Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[kenberg]

I, and many others, have been concerned about just where we are headed. By "we" I mostly mean the US, but I can vary that.

 

WaPo is starting a series on inequaity:

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/16/us-is-growing-more-unequal-thats-harmful-fixable/

 

Perhaps it will be worth reading, perhaps it will be worth discussing.

 

One of my thoughts:

Perhaps men are useful.

 

There was a saying in the 70s: A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

Maybe we should re-think this. Even if it takes a village to raise a child, two parents working together at it can be useful.

 

I am looking forward to seeing what WaPo has to say. There will not be just one simple and obvious solution.

[Gilithin]

There was a saying in the 70s: A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

[kenberg]

I realize most posters here, and perhaps most readers, often vote D. But surely there are some Rs. I hope for comments on vaccines. O believe I have some standing to ask for this. I do ot routinely support every D idea. I have objected to the Defund stuff. Also to paying out 50K to everyone with With student debt. I have expressed skepticism of CRT. And so on.

 

Much has been said about social media and vaccine skepticism. But we are not really going to be shutting social media down, and maybe we don't have to. We have Republican leaders who very possibly would be listened to by some Republicans. Possibly some of them really believe vaccines are dangerous, possibly some actually think vaccine skepticism is a natural by=product of election skepticism, but it seems more likely to me that they know better and are just quaking in their boots at the thought of contradicting DT.

 

If this problem is to be dealt with in any meaningful way then ordinary people who usually vote Republican must make it clear to these Republican leaders that there will a price to be paid for their cowardice.

 

Those Rs who still believe what DT says will say so. But surely there are many Rs out there who now recognize Trump for what he is. I am hoping they will tell their leadership that they must speak up.

 

Biden recently said social media was killing people by allowing false statements about the vaccine to be posted. True enough, but I doubt we can stop that. But the R leaders need the support of the R faithful, and I am hoping that Rs will let these leaders know that more courage is expected from them

 

I never expected to write something such as this, it's not my style, but we have a serious problem with getting people to take the vaccine and the silence, or even support of distorted claims, by leading Rs is irresponsible. Way beyond irresponsible.

 

Added: I see the DJIA dropped 700 points today and this is attributed to worry about the Delta. Maybe money will get people moving on this. Bad things can happen in life but bringing on bad things through idiocy is not the way to go.

[Winstonm]

I realize most posters here, and perhaps most readers, often vote D. But surely there are some Rs. I hope for comments on vaccines. O believe I have some standing to ask for this. I do ot routinely support every D idea. I have objected to the Defund stuff. Also to paying out 50K to everyone with With student debt. I have expressed skepticism of CRT. And so on.

 

Much has been said about social media and vaccine skepticism. But we are not really going to be shutting social media down, and maybe we don't have to. We have Republican leaders who very possibly would be listened to by some Republicans. Possibly some of them really believe vaccines are dangerous, possibly some actually think vaccine skepticism is a natural by=product of election skepticism, but it seems more likely to me that they know better and are just quaking in their boots at the thought of contradicting DT.

 

If this problem is to be dealt with in any meaningful way then ordinary people who usually vote Republican must make it clear to these Republican leaders that there will a price to be paid for their cowardice.

 

Those Rs who still believe what DT says will say so. But surely there are many Rs out there who now recognize Trump for what he is. I am hoping they will tell their leadership that they must speak up.

 

Biden recently said social media was killing people by allowing false statements about the vaccine to be posted. True enough, but I doubt we can stop that. But the R leaders need the support of the R faithful, and I am hoping that Rs will let these leaders know that more courage is expected from them

 

I never expected to write something such as this, it's not my style, but we have a serious problem with getting people to take the vaccine and the silence, or even support of distorted claims, by leading Rs is irresponsible. Way beyond irresponsible.

 

Added: I see the DJIA dropped 700 points today and this is attributed to worry about the Delta. Maybe money will get people moving on this. Bad things can happen in life but bringing on bad things through idiocy is not the way to go.

