of "Make America Florida" is unlikely to play well outside of the Sunshine/Meth State. While Jon Chait has become a full time Casandra on the DeSantis Beat, arguing that DeSantis should be seen as the GOP Frontrunner and a much stronger threat to democratic norms than the erratic and moronic Trump, the argument that DeSantis' schtick will only play with the GOP base is a strong one. 

In fact, Chait somewhat elides this fact in the linked piece above. DeSantis has come out against aiding Ukraine, a position that is going to become gospel among the MAGA Right. While there has been some softening of support for Ukraine, that has been mostly a product of partisan division. (This write-up buries the lead that it's the collapse of Republican support that has seen support for Ukraine soften across the board.) As the GOP becomes more and more aligned with Vladimir Putin, I don't think that will play to their electoral advantage.

Florida is synonymous with lunacy. While the state is trending redder and redder, some of that is the generational sorting of retiring Boomers bringing their baggage with them. The weird shibboleths of American conservatism are unintelligible to most Americans. Democrats could be hurt if inflation stays high or the Federal Reserve tips us into recession, but no one outside the Fox-o-sphere gives a shit about DeSantis' war on AP African American Studies. 

They might, however, care about his efforts to track the menstrual periods of high school athletes.

Then there is the fact that DeSantis is an whiny unctuous little troll who no one likes.  "Make America Florida" is bad, but "Only A Slightly Worse Person Than Ted Cruz" isn't much better.

Social Security Is Not Going Bankrupt

 Paul Krugman is sick of your bullshit.

The Aggrieved White Guy

 This is a really interesting story from WaPo about an ongoing controversy about DEI initiatives at the Virginia Military Institute. VMI was historically VERY White and intensely Southern. It shares a town with Washington and Lee, which itself lived deeply in it's Southern past. Robert E. Lee is buried there on the W&L campus and Stonewall Jackson used to have a statue on the VMI campus that cadets would salute.

Recently, VMI hired its first Black Superintendent. One of General Cedric Wins' charges was making VMI more inclusive. One of his classmates and former friends basically freaked right the hell out about it.

I would urge you to read the story, but Wins' former friend, Matt Daniel, basically started spiraling during the Ferguson unrest. On Facebook (natch) he called the protestors "animals." Here's a sampling:

 “Let’s hope all of these destructive animals go home and build a plan to become law-abiding contributors instead of the arsonists, looters, muggers, rapists, drug addicts, pimps, whores, gangster a-----e cowards that they obviously are.”

Daniel said "I've never seen anybody at VMI do anything racist at all....I don't even remember talking about race - ever." This is the perfect example of a term I don't really like to use too frequently: White Privilege. Daniel never talked about race at VMI because issues of race were invisible to him. I would wager that Wins had conversations about race with other Black students. Daniel never had to grapple with the long history of race and the shadow it casts over America, because he's White. 

His inability to see race is because he didn't need to see race. Now that the world is taking a hard look at the history of race, people like Daniel are freaking out. Here's another sample:

“(T)he reason why our education system is broken i[s] because Liberals have imbued in it the toxic waste and fabricated storyline of systemic racial bias, engineered history and perverted disgusting sexual hogwash.”

There's a lot to unpack there, starting with "fabricated storyline." How, exactly, is the storyline of racism in America fabricated? 

I am a few years younger than the Wins and Daniel, but I grew up in the South. Even in New England, though, I can't say my high school history course really leaned into the central role of slavery and white supremacy in American history. The past three decades have been a legacy of the civil rights movement in terms of centering the focus of historians in all sorts of marginalized groups. The idea that this somehow comes at the expense of White people is really...interesting.

Why do efforts at making more opportunities present such a psychic challenge to people like Daniel? The article doesn't offer a theory, but it does a good job of laying out the narrative.

Biden In Kyiv

 Biden's surprise visit to Kyiv is important in a lot of ways. There have been a number of conflicting reports about whether America's support of Ukraine is "bottomless." I presume this is either being leaked by war skeptics or it's a misinterpretation of concerns about whether House Republicans will continue to support funding Ukraine's defense. Biden standing next to Zelensky in Kyiv pledging to support them "as long as it takes" is a pretty clear message of US intent.

We are four days from the anniversary of the Russian invasion and one would assume that both sides will make symbolic attacks to mark the day. I would expect a major drone attack on Ukrainian cities. The US informed Russia that Biden would be in Kyiv so that they didn't accidentally kill him during an air raid. However, it was obviously still risky, and Biden's presence in a war zone is a major physical statement of commitment to Ukraine.

