Category: Politics

Walking Down Main Street, USA

I was at Disney World recently. I’ve been to Disney world many, many times over the last decade and a half. Not that long in the scheme of things, I grant you, but long enough to have an impression and an opinion on how things ought to be. Enough to recognize the difference between when Disney lives up to their advertising, and when it falls short. This last trip, it seemed to fall short.

Unlike other times where some catastrophe has wrecked part of my trip, there wasn’t a singular issue. Rather, it was the collective effect of many little issues. Things like “Bell Services was slow” or “the app was buggy” or “there weren’t enough servers working the kiosks.” Little annoyances that, individually excusable, collectively undermine the experience. For another vacation, I might not even mention them. After all, these things happen. But Disney advertises itself as being a cut above the rest precisely because it supposedly smooths these issues over through its trademark pixie dust and monopolistic panopticon of an area the size of Manhattan. 

The blame, according to people who follow Disney religiously, lies with the new executives. In trying to squeeze more profit from the parks, they have stripped things down to the bare bones. Cast members are overworked, overstretched, and underpaid, and the result is burnout and absenteeism. Thus, the usual layer of pixie dust becomes a bit spottier. It’s a compelling story, which is part of why I doubt it. It’s a little too quaint, a little too storybook, with a simple villain making bad choices, to explain systemic breakdowns.

Of course, that doesn’t make the story untrue. Disney has been cutting costs. Like any large institution, there is a measure of redundancy within the organization, at which the new executives seem to be taking aim. The new thinking seems to be that theme parks can still sell merchandise without needing a gift shop at every ride, so a lot of shops are being closed and the workers reassigned. But what happens when you keep cutting? The rides still function, but the lines are longer. The cast members, who are covering more people, are just a little less bubbly. Luggage takes a little longer to arrive. Food is just a little less fresh. The shelves aren’t restocked as quickly. 

But if the answer is Disney’s CEOs, why is the same true everywhere across the country? If the reason for so many shops at Disney’s Hollywood Studios being closed is Disney corporate strategy, why are shops closing in my hometown? Why are the ingredients at my local grocery store less fresh, and the mail running late, and the store shelves restocking so slowly? You could say something like “supply chain issues” or “worker shortages” but really this only pushes the problem back a step. Why is the supply chain struggling now? Where have all the workers gone? 

What seems more remarkable is that no one wants to mention the obvious answer. We’re in the midst of a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans before many states just stopped counting. Millions more have been sickened, and are unable to work to the same capacity. Others are restricted from working in order to support people in the former group. And this is only the disruption to the United States, not even touching the dislocation caused by disruption to global supply chains and migration. 

The idea that society- any society -can shrug off upwards of a million excess deaths and millions more disabled, without any kind of social or economic disruption, is a fantasy far beyond anything at Disney World. The idea that workers will be just as eager to compete for the same wages, despite the increased danger of infectious disease, coupled with the pressure of having to cover for sickened or dead colleagues, likewise ignores the basic tenets of supply and demand. When this happened during the bubonic plague, it was the beginning of the end of feudalism, as high-demand workers gained more leverage and began to upend traditional hierarchies. The decades after the 1918 Influenza Pandemic were a high point of labor unrest and economic turmoil in the United States, which only began to dissipate after the New Deal fundamentally restructured the American economy. 

Disney continues, as it long has, to be a microcosm of American society at large. Price hikes, staff shortages, shorter business hours, longer lines, are all making themselves known. And likewise, some of the early attempts to grapple with the issue are on display. In response to a more competitive labor market, in addition to tightening time off policies, Disney has been forced to look to new demographics, expanding and accelerating its college recruitment program. At the same time, since it cannot afford to lose the talent it has, the company has been compelled to become more inclusive in its rhetoric. 

Which, if you consider the ongoing spat between the right wing Florida state government and Disney, is hilarious. It is the head-in-the-sand public health policies, coupled with xenophobic protectionist immigration controls that have pushed Disney to embrace a more liberal political stance to attract talent. If this pattern ripples out to the wider American economy, and without aggressive government intervention in the labor market and public health, it almost certainly will, it will be a reversal of fortunes worthy of the Disney storytelling tradition.

The Q Corp

I want to take a moment to address a conspiracy theory I’ve seen emerging out of several right wing echo chambers. Specifically, following the Biden inauguration, there has been a, let’s say, crisis of faith in online communities surrounding the grand unifying conspiracy theory of Q-anon. One in particular which caught my attention claims that Trump will remain President because the United States was actually replaced by a corporation shadow-government founded in the City of London in the 1800s. The “actual” inauguration is in March and the fact that Biden was inaugurated in January means he’s illegitimate and Trump can depose him by reestablishing the real United States as it existed before the corporate version. 

Or something. Admittedly I’m skimming because every time I’ve seen this theory it’s been light on details and citations. I think it basically goes without saying that this theory is without basis in reality. But I think examining it offers a chance to shed light on a larger trend of right wing conspiracies, so let’s work through this thought experiment. 

Let’s suppose this theory is true. Let’s suppose that the United States as we know it today is not in fact a sovereign state but a non-governmental organization, that is, a corporation, that has assumed all the functions of one. Let’s assume that every accomplishment since was the work of this corporate entity- every law passed, every social program designed and implemented, every road built, every prisoner punished, every tax dollar collected, every war waged, every soldier drafted and bomb dropped, was all the work, not of a constitutional government, but an overgrown company. 

Okay, fine. What does that change? I mean, assuming this is true, then it’s the corporation, not the constitutional government, that has all the cards. They pay, and organize, and command the military. They regulate the economy, and reap the revenues from it. They built all the infrastructure that makes the US work. They are in every meaningful sense of the phrase, in charge, whether or not a piece of paper says so. And pretty much everyone is fine going along because that’s how society functions now. Every aspect of American society that would engender loyalty belongs to the corporation, so why would anyone defect now?

What then is supposed to happen in March? Is Donald Trump going to stand on the steps of the capitol alone and pantomime an inauguration? I mean, it’s not like the corporation’s employees- the Chief Justice, Congress, the capitol police, any of those people -are going to help him out. Actually, given what happened at the capitol recently, there’s a good chance he’ll be banned from returning. So I guess he’ll be reciting the oath from Mar a Lago. Maybe he’ll be on television, but if the mainstream media is really as organized against him as is commonly claimed, then it seems unlikely. And he’s banned from most social media. So he’ll say some magic words in an empty room, and then what? 

The answer, of course, is nothing. It changes nothing. The world would keep turning and Biden would still be in charge. It’s the old “if a tree falls in a forest” question. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that the event is televised. Suppose that Trump or someone close to him manages to hack into the emergency alert system. Suppose that while on camera, Trump makes the first coherent speech of his life, in which he delivers incontrovertible historical proof of constitutional discontinuity; that the modern federal government was founded on a lie, and that by default he is President. 

What then? Is the entire federal government going to just roll over? Will the standing military, which didn’t exist during peacetime in the 1800s, disappear in a puff of logic? Is everyone who relies on federal programs going to just stop being hungry and impoverished? Most Americans have never even read the constitution, and even fewer care what it says except when it touches their lives. Of course some people, maybe even powerful people, might decide to follow Trump, probably people who were looking for an excuse to follow him anyways, but that’s not the question I’m driving at. I’m not asking whether people would follow Trump into a civil war. I’m asking why would the historical evidence make a difference. 