 

Republicans are terrified of losing Trump voters if they do anything but parrot his lead. We cannot forget that after seeing him in action for 4 years 74 million Americans still voted for Trump.

 

My concern is that the world that you and Biden believe in no longer exists.

[pilowsky]

Has anything changed?

Ken's post prompted me to look up the newsreel archives of the Johnson era anti-war protests.

Here is one example https://bit.ly/AntiVietWar

Watching this video, it is interesting to note that the Demographics of the protesters seems to mirror the recent BLM protests.

If you google rock music concerts of the same period, they look more like Trump rallies, explaining some of the music he plays to warm up the crowd.

Now watch a video about Woodstock - http://bit.ly/WoodStock69

Nearly all the faces are young white kids.

Who were these people - us (although I was too young).

But we had our own little Woodstocks - like the real one, they had almost nothing to do with protesting about human rights.

The people were there for sex, drugs and rock n roll - teenage heaven. Here's a track from the Album http://bit.ly/FlashInMyHead

[kenberg]

Republicans are terrified of losing Trump voters if they do anything but parrot his lead. We cannot forget that after seeing him in action for 4 years 74 million Americans still voted for Trump.

 

My concern is that the world that you and Biden believe in no longer exists.

 

I don't regard giving up as a viable option.

[Chas_P]

I haven't seen you guys say much, if anything, about what's going on at the border. What are your thoughts? Is it a good thing for the country? Bad thing for the country? Makes no difference? What?

[Gilithin]

I haven't seen you guys say much, if anything, about what's going on at the border. What are your thoughts? Is it a good thing for the country? Bad thing for the country? Makes no difference? What?

I guess you mean Arizona. What is going on there is definitely a bad thing. I would hope that every educated person in the world (aside from enemies of the USA) would agree with that.

[barmar]

[/size][/font]

This looks to be a clear statement but on second thought I am not sure. The problem is with "always". People vote when they are 20 and they vote when they are 80.

I think you're misunderstanding it. It's not that a particular person always votes the same way. It's saying that certain groups of people vote consistently.

 

So 30% of Republicans will vote for whoever the Republican candidate is. And if it's between a black candidate and a white one, or between a man and a woman, a significant number will consistently vote based on race/gender, not issues (they might not admit it, or even be aware of it).

[barmar]

This sounds like she is advocating that CRT should be taught in schools. Often the response to criticism of teaching CRT in the schools has been that, except fr law schools and other settings with older students, CRT is not being taught in the schools and the conservatives, when criticizing the teaching of CRT to youngsters, are griping about something that nobody is doing or is planning on doing.

Very few are seriously advocating teaching CRT in public schools. The problem is that Republicans have jumped on this to refer to any teaching about the history of racism. And they think that kids will be taught "if you're white, you're inherently racist and you should be ashamed of it."

 

This is not CRT, and this is not what racism discussions will teach. But the right loves to scare people with dire warnings like this. When I was young, it was gay teachers -- they were going to indoctrinate our kids into the gay lifestyle. Same-sex marriage was going to destroy the institution of marriage (it seems to have survived). More recently it's been bathrooms -- if we let people use the bathroom of the gender they identify as, male pedophiles will claim to be women so they can molest our little girls.

 

It doesn't matter that none of these things is ever likely to happen. Conservatives don't like it when the world changes from what they're used to. And fear is one of the most powerful emotions.

[pilowsky]

I think you're misunderstanding it. It's not that a particular person always votes the same way. It's saying that certain groups of people vote consistently.

 

So 30% of Republicans will vote for whoever the Republican candidate is. And if it's between a black candidate and a white one, or between a man and a woman, a significant number will consistently vote based on race/gender, not issues (they might not admit it, or even be aware of it).

 

This is another good point - I was once advised that no matter a politician's own beliefs (this was a while ago) they will always espouse an anti-abortion position because around 10% of their electorate consider this to be a deal-breaker issue.

