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anthonybialy · 4 years

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Kabuki Quarantine

The government needs to keep you from living to keep you alive. Sickness is nothing new. Histrionic overreach is their only specialty. Mid-level elected executives turned broad suffering into specific interdictions about unrelated matters. Hassling maskless restaurant patrons brings to mind pointlessly invasive September 11 measures that haven't made us safe since. Confiscating liberty can only get worse if there are no marginal benefits.

Panic always motivates rational responses, so be sure to get wound up about the news. Those interfering with your business for your own good always use a totally calm counterpoint, which is that opponents of being bothered by law are demons wearing human skins who want everyone to croak. The claim is even more risible when made by those who tried to make nursing homes fun by letting everyone share a lethal disease.

We can move without fear through the sky thanks to an unwieldy legalized harassment squad staffed with the nation's ruder high school dropouts and convicted felons. You feel safer in the clouds, right?

TSA set the precedent for bothering Americans as a reply to horror. Pat the heads of anyone claiming security theater has prevented any terror measures. Then pat the bathing suit area, because they tacitly admitted they like it. To be fair, people who are useless even by federal standards have stopped plenty of travelers from making flights. It's easier to harass the innocent than terrorists, if not quite practical.

If al-Qaeda wanted flyers to remove shoes, they won. Hopeful passengers are still wandering aimlessly around security checkpoints protected from hideous floors with nothing but socks almost 19 years after that vile dastard tried to light his footwear fuse. And the liquid bomb plot was in 2006 if you wonder why you can't bring a Dr Pepper aboard in 2020. Tales of carrying liquids on flights are legends at this point. Those out to attack surely haven't attempted to devise new methods to inflict atrocities. But being kept thirsty surely makes air travel safe.

Security professionals couldn't spend a few seconds talking to passengers. Those obsessed with tolerant equality to the point of risking everyone's lives are focused on implements instead of humans with nefarious intentions, which for the record is also why gun control doesn't work. It's simply uncanny how the same principles apply to different issues. Similarly, bandana fetishists refuse to acknowledge common sense can do more to defeat an epidemic than mandatory cotton facial application.

Concerned people have done more than any bossy order to stop the contagion. Common sense is the best protection, which is why fans of big government think we're stuck with getting infected forever. Those who totally trust their fellow humans think simple wisdom must be mandated. Overreaching has created economic and human depression, but it's crucial to build counterproductive dependence.

There's little hope of order when forces of chaos get to impose their wills. Governments are reactive by nature, as they have to see what damage they inflict before they announce how to fix it. Residents who had dwellings ransacked are trying to rebuild after a toddler tornado, with the difference being legal adults don't have the excuse of being two years into life and experiencing the energy jolt provided by consuming handfuls of Sour Patch Kids for the first time. Anyone tasked with cleaning up after the immature can only attempt to repair some of the damage's effects. I'm sorry about your coffee table.

Capricious restrictions in the face of contagious disease are the opposite of scientific. I hope the illness is prevented by superstition, as the only other method currently being deployed as a bulwark is sanctimony. Call your birthday party a rally against injustice to keep Democratic governors from ordering dispersal.

Faith will protect you, according to our present understanding of epidemiology. Chant about six feet while wearing a ceremonial mask to maintain health. The only way to stay safer is to attend a protest enchanted against infection. Your cause just has to reach a certain level of righteousness, like wanting to replace cops with social workers.

Capricious orders are the most caring, as they mean benevolent saviors sense troubles unenlightened commoners don't. Being told what to do only seems like a random burden to the benighted.

Those who don't grasp how good they have it with their lives limited think they're being held back by governors who don't understand politics. Surely, office-fillers grasp the subtle scientific complexities involved in spreading illness. Political science majors who became lawyers are renowned for knowing how experiments work.

If you're already feeling sick, knowing we could've been done with this stupid illness might not make you feel better. People could have coped as it passed and immunity built while washing our hands and sticking grandma in a John Travolta bubble. But then we wouldn't have shut down the fundamental aspects of society for months.

The era for speciousness will always feature claims of unilaterally shutting down interactions prevented life from turning into a zombie movie. Sagacious elected prophets kept you safe by ruining your life, and you won't even build statues. You're so ungrateful just because you noticed all this ruin didn't even help. The same people don't think more cops prevent crime from happening in the first place need you to stay in solitary confinement just until life has no more problems.

