Here are some stories that tickled my anti-fancy the last couple of days. A mid-week blargh! No promises!
CDC overestimated outdoor COVID transmission rates by two decimal places
Read that story! Here are some relevant parts.
They continue to treat outdoor transmission as a major risk. The C.D.C. says that unvaccinated people should wear masks in most outdoor settings and vaccinated people should wear them at “large public venues”; summer camps should require children to wear masks virtually “at all times.”
These recommendations would be more grounded in science if anywhere close to 10 percent of Covid transmission were occurring outdoors. But it is not. There is not a single documented Covid infection anywhere in the world from casual outdoor interactions, such as walking past someone on a street or eating at a nearby table.
…
Erring on the side of protection — by exaggerating the risks of outdoor transmission — may seem to have few downsides. But it has contributed to widespread public confusion about what really matters. Some Americans are ignoring the C.D.C.’s elaborate guidelines and ditching their masks, even indoors, while others continue to harass people who walk around outdoors without a mask.
All the while, the scientific evidence points to a conclusion that is much simpler than the C.D.C.’s message: Masks make a huge difference indoors and rarely matter outdoors.
So much of our lives these last 15 months has been dictated by people making life-altering decisions for whole societies without a much of a fucking clue as to what was actually going on. The ignorance of our experts is both understandable and forgivable—no one could have been expected to design a response to the pandemic that precisely fit the shape of the problem, because no one really knew the shape of the problem. But the key to regaining the trust of the public after massive institutional failure is humility, not a continued reassertion of absolute certitude.
The shutdowns that swept across much of the world last spring were good—the lockdowns were not. It is now clear that forcing people to abandon large open spaces—going so far as to lock up tennis courts and place chains over park basketball rims, in my town—was stupid and probably counterproductive. That’s not really anybody’s fault. We didn’t know, last spring, that COVID-19 was spread almost exclusively as a result of spending time in an enclosed, poorly ventilated space with an infected person, and almost never outdoors, or on surfaces, or because of a failure to wash hands, or because somebody had a fever at fucking Disney World.
But the justification for these accidental overreaches must not be “we were just trying to be extremely cautious,” which is a purely self-serving, and still highly moralistic framing. “Oh, you got a problem with CAUTION?! We were just trying to save lives, THAT’S ALL.” It is a way of scolding people who are justifiably upset that their world was turned upside down by a bunch of experts best guesses. Justify it, instead, by telling the truth. And the truth is, they had no fucking clue! The temperature checks, the plexiglass queues, the surface sanitation regime, the closing down of outdoor public spaces—all nonsense! Say so! We want humility from those that ask for so much deference.
And now that we do know better, don’t worry so much about the easing of restrictions being seen as some sort of repudiation of the last year and a half of (bad) institutional advice. The repudiation is evident in the reality of the world around us—trying to stave it off is just ego-service. The only way to save face, and begin to rebuild trust in our crumbling institutions, is to admit the failure and refashion current guidelines around what we actually know, not on some impossible standard of extreme caution that is mostly about continuing to justify the initial ignorant response.
There is no covid-related reason to wear a mask outdoors if you are not in extended close contact with other people. Temperature checks are nonsense theater. Plexiglass largely inhibits good ventilation. If you are vaccinated, your life should essentially return to normal, though you may want to keep a mask handy for any extended indoor visits, or quick runs into the store. This should be the guidance from our experts, because it reflects what we now know. Experts maintain authority by acknowledging the limits of their knowledge, and admitting mistakes.
Woke-ism as a barrier to entry
I think we talked about this essay on the podcast at some point in the last year, but I’m not sure where. Listening to Marketplace on NPR last night, I noticed as clear an example of what the writer was on about as I can recall coming across.
In short, the idea is that the ability to communicate in the language of “social justice,” as it is popularly understood, has become a prerequisite for entry to positions of influence and power in elite circles. Being able to talk in this language is also a way of insulating those who are already in positions of power from criticism—criticism from within the movement, and from without.
The person being interviewed in this piece has such a facility for “Woke-ese” that she is able to slip right into an answer about “equity” and “inclusivity” in response to a question about people possibly having found other employment in the time since Broadway production shut down last year. Here’s the whole exchange:
Ryssdal: One of the things we learned out of the jobs report this past Friday was that some people are using this pandemic as an opportunity to re-gear themselves and maybe do something else. Do you have people not coming back who have said to you, “Yeah, I’d love to be in your show. But I spent the last year doing X, Y, Z, and I want to keep doing it”?