I suspect guns and other things have a similar standing in the USA.

I also don't think it is fair to describe the rump of the Republican movement that supports Trump as 'the Right'.

They are extremists who recently advocated the violent overthrow of the government - there are better words to describe them.

 

[y66]

Late last week Michael Brendan Dougherty of National Review stirred up a mix of interest and outrage among journalists by arguing that more understanding should be extended to unvaccinated Americans, whose hesitancy about getting Pfizered or Modernafied often reflects a reasonable uncertainty and wariness after a year of shifting public-health rhetoric, blunders and misleading messaging.

 

The alternative perspective, judging from responses to his column, regards the great mass of the unvaccinated as victims of deliberately manufactured paranoia, the blame for which can be laid partly on their own partisan self-delusion and partly on wicked actors in the right-wing media complex — from conspiracy theorists flourishing online to vaccine skeptics interviewed by Tucker Carlson to Republican politicians who have pandered to vaccine resistance.

 

The sheer numbers of unvaccinated Americans — upward of 80 million adults — means that these perspectives can be somewhat reconciled. On the one hand, there is clearly a hard core of vaccine resistance, based around tribal right-wing identity, that’s being nourished by both online conspiracy theories and the bad arguments and arguers that some Fox News hosts and right-wing personalities have elevated.

 

On the other hand, the ranks of the unvaccinated are much larger than the audience for any vaccine-skeptical information source and far more varied than the stereotype of Trump voters drinking up QAnon-style conspiracies. The vaxxed-unvaxxed divide is widest between Democrats and Republicans, but it’s also an education divide, an age divide, a gender divide, a racial divide, an urban-rural divide, an insured-uninsured divide and more. (My strong impression, based both on vaccine-hesitant people I know personally and anecdotes that show up in reporting, is that it’s a “good experiences with official medicine”-“bad experiences with official medicine” divide as well.)

 

The Kaiser Family Foundation has polling on vaccination rates that’s helpful for seeing both of these realities. In its survey, you can see the core of conservative resistance: Among Republicans, 23 percent say they definitely won’t get the vaccine, and among white evangelicals, 22 percent say they definitely won’t, figures that are higher than for almost any other subgroup in the poll.

 

But Republicans aren’t simply isolated in their own partisan world. Vaccine hesitancy abounds outside the conservative base, and overall vaccination numbers for Republicans and independents actually look more alike than the numbers for independents and Democrats. (52 percent of Republicans have had at least one vaccination; for independents, the number is 61 percent; for Democrats, 86 percent. Meanwhile, a full 16 percent of independents are a hard no compared with just 2 percent of Democrats.)

 

Likewise, lots of groups are more likely to be hesitant than firmly resistant, but they still have overall vaccination rates close to the rate for Republican constituencies. Black adults, for instance, have a vaccination rate of 60 percent, while Hispanics stand at 63 percent, both close to the white-evangelical rate of 58 percent.

 

Looking at the Kaiser data, then, doesn’t yield a picture of a vaccination effort foundering on the rocks of Republican obduracy and paranoia. It yields a picture of an effort that has been incredibly successful among seniors, well-educated liberals and Democratic partisans and yielded diminishing returns for other groups — from racial minorities to rural Americans to the less educated and young and uninsured. The friendliness of certain Fox News shows to vaccine skeptics is a subset of this problem, but not even close to the problem as a whole.

 

This has implications not just for Twitter blame-laying but for policy as well. Liberals who are convinced that the main problem lies with deluded QAnon moms or intransigent Trumpistas are naturally drawn to punitive solutions: pressure online giants to censor vaccine skepticism to break the spell of misinformation, and find as many ways as possible to mandate vaccinations, to force the intransigent to take their jabs or lose their jobs.

 

But if the unvaccinated and their motivations are complex and heterogeneous, then these strategies are more fraught. Censoring the internet will have little effect if many of the vaccine-hesitant are disconnected rather than very online or drawing on personal experience rather than anti-vaxxer memes. (As Facebook noted in defending itself against Biden administration attacks, its users are more vaccine-friendly than the national average.)

