Radio Silence

 I'll be travelling and unlikely to post much.

Enjoy Biden's America.

Is This It For America?

 When I read stories like this, I wonder if we have reached the end of the American democratic experiment, as such. We have a sizable portion of the population that is simply batshit insane, and there is no other way to describe them. They are unmoored from reality.

The thing is, that's nothing new. We have had the Klan running state governments. We have had John Birchers and Branch Davidians and militias before. The bombing of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City is still historically fresh. 

I do wonder if the new interconnectivity of the Internet age has acted as a force multiplier for the craziness. I read an article where someone in Upstate NY was getting death threats from Louisiana, because he had a mask mandate in his business or some nonsense. Basically, someone does something like have a mask mandate, it get picked up by a local crazy person and then it becomes an underground cause celebre in the Fever Swamps. I doubt very much that these Internet Tough Guys ever actually do anything, but I can also see a spiraling set of violent acts that makes it impossible to live with this crazy fuckers any more. 

As the piece above notes, there's a certain fervent craziness in the bluest states. It's there that evangelical, racist white people feel legitimately under threat. I think it dawned on them first that they are no longer a majority in this country. If we do see a descent into violence, how do we separate out the violently insane from the conservative who has simply soaked too long in the nightmarish swamps of Fox, OANN and NewsMax? 

I would frankly love it, at this point, if they all decided to move to the Idaho or Wyoming and declare independence. Good riddance. 

Crime Is The Left's Blindspot

 Yglesias takes on what comes next in the "defund" debate that is largely over. One of his most salient points is a larger point about "Black Lives Matter" that is largely ignored by those who focus on the very real issue of police brutality: the absence of prosecution when it comes to crimes against Black people.

It's too early to tell if the current reversal of violent crime numbers is a glitch or a trend, but it's not too early to think about how to craft better police policy that would address either option. One of the most underrated causes of the conservative resurgence from 1970-1990 were public perceptions about crime.

Here's where the Left - especially the Far Left - loses the thread. If you're a self-styled revolutionary who wants to abolish capitalism, you're blind to the fact that most people work hard to provide as comfortable a life for themselves and their family as they can. They want all of that protected. Any perception that crime is spiking will increase their support for people like Trump who blather on about American Carnage. 

Defund the Police was always a terrible slogan, because it did not say what it seemed to say, which is police abolition - though there were absolutely those who believed in police abolition. All of that got wrapped up in the idea of getting rid of the police, which I believe led to some of Trump's surprise strong showing among Black and Latino men. 

America needs to rethink how we do policing. And we absolutely need a counterweight to police authority. We need an independent panel in the DOJ who can investigate police brutality. District Attorneys are not the right people to do that. 

We also need to create the various entities that reform activists wanted: crisis social workers, community based policing, more body cameras. 

And we will need to pay police more so that we get better police. I'm not sure why that's complicated, but it is. 

Trolling Or Threatening

 When you read these stories, your first thought is how far gone a certain segment of our polity is. While Trump was more symptom than cause of the Rightist Rot in America, he certainly has normalized a sort of violent rhetoric that was largely absent from mainstream politicians.

But I also think that most of these people are cowards and blowhards and do not represent a real threat to the people they are harassing. However, it only takes one person to act on this, and I'm afraid it's just a matter of time before someone gets killed.  Or rather get killed again.

Confusing Inputs and Outputs

 This Matthew Yglesias piece is about how the SAT is an unfortunate scapegoat in a worthy cause. I think it hits on an important point when we discuss structural racism in America. The argument goes that the SAT is racist because Black and Brown students do worse. It strikes that the actual relationship is that the SAT exposes the outputs of structural racism in the US. If that is true, and I think they evidence suggests that it does, then blaming the test itself is exactly the wrong lesson to take if you are trying to end the impact of racism in education. 

The advantages that college educated parents can confer on their children - when it comes to something like the SAT - are legion. Making the jump to be the first person in your family to attend college is a mammoth undertaking. We should be looking at improving those odds. Blaming the test is exactly backwards, but it allows us to say to the world, "Look, we are addressing the racism in the system!" when really, you're simply finding a new way to avoid the actual work.

