Trump Voters & þe Death Cult; +BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-08-05 Th
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember:
First:
Yes, Virginia, there is something in the air and water in Trump-voting areas—some exudation from Trump voters, or some exudation that makes people into the easily-grifted morons who vote for Donald Trump—that also makes you join the Death Cult:
According to Charles Gaba, as of August 5, 2021:
I do not know what is more gobsmacking: that nearly 3/4—0.73—of the variance across states in their vaccination rates is signaled by Trump voting percentage—that’s a Pearson’s R correlation coefficient of 0.86, people—or that the regression line tells us that a state with no Trump voters would have an 82% vaccination rate, one with 40% Trump voters would have a 54% rate, one with 60% Trump voters a 40% rate, and one with 100% Trump voters an 11% rate.
Now it is not the case that only 11% of Trump voters are vaccinated, and that 82% of non-Trump voters are. There is an ecological effect: something in the air and the water and the culture that makes Trump voters in places where they are rare more likely to get vaccinated, and Biden voters in places where they are rare less likely to get vaccinated.
One Video:
Becky Chambers & Martha Wells: Discuss “A Psalm for the Wild-Built” & “Fugitive Telemetry”<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax6ioaQ3K_k>
Very Briefly Noted:
Rebecca Heilweil: From Ford Trucks to Xbox, the Chip Shortage Is Still Causing Problems: ‘The chip shortage is getting worse. The semiconductor supply crunch came for cars and phones. Now consumers are facing higher prices… <https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/8/5/22611031/chip-shortage-cars-electronics-automakers-gm-tesla-playstation-xbox>
Roland Li: Most Bay Area Companies Don’t Expect Employees Back in the Office Five Days a Week: ‘Empty work stations are seen at the Fast office space in San Francisco. Two-thirds of businesses in the Bay Area don’t expect employees to return to the office five days a week, once the pandemic ends. Nick Otto/Special to The Chronicle: More than two thirds of Bay Area companies plan to have workers in the office three days a week or less after the pandemic, a shift that could lead to a permanent drop of more than 1 million commuters a day… <https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Most-Bay-Area-companies-don-t-expect-employees-16367912.php>
Kate Riga: Finish Line On Bipartisan Bill Comes Into Sight With Reconciliation Struggle Still To Come: ‘Senate leadership is trying to “hotline” 16 amendments and final passage of the bipartisan bill tonight, meaning they are trying to get unanimous consent to go forward with this expedited process. A CBS reporter tweeted out the email to senators’ staff… <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/live-blog/finish-line-on-bipartisan-bill-comes-into-sight-with-reconciliation-struggle-still-to-come?entry=1383687>
Bijan: ‘Damn turns out the fascists were the fascists all along…
Ron Filipkowski: ‘NC Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson says that any politician who promotes or encourages people to get a covid vaccine should be voted out of office…
Danny Blanchflower: ‘Me too I was always one idiot member who kept saying a recession was coming but the other eight knew better that there wasn’t…
Paragraphs:
Fernando P. Polack & al. for the C4591001 Clinical Trial Group: Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid–19 Vaccine: ’A total of 43,548 participants underwent randomization, of whom 43,448 received injections: 21,720 with BNT162b2 and 21,728 with placebo. There were 8 cases of Covid–19 with onset at least 7 days after the second dose among participants assigned to receive BNT162b2 and 162 cases [with onset at least 7 days after the second dose] among those assigned to placebo…
LINK: <https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577>
Jeet Heer: The Right Versus the Military: ‘As we get more reporting about the Trump era, I think there’s more and more evidence supporting the idea of a failed but still dangerous wanna-be Duce…. Trump’s language became increasingly violent during Oval Office meetings as protests in Seattle and Portland began to receive attention from cable new outlets. The President would highlight videos that showed law enforcement getting physical with protesters and tell his administration he wanted to see more of that behavior, the excerpts show. “That’s how you’re supposed to handle these people,” Trump told his top law enforcement and military officials, according to Bender. “Crack their skulls!”… The fact that General Mark Milley resisted Trump’s commands is both heartening and disturbing. After all, the line separating democracy from military intervention in domestic politics shouldn’t have to depend on military leaders keeping their oath to the Constitution. There should be other safe-guards in place. Trump’s presidency shows how weak those safeguards are. Since Trump’s departure from the White House, a rift has opened up between the American right and the military. Republican politicians like Senator Tom Cotton and Congressman Matt Gaetz have taken to calling the military “woke” or infected with “critical race theory.”… Milley offered a spirited defense of studying critical race theory and other radical intellectual traditions…. It’s hardly a coincidence that the right now sees the military as the enemy. After all, they disobeyed Trump and were the major barrier for Trump carrying out his plans, both during the protests of 2020 and during the January 6 riot. The current right wing campaign is clearly designed to cow the military and make it more obedient, with one eye on the next Republican president. The crisis of American democracy that started under Trump isn’t over. The Trumpists are trying to reshape institutions to destroy the restraints that held them back…