 

Heavy-handed vaccine mandates, meanwhile, might alienate not just Fox viewers but also part of the political middle. The Kaiser data shows slight majority support for the general idea of employers requiring vaccination, for instance, but 61 percent oppose their own employer issuing such a requirement, which is probably the more meaningful statistic. Support for vaccine mandates for children is similarly soft: While 52 percent of Americans support vaccine mandates in K-12 education, it falls to 37 percent among parents with children under 18 years, and only 45 percent of Democrats with kids under 12 intend to vaccinate them as soon as a vaccine is available.

 

In a polarized landscape with widely distrusted institutions, a more patient approach seems much more civically healthy: a mix of local outreach, public health guidance that consistently promises normalcy as a benefit of vaccination (and doesn’t withdraw it arbitrarily), and actually arguing with skeptics. (The idea that every prominent conservative entertaining skeptical arguments must be a knowing liar is an important error in its own right.)

 

But — and here the pro-vaxx alarm is understandable — patience has substantial costs. Combine the large unvaccinated population with the fact that vaccines are saving lives but clearly do not choke off all transmission, and we’re set up for a near-future with repeated outbreaks and fewer, but still far too many, deaths.

 

Some share of those deaths may be unavoidable. As William Hoenig argued in a much-cited recent Twitter thread, the Delta variant is probably a harbinger of a future in which Covid endures as an endemic disease that many people get repeatedly but whose dangers are mitigated by previous immunity, vaccines and booster shots. In that dispensation, some people will inevitably still die of Covid the way some people die of influenza; the hope of “Covid zero” is slipping out of reach.

 

If that is our future, though, it still matters how we get there. The more people whose first immune experience comes through a vaccine rather than the virus itself, the fewer who will die during the transition to the future status quo. (Also, the faster we reach that status quo, the less temptation in more liberal parts of the country to embrace destructive policies like school closures this coming fall or winter.)

[y66]

I wasn’t planning on reading any of the new batch of Donald Trump books. His vampiric hold on the nation’s attention for five years was nightmarish enough; one of the small joys of the post-Trump era is that it’s become possible to ignore him for days at a time.

 

But after reading an article adapted from “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost” by Michael C. Bender, a Wall Street Journal reporter, I changed my mind and picked it up. What caught my attention wasn’t his reporting on White House disarray and Trump’s terrifying impulses — some details are new, but that story is familiar. Rather, I was fascinated by Bender’s account of the people who followed Trump from rally to rally like authoritarian Deadheads.

 

Bender’s description of these Trump superfans, who called themselves the “front-row Joes,” is sympathetic but not sentimental. Above all, he captures their pre-Trump loneliness.

 

“Many were recently retired and had time on their hands and little to tie them to home,” writes Bender. “A handful never had children. Others were estranged from their families.” Throwing themselves into Trump’s movement, they found a community and a sense of purpose. “Saundra’s life had become bigger with Trump,” he says of a Michigan woman who did odd jobs on the road to fund her obsession.

 

There are many causes for the overlapping dysfunctions that make contemporary American life feel so dystopian, but loneliness is a big one. Even before Covid, Americans were becoming more isolated. And as Damon Linker pointed out recently in The Week, citing Hannah Arendt, lonely people are drawn to totalitarian ideologies. “The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships,” Arendt concluded in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” describing those who gave themselves over to all-encompassing mass movements.

 

A socially healthy society would probably never have elected Trump in the first place. As Daniel Cox, a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote in FiveThirtyEight shortly after the 2020 election, the “share of Americans who are more socially disconnected from society is on the rise. And these voters disproportionately support Trump.”

 

Polling data from A.E.I.’s Survey Center on American Life found that 17 percent of Americans said they had not a single person in their “core social network.” These “socially disconnected voters were far more likely to view Trump positively and support his re-election than those with more robust personal networks,” wrote Cox.