One of the hard truths about politics is that laws and constitutions are just words on a page unless people believe in and abide by them. The Soviet constitution under Stalin contained guarantees of all the same freedoms as the first amendment of the US constitution, but only one of those societies actually has any history of a political norm of free speech, assembly, press, religion, and petition. If tomorrow some scholar at the library of Congress found a missing page of the constitution in which the founders made electricity unconstitutional, no branch of government would start clamoring to shut down the power grids. Either there would be an immediate amendment, or more likely, the country would all just collectively ignore that part of the constitution and carry on. That is what by all accounts should happen if Trump decides to invoke this particular theory. 

Despite all the tradition and ceremony involved in codifying social and political norms into laws, there is nothing intrinsically special about the law that is separate and above how we enforce norms. Or, put another way, laws are not magic spells, and invoking the law does not lessen the blow of the police truncheon. If your worldview is predicated on a chosen one invoking magic words to assume divine right to rule, that’s not a political theory, it is a cult. Of course in a free country you are welcome to privately believe these things, but those views are not compatible with democracy. Furthermore, if that worldview involves the violent purging or overthrow of opponents, then it is a terrorist cult, and those who act on it lose the protections afforded to peaceful political discourse.

One Small Correction

I wasn’t going to say anything about the Republican convention, but I want to set something straight: Joe Biden is not a communist. I know a few communists. Some I met at events, others I know through university. The thing about communists is, they’re not subtle. I mean, they literally carry red flags. You can’t get much more obvious.

The idea of the subtle or hidden communist really died with the USSR. China and Russia today have made it clear, both in words and actions, they don’t care what party line the rest of the world follows, as long as the rest of the world is made to revolve around them. Sure, they do foreign subversion all the same, but not communist subversion. They back whoever they think will best undermine the US, without regard to partisan allegiance. Meanwhile, Communist parties in the US don’t believe in subtlety as a matter of principle. It defeats the purpose of building class consciousness towards a revolution, which is kinda their whole schtick. Working within the system, and especially pretending to be moderate, would mean delaying progress towards the class war. 

Even if Joe Biden secretly believes, in his heart of hearts, that Marx was right and capitalism needs to die, and managed to get elected by subtly pretending he believes otherwise, the communists- those who have been marching and striking and carrying red flags all their lives -wouldn’t take him. For that matter, the people who actually call themselves communists unironically probably wouldn’t take Sanders either. Or anyone you’ve heard of. Communists don’t believe in compromise, at least, not with the establishment. Communists despise the Democratic Party, often more than they despise the Republican Party. The latter are at least transparent in wanting to exploit workers.

Do communists support voting for Biden over Trump? In most cases, no. Many don’t believe in voting at all, thinking it makes them morally beholden to the system by participating. This is also true of the anarchists I know. For the small group that do endorse voting as a means of making revolution, many would actually prefer to vote for Trump. Not because they agree with him, but because they expect he will further divide and undermine the United States, pushing the country closer towards social collapse and sowing the seeds for political violence. Communists expect Trump will bring them closer to the revolution they want, while Joe Biden will move the country further from communism. This line of thinking is called accelerationism, and it means voting for the most controversial, destabilizing candidate. 

But wait, I hear you ask. What about all those people who supported Bernie Sanders, and have since lashed themselves to the Democratic candidate? Almost all of them aren’t communists, at least, not in an orthodox Marxist sense. I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds of leftist terminology here, because between constant infighting, the shifting of terminology between elections and generations, and political labels being always to some degree in the eye of the beholder, there are no perfectly correct answers, but Sanders supporters are mostly not communists. If you held a gun to my head and made me pick labels, I’d say that most of Sanders’ core supporters are some flavor of democratic socialist or social democrat. 

Much ink has been spilled over these two labels, and the difference between them, particularly given how much they often hate each other. The General difference, near as I can tell, is that social democrats prefer reform, while democratic socialists demand revolution. Social democrats think democratic socialists are dangerous Molotov-throwing radicals who don’t understand how economics and politics work, and democratic socialists think social democrats are spineless cowering liberals who won’t put their money where their mouth is when it comes to actually making change. On the second point, both groups feel this way about the Democratic Party at large. 

As an aside, my secret suspicion is that a lot of particularly young Americans who are disenchanted with the mainstream, many who self identify as democratic socialist, or further left, would probably be social democrats or even just progressive leaning liberals if American culture didn’t imbibe the “socialist” label with such mythical rebellious qualities. Most developed countries, such as Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, and so on, have major social democratic parties, as well as small far left socialist and communist parties. But as America paints everything left of the Democratic center as socialist, it also pushes a lot of otherwise moderate voters into the label as well. 

But I digress. Among democratic socialists, you will find some accelerationists who are voting for Trump. Among both groups, you will find people who are so upset with Biden that they have vowed not to vote for him. I have not met a single person who self-identifies as socialist who likes Biden. To them, Sanders was the compromise candidate, and Biden is a right wing stooge, only a shade better than Trump. Many of them wish, and I quote, “that Biden were half as radical and socialist as republicans paint him”. Of those who have resolved to vote for him anyways, the reason is never that he is actually going to push the country in a socialist direction, but usually some variation of “I fear the violence Trump started will spiral further out of hand”. For these people who are hoping to make progress towards equality by reform and legislation, this is a bad thing. 

On the other hand, the militant communists, as opposed to the people who wind up at the same protests, are hoping and betting that Trump will win and accelerate the course of collapse and violence that has already started. The longer he’s in office, the more people lose hope in the American Dream, and the more people they can recruit. Of course, fascist and neo-Nazi recruitment has also gone up under Trump, but this doesn’t change the Marxist view that once it comes to open class war, the workers will prevail, since that is an article of faith. These are the people who actually want to dismantle America. And they’re backing Trump. 

On Social Distancing Vis a Vis Communism

I wish to try and address some of the concerns raised by protests against measures taken to protect public health in the wake of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Cards on the table: I think people who are going out to protest these measures are, at best, foolhardy and shortsighted. It’s hard for me to muster sympathy for their cause. Still, calling someone names doesn’t often win hearts and minds. So I’m going to try and do that thing that people tell me I’m good at; I’m going to write about the situation from where I stand, and try to understand where these people are coming from, in the hopes that I can, if not change behaviors, at least help people understand who may be equally mystified and apoplectic at my position as I am at theirs. 

I’m not going to address any conspiracy theories, including the conspiracy theory that these measures are part of some ill-defined plan of a shadowy elite to seize control. Mostly because, from where I stand, it’s a moot point. Even taking all of the claims about evil motivations at face value, even if we assume that everyone in government secretly wants to live in a totalitarian dictatorship and they see this as their chance, that doesn’t really affect the reality. The contents of my governor’s soul is between him and God [1]. He says he wants to save lives, and he’s put in place policies to mitigate the spread of disease. People are dying from COVID-19; maybe slightly more or fewer people than the numbers being reported, but definitely people [2], including people I know. 

For context, since the beginning of this episode, I have had friends and acquaintances die, and other friends and acquaintances friends go from being student athletes, to being so sick that they can’t sit up to type on a laptop. My university campus- the places where I learn, interact with others, and often write these posts -is split between being field hospitals, quarantine lodgings for hospital workers, and morgues. Because there aren’t enough staff, undergraduate students, even freshmen like me, who have any experience in nursing or medicine, are called on to volunteer as emergency workers, and facing the same conditions, often without proper equipment, that have claimed so many lives. Every night, from my own bedroom, I hear the sirens of ambulances rushing back and forth from the retirement village to the hospital. We’re not even the epicenter, and things are that bad here. 

