The Damage Done

 The sheer amount of damage that Trump and Republicans are doing to the world is tough to keep track of. Certainly, millions of people - many of them children - are going to die because they killed USAID. Other outrages - putting his name on the Kennedy Center - are easily fixed. Reversing his budgets are done in 2029 (presuming we still have a democracy by then). He is increasingly toxic, and as Minnesota demonstrated, when the people stand against him, he loses.

There are two areas that were especially galling yesterday. 

Trump basically went all in in dragging the power grid back to 1947. By repealing every single piece of constraint on emitting greenhouse gases, he is paving the way for massive amounts of pollution. The question, though, is really whether companies will actively move backwards on this. Yes, the massive open coal pits of Wyoming will continue to feed the data centers being built there. However, some tech companies are more eager to build small scale nuclear plants, because they have to know that once Trump is gone, coal will no longer be viable. It's not viable now, due to cost, not "woke."

Why is he doing this? To pwn the libs? In return for payoffs from hydrocarbon companies? However, if you're Ford or GM, do you really want to fall behind the rest of the world as they spring towards more hybrids and EVs? 

We also have the baffling (but not baffling) decision to simply not review the efficacy of mRNA flu vaccines. This is RFK, Jr's war on vaccines that everyone with half a brain saw coming. The US already takes longer than Europe to approve new drugs and treatments. Now, we have a really promising new form of vaccine and it's being killed to placate the roughly 20% of Americans who are skeptical of vaccines, a 20% that resides overwhelmingly now in the Republican Party.

Europe will no doubt plow ahead with medical advances, but the US is ceding that ground and it has been the US that has usually been at the forefront of medical breakthroughs, which is really the only possible defense for our expensive health care system. Our medical care costs too much in order to fund medical research and treatments. Now, we are destroying that, too. 

All of this is just an inconceivably stupid catering to unbelievably stupid people. 

Providing Democrats win in November, businesses will have to evaluate what the end of Trump and Trumpism might mean for them. I can't imagine the executive that will greenlight a coal burning power plant, knowing that it will never be profitable and won't even come online before Trump is out of office. Hopefully, medical research will simply relocate overseas so that science can progress during our sojourn in the America where race science is more popular with the government than actual science. 

So much awfulness everywhere you look. 

Lethal Stupidity

 IRL friends or long time readers may know that I had a very serious case of Covid during the Delta wave. I was hospitalized, then went home, then re-hospitalized, then airlifted to Mass General, then nearly sent to the ICU before I spent three days laying prone to avoid being intubated. For whatever reason, when I got the Pfizer vaccine I did not have the typical reaction of feeling like shit for a few days as my immune system adapted. Since then, I've had a few cases that have responded well to Paxlovid, but today I got my booster because Covid sucks and because it has a serious impact on my colleagues when I'm out of work for a week.

When I went in, I had to have an "existing medical condition" in order to qualify, since I'm not 65. I guess luckily I have borderline high cholesterol, so they gave me the shot.

As we know, Florida has ended required vaccines for school children; RFK has crippled the CDC and attacked the idea of vaccines in general. All of this was, of course, predictable. RFK is a vaccine skeptic who lied to the Senate in his confirmation hearing and then did exactly what he always wanted to do: eviscerate arguably the most successful health measure in human history - rivalled only by antibiotics. 

(Let's pour one out for irony, as Florida is saying that people shouldn't have vaccine mandates because "their body, their choice" as they strip abortion rights away from people.)

This extends beyond Covid. Childhood vaccines - a literal health care miracle - will be reduced in uptake in red states like Florida. This will lead to a return in measles and many older people have declining immunity from their own childhood vaccines, so they will be vulnerable. Measles, mumps, rubella will all spread from Florida to other states as herd immunity declines. It would be just if this was simply a case of FAFO, but people who can't take vaccines or people with compromised immunity or people with reduced immunity because it's been decades since they were vaccinated are all at risk.