 

It’s not just Trumpism that feeds on isolation. Consider QAnon, which has morphed from an internet message board hoax into a quasi-religion. In his book “The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything,” the journalist Mike Rothschild shows how central a sense of digital community is to QAnon’s appeal. “It’s one of the reasons why baby boomers have fallen in with Q to such a surprising degree — many are empty nesters, on their own, or retired,” he writes.

 

It’s also likely a reason that QAnon started expanding in tandem with Covid lockdowns, finding new life among Instagram influencers, yoga practitioners and suburban moms. Suddenly people all over America had their social lives obliterated, and many mothers found themselves trapped in domestic isolation beyond anything imagined by Betty Friedan. Stuck at home, they had more time to get sucked into internet rabbit holes. QAnon, which came to merge with Covid-trutherism, gave them an explanation for their misery and villains to blame.

 

A cruel paradox of Covid is that the social distancing required to control it nurtured pathologies that are now prolonging it. Isolated, atomized people turned to movements that turned them against vaccines. Here, too, Arendt was prescient. She described people shaken loose from any definite place in the world as being at once deeply selfish and indifferent to their own well-being: “Self-centeredness, therefore, went hand in hand with a decisive weakening of the instinct for self-preservation.”

 

One of the most vivid characters in Bender’s book is Randal Thom, a 60-year-old Marine veteran whose wife and children left him because of his drug problem, and who spent time in prison. “The rallies became the organizing principle in his life, and Trump fans loved him for it,” writes Bender. “Like Trump himself, all of Randal’s past mistakes didn’t matter to them.” When he got sick with what he believed was Covid, he refused to go the hospital, lest he “potentially increase the caseload on Trump’s watch.” (He survived but died in a car crash on his way home from a Trump boat parade in October.)

 

Toward the end of Bender’s book, Saundra reappears. She’d just been at the Capitol for the Jan. 6 insurrection and seemed ready for more. “Tell us where we need to be, and we just drop everything and we go,” she says. “Nobody cares about if they have to work. Nobody cares about anything.” If you give people’s life meaning, they’ll give you everything.

[kenberg]

I think you're misunderstanding it. It's not that a particular person always votes the same way. It's saying that certain groups of people vote consistently.

 

So 30% of Republicans will vote for whoever the Republican candidate is. And if it's between a black candidate and a white one, or between a man and a woman, a significant number will consistently vote based on race/gender, not issues (they might not admit it, or even be aware of it).

 

Am I misunderstanding? I was addressing this statement in Pil's post:

 

"It is a truth, universally acknowledged, amongst politicians that about 33% of people will always vote for the same party - no matter who is in it."

I mentioned that "always" made this seem unlikely.

And he did not say 33% of a particular group (except for "people", which I suppose is a group).

People decide how to vote in various ways. I took the statement to mean that about a third of the electorate has simply decided "I am a Republican and so I vote Republican" or "I am a Democrat and so I vote Democrat". I think that is the way Adam took it when he acknowledged that is basically how he votes. He said he would make an exception in the case of a truly awful D candidate. Sure. I can imagine this one third number meaning "I always vote for the Party, but of course if the candidate was truly awful I would not". So it would be one third, but allowing for the possibility of exceptions.

My father belonged to the carpenters union. At election time the union gave its members a list of who they should vote for. Of course it wasn't binding but I think a fair number of union members did not much follow politics and voted the way the union recommended. And that was usually Dem.

Pilowsky can tell me if I misunderstood, but I took it as saying that about a third of the voters don't really much get into details, rather they decided long ago that they were D so they vote D or they are R so they vote R.

It really seems clear to me that this is what the sentence meant, but I have been wrong before.

[kenberg]

Very few are seriously advocating teaching CRT in public schools. The problem is that Republicans have jumped on this to refer to any teaching about the history of racism. And they think that kids will be taught "if you're white, you're inherently racist and you should be ashamed of it."