This Is So Critical

 Biden is trying to undo the evisceration of the professional civil service.

Most people's unpleasant interactions with government come at the state level. So there is a reflexive anti-bureaucrat strain in American culture. But a professional bureaucracy staffed by experts is critically important in a complex modern society. For instance, critics attacked the Biden administration for not reuniting families separated at the border, but that requires a staff of professional, bilingual child welfare workers. If you want real action on climate change, you're going to need climate scientists. 

If Biden can refresh the federal bureaucracy, especially with younger people - decades of antigovernmental rhetoric has left a greying federal workforce - that would constitute a transformative (if largely invisible) moment in our national life.

What's Their Play Here?

 The House very narrowly passed a bill that would beef up Capitol security, because "the Squad" either voted against it (Ayanna Pressley, Cori Bush and Ilhan Omar) or abstained (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman). 

I get that they are strong "defund the police" people. I also get that the bill passed anyway. But what are they doing here? The Capitol Police literally saved their lives. Several of them have complained about feeling threatened by the gun-toting idiots in the GOP caucus, like Marjorie Traitor-Greene and Lauren Boebert. Who do they think is protecting them?

It's possible that leadership allowed this symbolic vote, but it just looks like shit if you're trying to paint the GOP as being unified in opposition to common sense measures surrounding January 6th. 

With friends like these...

I'm Dubious

 I believe Donald Trump will actually be indicted, when the indictment is entered and not a moment before. I very much believe he SHOULD be indicted - at the very least for tax fraud - but I'm struggling to see it happen, given the institutional pressures to not indicted a former president, no matter who that shitbag might be.

Crisis Camouflage

 Jon Chait looks at the failure of the GOP to take climate change seriously and therefore the way it imperils policy, because you don't have the usual push-pull that allows for a wider range of options. The only party offering any solutions to climate change is the Democrats and they have some less than optimal ideas, because every solution comes with tradeoffs that hurt a constituency somewhere.

In particular, he notes environmentalist opposition to nuclear power. This has struck me, too. I get that nuclear power can be catastrophic when it goes wrong, and states that prioritize cheap nuclear power are flirting with disaster, as at Chernobyl and Fukushima. However, if you are serious about de-carbonizing, you need fission reactors. Period. Yet, we see Germany taking their reactors off-line. Why?

The fact is that certain segments of any activist group are wedded to their prior assumptions and goals. An example that briefly overwhelmed rightist media was the idea that Biden will ban beef. He will not. However, animal rights activists are correct when they say that industrial farming of meat is bad for the environment. That's not REALLY why they want to ban beef; they had that position anyway. But the climate crisis is an opportunity to advance their agenda. 

John Kerry, Biden's climate czar, said that technologies don't exist yet that will dramatically help us solve climate change. Think carbon sequestration. If we had a way to pull large quantities of carbon out of the air and store it underground, that could make a huge and immediate impact. It is unlikely to solve the overall issue, but it would be hugely helpful. However, if you see in the climate crisis an opportunity to solve other issues - the malfeasance of multinational petrochemical companies, suburban sprawl, meat eating, unfair labor practices and environmental racism - then a carbon sequestration technology would undermine the urgency of your pet issue.

If you care about climate change, you should be hopeful for large scale carbon sequestration, new forms of nuclear power and/or geoengineering. If you are using the climate crisis to advance a separate agenda (part of the problem with the "Green New Deal.") then you might actively oppose the most promising route to solving the climate crisis.

So...UFOs....

 I guess they are a thing.

My basic question is that we have a technology that can somehow traverse the vast distances of space to come spy on us (presumably) but they can be captured by radar technology? If they can master space travel, why would they need to hang out in our airspace?

Which Came First, The Chickenshit Or The Yegg?