Buried in this update is an interview with Michael Kofman - who's been a valuable voice on Russia. Kofman says that the ongoing probes and small bore, disjointed attacks are the Russian spring offensive. The brute force human wave attacks with Wagner convicts and mobiks are slowly gaining ground around Bakhmut. It's a meat grinder that demonstrates three things about the current state of Russia's war making capability.

First, Putin needs some sort of victory and - for whatever reason - it's decided that Bakhmut - a town of little actual significance - is going to be that victory. No matter the cost.

Second, Russia's primary - perhaps only - advantage is manpower. Not skilled manpower, but the brute force of numbers. They can afford to kill two or three Russians for every one Ukrainian and still have a path to victory. Or so they think. Armies get degraded by poor leadership and senseless slaughter, but the idea that their only path to victory is to bleed themselves and their opponents dry is telling.

Third, offensive warfare is very difficult. It functions best with combined arms and maneuver warfare. That means tying in your artillery with your armor with your supporting infantry, supported by as much air support as you can bring to bear. Russia has not shown this capability at all in this war. They have been especially poor, apparently, at supporting armored movements with infantry. Offensive warfare usually results in high casualties among the attackers, as they have to overcome established defensive positions.

Russia's reliance on meat grinder tactics could very well work in Bakhmut, as they have been throwing thousands of bodies into the bloody maw of Ukrainian defenses. However, it's doubtful that Russia can exploit any breakthroughs or advantages that the fall of Bakhmut might bring.

What is more interesting to me is whether Russia is grinding up important troops in Bakhmut that might be needed to hold back Ukraine's expected Spring Offensive. If Russia is bleeding experienced soldiers in February, who will be left to defend against what will hopefully be a coordinated, thoughtful movement - presumably towards Melitopol and the Azov Sea.

In some ways, Biden's trip and Russian advances are both "noise," significant in some ways but not determinative of success for either side. I would think Ukraine will have the final say some time in April.

Uncle Joe

 Ezra Klein makes some really good points about Joe Biden running in 2024.

- Biden is old and that manifests most clearly in the worsening of his speech impediment, a problem that is magnified among reporters who love words and speechs.

- Biden is old and that gives him a perspective and restraint that he himself lacked in earlier days.

- Biden is old in a party that is young and that allows him to bridge the gap between the old constituencies of the party and the new.

- Biden has been very successful. While it would be ridiculous to say that Biden has solved the myriad problems bequeathed him by Trump and even Obama and Bush, he has made remarkable progress across a broad spectrum of policy areas. Ukraine, infrastructure, China, climate change: it's a strong record.

As Klein concludes, he notes that Biden is at the mercy of two things largely beyond his control. Age related decline and inflation. He could have a heart attack tomorrow. Inflation could continue to roil the economic outlook of the country. I think both are unlikely but not impossible.

Biden is...kinda boring. 

How refreshing is that?

Exactly Who You Expected It To Be

 Looks like some of the Worst People have a club. What's so frustrating about this is how they take a completely legitimate point - "war is terrible" - and strip it of it context - "Russia invaded its neighbor for pure conquest". 

Yes, we should have an end to the war in Ukraine. That end should be when Russia retreats to - at the very, very least - the borders of one year ago. Anyone who doesn't see that confuses me as to what exactly they do see.

Clown Car

 Look, Andy Ogles (R-TN) is not George Santos, but he's not exactly Honest Abe, either. People exaggerate their accomplishments all the time, but there is something pathological going on in the GQP. Some of this, I think, has to be a product of Trump's "ability" to break what were previously considered ironclad rules and still "win" the presidency. Because he weathered scandals that would have immolated any other politician, there must be an assumption among a certain type of sociopath that they can simply lie their way to elected office.

Ultimately, however, the fault lies with Republican voters. It was they who decided to stick with Trump after...well...everything. The lesson this delivered to the GOP was unmistakable. It's not just that Trump embraced a form of White Nationalism that won over some WWC voters, it's that he demonstrated that norms are meaningless within the GOP political sphere. 

The people who say that Al Franken resigned over far less are perhaps missing this point. Al Franken cared about the norms of a functioning political system. The GOP currently does not.