 

This is not CRT, and this is not what racism discussions will teach. But the right loves to scare people with dire warnings like this. When I was young, it was gay teachers -- they were going to indoctrinate our kids into the gay lifestyle. Same-sex marriage was going to destroy the institution of marriage (it seems to have survived). More recently it's been bathrooms -- if we let people use the bathroom of the gender they identify as, male pedophiles will claim to be women so they can molest our little girls.

 

It doesn't matter that none of these things is ever likely to happen. Conservatives don't like it when the world changes from what they're used to. And fear is one of the most powerful emotions.

 

Again I am not sure I misunderstood anything. I was responding to

 

The topic is often taboo in white families, but of course it can't be avoided for many families of color. As Wenner Moyer writes in a guest essay today, researchers have learned that discussing race with children actually decreases prejudice among white children and increases the self-esteem of children of color. "If states ban the teaching of critical race theory, as conservative lawmakers in many are attempting to do, or if schools don't provide consistent education about racism and discrimination, it's imperative that parents pick up the slack," she writes.

 

If the author does not want this to be thought of as advocating the teaching of CRT she needs to learn to express herself more clearly. She allows for the possibility that CRT might not be taught, but then says that if it is not taught then parents have to make up for this. This sounds like she is advocating that it be taught.

 

Do I think CRT should be taught? I think CRT means different things to different people and maybe means different things even to the same person depending on the particular argument at hand. I am fine with teaching history as it happened, good and bad. In my not particularly good high school, one of the good things we did was write many term papers. The general subject matter was set but we were free to choose the exact topic. We were expected to do some library research, put our ideas together and write a decent paper. We were not required to come to a preset conclusion. A person can learn a bit about how to think doing that. There are many historical issues that could be of interest. When I was 13 I wrote a paper on Douglas MacArthur. He had recently been relieved of command in Korea. I learned a lot. Students could select a topic from a list of racial issues and do some library work.

 

Another time we were assigned to groups and each group was to choose a Shakespeare play that we had not read. We were to read it, think about it, and write about it. We chose The Merchant of Venice. Thoughts about anti-semitism were included in our report.

 

i learned from my civics teacher that there was support for Hitler in the US during the 30s.

 

Now that I think about it, maybe my high school wasn't all that bad. Except for my idiot biology teacher. But my metal shop teacher was excellent.

[y66]

My big point about this is that the elite discussion of vaccine resistance seems a little bit perversely focused on the hardest problems. How do you persuade distrustful people who live in communities where trust and vaccination levels are so low that you need to be obsessed with avoiding political backlash? I’m not sure.

 

So we should start with the easy stuff.

 

Get the FDA to stop fueling vaccine resistance. Let institutions that don’t need to worry about backlash roll out mandates. Somehow Los Angeles County is reacting to Delta by trying to re-impose a county-wide mask mandate but hasn’t mandated vaccination for its own sheriff’s department. In D.C., we’re hand-wringing about schools in the fall but we’re not mandating vaccination for teachers or kids over 12. Offer people some money and some time off to get their shots.

 

All of this will improve the vaccination rate, which is good. It will also increase the share of the non-vaccinated population who have people in their social circle that have been vaccinated and may serve as validators.

 

For all the talk right now, we’re really barely doing the minimum to encourage vaccination and we really ought to step it up before our hospitals get in trouble and a new wave of efforts to impose restrictions on social and economic life go back to tearing the country apart.

 

https://www.slowboring.com/p/vaccine-fda-approve

[kenberg]

I am definitely becoming a Matt Yglesias fan. His column makes a lot of sense. But I want to quarrel, at least maybe quarrel,with this:

 

 

If you just listen to what anyone is saying about the Covid vaccines, they are endorsing them.

 

The acting director of the FDA and her Trump-era predecessor are encouraging people to get vaccinated. The director of the CDC and her Trump-era predecessor are encouraging people to get vaccinated. The President of the United States is loudly encouraging people to get vaccinated, and his predecessor is quietly doing so. The Surgeon General says you should get vaccinated. Dr. Fauci says you should get vaccinated. It’s possible these people are all lying and full of ***** or something, but as a journalist, I am simply conveying what’s clearly true — all the people in positions of authority are endorsing the Covid vaccines and encouraging you to take them.