LINK:
Matthew Yglesias: Single-Family Houses Are Great, Single-Family Zoning Is Not: ‘Zoning reformers feel insecure about adhering to… a free-market regulatory position. Politically… the most important thing is to appeal to older normies with moderate views….. Socially, the most important thing is to fight with leftists about who’s a sellout…. That encourages the adoption of edgy, radical-sounding rhetoric when in most contexts, the best thing to do is to appeal to old-fashioned American values like freedom, property rights, and the dream of abundance while reassuring everyone that if you like your detached single-family home you can keep it. The rhetorical turn that I think has been unhelpful here is that I often see reform proposals framed as an effort to “abolish single-family zoning.” In left-wing activist circles, people like to try to associate themselves with the movement to abolish slavery, in part because abolishing slavery was really good and in part because “if we’d listened to people like you we’d have never abolished slavery” is a popular lazy rebuttal to voices calling for caution and political pragmatism. So you often end up in motte-and-bailey situations where people will say they are prison abolitionists, but then when you ask what should happen to serial killers they concede they’ll be involuntarily confined, just under circumstances so different from what prevails in the contemporary American prison system (Norway, say) as to constitute a form of abolition. This is a dumb way to do politics but some people find it entertaining, and a similar tic leapt into the land use conversation…
LINK:
F.M. Cornford: Microcosmographica Academica: ‘2. PARTIES: First, perhaps, I had better describe the parties in academic politics; it is not easy to distinguish them precisely. There are five; and they are called Conservative Liberals, Liberal Conservatives, Non-placets, Adullamites, and Young Men in a Hurry.A Conservative Liberal is a broad-minded man, who thinks that something ought to be done, only not anything that anyone now desires, but something which was not done in 1881–82. A Liberal Conservative is a broad-minded man, who thinks that something ought to be done, only not anything that anyone now desires; and that most things which were done in 1881–82 ought to be undone….The Non-placet differs in not being open to conviction; he is a man of principle. A principle is a rule of inaction, which states a valid general reason for not doing in any particular case what, to unprincipled instinct, would appear to be right…. The Adullamites are dangerous, because they know what they want; and that is, all the money there is going….. The Young Man in a Hurry is a narrow-minded and ridiculously youthful prig, who is inexperienced enough to imagine that something might be done before very long, and even to suggest definite things. His most dangerous defect being want of experience…. The Young Man in a Hurry is afflicted with a conscience, which is apt to break out, like measles, in patches. To listen to him, you would think that he united the virtues of a Brutus to the passion for lost causes of a Cato; he has not learnt that most of his causes are lost by letting the Cato out of the bag, instead of tying him up firmly and sitting on him, as experienced people do. O young academic politician, know thyself!…
LINK: <https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/baked/micro.pdf>
John Stuart Mill: Dark Satanic Millian Liberalism: ‘[1] Mechanical inventions… have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish. Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot….
[2] Every one has a right to live…. But no one has a right to bring creatures into life, to be supported by other people. Whoever means to stand upon the first of these rights must renounce all pretension to the last. If a man cannot support even himself unless others help him, those others are entitled to say that they do not also undertake the support of any offspring which it is physically possible for him to summon into the world… the state… is bound in self-protection, and… for the sake of every purpose for which government exists, to provide that no person shall be born without its consent….
[3] If the ordinary and spontaneous motives to self-restraint are removed, others must be substituted…. The guarantee of support could be freed from its injurious effects upon the minds and habits of the people, [only] if the relief, though ample in respect to necessaries, was accompanied with conditions which they disliked… some restraints on their freedom… privation of some indulgences… [their] condition… needs not be one of physical suffering, or the dread of it, but only of restricted indulgence, and enforced rigidity of discipline…
LINK: <https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/05/dark-satanic-millian-liberalism-from-john-stuart-mill.html>
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Jeet Heer's piece on the military vs GOP leaves out one very important piece, which is the long-term Dominionist drive to insert and encourage rightwing Christian fundamentalist fanatics in the military. They are not content to "cow the military and make it more obedient".
I have just heard that an extended family member of my wife in Arkansas is in hospital with Covid. He is old and disabled. His daughter doesn't believe Covid is real and prevented him from being vaccinated when he wanted it. Now he is on a ventilator. Despite the personal experience, the daughter still is in denial about Covid. This is an anecdotal example that also supports the more general reporting of some getting vaccinations secretly in defiance of pressure from family members.