UPDATE: We got another one! In this case, it seems pretty clear that Anna Luna (R-FL) is someone who's pretty and cynically opportunistic about her biography. That combination of good looks and low key sociopathy is preferred by the Charlie Kirks of this world who found her.

Trans Care

 Jamelle Bouie makes a brilliant case for the universality of trans rights. In this, he mirrors my own preference for couching progressive social issues in universal ideals and long held democratic beliefs. Trans people just want the dignity and respect we extend to other people. That's it.

Yglesias naturally finds a way to be a bit annoying about this. His point isn't terrible, though. We don't know enough about the impact of gender affirming care in younger kids. We don't know why we have seen a massive spike in gender nonconforming kids. 

However, the central point is that while we might want to be careful about how fast we move to new treatments and guidelines, that process has to come from a place that respects the dignity of trans people. If we start there, we should be OK. It goes without saying that the cultural right is not coming from a place of respect for their dignity.

UPDATE: I wanted to add something about the idea that basic dignity and respect are universal values that "everyone" can get behind. Do unto others and such.

What's more, extending dignity and respect is not a zero sum situation. With the arguments between cis women and trans women over who gets to have a prominent voice in women's spaces...I am not able to make any judgments on that. Nor should I. But the civil wars that often erupt between advocates for one group and another are largely a product of thinking that there is a finite amount of attention or resources and if one group gets their side heard, it means - by default - that the other side is muted.

If we think of universal values of dignity and respect then few people would think that extending dignity towards trans people comes at the expense of other groups. In fact, it becomes an expansive practice that grows as it is used. Perhaps it would ease some of the tension between groups. Arguments over when to accelerate transitions or use puberty blockers are important and unsettled. But you begin with dignity and respect.

Stop Hitting Yourself

 The key takeaway from Biden's State of the Union address was the combative exchange over Social Security and Medicare. A handful of Republicans have - for years - wanted to end these entitlement programs. While Hurricane Katrina and Iraq were considered important in driving George W. Bush's approval ratings into the toilet, it was his plan to privatize Social Security (plus meddling in Terri Schiavo's death) that really crushed him. Cutting Social Security benefits is electoral poison.

When Biden seemed to get the Chaos Caucus to agree with him not to cut Social Security and Medicare, he really put them in a tight spot. They are very visibly on record saying they don't want to cut entitlements.

Then the backtracking started, to the point where Rick Scott and Ron Johnson are talking about cutting benefits. Mitch McConnell - whose political genius is overstated - has tried to distance the GOP from this position, but they keep stepping on that rake.

In some ways, this debate is going to be a mirror image of "Defund the Police." That was a messaging fiasco for the Democrats, as a few vocal activists took a phrase that was at best misleading and turned it into a major message leading up to the 2020 election. They would say "Defund the Police" and then spend ten minutes explaining that they didn't literally mean deny funding to police departments, but changing where the money went and blah blah blah. 

Today, the GOP is making semantic arguments where they parse whether they are cutting benefits to current entitlement recipients versus future recipients. That's just terrible politics. "If you're explaining, you're losing" is a pretty good rule of thumb and they are going to be called out on this every chance Democrats can do it.

What makes this even funnier is that Rick Scott - a man who make Voldemort look warm and fuzzy - is running for re-election. Now, it could very well be that Florida has self-sorted itself into Alabama with better beaches, but if the main issue in the 2024 Florida Senate race is Rick Scott trying to gut Social Security and Medicare, it could be the type of stark issue that shakes up a winnable race for the GOP.

Biden's stutter makes him a less than compelling "leader" in a TV-driven media landscape, but his political instincts are excellent. Picking a fight over entitlements is a great way to drive a potential group of swing voters into Democrats' arms.

America Is A Violent Place

 Yglesias tends to resort to "philosophy major" mode when talking about things like police reform. All his points are good, but they miss the human reality at the heart of calls to reform police. While I agree that there are certainly more than enough criticisms of activists tactics and language - "Defund" being the prime example - that can be the wrong thing to focus on.

Buried somewhat in Yglesias' criticism of reform activists is a critical nugget that he nods at, then glides over: policing in America will always be more violent than other, similar countries, because America is more violent than other, similar countries.

The reason is guns.

Americans might be slightly more violent than, say, the Dutch. More likely, when you add the absurd armaments to the population, you create a more lethal population rather than a more violent one. That is absolutely going to have an impact on police practices. Yglesias notes the conundrum of what policy should be surrounding someone waiving a knife or trying to stab a police officer. You can absolutely kill someone with a knife, but officers are wearing body armor and have tasers. They can shoot somewhere else besides center mass. But they can also get killed, so where does one draw the line?