I'd like to believe that there will be consequences for people like RFK but the best I can hope for is that he dies of a treatable disease, because he won't face consequences in our corrupted court system.

Not Dead, But Not Well

 Trump is not dead. He appeared (late) to a press avail flanked by his minions in the Oval. Given his atypical disappearance, there was perhaps more parsing of his words and actions than usual. He was not drooling, but it was still deeply unhinged. Of course, most of his public utterances are just...nuts. He sounds like a fourth grader who was called on in class, but who didn't do the reading. The absolute blathering stupidity is just breathtaking for those with eyes to see. Trump's feral grip on his supporters and the presumption of expertise he has as a "business man" has hidden the fact that two-thirds of what he says is either false or bonkers or both.

On policy, we already have one state compact on vaccines on the Pacific Coast (and I hope soon in the Northeast). Richardson notes the fact that Courts are starting to be heard on a lot of his lawless actions and it's going poorly for Stephen Miller's plans for a fully fascist America. Epstein stuff exploded in the House today.

I try to live in a guarded hope for the future. My gut and experience tells me that there is a reckoning coming for the corruption and incompetence. I was watching the Spike Lee documentary on Hurricane Katrina, and it just feels like we are ripe for some catastrophe that will be made worse by the idiots running our government.

What seems especially clear is that Trump's diminished physically and cognitively. Maybe the media won't report on it, but it sure seems apparent to the naked eye. As that happens, it empowers people like Miller and Russell Vought. And they truly are odious creatures whose ideas are toxic. This past week suggests that Trump - whose one skill is "dominating the discourse" - could be losing that ability as he declines. 

Vaccines and MAGA World

 Yglesias looks at vaccines, especially in light of the fact that a child died of measles yesterday. I had my flu shot, but we had a terrible flu season, I coach wrestling which makes it easy to vector and sometimes a vaccine is imperfect. 

In order for vaccines to work most effectively, we need as many people as possible to take them. Vaccines - arguably the greatest advance in the history of medical science alongside antibiotics - work both by reducing your vulnerability and by preventing spread. If 95% of people are vaccinated, then a disease can't get momentum or mutate as easily.

Left unsaid in Yglesias' analysis is the fact that the anti-vax movement has now taken up residence in the political right in this country. This is part of the broader ideological sorting of certain groups. Gone are the heterodox parties of the mid-20th century, instead every single anti-government crank now has a home in the GOP. 

What's more, we can see in this antigovernmental movement a rejection of common cause. We get vaccinated to protect ourselves, but we also do it to protect others. The selfish, self-centeredness of the political right that has always been a part of their DNA was then catalyzed by the Covid measures taken to keep people alive.

Selfishness is not considered a virtue in any culture and in some it's the gravest sin. It makes sense that it would find a home in the GOP.

Dead Americans

 Yesterday, I wrote about the overt death threats that have started in Trumpistan. There will be people who are killed by political violence. Trump's pardons will exacerbate that.

There are other ways Trump will get Americans killed. The first is related to the pardons. On the one hand, when you remove the consequences for political violence - on behalf of Trump - you incentivize his worst cultists to commit more violence on his behalf. Yes, there are probably a few insurrectionists who don't want any more part of that circus. There are others who are simply violent people. Some of them will come home and commit domestic violence against those who may or may not have talked to the police.

I feel pretty certain that within the next few months, at least one of the people Trump pardoned will be arrested for a crime that is not explicitly political in nature. Democrats need to Willie Horton the shit out of that person.

We also have Trump's bizarre pardon of Ross Ulbricht, who facilitated drug trafficking. Given how Trump leveraged the fentanyl crisis to win votes, pardoning a guy who helped move drugs around seems odd. I doubt Ulbricht recreates Silk Road, but some sort of imitator will crop up, again because Trump has seemingly decided that drug dealers are OK, as long as they are white.