 Martin Longman makes the case that perhaps the worst part of Trump's win was that he recast the GOP in his image. Not the racism and naked greed, so much. That was always there. It was Trump's rampant and really unique disregard for objective reality. I suppose so, but that was certainly true of the Bush Administration, too. The Bushies felt they could bend reality to their will, whereas Trump's version is even less tethered to reality, but the epistemological closure was there decades ago. (And it does exist in quarters of the left, as well.) 

All politicians hedge the truth, but the party of Nixon/Watergate; Reagan and Bush/Iran Contra, Bush/WMD and Trump/gestures wildly at everything is less a sharp break than a steady decline.

The Honor System vs Immunology

 The question prompted by the CDC's surprise announcement that you don't have to wear a mask if you're fully vaccinated is "How do I know the maskless person next to me is really vaccinated?"

This misreads the statement by the CDC and the nature of emerging from the pandemic and the typically shitty way that the CDC, the WHO and other public health institutions have communicated with the public.

If you are fully vaccinated, you are basically immune from the virus. Even if you do get a "breakthrough infection" it will be mild. So, that person standing next to you without a mask might as well be masked, because you are basically immune.

The problem is not so much that I - as a fully vaccinated person - will get sick. Right now, my youngest son is a few days away from the Dos Dose, so we are about 17 days away from family unit immunity. At THAT point, I will feel pretty free to discard my mask. As it is, I feel weird about doffing the mask, because there is a social etiquette involved. If you're wearing one, I will wear one.

Once my family is fully vaccinated, we can go about without a mask and it would be roughly the same as if we were masked. That, I think, is the meaning of the CDC's new guidelines. 

However, the goal needs to be getting to 75-80% vaccination. At the moment, the most urgent populations have mostly been vaccinated, and the so-called "slowdown" has stabilized. There are various clever ways that state and local governments and private institutions are incentivizing vaccinations, but the "vaccine passport" would be the gold standard...and also something we aren't going to do. Biden is not going to expend political capital to create a massive partisan backlash over FREEDUMB!!!1!1 

Ideally, telling people that if they get fully vaccinated, they can drop the masks would dramatically incentivize getting the vaccine, but we know full well that a certain segment is simply going to drop their masks and risk spreading the disease. My hope is that the CDC and Biden Administration is looking at data that suggests that 25% simply won't get the vaccine and says, "Fuck'em." You don't need that many people vaccinated to still get to herd immunity. It really sucks for the immunocompromised who can't take the vaccine, but I guess that's just the breaks. 

Pretty much we are at a place where if you want a vaccine, you can get a vaccine. Easing the hurdles still needs to be done - mobile clinics, clinics at churches and schools - but we will get to that 75% number in June, I think, maybe July. 

So, those unvaccinated assholes who want to come cough in my face? I'm bulletproof and you're still an asshole.

Right Wing Kleptocrats Are A Real Problem

 Josh Marshall has an astute take on the ongoing violence in Israel and how it actually plays into Netanyahu's desire to hold on to power and evade criminal charges for corruption. Trump's desperate desire to stay in the White House was equal parts narcissistic wound and the knowledge that he broke a shit ton of laws. The idea of a peaceful transfer of power in Brazil, the Philippines, Hungary or Poland is remote; in Russia, it is inconceivable. 

The old structures of the Cold War are gone. Some have recast the global conflict of the post-Al Qaeda years as Liberal Democracy v Authoritarianism. More helpful would be a clear camp between corrupt kleptocrats - Putin and Trump certainly, but there are a host of others, including regimes as disparate as Venezuela's, Iran's and Netanyahu's - and countries that follow some rule of law.

That is the fundamental schism in the world in 2021. "Populism" is simply a tactic used to cover for the kleptocrats. 

Madam President

 Elizabeth Warren published a book that lays the cause of her defeat in the primaries largely at the feet of sexism. Jon Chait had a problem with it, but I think Matthew Yglesias has a better take on it. The problem is that Yglesias glosses over a critical fact: almost every female Head of Government has been a Prime Minister. (I said several times during the primary that I thought Warren would make an outstanding Prime Minister.)

