- Sometimes mainstream press becomes so anxious about avoiding criticism for lack of balance, reporters forget to tell the unbalanced truth. tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors takes Politico to task for a report on Obama’s fading accomplishments. tengrain’s title says it: Politico Sees The End of an Era, But Cannot Say Why It’s Ending.
- 75 years later, M. Bouffant at Web of Evil remembers the day the Thousand Year Reich ended, 988 years early.
- Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post goes after my president’s facial expressions. It’s petty but it is entertaining, at least to my very active juvenile sensibilities.
- Jonathan Bernstein looks at Trump activism in dealing with COVID-19 and sees … well … nothing. “The president still shows no sense of urgency in dealing with the pandemic, and Senate Republicans are along for the ride.”
- News Corpse kind of … well … gloats, actually, at Donald Trumps pain at one poll in particular. Americans trust CNN more than their president.
- In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson details what virus expert Mr. Trump has most recently fired and for what, and just what has been causing concern and anger for our Commander-in-Chief: It isn’t virus related deaths.
- John Scalzi at Whatever finds it easier to deal with isolation than most. He writes books for a living, so isolation can be an advantage. He has empathy with those willing to risk life and health to get back to normality. He gets a little acerbic about political posturing based on the idea that death is okay if it’s mostly confined to the old, the poor, the not white. I have expressed similar impatience.
- Vixen Strangely, at Strangely Blogged, has little sympathy with those who refuse to go along with pandemic restrictions because freedom means the ability to put other folks at deadly risk.
- North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz explains what freedom is, what freedom has cost others who purchased it for us, and why it is so valuable. And he is impatient at the squandering of freedom for eight weeks of impatience at inconvenience of dealing with a pandemic.
- So a few conservatives say that the lives of 2% of the population is a good trade for reviving the economy. Green Eagle does the math and comes up with an interesting historical match.
- Iron Knee at Political Irony brings us a bit of sad irony as more rural red states, having gloated a little over the pandemic death rate in blue states, are accelerating and may take the death lead in another 3 weeks.
- Scotties Toy Box illustrates the difference between concentration camps and home quarantine.
- Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit is startled at the news from Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. The new legal standard is that meatpakers are inferior people, not to be valued like regular folks.
- nojo considers the legal phrase for psychotic lack of empathy and applies depraved indifference, a complete lack of empathy for others, to libertarianism, contemporary conservatism, and one individual in particular.
- PZ Myers finds that a meme currently making the rounds has been photo-shopped to make bigots look more stupid. He finds the original which simply shows them to be profoundly evil.
- In Hackwhackers our Attorney General is asked how history will view his decision to drop the case against the very guilty Michael Flynn. Bill Barr answers that history is written by the winners. A principled response, I suppose, if your legal principles are based on something other than what is legal or principled.
- Satire is getting harder these days as national leadership goes to self-parody. Andy Borowitz reports as Attorney General Bill Barr tests negative for integrity.
- Scot Ross is a Democratic activist specializing in oppo-research, which is to say he digs deep for dirt. He is known for what we might call unrestricted use of language. Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson watches as Ross is appointed to a state government Ethics Commission and gets in an ironic dig. It will be entertaining to watch video of public meetings with words periodically bleeped.
- Infidel753 examines the choices in November and explains the stunning simplicity.
- Nan’s Notebook considers the B-theory and contemplates the idea that time is an illusion, a contrivance to help us through our existence.
- In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, atheist Bruce receives a message from a true believer who is having doubts for the first time. Bruce provides empathy and guidance that may not lead to atheism. A friendly hand on the shoulder rather than a push toward non-belief.
– Podcasts –
The “Thousand Year Reich” did end 988 years early.
And now the Fourth Reich has risen on the Potomac. The enemies of democracy are in power, voters are suppressed, and the next election may not be a fair one.
“Don’t yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.”
― Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui 1941
“So a few conservatives say that the lives of 2% of the population is a good trade for reviving the economy.”
There is a lot to consider when determining whether or not to ease the coronavirus restrictions, including the dangers of overwhelming our health care system and just how much a reopened economy would get back on track if everyone were still concerned about getting sick.
The specific question of the value of the economy against the value of human life, however, cannot be dismissed on anything like the grounds that human life is invaluable. In practice, we do not and cannot actually treat a human life as such because we don’t have the system, resources, or will to do so. The numbers that conservatives lately like to cite regarding deaths from the flu and car accidents are not irrelevant to this discussion.
What if only .5% or .1% of the population would be lost? The closer it gets to the number of deaths that we accept from some other set of causes that could be prevented by staying home, the more likely we are to accept it. Similarly, the longer a shutdown lasts, the more willing people will be to end it. There are, after all, non-abstract consequences to unemployment, broken supply chains, and the other economic effects of the shutdown.
It is OK to discuss and disagree over the answer to this sort of question. It’s not like some specific number is the right answer. A person is neither a monster for accepting some deaths nor a totalitarian for accepting and supporting his government’s coronavirus restrictions.