Finally, Paul Krugman notes that what is happening in the broad field of public health is incredibly alarming. Withdrawing from the World Health Organization is "bad" but we are going to see measles come back, notably in Red States, as national guidelines are abandoned. Kids die of measles. And this is before RFK Jr gets his weird assed claws into the national health apparatus.

Trump has clearly hit the ground running with all the Project 2025 horrors. While we have moments like the judge who ridiculed the Executive Order ending birthright citizenship, the "energy" is entirely with Trump's blitzkrieg on American institutions.

I do think that Josh Marshall is correct that these actions are going to backfire politically. I think Pete Hegseth gets confirmed by a tie-breaking vote by Vance. Then, if anything happens to the American military, his manifest incompetence gets the blame. As soon as one of those January Sixers commits a crime, Democrats need to hammer that story. The first kid who dies of measles has to get the Riley Laken Treatment.

Trump is a fucking idiot, and he's surrounded himself by evil men who know how to cater to his bloated ego to advance their own odious agenda. Things will get worse, but TRUMP IS NOT IMMUNE TO THE POLITICAL LAWS OF GRAVITY. When Americans die because he won the election, that will have consequences.

Trump's Terrible Four

 There are four terrible nominees that Trump has put forward: Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel and RFK, Jr.  The first three are the most immediately dangerous, as they will have a large voice in national security matters at a time of international unrest.

That doesn't mean that RFK isn't really dangerous, too.

Yes, But Also...What?

 Yglesias has published his blueprint for Democrats coming off the 2024 loss. He is then elaborating on his points and today he looked at the crime and public disorder issue.

In some ways, this issue really is a perfect distillation of the headwinds facing Democratic politicians. Crime has fallen under the Biden administration after a Covid related spike (more on that in a bit). Democrats did not embrace "defund the police" and they have made a good faith effort to balance public order with civil and legal rights. 

However, the "vibes" around crime and disorder (which I think Yglesias helpfully uncouples a bit) were bad. If you want a party that's "tough on crime" you elect Republicans, even though their standard bearer is a convicted felon. The reason is that Republican crimes take place in the C-Suite and Wall Street, which impose a hidden cost on America, as opposed to having homeless people on the street and drug stores locking up their wares. Democrats err on the side of civil liberties, while Republicans rely on the opacity of financial crimes to shield their "constituents". This is leaving aside the numerous alleged instances of sexual assault committed by Trump and his Cabinet nominees.

The idea of "Back the Blue" where it comes to Blue States improving their daily governance would be part of this solution. When we visited Portland, we certainly saw the homeless issue, but it's just such a normal part of urban life today that it hardly seemed as bad as the people who live three hours east of Portland imagine that it is. 

Homelessness is the central issue of public order that cities struggle with. Yglesias actually never really talks about that, but it strikes me that if you were reduce the number of homeless by 50% the overall sense of public order would increase by leaps and bounds. It is also true that there is a segment of progressive politics that seems to prioritize calling them "people experiencing houselessness" rather than ameliorating both the misery of the homeless and the degradation of public spaces that follows. 

There is no direct policy solution for murder or rape, crimes that are too common yet not regular occurrences in people's lives. Homeless policy - some combination of voluntary and coercive assistance - would have an immediate impact. Not addressing that has proven to be political malpractice.

There is - and I can only shout this so many times - a huge gaping hole in Yglesias' argument: Covid.

The underreported story of 2021-2024 has been how we emerged from the acute crisis of Covid into a fractured, fractious world of politicized public health, denigration of experts, and most importantly an unexplored and underappreciated state of trauma from those years.

March 2020 was intensely scary and disorienting. We were sequestered in our homes, hoping that we left our groceries outside long enough to kill whatever germs threatened to enter our homes. We were denied the segmentation of our lives into "work" and "home" while our children were stripped of their schooling. This isn't an argument about policy, which did the best it could. It's the fact that all the old rules and norms - rules and norms that Trump had already eroded - seemed moot. Throw in the George Floyd movement and a "rules-based" society seemed obsolete.