In a parliamentary system, you vote for a party as much as an individual. There is usually a separate figure who serves as Head of State - either elected or hereditary - and the PM is a product of working his or her way up the professional ladder. When a voter in Birmingham or Toronto or Auckland or Berlin goes to the polls, they vote for the party they want to see running things by voting for a member of the parliament (or in some cases simply the party; in New Zealand you vote on both). This removes the personality question largely off the table. 

Presidents are elected based on some form of personal charisma. You (and I) may find Trump loathsome, but he clearly had and has a charismatic hold on people. His sneering belligerence was a selling point as much as a liability. The President is a representative of the entire nation and - among other things - Commander and Chief of the Armed Forces. There are a ton of sexist assumptions that weigh on a presidential candidate like Hillary Clinton that simply don't apply to Jacinda Arden, Teresa May or Angela Merkel. 

The general pattern of history shows that we break the color barrier before the gender barrier, but I hope we get there sooner. However, our first female president will largely be bound by the same constraints that Obama was bound by: taking care not to poison the well for future candidates. One reason Biden can be bolder than Obama is that "Old White Guy" doesn't have to worry about establishing a bad precedent for other Old White Guys. 

We currently have a female Speaker of the House. I would love for Warren to succeed Schumer as Majority Leader some day, but maybe that's Amy Klobuchar's future. The simple tautology of "we won't have a female president until we have a female president" is a reflection on how we elect people to that office and the sexist assumptions that we rely on when we do.

I don't know how much sexism cost Warren. I know Hillary Clinton won more votes than Donald Trump. I know the electoral dynamic that gave us 2016 is not solely about sexism and perhaps we should refrain from risking a loss in 2024 or 2028 until that long awaited demographic transition occurs (or the GOP gets less batshit insane). Ideally, 2028 is Harris vs Traitor-Greene and we can tease simply misogyny out of it.

I very much want to see a Madam President, but right now I fear for any Republican return to power, given the toxic, anti-democratic nature of their current beliefs. How much am I willing to risk? That question is not unreasonable nor are the underlying assumptions about how sexist biases influence the selection of president, because it is the presidency and not the prime ministership.  

It Won't Matter

 It's doubtful the current lawsuit against the NRA will lead to the abolition of the NRA. It is probable that ongoing litigation will expose the NRA as being a hopelessly corrupt set of self-dealings, back scratchings and outright graft.

It seems pretty clear Wayne LaPierre is - in addition to being a merchant of death - is just a garden variety crook and aspiring kleptocrat. The NRA existed to bilk the rubes of their rubles to perpetuate gun and ammunition sales by scaring them about the abolition of gun rights. They then used that money to buy help elect Republicans and live high on the hog. It's no different than what Trump has done, looting the bank accounts of his cultists to pay to stop things he's lying about happening.

Eventually, it boils down to this: 

-The modern "Conservative Movement" is a series of grifts, and in order to keep the grift going, you have to keep the marks scared and angry.

Lots of people point to Fox and its warped brethren at OANN and NewsMax as the problem, but they are often just the hosts for the fear-based grifting. The election of Marjorie Traitor-Greene isn't the PLAN, it's the BYPRODUCT of this approach. Once you scare the right people enough, they will do anything to make the boogeyman go away and protect themselves from American Carnage. Fox is the vessel, not the originator. It's origins trace back to Richard Viguerie and the John Birch Society newsletters. 

If you disbanded the NRA tomorrow, it would simply arise again in a different form. The gun-humping ammosexuals would demand someone come and take their money and nurture their fears. As we are seeing with the rise of OANN, Fox is not the root cause and mover of conservatism's descent into delusional madness, it's simply an amplifier for this existing phenomena. 

It would be a nice scalp to take down the NRA. It would be emotionally satisfying and maybe a small percentage of gun humpers would change their mind when they discover they were duped. Every soul turned from the Dark Side is a soul saved.

But the enduring fact is that those duped by conservatism seem to want to be duped.