So the virus is very real. The toll is very real. The danger is real. We can quibble over who bears responsibility for what later. There will be plenty of time for anger, grief, and blame; plenty of time to soberly assess who overreacted, who under-reacted, who did a good job, and who ought to be voted out. I’m counting on it. In the now, we know that the virus spreads by close and indoor contact [2][3]. We know that there are only so many hospital beds, and we have no way to protect people or cure them [4][5]. It stands to reason that if we want to save lives, we need to be keeping people apart. And if we believe that a function of government is looking out for and protecting lives, which even most libertarians I know agree on, then it stands to reason that it’s the government’s job to take action to save as many lives as possible. Yes, this will require new and different exercise of powers which might in another context be called government overreach. But we live in new and different times. 

Not everyone is able to comfortably come to terms with change. I get it. And if I’m really honest, I’m not happy with it either. A lot of people who argue for shutdowns try to spin it as a positive thing, like a children’s television episode trying to convince kids that, hey, cleaning up your room is actually fun, and vegetables are delicious. Look at the clear skies, and the dolphins in the Hudson River. Staying at home makes you a hero; don’t you want to feel like a hero? And yeah, there are silver linings, and reasons why you can look on the bright side. For some people looking for that bright side is a coping mechanism. But truth be told, mostly it sucks. Not being able to hug your friends, or eat out at a restaurant, or just hang out in public, sucks. You’re not going to get around that. And a lot of people are angry. People feel deprived and cheated.
And you know what? That’s fine. You’re allowed to feel angry, and cheated. Being upset doesn’t make you a bad person. Your experiences and feelings are valid, and you’re allowed to pout and stomp and scream and shout.

That’s fine. Let it out, if you think it’ll make you feel better. You’re right, it’s not fair. Life isn’t fair, good people are suffering, and that’s infuriating. Unfortunately (and I do mean this sincerely), it won’t change anything. The virus has made it abundantly clear that it doesn’t care about our feelings, only our behavior. However we feel, if we want to save people, we need to stay apart. If we support the idea that governments should look out for people, we should insist that they lend their power to these measures. We can still hate being cooped up. But we need to understand that this is the lesser of the evils. Whether it takes a week, a month, or even a year, the alternative of massive death needs to be ruled out.

Some people have raised the argument that, even though we care about human lives, Americans need to work. The implication that Americans need to work, as opposed to, say, just kinda wanting to work, implies a kind of right. Maybe not as absolute as free speech, or as technical as the right to a trial by a jury of peers, but maybe something akin to a right to privacy; a vague but agreed upon notion that we have a general right to strive for something. Of course, no right is truly absolute. Even free speech, the one that we put first in our bill of rights, and generally treat as being the most inviolable, has its limits. As a society we recognize that times of war, rebellion, or public danger, our rights are not absolute. The police don’t have to mirandize you to ask where the bomb is, or stop chasing an armed suspect because they ran into a private home [6]. 

Hopefully, even if we may, as a matter of politics, quibble on where the exact lines are, we can all concede that rights are not absolute, and having exceptions for a larger purpose is not advocating tyranny. This same line of reasoning would apply to any previously undefined right to work as well. And I think it’s pretty clear the basis for why the current pandemic constitutes such an exception. We can have respectful disagreements about what measures are useful in what areas, but when the overarching point is that we need to minimize human contact for public safety, it seems like that covers most things in dispute. Again, you don’t have to like it. You’re welcome to write a response. But do so from your own home. If you’re feel compelled to protest something specific, then protest safely, but don’t sabotage the efforts of people trying to make this go away.

Maybe you’re thinking: Okay, that sounds nice, but I actually need to work. As in, the bills don’t stop coming, and this stimulus check isn’t going to cut it for longer. Life doesn’t stop for illness. Even in localities that have frozen certain bills and have good food banks, there are still expenses. In many places, not enough has been done to allow people who want to do the right thing to be able to do so. Not everyone can work from home, and in a tragic irony, people who live paycheck to paycheck are less likely to be able to work from home, if their jobs even exist in a telecommuting economy. For what it’s worth, I’m with the people who say this is an unfair burden. Unfortunately, as we know, life isn’t fair, and there’s not a way to reconcile saving lives and letting everyone work freely. As an aside, though I don’t think anyone genuinely believes in sacrificing lives for GDP, I’ll point out that more people getting sick and dying actually costs jobs in the long run [7][8]. Economists agree that the best way to get everyone back to work is to devote as much of our resources as possible to fighting this virus.

People say we can’t let the cure be worse than the disease, and although I disagree with the agenda for which this is a talking point, I actually agree with the idiom. Making this a choice between working class families starving, and dying of disease is a no-win scenario, and we do need to weigh the effects of cutting people off. That doesn’t make the virus the lesser of the evils, by any stretch of the imagination. Remember, we haven’t actually ruled out the “Millions of American Deaths” scenario if we go back to regular contact patterns, we’ve just put it off for now. That’s what flattening the curve means; it’s an ongoing process, not a one and done effort [9]. Saving lives is a present tense endeavor, and will be for some time. Still, a cost-benefit analysis requires that we understand the costs. People are losing jobs, and suffering for it, and government policy should take that into account. 

Here’s where I diverge from others: keeping things shut down does not necessarily have to mean that people go hungry. Rather than ease lockdown restrictions, this is where I would say governments, both state and federal, need to be doing more while they’re telling people to stay home. It’s not fair to mandate people stay at home while their livelihoods depend on getting out and working; agreed, but there’s more than one way to neutralize that statement. The government could scale up the stimulus checks, giving every American an emergency basic income. Congress could suspend the debt limit and authorize special bonds akin to war bonds to give unemployment and the Payroll Protection Program as much funding as they need, removing the bottleneck for businesses. Or, you could attack the problem from the opposite end; mandate a halt on payments for things like rent, mortgages, utilities, and so on, and activate emergency nutrition programs drawn up by the pentagon to keep Americans fed during a nuclear winter. Common carriers such as utilities, telecoms, delivery companies, and other essential services could be placed under temporary government control through existing emergency powers if necessary. 

Such a mass mobilization wouldn’t be unprecedented in American history. The world wars the the New Deal show that it can be done while maintaining democratic governance. The measures wouldn’t need to be permanent, just for the duration of the crisis created by the pandemic. There’s a good historical case that a strong response would benefit our economic recovery once this passes [8]. You wouldn’t necessarily need to do all of the things I mentioned; you could tailor it to fit demands in specific areas. The point is, people don’t need to starve. The trade off only exists in the system we’ve constructed for ourselves. That system is malleable, even if we don’t often view it as such, because we so rarely get to a point like this. The lockdown is easier to see as malleable, because it’s recent, and we can remember a time before it, but there’s a much stronger scientific basis for why we need to keep it in place, at least for now.

I’ll address one more point, and that is the argument that, material need or no, people have a deeper need, and by implication a right, to get out and try to make a living in the world. This is subtly different than the idea that people have a default legal right to do as they will, as covered earlier. By contrast this strikes at a deeper, philosophical argument that people have a need to contribute positively. The idea that people simply go stir crazy, and television and video games lack that certain element of, as Aristotle put it, Eudaimonia, the joy achieved by striving for a life well lived [10]. I think this is what people are getting at, at least, the people who have really sat down and thought about it, when they decry increasing government dependence while life is under quarantine. They probably understand that people need to eat, and don’t want anyone to die, but deeper than any legal right, are concerned that if this state of affairs drags out, that people will stop striving, and lose that spark that drives the human spirit. People need to be able to make their own lives, to give them meaning. 