That moment was a period when some of us were following myriad rules about masking and distancing and struggling to make a normal world in an abnormal time. Meanwhile, people started drag racing on the nearly empty interstates. Police pulled back from the streets in the face of protests to let people see what "defund the police" might look like. For one set of Americans, rules were for suckers. For another, they were tyranny. 

We are about to enter a smorgasbord of corruption under Trump. He is going to sell government functions like his shitty gold sneakers. What's more, I think the idea that Republicans are soft on White Collar Crime is the sort of "brand" that people instinctively understand, in the same way they brand the Democrats as coddling petty crime. 

So, my response to Yglesias' road map on public disorder would be for Democratic cities to directly address homelessness to alleviate the sense of overall disorder. Meanwhile, national Dems need to hammer and hammer and hammer on the coming instances of corruption. The most inexplicable aspect of Trump's appeal is the idea that he's a "fighter" for the working class. Democrats need to destroy that brand by pointing out Trump's Cabinet of Broligarchs and Billionaires. When the coming Crypto Bubble explodes, they can lay the economic catastrophe at the GOP's feet. 

How Trump's Lying Made Him President

 There are going to be a LOT of Hot Takes about why Trump was re-elected after losing four years ago. The simplest explanation - it was the inflation - has a lot of merit to it. We are seeing incumbent parties around the world get smoked in elections since Covid. I honestly think that if Covid had burst forth in the spring of 2019 rather than the spring of 2020, Harris would've won. People forget that he presided over a shitshow of a response and therefore give him a pass on a catastrophic aspect of his presidency.

I also think that his incessant lying actually helps him.

For normie libs like me, lying is bad. It show low character.

For low information voters, "all politicians lie" so they don't register it as such. This - I think - is how you get the wide discrepancies between support for Trump and support for protecting abortion in ballot measures. Trump was the instrument to overturn Roe and has bragged about it, but now he lies about it and there are actual voters who think he will protect abortion rights.

There read on him is that he's a libertine and wouldn't ban access to abortion. And he might not! Who the fuck knows?

It also gets you this.

In Michigan, Trump currently has 2,795,917 votes. Harris has 2,714,167

In the Michigan Senate race, Mike Rogers (R) has 2,672,303; Slotkin has 2,690,332.

You actually see more third party votes at the Senate level than the presidential. Add all the votes up and you have about 80,000 votes for president that don't vote for the Senate at all. There's an almost 100,000 vote gap between Trump and Rogers, as opposed to the 25,000 vote gap between Harris and Slotkin.

I think the past eight years has made a compelling case that Trump is sui generis. He's unique - for whatever reason that might be unfathomable - in that those normal rules don't apply to him. He's getting votes that normal Republicans won't. 

And I think that is linked to the fact that exactly those sort of Trump voters simply don't take his words at face value.

Now that he's won, he's dusting off Agenda 2025, which many of his voters will be surprised to discover what they have voted for. I fear that we won't flip the House, which could be disastrous for things like the Affordable Care Act. He's going to loose RFK, Jr on public health and Elon Musk on the federal bureaucracy. He told us he would, and those with ears to hear and eyes to see believed him. 

Many of his voters didn't, and we will all live with the consequences. Well, those of us who survive.

Counting The Dead

 Paul Campos links to an Economist study of excess deaths during Covid. Excess deaths are the spike away from the "normal" number of deaths in a given population in a given time period. If an elderly person dies of Covid at home, they might not show up as a Covid statistic, but their death was still caused by Covid. Similarly, if they had a heart attack but couldn't access health care, because ERs were overwhelmed...same difference. 

The basic idea was that during Covid public health officials were either overwhelmed or forbidden from keeping accurate tallies of the dead. The US, despite efforts by people like Ron DeSantis to screw with the numbers, actually kept reasonably accurate tallies of the Covid dead. The official death toll was 1,170,000 (consider that number for a moment), when the the "excess death number" was 1,400,000. 