 

 

Yes it is true that Fauci says take the vaccine. And the director of the CDC, but I can't recall her name at the moment. This means that a lot of people don't know what the CDC is or who the director is or what she says. So how to get people convnced?

 

The argument should be simple: Delta is surging, deaths from Delta are surging, the vast majority of deaths from Delta are from the non-vaccinated.

 

That's it.

 

Most people don't want to die. So this argument should work. How to get heard?

 

Mostly the naysayers are Republican. People who vote Republican have been convinced by someone to vote Republican. The same people who convinced them to vote Republican have a decent chance of getting the above message across.

 

Efforts should be placed on getting these folks to speak up. I realize that some do speak up, and contrary to "all the people in positions of authority are endorsing the Covid vaccines", some Rs are hemming and hawing or are outright belligerent to the vaccine. Ok, but not all Republicans are that stupid. Some are simply cowards. There should be a heavy push on them to take a position. If a person is not given the option to duck and weave, at least some of them will decide that they really do not want to advocate a suicidal course. Nobody has to change their views on socio-political issues, they just have to take the ******* vaccine. The R leadership is ducking this, and they should not be allowed to duck it. People are dying. taking the vaccine will help protect them, what should a person do? Duh..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Gilithin]

Most people don't want to die.

Most don't. And for those the government need to be there and offer them every opportunity to get their wish. But for those that do want to die, or are at least ambivalent about it, is it really the government's place to impose living on them? Your way of thinking is not their way of thinking; and the Republican leadership has for the most part already shown that they will follow the other way. They have not ducked it, they just spoke with a different message. It would be unwise to expect any aid from that quarter any time soon.

[kenberg]

Most don't. And for those the government need to be there and offer them every opportunity to get their wish. But for those that do want to die, or are at least ambivalent about it, is it really the government's place to impose living on them? Your way of thinking is not their way of thinking; and the Republican leadership has for the most part already shown that they will follow the other way. They have not ducked it, they just spoke with a different message. It would be unwise to expect any aid from that quarter any time soon.

 

I very much think that if someone wants to die he then can do that. Assisted suicide makes good sense to me. I think it could have a few restraints. Maybe require that the person state his wish, then ten days later say that it is still his wish, and ten days after that confirm it remains his wish, then he gets medical assistance in bringing it about. He does not have to explain why he wishes to do this.

 

But I doubt that is what is going on with the naysayers. I was talking with one such a while back, during social distancing and masks, before vaccines. He was very skeptical, very much a "nobody tells me what to do" type. I kept it short and simple: "You have a right to commit suicide, you don't have a right to take others with you". I doubt I changed his mind, and I suppose that's ominous for the approach I am suggesting.

 

My elementary school teacher took the class to see The Emperor's New Clothes, the point being that people can be really blind to reality until someone speaks up and then others decide to take a second look. Ok, it's a fairy tale but fairy tales can have their uses. I don't believe that all Rs think the vaccines will magnetize people. I hope that there are a reasonable number of Rs who actually think vaccines are useful. I would very much like those people to speak up. It would not totally solve the problem, it could help solve the problem. People who would ignore me might listen to them.

[pilowsky]

So, if these same patriots were members of the armed forces and they approached the enemy in battle, is it the American way - in the pursuit of life liberty and happiness to not join their comrades in battle because:

1. I just want to see how it works out for others
2. It looks like the gun they gave me is experimental.
3. The guy running the show is monitoring me.
4. Nobody tells me what to do.

[mikeh]

Fwiw, as an outsider who has a number of American friends (some ex-pats and some still in the US) and being immersed in US media, my perhaps simplistic take is that US society focuses on individual rights to an unhealthy degree.