Expressed in philosophical terms, I’m more sympathetic to this argument than my politics might suggest. I agree that people need meaning in their lives. I even agree that handouts don’t provide that meaning the same way that a successful career does. It is human nature is to yearn to contribute, not just survive, and for a lot of people, how they earn money outside the home is what they see as their contribution; the value they add and the proof of their worth. Losing that is more than just tragic, it’s existentially terrifying. I remember the upheaval I went through when it became clear I wasn’t going to be able to graduate on time with my disability, and probably wouldn’t get into the college on which I had pinned my hopes and dreams as a result. I had put a lot of my value on my being a perfect student, and having that taken away from me was traumatic in its way. I questioned what my value was if society didn’t acknowledge me for being smart; how could I be a worthwhile person if society rejected the things I put my work into. Through that prism, I can almost understand how some people might be more terrified of the consequences of a shutdown than of the virus.

The idea that work gives human life meaning isn’t new. Since the industrial revolution created the modern concept of the career, people have been talking about how it relates to our philosophical worth. But let’s tug on that threat a little longer. Before any conservative pundits were using the human value of work to attack government handouts, there was a German philosopher writing about the consequences of a society which ignored the dislocation and alienation which occurred when the ruling class prevented people from meaningful work. He used a German term, Entfremdung der Gattungswesen, to describe the deprivation of the human soul which occurs when artificial systems interfere in human drives. He argued that such measures were oppressive, and based on his understanding of history would eventually end in revolution. 

That philosopher was Karl Marx. He suggested that industrial capitalism, by separating the worker from the means of producing their livelihood, the product of their labor, the profits thereof, and the agency to work on their own terms, the bourgeoisie deny the proletariat something essential to human existence [11]. So I guess that protester with the sign that “social distancing = communism” might be less off the wall that we all thought. Not that social distancing is really communist in the philosophical sense, rather the contrary; social distancing underlines Marxist critiques of capitalism. True to Marxist theory, the protester has achieved consciousness of the class iniquities perpetuated by the binding of exploitative wage labor to the necessities of life, and is rallying against the dislocation artificially created by capitalism. I suspect they probably wouldn’t describe themselves as communist, but their actions fit the profile. 

Here’s the point where I diverge from orthodox Marxism. Because, again, I think there’s more than one way to neutralize this issue. I think that work for meaning doesn’t necessarily need to be work for wages. Suppose you decoupled the drive of material needs from the drives for self improvement and worth, either by something like a universal basic income, or the nationalization and dramatic expansion of food banks, rent controls, and utility discount programs, such that a person was able to survive without working. Not comfortably, mind you, but such that starving is off the table. According to Marx this is most assuredly not communism; it doesn’t involve the worker ownership of the means of production. People still go to work and sell their labor, and market mechanisms dictate prices and reward arbitrage. 

What this does, instead, is address the critique of our current system raised by both Marx, and our protester. In addition to ensuring that no one goes hungry, it also gives the opportunity, indeed, an incentive, for individuals to find socially useful and philosophically meaningful work beyond the market. Feeling useless sitting at home? Go get on video chat and tutor some kids in something you’re good at. Go mow lawns for emergency workers in your area. Take an online class, now that lots of them are free. Make some art; join the trend of celebrities posting videos of themselves singing online. If you have any doubts that there is plenty of unpaid but necessary and useful work around the house, ask a housewife. Rather than protest the lack of a particular task, we should take this opportunity to discover what useful and meaningful work we can accomplish from home. 

The dichotomy between opening and starving is a false fabrication, as is the dichotomy between deference to scientific and philosophical principles. Those who protest one or the other appear either to represent a fringe extreme, or misunderstand the subtleties of the problem and the multitude of measures which we may take to address it. Our individual freedoms reflect a collective responsibility and commitment to self moderation and governance, which we must now demonstrate, by showing the imagination, foresight, and willingness to sacrifice for a greater cause which has defined our human struggle. In this moment, the responsibilities to our fellow human beings outweigh some of the rights we have come to take for granted. This exigency demands a departure from our norms. We must be prepared to suspend our assumptions, and focus on what really matters. Now is the time to find meaning in things that matter to us. To demand better from our government than platitudes and guidelines. To help ourselves and our fellow human being without prejudice. 

Works Consulted

[1] Matthew 7:1, KJV

[2] “Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19).” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020, www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html.

[3] “Coronavirus.” World Health Organization, World Health Organization, www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019.

[4] “ Over the past several weeks, a mind-boggling array of possible therapies have been considered. None have yet been proven to be effective in rigorously controlled trials”“Pursuing Safe and Effective Anti-Viral Drugs for COVID-19.” National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 17 Apr. 2020, directorsblog.nih.gov/2020/04/17/pursuing-safe-effective-anti-viral-drugs-for-covid-19/.

[5] “ There are no drugs or other therapeutics approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to prevent or treat COVID-19. Current clinical management includes infection prevention and control measures and supportive care”“Therapeutic Options for COVID-19 Patients.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 21 Mar. 2020, www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/therapeutic-options.html.

[6] Burney, Nathan. “The Illustrated Guide to Law.” The Illustrated Guide to Law, 17 Apr. 2020, lawcomic.net/.

[7] Pueyo, Tomas. “Coronavirus: Out of Many, One.” Medium, Medium, 20 Apr. 2020, medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-out-of-many-one-36b886af37e9.

[8] Carlsson-Szlezak, Philipp, et al. “What Coronavirus Could Mean for the Global Economy.” Harvard Business Review, 16 Apr. 2020, hbr.org/2020/03/what-coronavirus-could-mean-for-the-global-economy.

[9] Ferguson, Neil M, et al. “ Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand.” Imperial College of London, 16 Mar. 2020, https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/mrc-gida/2020-03-16-COVID19-Report-9.pdf

[10] Aristotle. “Nicomachean Ethics.” The Internet Classics Archive, classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.1.i.html.

[11] Marx, Karl. “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm.

What is a Coronavirus, anyway?

I had about come to the conclusion not to write anything on the current crisis. This was because I am not an expert. There are plenty of experts, and you should listen to them over me, and I didn’t want to detract from what they’re saying by adding my own take and spin. I also didn’t want to write something because, in five attempts so far, every time I’ve sat down to write something out, double checking my sources and cross referencing my information, the situation has changed so as to render what I was about to say outdated and irrelevant, which is incredibly frustrating. The last thing I want to do is give advice contrary to what’s being said. 

But it looks like we might be heading towards a situation where the advice is stabilizing, if only because when the advice is “shut down everything”, you can’t really escalate that. And the data suggests that we are moving towards a long war here. It’s hard to say, but I’ve seen reports with numbers ranging from a few weeks, to eighteen months. And whether we manage to skate by lightly after a few weeks at home, or whether the first two years of the 2020s go down in history akin to the time of the Bubonic Plague, we need to start understanding the problems with which we find ourselves dealing in a long term context. Before I delve into what’s going on, and what seems likely to happen, I’m going to spend a post reviewing terminology.

I wasn’t going to die on this hill, but since we’ve got time, I’ll mention it anyway. Despite begrudgingly ceding to the convention myself, I don’t like calling this “Coronavirus”. That’s not accurate; Coronavirus is not the name of a virus. The term refers to a family of viruses, so named for protein chains which resemble the outermost layer of the surface of the sun. You know, the spiky, wavy bit that you would add to the picture after coloring in the circle. There are a lot of viruses that fit this description, to the point that the emoji for virus (ie: 🦠 ) could be said to be a generic Coronavirus. In addition to a number of severe respiratory illnesses, such as SARS, and now COVID-19, Coronaviruses also cause the common cold. 

They’re so common, we usually don’t bother naming them unless there’s something unusual about them. The World Health Organization was a bit slow to come out with its name for this one; and in the interim the media ran with the word they had. Despite my instinct, I’m not going to tell you you need to get up and change everything you’re saying and remove posts where you said Coronavirus, just be aware of the distinction. We’ve gotten to a point in social discourse where the distinction is academic, the same way everyone understands that “rodent problem” refers to rats or mice rather than beavers. But do be aware that if you’re reading scientific journals, if it doesn’t specify, it’s as likely that that they’re referring to the common cold as COVID-19. 