You can look at the numbers in the Economist, but it's striking how some countries' numbers are just ridiculously skewed. It should come as no surprise that Russia and China lead the way with fake numbers, but India's inclusion is likely simply a lack of capacity in their public health department.

For everyone who said and still says "It's just the flu", please do me a favor and fuck off. There is no doubt that masking and distancing were incredibly traumatic, but so are a million and a half deaths. Oh, and Covid still kills about a 1,000 people a week in the US. That's a Vietnam War's worth of deaths every year.

The Unprocessed Trauma Of It All

 Josh Marshall echoes what I've been saying for a couple of years now: we, as a society, underwent a shocking series of traumas from March of 2020-January of 2021, and we have never truly processed them in a way that has allowed us to move on. The great unspoken mover of politics right now is this lingering sense of doom and trauma. Incumbent governments everywhere are unpopular; in fact, Biden is reasonably popular on the global scale. The reason this is happening in contradiction of some pretty good objective metrics is because we have never been able to process the events of the annus horribilus.

It began four years ago this month. Things shut down ominously, I will not forget driving home from Georgia down the Jersey Turnpike and it was ghostly empty at 8:30 at night. We lived in fear of every delivery, every chance encounter. They were stacking bodies like cordwood in New York. 

Then we had the eruption of anger over George Floyd, which folded into the simmering anger over Trump's rank unfitness for office and the blind devotion of his cult. I remember getting a text from a wrestler who asked if anything ever got better. 

Then, of course, there was January 6th, an event whose only closest predecessor was secession in 1860. When Trump was not convicted in his second impeachment, we were faced with the very real possibility that we would be faced with the exact situation we are faced with today: a Trump re-election with dire consequences for America and the world.

Since then, we also had the Delta and Omicron waves. The Delta wave nearly killed me and during the Omicron wave, we made the decision to keep the school open without testing, risking the lives of the faculty in the process. The entire period from March of 2020 through roughly January of 2022 was a period that alternated between fear and anger. That's almost two years of living through a prism of trauma.

If the Biden team are not working to tie the worst of the pandemic to Trump, they are guilty of malpractice. However, the problem runs deeper, because Biden was president during the second half of the pandemic - the half where people began to resent the precautions being taken and the inflationary costs of the pandemic and then the war.

When it comes to inflation, there is no scenario where Trump becomes president and makes inflation better. His preferred policies - tariffs and deportations combined with deficit funded tax cuts - will increase inflation. This should not be a controversial opinion; it's economic fact. However, no one really cares about facts. Some of this is the pervasive effort of Republicans and Trump to destroy the idea of objective truth, but it's also a byproduct of the balkanized media landscape of social media.

I've struggled to understand why young people are so incredibly outraged by events in Gaza. It's not that events in Gaza aren't outrageous; they are. But why do they care? There are worse events happening right now in Myanmar and there are comparable events happening all the time in Africa. Haiti is on fire. This sort of human horror show happens all the time. Why Gaza?

Some of it is that anti-American elements in Russia, China, Iran and Iran's proxies see a perfect opportunity to exploit this very real tragedy to create a new fissure in America's culture wars. That wouldn't work, though, if there wasn't a real sense of displaced anger among America's youth that has no place to land. 

The fact that the Biden Administration is doing more than any other administration ever by a country mile on climate and pollution is objectively true. The vibes of climate doomerism are real, though.

If the vibes change, I think Biden wins Texas, Florida and North Carolina. If they don't, America could see a dictatorial strongman seize power - or not depending on distressingly thin margins.

Finding a peace solution in Gaza will only go so far to bring young voter back into Biden's column. I just don't know what else will.

UPDATE: I forgot about everyone freaking out about crime. Crime absolutely spiked and it has absolutely declined and we only feel the increase.

What's Covid Been Up To?

