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.