The term COVID-19 is designated by the World Health Organization, short for COronaVIrus Disease, 2019. WHO guidelines are explicitly crafted to design names which are short, pronounceable, and sufficiently generic so as to not “incite undue fear”. These guidelines specifically prohibit using occupational or geographic names, for both ethical and practical reasons. Ethically, calling a disease specific to an area or people-group, even when it doesn’t imply blame, can still create stigma. Suppose a highly infectious epidemic was called “Teacher’s Disease”, for instance. Suppose for the sake of this that teachers are as likely to be carriers as everyone else, but the first confirmed case was a teacher, so everyone just rolls with that. 

Even if everyone who uses and hears this term holds teachers completely blameless (not that they will; human psychology being what it is, but let’s suppose), people are still going to change their behaviors around teachers. If you heard on the news that Teacher’s Disease was spreading and killing people around the world, would you feel comfortable sending your kids to school? What about inviting your teacher friend over while your grandmother is staying with you? Would you feel completely comfortable sitting with them on the bus? Maybe you would, because you’re an uber-mind capable of avoiding all biases, but do you think everyone else will feel the same way? Will teachers be treated fairly in this timeline, by other people and society? And perhaps more crucially, do you think teachers are likely to single themselves out for treatment knowing that they’ll have this label applied to them?

There are other practical reasons why using geographic or occupational names are counterproductive. Even if you have no concern for stigma against people, these kinds of biases impact behavior in other ways. For instance, if something is called Teacher’s Disease, I might imagine that I, as a student, am immune. I might ignore my risk factors, and go out and catch the virus, or worse still, I might ignore symptoms and spread the virus to other people. I mean, really, you expect me, a healthy young person, to cancel my spring break beach bash because of something from somewhere else, which the news says only kills old timers? 

You don’t have to take my word for it either, or even the word of The World Health Organization. You can see this play out through history. Take the Flu Pandemic of 1918. Today, we know that the virus responsible was H1N1, and based on after the fact epidemiology, appeared first in large numbers in North America. Except, it wasn’t reported due to wartime censorship. Instead, it wouldn’t hit the press until it spread to Europe, to neutral Spain, where it was called Spanish Flu. And when the press called it that, the takeaway for most major governments was that this was a Spanish problem, and they had bigger issues than some foreign virus. The resulting pandemic was the worst in human history. 

I am not going to tell you what words you can or can’t use. Ours is a free society, and I have no special expertise that makes me uniquely qualified to lecture others. But I can say, from experience, that words have power. The language you use has an impact, and not always the impact you might intend. At times like this we all need to be mindful of the impact each of us has on each other. 

Do your part to help combat stigma and misinformation, which hurt our efforts to fight disease. For more information on COVID-19, visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webpage. To view the specific guidelines on disease naming, go to the World Health Organization.

Foreshadowing

After a brief unplanned hiatus, I have returned from the land of midterms and existential angst. Quite simply, I stopped writing for a period because between several different papers and written exams, I exhausted my tolerance for dealing with words in a constructive capacity.

But recently, my Poli-Sci professor said something that shocked me enough to dust off an abandoned draft. After handing out a New York Times article on the impeachment inquiry, he said that, though he had covered the constitutional and political basis of impeachment before the midterm, he wanted to go over it again, because usually when he covered it, it was just for the quiz, and it looks like this is going to be a thing. He said that even as a political science professor, he didn’t know what was going to happen any better than we do, but that it was his job to prepare us as best he could. 

And then he said: I hope you’re all paying attention to the news, because that may turn out to be more important than your grade in this class. 

Sometimes, I wish I was disciplined enough to keep a proper journal. Given my intermittent memory issues, I can imagine that this would be immensely useful. I have been recommended to keep a journal on a few occasions by my doctors, and have attempted to cultivate the habit several times, but I never quite manage to keep it. I do not have the concentration nor the time, and I am simply not disciplined enough to compel myself to make time, or force myself to concentrate. I’m barely disciplined enough to post regularly here, and I sure do t have the fotitude to do the same thing without an audience.

I regret these circumstances, partly because it keeps me from being able to look up matters such as what I had to eat before my stomach became upset, or where I was at three o clock on January second two thousand and fifteen. But mostly, I regret not being able to keep a journal because I believe it might be of some historical interest in the far future. I may or may not remember where I was when the event that goes down in history takes place when future generations ask, but I certainly won’t remember where I was and what it was like the day before. And I won’t be able to look it up, either. All the sights, sounds, smells, and little details of human experience that I now enjoy will be washed away long before my story is even over. 

We live in interesting times. That much is indisputable, I think. Some day there will be textbooks summarizing the headlines we are not watching daily. More than just textbooks, there will be historical dramas, novels, games, even musicals set in our era looking backwards. And they will get so much wrong, partly as a consequence of trying to imagine something they never lived, but mostly because they will be imagining what it must have been like to live now with the limited perspective of retrospect.

They might be sympathetic to our stories, but privately they will wonder why the future consensus wasn’t obvious to us at the time. It will seem inevitable to them.
This is the danger of history. Nowadays it’s easy to see why the Soviet Union had to fall, why the allies had to win World War 2, why the American Revolution had to triumph and establish a global superpower, why the Roman Empire was unsustainable, and so on and so forth. Those things happened, and insofar as we are satisfied in knowing why they happened, they seem to a certain degree inevitable. Or if not inevitable, it is difficult to see how people at the time could have been blind to what would come to pass. 

I’m guilty of this too. In my case, it’s the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent breakup of the soviet bloc that fascinates me. I simply cannot imagine a world in which there is an east and west Germany, right next to each other, diametrically opposed, and seeing this as completely natural. I laugh every time I find a map from the time period. It just seems so silly, like a cheap gimmick. Of course they had to reunify, how could it be otherwise? Sure, I might be able to, for the sake of argument, dream up a scenario in which East Berlin is the site of something on par with Tiananmen Square, and the Warsaw Pact continues existing, placing itself somewhere between modern China and modern Cuba.

But I can’t begin to reconcile that fantasy with the real world. And I have trouble constructing a worldview where it would seem equally or even more reasonable to bet on that reality coming true instead of ours.
That is why I would want to try and keep a journal, to capture the uncertainty of this moment. It’s not that we don’t know we’re living through history, we just don’t know how it will end. If you’re reading this in the future, it may be difficult to understand, so let me give you a rundown.

  • We don’t know what the economy will do. Some say it will soon go into a recession, others say that’s just alarmist speculation. Both options seem plausible.
  • I can’t say what Europe will look like. The United Kingdom is in disarray and seems to be having an identity crisis over the prospect of leaving the European Union, which is uncertain. Allusions have been made to a more united Europe, which has caused massive backlash. 
  • I don’t know what will become of my own country, the United States. Impeachment hearings have been announced against the president, after years of activists calling for them. The scandal, which regards phone calls with Ukraine and other world leaders, has snowballed remarkably quickly.
  • The President has threatened violence, and possibly even civil war, if he is removed, though most people have taken this as a joke.

    This may sound like foreshadowing. Perhaps it is, but certainly not intentionally.

Some Like It Temperate

I want to share something that took me a while to understand, but once I did, it changed my understanding of the world around me. I’m not a scientist, so I’m probably not going to get this exactly perfect, and I’ll defer to professional judgment, but maybe I can help illustrate the underlying concept.