 

Yes, any civilized society ought to establish and protect many rights for all members of that society (including non-citizens).

 

But any civilized society ought also to promote amongst its members the notion that we are all members of a society and, as such, have responsibilities and obligations to each other and to society as a whole, and that these responsibilities and obligations are co-equal with our rights.

 

Those ignoring masking rules, social distancing and vaccines seem, in many cases, to be motivated by a belief that their individual right to decide how to respond to the pandemic is the only issue to consider. The notion that they ought to be vaccinated, etc, to protect other members of society simply doesn’t occur to them.

 

DeSantis in Florida and that ugly Governor in Texas seem classic examples of Republicans who see no greater good than their own self and no reason anyone should suffer the slightest inconvenience for the sake of others.

 

I’m not sure when the myth of rugged individualism took hold so strongly in such a huge segment of the US. Probably in the 1950s I suspect. That’s it’s a myth is obvious to anyone with even a modest knowledge of history.

 

I’m not claiming any other western country is immune to this problem. We have our own fantasists here, and one need only look at the UK, France, Australia etc to see the same truly stupid attitudes. It’s just that with the size and cultural presence of the US, the results are even more terrifying than seeing similar, but less prevalent attitudes elsewhere.

[kenberg]

And just when I thought nobody was listening to me.

 

https://www.washingt...ff7f_story.html

 

 

A growing number of top Republicans are urging GOP supporters to get vaccinated as the delta coronavirus variant surges across the United States, marking a notable shift away from the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorizing that has gripped much of the party in opposition to the Biden administration's efforts to combat the virus.

 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was part of the rising chorus on Tuesday, stressing the need for unvaccinated Americans to receive coronavirus shots and warning that the country could reverse its progress in moving on from the pandemic.

 

"These shots need to get in everybody's arm as rapidly as possible, or we're going to be back in a situation in the fall that we don't yearn for, that we went through last year," McConnell said during his weekly news conference. "I want to encourage everybody to do that and to ignore all of these other voices that are giving demonstrably bad advice."

 

The remarks from McConnell followed comments in recent days from other top Republicans and from conservative voices urging people to get vaccinated, even as other members of the GOP continue to sound notes of skepticism and spread misinformation about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.

 

It's what I was rooting for. This is so simple it is hard to imagine it otherwise.

 

It is my hope that this will help. Maybe the "other members of the GOP continue to sound notes of skepticism and spread misinformation " can do some re-thinking also. It would be really good if they did. C'mon guys. It's time.

 

[pilowsky]

Don't get over-excited.

Moscow Mitch made a motza through his wife's 'work' in the previous (what is loosely termed) administration.

Elaine Chao was found to have used her office for personal gain although the DOJ refused to pursue charges.

 

For someone to be influential, people at least need to know who they are.

Here's an interesting piece from 538. https://53eig.ht/3eEv0Tq

[johnu]

Don't get over-excited.

Moscow Mitch made a motza through his wife's 'work' in the previous (what is loosely termed) administration.

Elaine Chao was found to have used her office for personal gain although the DOJ refused to pursue charges.

 

Elaine Chao was found to have used her office for personal gain although the TRUMP DOJ refused to pursue charges.

 

Fixed your post.

 

Justice Department declined to prosecute Wilbur Ross over census citizenship question testimony

 

In case there was any doubt, it was the Trump DOJ that declined to prosecute Wilbur Ross for repeatedly lying to Congress. Hmmm, it there a pattern here?

[pilowsky]

Fixed your post.

 

Justice Department declined to prosecute Wilbur Ross over census citizenship question testimony

 

In case there was any doubt, it was the Trump DOJ that declined to prosecute Wilbur Ross for repeatedly lying to Congress. Hmmm, it there a pattern here?

 

The (so-called) DOJ that refused to prosecute both Chao and Smith and the rest of Trump Swamp is now gone - PTL - (and I'm a nonbeliever).

Is there any chance that the charges can be rejuvenated?

PS TYFFMP