The "Warrior Training" that a lot of police undergo is deeply problematic, as it creates a "shoot first" mentality that more resembles a war zone than an American community. However, the widespread availability of tremendously lethal weaponry does mean that any encounter could turn into something horrible. 

There was a time when police departments embraced gun control. It is striking that many police unions do not currently prioritize getting weapons of war off the streets. That does render their priorities suspect. It doesn't, however, reduce the salience of the issue of guns.

If there are two things that render America a fractious, dangerous place, it would have to be guns and Christianist politics. 

And What About Russians?

 The Post has a good story about the Russians leaving Russia. While it is difficult for Russians to emigrate to Europe at the moment, they are fleeing to places like Armenia and the Middle East. Russian oligarchs have been offshoring their money since the oligarchs existed. Now, not only are they fleeing, the broader middle class seems to be fleeing, too. It's telling that IT people - people whose livelihoods are tied to global connectivity - are abandoning Russia. 

There's a demagogic argument that we should treat all Russians as culpable for Russia's actions. This is an argument to prevent Russians from fleeing Russia to NY or London. 

The counter argument - aside from the fact that few Russians are able to impact Russian policy - is that depriving Russia of their most educated and global citizenry will weaken it over time. I think that's a strong argument. Russia is in the midst of a demographic crisis. 

This is the population of Russia. The dark crimson are the number of excess women over men in older generations. Men in Russia die in staggering numbers from alcohol and drug abuse related reasons. Now, they are dying in Ukraine and fleeing the country to avoid being drafted. That big bulge in the middle is a period in the '80s when Russians were urged to have a bunch of kids. There is an echo of that from 2011-2018. 

That bulge generation is done having kids. The bust that follows is are the people fleeing the countries, so the population of Russia will shrink even faster.

I suppose there's an argument that forcing unhappy Russians to stay in Russia could prompt a revolution. I doubt it, but it's not impossible. Or perhaps after living abroad these refuseniks from Putin's War could come home and bring expectations that Putin can't meet.

Either way, the future of Russia seems pretty bleak.

What's Up With Russia?

 Some odd events in eastern Ukraine. Russia has been conducting a meatgrinder campaign around Kremina and Bahkmut. But most knowledgeable analysis - including that within Russia - suggests that Russia is waging this attritive combat because they haven't the capability to do maneuver warfare.

This form of sacrificing conscripts and convicts to make incremental gains could work if Ukraine becomes obsessed with holding on to a place like Bahkmut. Ukraine is presumably preparing for a spring offensive with their new tanks. They will need enough troops to make that happen. Russia has the clear advantage in manpower - if not morale. That could change if they kill enough of their own troops, or we see wide scale mutinies.

It sure seems like Russia is making a bad decision, and we shouldn't assume that they are out of wishful thinking.

However, their decision-making has been shit all year anyway.

I Hate This Song

 Every decade, we get a repeat of this same, mindless tune: Social Security is going to go bankrupt.

No. It isn't.

When someone tells you it is, they are lying or ignorant. If they are lying, it's because they want to cut benefits because they are heartless pricks.

What Am I Even Doing?

 Winters are...hard. I have four sections to teach; I am a varsity head coach (at least for a few more weeks before stepping down); it's New England; being a parent is always hard no matter what time of year it is.

All of this is to say that I'm routinely exhausted from December through the end of the wrestling season. I have to prep classes, prep practices, run both, grade papers and there's a lot of extraneous stuff surrounding wrestling. For instance, we are hosting the league tournament this year.

So when I finish my work at the end of the day, I'm freaking done. My brain is cooked. 

All of which leads me to social media.

Of all the aspects of social media, I don't think we pay enough attention to the brevity of most experiences. YouTube and Facebook can have longer videos, but generally speaking, your interactions with TikTok, Twitter and (I presume) Instagram are measured in seconds, not minutes. It is perfect, therefore, for the exhausted brain. There's no commitment to a video on TikTok or a Twitter thread, and you can bounce lightly from one to another.

Now that Twitter is effectively broken,  I spend my braindead time on TikTok. It's...nice. Twitter was rarely "nice," but TikTok lets me see dog videos and cool music "stitches" and heartwarming stories. On Twitter, I had a couple of Tweets mildly explode, and that was an incredibly endorphin rush, but TikTok just provides me with a stream of things that make me vaguely happy.