So temperature is not the same thing as hot and cold. In fact, temperature and heat aren’t really bound together inherently. On earth, they’re usually correlated, and as humans, our sensory organs perceive them through the same mechanism in relative terms, which is why we usually think of them together. This sensory shortcut works for most of the human experience, but it can become confusing and counterintuitive when we try to look at systems of physics outside the scope of an everyday life. 

So what is temperature? Well, in the purest sense, temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy among a group of particles. How fast are they going, how often are they bumping into each other, and how much energy are they giving off when they do? This is how temperature and phase of matter correlate. So liquid water has a higher temperature than ice because its molecules are moving around more, with more energy. Because the molecules are moving around more, liquid water is less dense, which it’s easier to cut through water than ice. Likewise, it’s easier still to cut through steam than water. Temperature is a measure of molecular energy, not hotness. Got it? Good, because it’s about to get complicated.

So something with more energy has a higher temperature. This works for everything we’re used to thinking about as being hot, but it applies in a wider context. Take radioactive material. Or don’t, because they’re dangerous. Radioactivity is dangerous because it has a lot of energy, and is throwing it off in random directions. Something that’s radioactive won’t necessarily feel hot, because the way it gives off radiation isn’t the way our sensory organs are calibrated. You can pick up an object with enough radiated energy to shred through the material in your cells and kill you, and have it feel like room temperature. That’s what happened to the firemen at Chernobyl. 

In a technical sense, radioactive materials have a high temperature, since they’re giving off lots of energy. That’s what makes them dangerous. At the same time, though, you could get right up next to highly enriched nuclear materials (and under no circumstances should you ever try this), without feeling warm. You will feel something eventually, as your cells react to being ripped apart by, a hail of neutrons and other subatomic particles. You might feel heat as your cells become irradiated and give off their own energy, but not from the nuclear materials themselves. Also if this happens, it’s too late to get help. So temperature isn’t necessarily what we think about it.

Space is another good example. We call space “cold”, because water freezes when exposed to it. And space will feel cold, since it will immediately suck all the carefully hoarded energy out of any body part exposed to it. But actually, space, at least within the solar system, has a very high temperature wherever it encounters particles, for the same reason as above. The sun is a massive ongoing thermonuclear explosion that makes even our largest atom bombs jealous. There is a great deal of energy flying around the empty space of the solar system at any given moment, it just doesn’t have any particles to give its energy to. This is why the top layer of the atmosphere, the thermosphere, has a very high temperature, despite being totally inhospitable, and why astronauts are at increased cancer risk. 

This confusion is why most scientists who are dealing with fields like chemistry, physics, or astronomy use the Kelvin scale. One degree in the Kelvin scale, or one kelvin, is equivalent to one degree Celsius. However, unlike Celsius, where zero is the freezing point of water, zero kelvins is known as Absolute Zero, a so-far theoretical temperature where there is no movement among the involved particles. This is harder to achieve than it sounds, for a variety of complicated quantum reasons, but consider that body temperature is 310 K, in a scale where one hundred is the entire difference between freezing and boiling. Some of our attempts so far to reach absolute zero have involved slowing down individual particles by suspending them in lasers, which has gotten us close, but those last few degrees are especially tricky. 

Kelvin scale hasn’t really caught on in the same way as Celsius, perhaps because it’s an unwieldy three digits for anything in the normal human range. And given that the US is still dragging their feet about Celsius, which goes back to the French Revolution, not a lot of people are willing to die on that hill. But the Kelvin scale does underline an important point of distinction between temperature as a universal property of physics, from the relative, subjective, inconsistent way that we’re used to feeling it in our bodies.

Which is perhaps interesting, but I said this was relevant to looking at the world, so how’s that true? Sure, it might be more scientifically rigorous, but that’s not always essential. If you’re a redneck farm boy about to jump into the crick, Newtonian gravity is enough without getting into quantum theory and spacetime distortion, right?
Well, we’re having a debate on this planet right now about something referred to as “climate change”, a term which has been promoted in favor over the previous term “global warming”. Advocates of doing nothing have pointed out that, despite all the graphs, it doesn’t feel noticeably warmer. Certainly, they point out, the weather hasn’t been warmer, at least not consistently, on a human timescale. How can we be worried about increased temperature if it’s not warmer?

And, for as much as I suspect the people presenting these arguments to the public have ulterior motives, whether they are economic or political, it doesn’t feel especially warmer, and it’s hard to dispute that. Scientists, for their part, have pointed out that they’re examining the average temperature over a prolonged period, producing graphs which show the trend. They have gone to great lengths to explain the biggest culprit, the greenhouse effect, which fortunately does click nicely with our intuitive human understanding. Greenhouses make things warmer, neat. But not everyone follows before and after that. 

I think part of what’s missing is that scientists are assuming that everyone is working from the same physics-textbook understanding of temperature and energy. This is a recurring problem for academics and researchers, especially when the 24-hour news cycle (and academic publicists that feed them) jump the gun and snatch results from scientific publications without translating the jargon for the layman. If temperature is just how hot it feels, and global warming means it’s going to feel a couple degrees hotter outside, it’s hard to see how that gets to doomsday predictions, and requires me to give up plastic bags and straws. 

But as we’ve seen, temperature can be a lot more than just feeling hot and cold. You won’t feel hot if you’re exposed to radiation, and firing a laser at something seems like a bad way to freeze it. We are dealing on a scale that requires a more consistent rule than our normal human shortcuts. Despite being only a couple of degrees temperature, the amount of energy we’re talking about here is massive. If we say the atmosphere is roughly 5×10^18 kilograms, and the amount of energy it takes to raise a kilogram of air one kelvin is about 1Kj, then we’re looking at 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 Kilojoules. 

That’s a big number; what does it mean? Well, if my math is right, that’s about 1.1 million megatons of TNT. A megaton is a unit used to measure the explosive yield of strategic nuclear weapons. The nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki, the bigger of the two, was somewhere in the ballpark of 0.02 megatons. The largest bomb ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, was 50 megatons. The total energy expenditure of all nuclear testing worldwide is estimated at about 510 megatons, or about 0.05% of the energy we’re introducing with each degree of climate change. 

Humanity’s entire current nuclear arsenal is estimated somewhere in the ballpark of 14,000 bombs. This is very much a ballpark figure, since some countries are almost certainly bluffing about what weapons they do and don’t have, and how many. The majority of these, presumably, are cheaper, lower-yield tactical weapons. Some, on the other hand, will be over-the-top monstrosities like the Tsar Bomba. Let’s generously assume that these highs and lows average out to about one megaton apiece. Suppose we detonated all of those at once. I’m not saying we should do this; in fact, I’m going to go on record as saying we shouldn’t. But let’s suppose we do, releasing 14,000 megatons of raw, unadulterated atom-splitting power in a grand, civilization-ending bonanza. In that instant, we would do have unleashed approximately one percent of the energy as we are adding in each degree of climate change. 

This additional energy means more power for every hurricane, wildfire, flood, tornado, drought, blizzard, and weather system everywhere on earth. The additional energy is being absorbed by glaciers, which then have too much energy to remain frozen, and so are melting, raising sea levels. The chain of causation is complicated, and involves understanding of phenomena which are highly specialized and counterintuitive to our experience from most of human existence. Yet when we examine all of the data, it is the pattern that seems to emerge. Whether or not we fully understand the patterns at work, this is the precarious situation in which our species finds itself. 