 I woke up with a scratchy throat and a cough, which pre-2020 would've been just another late November day. Ya get colds! Whaddya gonna do 'bout it?

However, Covid is still out there and still lethal - albeit in much reduced numbers. Balloon Juice's Anne Laurie puts together a weekly update. The CDC keeps reporting data, too. The reality is that Covid is still killing about 1,000 a week. That's striking for two reasons. The first is that red states are almost certainly fudging their numbers for the stupidest possible reason: To pwn the libtards. The second is that we have a new 9/11's worth of deaths every three weeks and no one gives a shit.

Every respiratory virus explodes during this time of year. It's the nature of how cold weather impacts our nasal membranes and the retreat indoors. Covid is now endemic as opposed to a pandemic, so it's around and killing people. Given the politicization of vaccines, let's hope the viral wrath falls heaviest on those who militantly refuse to get vaccinated, because they are not only risking their own lives but speeding the spread of the virus in general. 

Since January 2021, the gap between Republicans and Democrats has grown, as Republicans have decided that vaccines are a deep state conspiracy. Be a shame if instant Darwin made a visit to those whose cultish devotion to freedumb risked all our lives.

At any rate, one has to wonder about the electoral impact of Covid. We've seen Democrats outperform expectations since 2020, and I do believe that 1/6 and Dobbs is driving that. However, is there a demographic event under the surface where older Republicans are dying of Covid at a disproportionate rate?

NPIs

 Nothing brings out Bad Yglesias more than Covid Hot Takes. The fact that he's channeling Nate Silver, himself a fountain of Covid Hot Takes, isn't a promising start. His argument seems to be that things like masking and social distancing didn't work, but his argument is muddled, because he often points out that they did work. As he notes, the bans on large gatherings was a good idea, but we had a mess of rules and enforcement for things like masks and dining.

Then he says, and this is his hobby horse, that school closings were bad. How much of this is because he has a school age kid...I don't know. But the argument that banning large indoor gatherings was good, but schools should have been open is nonsensical. 

When we opened in the fall of 2020, it was with a LOT of trepidation and precautions. As a boarding school, we could effectively isolate large parts of the population - the boarders. We created "pods" of kids who could be together and we tested every person on campus every week. Many students were remote, as we had to teach in hybrid classes. Now, the broad point that this was "bad schooling" does, I think, hold water. We continue to see gaps and lags in student learning, especially incoming students. So even with a hybrid system, we saw learning loss. 

The solution to this was not to open schools, but to build into schooling an additional year for Generation Covid. Some students could navigate independent learning better than others, and maybe they wouldn't need or want that additional year, but you can't argue that banning large gatherings is good...and then argue for packing students into classrooms. Sure, the students would likely be fine if Covid broke out among them, but they would bring the disease home and the teachers would get sick. A lot of teachers are older, frankly, in many public schools. 

So, banning large gatherings is good to save lives, but lets reopen schools and if some teachers die, well...whatever.

Trauma Nation

 I've been saying that we have never really gotten over the trauma of Covid. This piece really lays it all out. Please read it, as it's better than any superficial analysis I could offer.

A taste:    

These recent large-scale hurts magnify one another because they are so tightly grouped together; they are especially deep because we have come to understand every single one of them as a betrayal: It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The government was supposed to work. The planet shouldn’t turn on us. We are a democracy with an orderly and peaceful transition of power. Children should not be shot at school.

Admittedly, these promises have only spotty integrity over the centuries (some of them were never really true). Today, they are all being broken simultaneously. As we experience betrayals again and again, the breaches of trust become both more impersonal and less coherent. There is no one person to blame, but we also can’t write off our tragedy to a twist of fate. What we have been through couldn’t have happened to just anyone. We cannot exactly follow the chain of causation to a single intelligible event, and yet there is nothing about our experience that’s an accident.