And it's destroying my brain. Increasingly, if I am trying to decide between watching a two hour movie, a few 30 minute TV shows or scrolling through TikTok, I'll pick the latter. It's the mental equivalent of fast food - empty of nourishment but tasty. It's scientifically constructed to make me consume it without deciding to consume it or thinking about what I'm consuming.

I still get some information from Twitter, but since it's no longer "fun" I likely won't delete it. I think I might need to delete TikTok. I don't want to turn my brain to mush.

Christian Nationalists

 Jennifer Rubin runs down new polling that simply gives us another data point on the descent of the American Right into authoritarianism. She hypes it as an alarming poll, but it really needs to be understood as the composition of the current GOP. It's a god-bothering, Christianist movement that embraces authoritarianism in all of its guises: dominion of man over woman, humans over nature and white people over "others." It places America on a divine plane, which exempts it from criticism. To criticize America is to criticize - in a roundabout way - God Himself.

So, when Ron DeSantis wagers that he can become the GOP nominee by banning books, he's not making a bad bet. The GOP wants to be in charge of your life, your uterus, your bedroom. All while prattling on about freedom.

I think that's why I'm OK with an obviously aging Joe Biden being the nominee. He's just so freaking normal and these GOP Jeebus Freaks are simply not. The hidden meaning of the poll Rubin dissects is that most people do not hold these beliefs. That's the takeaway.

SOTU

 I guess I missed quite the donnybrook at the State of the Union last night. Like Josh Marshall, I find them tedious, but I guess I should have known that the Chaos Caucus would make things...interesting.

This "fact check" column shows the cognitive rot at the heart of American news coverage. The SOTU is both a constitutional requirement and a political event. Biden was making a case for his administration. If he lied, he should be called on that. The column is...I couldn't finish it, but the common refrain was "this needs context." Basically, this was a call to turn a talking point into a position paper. Why? In what possible universe is it important to qualify or contextualize a SOTU address? So many comments were "Well, what Biden said was technically true, in the sense that is factually accurate, but if you look at it this way, it could be false."

Here's a great example:

WHAT WAS SAID

“We’re finally giving Medicare the power to negotiate drug prices.”

This needs context. The Inflation Reduction Act, which Mr. Biden signed into law in August, does fulfill Democrats’ long-held goal of empowering Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs directly with pharmaceutical makers. But the law has limits. The negotiation provisions do not kick in until 2026, when the federal government may begin negotiating the price of up to 10 medicines. The number of drugs subject to negotiation will rise over time. 

I suppose that you think you're being very clever and savvy by pointing out the technical ways that what Biden said is both accurate and not accurate, when really he's just being accurate. Biden does not claim that we are currently negotiating prices. He says we will. Because of a bill he passed. 

Meanwhile, the GQP is screaming at him from the cheap seats. That would seem to be the story here.

There Are No GOP Moderates

 Don Bacon of Nebraska is as close to a moderate Republican as you can get. However, he's basically endorsed the debt ceiling hostage taking. Bacon does not appear to be an idiot. He understands the difference between the debt ceiling and the budget. To conflate the two is not to suggest he's suddenly an idiot, but that he understands the political calculus. In the GOP, the debt ceiling IS the budget. While Biden has signaled a willingness to negotiate over the budget for 2024, he is not going to negotiate over the full faith and credit of the United States. Nor should he.

That Bacon is basically tying the debt ceiling and the budget together isn't an act of stupidity, it's an act of surrender to the lunatics like Gaetz, Gosar and Greene who might not actually know the difference.

Death By Dumb

 Josh Marshall makes a really good point about the recent avian flu epidemic that is causing the price of eggs to soar. Avian flu very rarely jumps species into humans or other mammals, but when it does, it's incredibly lethal. As in - if you get it, there's a 50% chance you will die.

In America - and several other places - pandemic response has moved from a public health concern to a partisan culture war issue. Now, wearing a mask or even getting a vaccine is increasingly a political act. I don't wear a mask, because I'm vaccinated out the ass, I've had a bad case and a mild case. I feel pretty good that Covid - for me - will be a cold, like most coronaviruses.

Avian flu is a different beast. And because we have politicized public health on the altar of stupidity and tribal politics, if it does jump to humans, the impact could be catastrophic. As in tens of millions of dead, in America alone.