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10oclockdot · 7 years

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10 More Times I Spun the Ol' Wheels of Thought

1. Gaming is puppetry.

2a. Donald Trump was the biggest liar in the room (Politifact confirmed, we recall), so he called Ted Cruz "Lyin' Ted" so that no one could call him Lyin' Trump. Donald Trump was the crookedest person in the room, so he called Hillary Clinton "Crooked Hillary" so that no one could call him Crooked Donnie. Has there always been this much projection in our politics? Has each side always impugned the other side with their own worst fault? Maybe all this time that Democrats have been telling white working-class Republican voters that they were voting against their interests, we were disavowing the fact that increasingly the Democratic party was also ignoring white working-class interests.

2b. Throughout the entire election cycle, popular wisdom held that Donald Trump's takeover of the Republican party signaled that the GOP was in ruinous disarray. This was the thing liberals got most wrong, because really, it was the Left that was in disarray. The Republican party successfully rebranded itself without losing very many of its constituents. Meanwhile, it was the Left that lost all its key elections. It was the Left that nominated a pro-war pro-Wall-Street neo-liberal. It was the Left that, over the course of a couple decades, completely abandoned its once-time blue-collar base. It was the Left that ended up alienating its rural voters by stereotyping them as backward, sexist, racist, homophobic gun nuts, rather than working collaboratively with them to get them on board with the intersectional causes of social justice. And it's the Left that doesn't really have a coherent agenda going forward to reclaim the voters it lost. After all, fighting poverty ought to be the central tentpole of any social justice agenda, and yet Democrats never seem to talk about white poverty. To be sure, rural America bears some of the responsibility to educate itself about structural prejudice and microaggressions and purge itself of xenophobia, Islamophobia, homophobia, racism, and such, BUT I think it's reasonable to say that the Left must stand in solidarity with rural America before we can expect rural America to stand in solidarity with other Leftist causes.

3. I used to think that I could measure the rectitude of a given ideological framework by examining its limits or margins. I believed that if there were sexist Christians (and there are, to be sure), that invalidated the whole of Christianity. I believed that, at its heart, there were no good Christians, because churches bred or maintained or at least turned a blind eye toward patriarchy. But now I'm beginning to think that no ideology, no matter how radical, centrist, or conservative, is very good at policing its own margins. It appears that there are plenty of terrible people under the big tent of the left. There are plenty of people who call themselves feminists who are nevertheless racist or pro-capitalist or cultural appropriators or trans-exclusionary or anti-science or anti-logic or what-have-you. Not to mention that human beings are, en masse, liars, hypocrites, manipulative, self-serving, and prone to mental laziness. How, then, do we honestly judge a social movement? By what statistical method can we control for the ignoble outliers in every movement, so that we hold ourselves to the same fair standards to which we hold others?

4. In the age of the internet, we model the distribution of knowledge in terms of the network or the viral outbreak. Through these models and metaphors, we track trends on twitter, shares of videos, and reblogs of posts. We can map the spread of an idea. What would happen if we applied this kind of model retroactively to earlier times in history? Could we map the network of papal proclaimation spreading from Rome to local Catholic parishes? What was the rate at which scientific discoveries traveled from the Arab world back to Europe in the middle ages? What was the "bandwidth" of the silk road? Did the know-how of the bronze age or the iron age spread quickly or slowly? What carried this knowledge and why?

5. As the resources on the planet dwindle, the markets for stamp collecting, wine collecting, art collecting, antique collecting, et al continue to prosper, and the value of the rarest and most prized objects within these markets continues to increase. Why so? I argue that it's because as there's less land and gold and other natural resources for each wealthy person to own, the market must imbue other objects with value. Consider the raw material value of the paper, glue, and ink in an album of very valuable stamps. It's minimal. But what majestic alchemy that market forces in the modern and post-modern era have imbued such worthless scraps with such enormous social value! Never has it been possible to own so much social value in so little matter.

6. Don't tell me that El Chapo's cartel functions like a corporation unless you're also willing to say that corporations function like El Chapo's cartel. Capitalism functions the same whether the market is legal or illegal.