I'm OK, So Everything Is Normal

 I enjoy when Yglesias pushes back against conventional wisdom in some instances. I think it's helpful to read contrarian voices to challenge what you believe. However, he can be almost willfully blind to the actual realities of the contemporary GOP, and this is not unique to him. Most pundits are pretty comfortable financially and socially. They live in major cities, with all the issues and privileges that accrue to that, and they probably aren't worried about things like abortion rights.

Anyway, Yglesias makes the case for why Ron DeSantis "seems to have stalled". It's kind of willfully obtuse. His argument is that DeSantis was briefly popular because he was very Covid skeptical and that aligned with the GOP base, and now that Covid is gone, he's not as popular.

What a load of horseshit. 

DeSantis had his little moment because Trump tried to overthrow the elected government of the United States. He tried desperately to mimic Trump's movements and political instincts - attack, attack, attack - but lacked authenticity and charisma. DeSantis is Scott Walker 2.0. He is a fairly repellent human being with the charm of wet laundry.

What Yglesias consistently does is apply his lens to GOP voters. He fancies himself a rational, objective guy (he is, in fact, a walking bundle of his prior convictions) and therefore assumes that GOP voters are as well. There is a frame in economics and political science of the Rational Actor that presumes that everyone acts in their perceived reasoned self-interest. The behavior of GOP voters who seem to vote against their self-interest puzzles them, but they just assume it's a glitch.

To assume that GOP voters are choosing candidates based on a reasoned evaluation of competing policies is to ignore that political devolution of the Republican Party this century. The fact that the GOP did not have a party platform in 2020 is sense a quirk and not a feature of GOP politics. Trump is an aberration and not - as he truly is - the natural endpoint of a party that has become a creature of Fox News Grievance.

DeSantis' boomlet was caused by his anti-Covid Safety politics. Yglesias is puzzled why Covid amelioration measures became a partisan issue, which gives away the game. Anyone to the left of Trump felt that it was in our personal and national interest to save as many lives as possible by using NPIs and vaccines to fight the virus. Precisely because people on the left took the stance of masking, distancing and vaccinating,  the right opposed it. It's that simple and that stupid. Even as Republicans began dying in disproportionate numbers because of their refusal to take countermeasures to Covid, they clung to harmful beliefs that flew in the face of all evidence.

Trump has been mildly hurt by boasting about his vaccination record, which was arguably the one good thing he did as president. Even Trump himself cannot escape Cleek's Law.

So, if we understand that the base GOP voter is simply reacting against the cultural and political Left, then policy doesn't really matter. The obvious craving for a dictatorial strong man by vast portions of the Right is about vanquishing their enemies rather than any real concrete goal. If a policy helps "pwn the libtards" then it is good, even if it hurts them, too.

DeSantis spiked by attacking the current bugaboos of the Right - teaching actual American history, letting LGBT people exist, Disney, education as a public good - not because he had any real hold on their loyalties.

As quite a few people have noted, Trump's legal troubles have helped him with the GOP base. He's committed multiple crimes (ok, allegedly, but he's plead guilty to others).  He is manifestly unsuited by temperament, ability or experience to be president. That does not matter! In fact, the more he's placed in legal jeopardy, the more his poll numbers rise with the GOP base.

To embrace Cleek's Law is to abandon the bothsides frame of a certain class of punditry. After Trump was elected, the NY Times went on numerous Cleetus Safaris to Ohio Diners to try and understand the average Trump voters' position on capital gains tax cuts.

They haven't learned a goddamned thing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Covid Denialism

 I mean, why not? We have people denying that Trump lost, that tax cuts cause deficits, that the earth is round...so why not deny that Covid was really "that bad"?

It seems roughly 1,300,000 more Americans died during the pandemic. Whether they died precisely from Covid isn't really the point. The pandemic was an event that impacted overall public health in ways that were deadlier than all other wars America ever fought. 

What I really can't understand is how motivated reasoning - which I admit is a very powerful force - could be so strong that it requires people to deny that Covid was really, really bad. Why, exactly, are they motivated to deny it?