When Covid first broke out, the Right - including Trump - said it was "just the flu" which tells you all you need to know about how they will respond to an avian flu outbreak.

More On The Balloon

 Appropriately enough, Balloon Juice has a compendium of the lunacy that the Chinese Spy Balloon unleashed in the fever swamps of the American Right. Jason Kander had an especially good day on Twitter lampooning this idiots.

Jason Kander

@JasonKander

Hawley: SHOOT IT DOWN Biden: We will when it’s not above Americans Hawley: Where’s Biden? Biden: Waiting for it to be over the ocean Hawley: We need an investigation! *Balloon floats over ocean, gets shot down* Hawley: … boy parts people playing sports with girls!?!

5:07 PM · Feb 4, 2023·

66.7K

Views

It's not that this tactic is new. It's that the Right Wing Wurlitzer of the early '00s has become a firehose of nonsense. They are so subsumed by their own obsessions that they begin to speak in a foreign tongue.

For the most part, it's invisible to those Americans who are not Very Online, but the weak showing of the GOP in the midterms has to be - in part - a function of just how banana pancakes they must sound when anyone listens to what they are saying most of the time.

Fuck You, Balloon

 We shot the Chinese balloon down off the coast of Carolina. 

China is in an interesting place right now. (And not just because we are studying China in class.) A few things to consider.

- Xi Xinping has dismantled the party leadership structure put in place by Deng Xiaopeng 40 years ago to prevent the rise of another disastrous leader like Mao. Deng's basic idea is that you can have different factions rotate through power, that all paramount leaders should have ten year terms and party leadership should have a mandatory retirement age. All of this was designed to avoid exactly the sort of stovepipe decision making we've seen Putin execute in Ukraine. Mao made a terrible choice with the Great Leap Forward because there was no other voice to counter him, and when he was sidelined, he made as bad a choice with the Cultural Revolution. Deng wanted to avoid another Mao-type leader.

- Part of Xi's plan was to rely on China's rise to equal global power with the US and the EU. The three economies are more or less the three largest in the world, though America is a far richer country, once you divide per capita. Xi was hoping China's continued economic ascendency would allow it to form a tri-polar world between Beijing, Washington and Brussels.

- Another part of this plan was to ally with other autocratic regimes like, I dunno, Russia and Iran. This would give China an alliance of its own as a counterweight to the US/EU. Russia would hopefully be a help in fracturing the EU through support of efforts like Brexit or Catalonian independence. Now, Russia has managed to revitalize and reinvigorate both the EU and NATO, with the US firmly reorienting itself towards both Europe and East Asia and away from the Middle East. Putin's bloody blunder in Ukraine has to be making him reconsider his friendliness towards Moscow. And the brutal crackdowns in Iran can't bode well for the long term stability of THAT regime, either.

- Additionally, the ability of NATO to effectively arm Ukraine and hold Russia largely at bay will have to make him reconsider any plans he might have to forcefully conquer Taiwan. The US, Japan and other East Asian countries worried about China will now have reason to be proactive in arming Taiwan for its defense.

- China recently relaxed its draconian Covid restrictions in the face of widespread public opposition. The Chinese regime has been quite clever in how it approaches certain types of protest. It isn't like Iran where if you start protesting, the Revolutionary Guard just starts shooting. The Chinese state - ostensibly, but not actually communist - understands that repressing the "people" has a downside. (This offer not valid in Tibet or Xinjiang.) We spoke in class whether the Chinese state if "brittle" (like Russia) "adaptive" or "consultative". Is there appetite among the Chinese people for a potentially damaging conflict with the West?

So this is an inflection point for China, and the balloon is just part of it. It's embarrassing. Everybody spies, but you aren't supposed to get caught so publicly. They've yoked themselves, to a degree, to a Russia that seems dangerously off the rails. They're picking fights with India - a country that will soon surpass them as the largest in the world. 

Deng put in place a system to shield China from bad decision making. Xi tore it down. Is he already beginning to step on rakes?

UPDATE: The "discourse" over the balloon itself is pretty stupid.

The Never Trump Plan

 Apparently the "sane" wing of the GOP has a plan for Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign: They hope he dies.

Incrementalism

 The Affordable Care Act was a milestone piece of legislation, but I think it's important to make sure it's not seen as the endpoint on health care reform. Obviously, nothing will get done with a GOP House and a Senate wedded to the filibuster, but there is a future legislative and political agenda on healthcare for Democrats.