7a. I would be much more interested in moral philosophy if its sole aim were to determine WHY we make the intuitive moral judgments that we make, rather than to propose some code of moral behavior. I'm not interested in any moral philosopher who comes up with a set of reasons for pulling or not pulling the lever in the trolley problem. I'm interested in whoever could tell me WHY I'm more likely to pull the lever than to push the large man. What calculations is my brain doing? What's it weighing? Where did this moral architecture come from? What was its adaptive advantage? What ancient ancestral dilemmas gave it its strongest leanings? If our brains' snap moral judgments don't have much to do with utilitarian mathematics, what DO they rely on? Are our intuitions outmoded for our present way of life? If so, which ones? Do some which don't comport perfectly with cold logic nevertheless retain an adaptive advantage?

7b. Because if we could figure this out, we'd be able to understand our politics VASTLY better than we do now. Some time ago, I wrote a post on the justice or injustice of the way Henrietta Lacks and her descendants were treated (here). I came to the conclusion that ultimately our moral judgments all come back to one thing: poverty is wrong. Full stop. I don't think that anyone feels, deep down, that poverty is a good thing. People might think it's natural or to be expected or necessary or deserved or whatever, but no one, deep down, considers it good. BUT, poverty is everywhere. SO: if poverty is wrong, BUT it's everywhere, the brain has to do some complex gymnastics to account for that. Perhaps the individual decides that poverty is usually the result of sin or some bad choice, and thus poverty is merited and deserved. Perhaps the individual decides that poverty is the result of greed, and thus that greed must be combatted so that resources may be distributed more equitably. Perhaps the individual decides that poverty is structurally necessary for the economy to function (since it provides an incentive to work?), and therefore any attempt to eliminate it would be disastrous. Maybe we say they're lazy. Maybe we say that they live in a "backwards" culture that doesn't know any better. Maybe we tell ourselves it doesn't matter because they live far away. Maybe we point out that even if we gave all of our income away, poverty would continue, so we're powerless to stop it. Maybe we blame poverty on a desert (they should move!). Maybe we blame the number of kids they have (too many mouths to feed!). And so on. By giving poverty a cover story (a myth), we give it a reason for being. And thus we make poverty reason-able to ourselves.

7c. I suggest that because our inborn aversion to poverty so powerfully and diametrically conflicts with the realities of poverty, that we have built up a whole superstructure of religions, philosophers, storytellers, and pundits and grown them over millennia to justify poverty to us. We do not spend so much time rationalizing or explaining away poverty because we believe, deep down, that poverty is acceptable. We do it because deep down we know that we know that we know for certain that poverty is terrible, and thus our justifications for it must be powerful and constantly repeated. "Everybody's giving a reason why all these people are in poverty, therefore poverty seems reasonable, therefore I guess it isn't that big of a moral ill." (By the way, what other areas of the status quo have we constructed vast industries to rationalize? Rather than spend the same energy to change them?)

7d. Perhaps, deep down, all of our complex moral judgments boil down to very basic innate brain chemistry. Poverty = bad, death = bad, hurt = bad. Stuff like that. But now, thrust into the emergent complexity of the world around us, grappling with our vast knowledge of this world, of having regular and precise news of stuff happening at every point on the planet (historically amazing and pretty new for our species), we have to come up with a constant stream of justifications and rationalizations to keep the bad-alarms from going off in our brains constantly, all the time. And because these ideological prostheses of justification are so numerous and so elaborate, we think that THOSE are moral philosophy. But I think moral philosophy should concern itself instead with the question of why do we feel the NEED to come up with these incredibly complex systems of "that's ok, that's not ok, that's sometimes ok but only if...".

8. The harder we are to impress, the easier we are to oppress.

9. Dear Trump cabinet: It's becoming clear that he chose nearly all of you to function as his useful idiots. He selected you precisely for your lack of education, your dearth of relevant qualifications, and your almost-certain incompetence to fix complex 21st-century problems. He chose you because he wants to be able to think he's the smartest guy in the room. And the 1% always profits when the government is weak and inattentive to the needs of the 99%. Trump isn't your teammate. He forces you to embarrass yourself to prove your loyalty to him, but he has no loyalty to you. He's setting you up for failure and he's ready to blame you for everything. He probably laughs at you behind his back. He hopes you'll never realize what contempt he has for you. But there's hope. Because one day you'll figure it out. And when you do, America's best scientific and political minds will be waiting, secretly, in the wings, to help you take him down.

10. Dear Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: Just because Nixon won the presidency doesn't mean you have to give Best Picture to Oliver!.

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c-matthews1 · 3 years

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Corrupted Politics.