Unchosen Battles

Sometimes, you get to pick your battles. On items that don’t directly affect me, I can choose whether or not to have an opinion, and whether or not to do the research to be informed. Sure, being a good, well-informed person with a consistent ethical framework dictates that I try to have empathy even for issues that don’t impact me, and that I ought apply my principles in a consistent way, such that I tend to have opinions anyway. But I get to decide, for instance, to what degree I care about same sex marriage, or what’s happening in Yemen, or the regulations governing labor unions. None of these things has a noticeable effect on my day to day life, and as such I have the privilege of being able to ignore them without consequence. 

Of course, this isn’t always the case. There are lots of policies that do directly affect me. The price of tuition, for instance, is of great concern, since I am presently engaged in acquiring a degree which I hope will allow me to get a job that will let me pay my bills, ideally without having to take out a small fortune in loans to cover it. Transport policy affects because I am an adult with places to be who cannot drive, and current American transport policy borders on actively hostile to people in my position. 

And then there’s healthcare. I’m not a single issue voter, far from it, but healthcare is a make or break issue for me, since it dictates whether I, and many people I care about dearly, live or die. The policies of the US government in this area determine access to the tools of my life support, whether my insurance company is allowed to discriminate against me, and what price I have to pay to stay alive. These policies are life and death, but that turn of phrase is overused, so let me put it another way: 

With the policy as it is now, I can scrape by. Others can’t, which is tragic, but I’m lucky enough to have money to burn. If the policy changes to make my medication affordable the same way it is in Mexico, I will in one stroke save enough money each year to cover my tuition forever. If policy changes to remove existing protections, then nothing else in the world will matter, because I will go bankrupt and die in short order. It won’t even be a question of choosing between medication and food or rent; without my medication I don’t live long enough to starve to death, and the money I’d save by starving is trivial anyway. I don’t have the privilege of choosing whether to care, or even which side I fall on. I would love to have other priorities; to say that Climate Change is the greatest threat, or immigration is a moral imperative, or whatever other hill I might elect to die on. But for the time being, as long as I want to continue breathing, I have my political opinions chosen for me. 

That’s the way it’s been for as long as I have had political opinions of which to speak. But recently, there’s been a shift. Suddenly, after years of having to beg minor officials to listen, with the presidential election gearing up, people have begun to take notice. Talking points which I and the people I work with have been honing and repeating for seemingly eons are being repeated by primary front runners. With no apparent proximal trigger, our efforts have gained attention, and though we remain far from a solution that will stand the test of repeated partisan attempts to dismantle it, a potential endgame is in sight. 

But this itself brings new challenges. Where before we could be looked upon as a charity case worthy of pity, now we have become partisan. Our core aims- to make survival affordable in this country -have not changed, but now that one side has aligned themselves publicly with us, the other feels obliged to attack us. Items which I previously had to explain only to friends, I now find myself having to defend to a hostile audience. Where once the most I had to overcome was idle misinformation, now there is partisan hatred. 

This is going to be a long campaign. I do not expect I shall enjoy it, regardless of how it turns out. But my work to etch out a means of survival continues. 

Who Needs Facts?

Let us suppose for the sake of discussion that the sky is blue. I know we can’t all agree on much these days, but I haven’t yet heard anyone earnestly disputing the blue-ness of the sky, and in any case I need an example for this post. So let’s collectively assume for the purposes of this post, regardless of what it looks like outside your window at this exact moment, that we live in a world where “the sky is blue” is an easily observable, universally acknowledged fact. You don’t need to really believe it, just pretend. We need to start somewhere, so just assume it, okay? Good.

So, in this world, no one believes the sky isn’t blue, and no one, outside of maybe navel-gazing philosophers, would waste time arguing this point. That is, until one day, some idiot with a blog posts a screed about how the sky is really red, and you sheeple are too asleep to wake up and see it. This person isn’t crazy per se; they don’t belong in a mental institution, though they probably require a good reality check and some counseling. Their arguments, though laughably false, coming from a certain conspiratorial mindset are as coherent as anything else posted on the web. It’s competently and cogently written, albeit entirely false. The rant becomes the butt of a few jokes. It doesn’t become instantly  popular, since it’s way too “tinfoil hat” for most folks, but it gets a handful of readers, and it sets up the first domino in a chain of dominoes. 

Some time later, the arguments laid out in the post get picked up by internet trolls. They don’t particularly believe the sky is red, but they also don’t care what the truth is. To these semi-professional jerks, facts and truth are, at best, an afterthought. To them, the goal of the Wild West web is to get as many cheap laughs by messing with people and generally sowing chaos in online communities, and in this, a belief that the sky is red is a powerful weapon. After all, how do you fight with someone who refuses to acknowledge that the sky is blue? How do you deal with that in an online debate? For online moderators whose job is to keep things civil, but not to police opinions, how do you react to a belief like this? If you suppress it, to some degree you validate the claims of conspiracy, and besides which it’s outside your job to tell users what to think. If you let it be, you’re giving the trolls a free pass to push obvious bunk, and setting the stage for other users to run afoul of site rules on civility when they try to argue in favor of reality.

Of course, most people ignore such obviously feigned obtuseness. A few people take the challenge in good sport and try to disassemble the original poster’s copied arguments; after all they’re not exactly airtight. But enough trolls post the same arguments that they start to evolve. Counter arguments to the obvious retorts develop, and as trolls attempt to push the red-sky-truther act as far as possible, these counter arguments spread quickly among the growing online communities of those who enjoy pretending to believe them. Many people caught in the crossfire get upset, in some cases lashing back, which not only gives the trolls exactly the reaction they seek, but forces moderators on these websites to take action against the people arguing that the sky is, in fact, [expletive deleted] blue, and why can’t you see that you ignorant [expletive deleted]. 

The red sky argument becomes a regular favorite of trolls and petty harassers, becoming a staple of contemporary online life. On a slow news day, the original author of the blog post is invited to appear on television, bringing it even greater attention, and spurring renewed public navel gazing. It becomes a somewhat popular act of counterculture to believe, or at least, to profess to believe, that the sky isn’t blue. The polarization isn’t strictly partisan, but its almost exclusive use by a certain online demographic causes it to become of the modern partisan stereotype nevertheless. 

Soon enough, a local candidate makes reference to the controversy hoping to score some attention and coverage. He loses, but the next candidate, who outright says she believes it should be up to individual Americans what color they want the sky to be, is more successful. More than just securing office, she becomes a minor celebrity, appearing regularly on daytime news, and being parodied regularly on comedy series. Very quickly, more and more politicians adopt official positions, mostly based on where they fall on the partisan map. Many jump on the red-sky bandwagon, while many others denounce the degradation of truth and civic discourse perpetuated by the other side. It plays out exactly how you imagine it would. The lyrics are new, but the song and dance isn’t. Modern politics being what it is, as soon as the sides become apparent, it becomes a race to see who can entrench their positions first and best, while writers and political scientists get to work dreaming up new permutations of argument to hurl at the enemy.

It’s worth noting that through all of this, the facts themselves haven’t changed. The sky in this world is still blue. No one, except the genuinely delusional, sees anything else, although many will now insist to their last breath to wholeheartedly believe otherwise, or else that it is uncivil to promote one side so brazenly. One suspects that those who are invested in the red-sky worldview know on some level that they are lying, have been brainwashed, or are practicing self-deception, but this is impossible to prove in an objective way; certainly it is impossible to compel a red sky believer to admit as much. Any amount of evidence can be dismissed as insufficient, inconclusive, or downright fabricated. Red-sky believers may represent anywhere from a small but noisy minority, to a slight majority of the population, depending on which polling sources are believed, which is either taken as proof of an underlying conspiracy, or proof of their fundamental righteousness, respectively. 