The immediate aftermath of ACA led many insurance companies to soften some of their policies. For whatever reason - and I realize this is completely anecdotal - our health insurance was changed during Covid. We went from a reasonably annoying health insurance provider to an unreasonably annoying one. For the first time in a long time, I would argue that our health insurance situation has gotten worse.

Of course, it's not just anecdotal. Most health insurance companies and terrible. They do not provide health care. They seek to profit off insurance that might protect people from health care costs. Aetna and Blue Cross do not exist to provide you health care; they exist to profit off the health care industry. 

Ideally, there is a time in the near future where GOP extremism gives Democrats the Presidency, the House and a majority in the Senate willing to axe the filibuster. While there are a host of reforms they might engage in - voting rights, climate change, housing policy - adding a true public option that could cover everyone - even people with insurance through work - would be the next step in getting profit out of the delivery of covering actual health care.

Obesity

 Yglesias did one of those things where he brings some of his priors to a debate he really doesn't know a bunch about and does a bunch of confirmation bias research to prove the point it felt like he was going to make in the first place.

This one is on obesity, which is the latest front in the perpetual war between responsibility and tolerance. Basically, this debate breaks down whether you think obesity is a personal failing or whether its a culture event beyond the control of anyone to really control. No one "chooses" to be obese, but if you have tasty, quick, cheap food available to you, you're going to eat that and become overweight.

Of course, "overweight" is another issue. According to BMI, I'm obese. If I was at the weight I want to be - knowing myself and my body - I would merely be overweight. What BMI leaves out is that I am a fairly stout guy - wide through the shoulders. I lift weights as my primary form of exercise. So, I'm physically fit (most of the time, not currently) but I'm "obese." In fact, my body fat composition at the moment is not where I want it to be - wrestling season makes it hard to workout on my own - but my actual weight is the same as it was this fall when I was in pretty good shape for someone my age. Luckily, my doctor is not a slave to BMI and he's cool with my weight as long as I'm fit.

So one reason Americans are more "obese" is - I believe - simply because they are bigger. However, any trip to certain parts of America will let you know that people in America carry too much body fat. 

Recently new guidelines for childhood obesity created friction among people who saw this as "victim blaming." Certainly kids aren't making informed choices about what they eat, but presumably this message is for the parents. There is a good argument that food processors are creating less healthy options. "Salt, sugar and fat" and all that.

I actually do know a few things about weight loss and weight control as a wrestling coach. The answer strikes me as pretty easy - with the obvious caveats that every situation is unique. The basic problem is we have access to way more calories and way more "empty" calories than ever before. There may be "hacks" that help you navigate this dynamic, but the basic issue is if you take in more calories than you burn, your body will store those extra calories as a future store of energy as fat.

That's pretty much it.

However, your need for about 2500-3000 calories a day can often be met in a single trip to Starbucks. When chains post the caloric content of food, that's a really good way to monitor whether you are getting "excess" calories. For some, this is fat shaming. I honestly don't know what to say about that. It feels like people are looking for things to be upset about.

Maintaining a healthy weight - or more accurately a healthy percentage of body fat - is simply going to be a challenge for many people in the food environment we have created for ourselves. An unhealthy amount of body fat is not good for you and correlates and causes many health complications. My "overweight" status is hard on my knees, which is why I want to be 10 pounds lighter. It's hard when I can get 2000 calories at a single meal (and I'm older and my metabolism is slowing).

There is a compassionate middle ground that acknowledges that high percentages of body fat is bad for you, while understanding that this is frequently difficult to resist.

Screaming At The Mirror

 While there is an aspect of bothsides to the idea of epistemological closure, the Right is far more ensconced up its own ass than the Left. The current internecine war within the GOP over vaccines and school closures is a great example of this.

No one liked wearing a mask or closing schools. Getting a shot isn't anyone's idea of a fun time. But the idea that these real and important public safety measures amounts to tyranny is absurd. However, the GOP continues to have arguments about shit that is rapidly receding from the public mind. Sure, Glenn Youngkin basically won the Virginia governorship over school closures. Outside of the GOP base, is anyone really still fuming over school closures?

Underestimating the stupidity of the median voter isn't a wise move, but if we are sorting the GOP into their own echo chamber, then I am hopeful that the GOP will continue to marginalize itself.