When we journalists write about politics, we tend to focus on the rational. In our efforts to help readers understand current events, we strive to explain the calculus of power: who has it, who wants it, how it is acquired and maintained. In the process, we usually try to avoid too much outright moralizing, because that might make us look sentimental or subjective.

But there are times when our cautious political vocabulary fails us — and now is one of those times. We are experiencing a moment when many events can be described only with the word “evil.”

In a recent interview, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad boasted that he had reached a “major understanding” with Arab countries that have treated him as an outcast due to his brutal prosecution of his country’s seven-year civil war. The war has killed some half a million of his compatriots and turned millions of others into refugees. Yet now Assad is preparing to celebrate “victory.” He remains in power — though his country lies in ruins around him and most of his fellow Syrians are homeless, traumatized, lost. Evil is arrogant.

A young Bulgarian journalist has been raped and murdered. We don’t yet know who committed this crime, but we can be sure that Viktoria Marinova’s investigations into corruption had something to do with it. Her country is plagued by organized-crime groups, so it’s likely her killers will never face justice. Evil rejoices in impunity.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to two campaigners against sexual violence, Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege. Murad, a Yazidi from northern Iraq, is a campaigner for survivors of sexual slavery at the hands of the Islamic State, that fanatical jihadist group that considers its work so sacred that no atrocity is beneath it. (She is a survivor herself.) Mukwege treated women victimized by marauding militias in eastern Congo, a part of the world that has endured decades of ferocious conflict fueled by the lure of lucrative natural resources. Evil loves chaos.

It may be that I am especially sensitive to such stories right now because of the sickening news about my Post colleague Jamal Khashoggi, a leading Saudi journalist who disappeared last week after visiting his country’s consulate in Istanbul. Though his fate remains unclear, informed sources are saying he has been killed. We can only hope it isn’t so.

Opinion | Jamal Khashoggi is gone, but The Post will not let this go

Columnist David Ignatius and editor Karen Attiah remember Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)

But we do know why his government doesn’t like him: because he has told the truth. He has been a sharp critic of the Saudi regime and its ruthless treatment of the country’s citizens. He has been especially outspoken about Riyadh’s leading role in the war in Yemen, which has taken tens of thousands of lives and left millions at risk of starvation.

Genocide in Myanmar. Russia’s war on Ukraine. China’s ethnic cleansing of the Uighurs. The shocking rise of political movements that openly vilify minorities and migrants.

What is striking about all of these horrors is the shamelessness of the perpetrators. Evil has always existed (and always will), but rarely have the bigots, the thugs and the warmongers so brazenly advertised their sins. Vladimir Putin’s government positively rejoices over the murder of its opponents. A Brazilian presidential candidate and the Philippine president make jokes about rape.

I’m not sure I understand all the reasons for this outpouring of depraved behavior. Social media, which has unleashed many of our hitherto closeted demons, clearly serves as an accelerant. (Consider Facebook’s rolein whipping up animosity against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar.) A worldwide revolt against established elites — part slow-motion response to the 2008 financial crisis, part discontent with the inequities of globalization — has engendered a politics of rage that loosens the norms of good behavior. International networks of corruption are eroding democratic institutions. Western governments — above all, the Trump administration — show little inclination to call out human rights violations or to push back against the despots. And the strongmen appreciate the favor.

The United States, of course, is not immune. A few years ago, members of the so-called alt-right wouldn’t have dared to show their faces in public; now they’re empowered by an increasingly assertive culture of white-nationalist grievance, stoked by President Trump’s racist dog whistles. As I write this, misogynistic trolls — egged on by the president — are working overtime to destroy the life of Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who was brave enough to make a public statement about a trauma in her past. Meanwhile, children as young as 2, separated from their migrant or asylum-seeking parents by the U.S. government, are facing immigration courts on their own. And, of course, the president’s cheerleading for authoritarian regimes around the world — particularly North Korea, the vilest of them all — signals to the dictators that they can get away with anything as long as they participate in a helpful photo op.

Evil, contrary to popular belief, is never straightforward. Perhaps the hardest part about confronting evil is its complexity. There is a potential for evil in everyone, and even the most bloodthirsty dictators retain some semblance of humanity. This is precisely why we cannot rely solely on others — courts, political representatives, diplomats, international organizations — to fight back for us. Each of us must take a stand. Each of us must do what we can to act against the evil that we see around us — now more than ever.

C. Matthews

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