There are several questions here, but here’s my main one: Is this opinion entitled to respect? If someone looks you in the eye and tells you the sky is not blue, but red, are you obliged to just smile and nod politely, rather than break open a can of reality? If a prominent red-sky-truther announces a public demonstration in your area, are you obliged to simply ignore them and let them wave their flags and pass out their pamphlets, no matter how wrong they are? Finally, if a candidate running on a platform of sticking it to the elitist blue sky loyalists proposes to change all the textbooks to say that the color of the sky is unknown, are you supposed to just let them? If an opinion, sincerely believed, is at odds with reality, is one still obligated to respect it? Moreover, is a person who supports such an opinion publicly to be protected from being challenged? 

Mind you, this isn’t just a thought experiment; plenty of real people believe things that are patently false. It’s also not a new issue; the question of how to reconcile beliefs and reality goes back to the philosophical discussions of antiquity. But the question of how to deal with blatantly false beliefs seems to have come back with a vengeance, and as the presidential election gets up to speed, I expect this will become a recurring theme, albeit one probably stated far more angrily. 

So we need to grapple with this issue again: Are people entitled to live in a fantasy world of their choosing? Does the respect we afford people as human being extend to the beliefs they hold about reality? Is the empirical process just another school of thought among several? I suppose I have to say don’t know, I just have very strong opinions.

Fool Me Once

I’m going to start with a confession of something I’ve come to regret immensely. And please, stick with me as I go through this, because I’m using this to illustrate a point. Some time in early 2016, January or February if memory serves, I created a poster supporting Donald Trump for president. The assignment had been to create a poster for a candidate, any candidate. The assignment was very explicit that we didn’t have to agree with what we were writing, and I didn’t, we just had to make a poster. 

At this time in high school, I was used to completing meaningless busywork designed to justify inflated class hours. It was frustrating, soul-dredging work, and since I had been told that I wouldn’t be graduating with my class, there was no end to my troubles in sight. I relished the chance to work on an assignment that didn’t take itself so seriously and would allow me to have some fun by playing around. 

The poster was part joke, part intellectual exercise. Most everyone in my class picked either Clinton or Sanders; a few picked more moderate republicans or third party candidates, not so much because our class was politically diverse, but either out of a sense that there ought to be some representation in the posters, or because they believed it would make them stand out to the teacher. I went a step further, picking the candidate that everyone, myself included, viewed as a joke. I had already earned myself a reputation as devil’s advocate, and so this was a natural extension of my place in the class, as well as a pleasant change of pace from being called a communist.

It helped that there was basically no research to do. Donald Trump was running on brand and bluster. There were no policies to research, no reasoned arguments to put in my own words. I just put his name in a big font, copy and pasted a few of his chants, added gratuitous red white and blue decorations, and it was as good as anything his campaign had come up with. If I had been a bit braver, a bit more on the ball, or had a bit more time, I could have done proper satire. I was dealing with a relatively short turnaround time on that assignment, but I tried to leave room for others to read between the lines. But the result was half baked, without the teeth of serious criticism or parody, only funny if you were already laughing, which to be fair, most of us were. 

The posters were hung up in the classroom for the rest of the year, and I suspect I dodged a bullet with the school year ending before my work really came back to haunt me. I’m not so self-indulgent as to believe that my work actually swayed the election, though I do believe it may have been a factor in the mock election held among our students, where my poster was the only one supporting the winner. I also think that my poster succinctly represented my place in the general zeitgeist which led to Trump’s election. I learned several lessons from that affair. Chief among them, I learned that there is a critical difference between drawing attention to something and calling it out, since the former can be exploited by a clever opportunist. 

Relatedly, I learned that just because something is a joke does not make it harmless. Things said in jest, or as devil’s advocate, still carry weight. This is especially true when not everyone may be on the same page. I never would’ve expected anyone to take anything other than maybe a chuckle from my poster, and I still think that everyone in my class would have seen it that way coming from me. But did everyone else who was in that classroom at that time see it that way? Did the students in other classes, who saw that poster and went on to vote in our mock election take my poster to heart? 

Of course, that incident is behind me now. I’ve eaten my words with an extra helping of humble pie on the side. I won’t say that I can’t make that mistake again, because it’s a very on-brand mistake for me to make. But it’s worth at least trying to lear from this misstep. So here goes: my attempt to learn from my own history. 

Williamson is using dangerous rhetoric to distinguish herself in the Democratic race, and we should not indulge her, no matter how well she manages to break the mould and skewer her opponents. Her half baked talking points rely on pseudoscience and misinformation, and policy designed on such would be disastrous for large swaths of people. They should not be legitimized or allowed to escape criticism. 

Why do I say these things? What’s so bad about saying that we have a sickness care system rather than a healthcare system, or even that Trump is a “dark psychic force” that needs to be beaten with love? 

Let’s start with the first statement. On the surface of it, it’s a not-unreasonable, logically defensible position. The structural organization of American society in general, and the commodification of healthcare in particular, have indeed created a socio-professional environment in the healthcare field which tends to prioritize the suppression of acute symptoms over long-term whole-person treatments, with the direct effect of underserving certain chronic conditions, especially among already underserved demographics, and the practical effect that Americans do not seek medical attention until they experience a crisis event, leading to worse outcomes overall. This is a valid structural criticism of the means by which our healthcare system is organized, and something I am even inclined to agree with. So why am I against her saying it?

Because it’s a dog whistle. It refers directly to arguments made by talking heads who believe, among other things, that modern illnesses are a conspiracy by Big Pharma to keep patients sick and overmedicate, that the government is suppressing evidence of miracle cures like crystals, homeopathy, voodoo, and the like, that vaccines are secretly poisonous, and the bane of my own existence, that the pain and suffering of millions of Americans with chronic illness is, if not imagined outright, is easily cured by yoga, supplements, or snake oil. I particularly hate this last one, because it leads directly to blaming the victim for not recognizing and using the latest panacea, rather than critically evaluate the efficacy of supposed treatments.

Does Williamson actually believe these things? Is Williamson trying to rile up uneducated, disaffected voters by implying in a deniable way that there’s a shadowy conspiracy of cartoon villains ripping them off that needs to be purged, rather than a complex system at work, which requires delicate calibration to reform? Hard to say, but the people she’s quoting certainly believe those things, and several of the people I’ve seen listening to her seem to get that impression. Williamson’s online presence is full of similar dog whistles, in addition to outright fake news and pseudoscience. Much of it is easy to dismiss, circumstantial at best. But this is starting to sound familiar to me. 

What about the second quote, about psychic forces? Surely it’s a joke, or a figure of speech. No one expects a presidential candidate to earnestly believe in mind powers. And who is that meant to dog whistle to anyways? Surely there aren’t that many people who believe in psychic powers?

Well, remember that a lot of pseudoscience, even popular brands like homeopathy, holds directed intention, which is to say, psychic force, as having a real, tangible effect. And what about people who believe that good and evil are real, tangible things, perhaps expressed as angels and demons in a religious testament? Sure, it may not be the exact target demographic Williamson was aiming for. But recent history has proven that a candidate doesn’t have to be particularly pious to use religious rhetoric to sway voters. And that’s the thing about a dog whistle. It lets different people read into it what they want to read. 

Despite comparisons, I don’t think she is a leftist Trump. My instinct is that she will fizzle out, as niche candidates with a, shall we say, politically tangential set of talking points, tend to do. I suspect that she may not even want the job of President, so much as she wants to push her ideas and image. Alongside comparisons to Trump, I’ve also heard comparisons to perennial election-loser Ron Paul, which I think will turn out to be more true. I just can’t imagine a large mass of people taking her seriously. But then again… fool me once, and all that.