Price: Yeah, we don’t know yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the case. I certainly have heard about other friends’ shows and other colleagues that have left the business entirely. Broadway is going to come back. But it also needs to come forward. It has to change, it has to be more equitable, more inclusive. It has to understand that the people both in the seats and the people backstage and on the stage have been through an unbelievable experience. And we have to give all we can in terms of space and support and change so that they’re comfortable and they’re happy to be there. And we won’t know all the answers to any of this until we start engaging with everyone and put our changes in place both as a show and as an industry in general to make sure that people feel safe.
Look at that pivot! She’s so fluent in this language that she’s able to turn a question about staffing into an acknowledgement of the past sins of the institution, even though no one was asking. That she is herself an elite member and protector of institutional power is forgiven because she is able to speak the language of the “oppressed.” Of course, this is mostly anodyne HR-speak horseshit, but the point is that it’s anodyne HR-speak horseshit as gatekeeping—this is a preemptive bulwark against woke attack, a signal to her fellow class-travelers that she is one of them, and makes for terrific job security.
It is also a sign that no one else will rise to her position without being fluent in the language of the woke—a language that is only really understood by a cultured elite who went to the right schools and colleges, who keep up with the continuing education that is Twitter, who know when to perform their understanding of systemic power dynamics, equity, oppression, and all the rest. You want to get a job where you’re in charge of anything or anybody, in this industry, or any other in this class? You must speak the language.
Of course, there have always been barriers to entry into management and ownership in any realm. The point is to recognize that all the woke gobbledlygook isn’t justice, it’s just more of the same—not indicative of some enlightened moral superiority, but insulation against the unwashed hordes at the gates. That it sets up the speaker to claim the mantle of victimhood at the first sign of attack is just icing on the cake.
Atlanta massage parlor killer to face death penalty on hate crime charges
In a news conference on Tuesday, Ms. Willis said she had reviewed statements that Mr. Long had given to investigators and believed that seeking the death penalty and hate crime enhancements was appropriate, but she did not lay out any new evidence about his motivations.
“If you harm any member of our community, you are going to be held accountable,” Ms. Willis said, adding that she wanted to send a message to victims that “it does not matter your ethnicity, it does not matter what side of the tracks you come from, it does not matter your wealth, you will be treated as an individual with value.”
Apparently the victim’s ethnicity not only does matter, but is of the utmost importance in determining how a perpetrator will be held accountable. I have talked about this at some length on the podcast (yes, twice), so I won’t go on too long, here. But I just can’t get past the contradiction of what we’re expected to believe about this whole situation to make these “hate crime enhancements” make any sense.
First, we are asked to recognize that the employees at the massage parlors are mostly Asian women at least in part because of systemic forces of white supremacy and discrimination. Accepting that premise, we are then further asked to recognize that the killer had a hyper-sexualized view of Asian women in general because of similar systemic white supremacy—and not because, say, he was a shamed sex-and-self-hating weirdo and they worked at a fucking rub’n’tug. But fine! Accepting that, too—we are asked to further believe that he hated them, and killed them, not because they worked at the rub’n’tug, but because they were Asian. Does his hatred of Asians flow from the fact of their Asian-ness, or their Asian-ness as it relates to their circumstance as hyper-sexualized victims of white supremacy? The victims’ Asian-ness is somehow both immaterial to their circumstance and entirely determinative of their circumstance. But even if we can hold the whole basket of contradictions in our heads, if those two things are inextricable from one another, in no small part due to systemic forces of white supremacy undergirding the whole world, are we really, as a society, going to pin the “hate” on this fucking violent moron, this guilt and shame riven idiot whose stupid religion convinced him that his boners were evil? Are we going to kill him for it? To what end? This hate—created as it was by circumstance and systems of oppression and white supremacy over which no one can be said to operate any control—this hate is somehow his fault? That doesn’t make any sense! Charge him with a crime! He’s a criminal! That makes sense.
It’s easy to be right about everything if you don’t actually mean anything you say
Matt Yglesias wrote a good essay about why this one particular flavor of “white supremacy discourse” is both total hogwash and also demonstrably racist and race-essentialist on its own terms. The flavor is Tema Okun, who is a white lady who sells her brand of anti-racism to schools and cities and businesses for a handsome profit.
The amusing reaction to this piece by woke types is to simply dismiss all of Tema Okun’s problematic ideas as not in keeping with the mainstream of anti-racist discourse, or as reductionist bullet points of larger, more defensible ideas.
This is a very common response to any specific problems pointed to in anti-racist theory. “Yeah, sure, it’s bad when you put it that way, but no one really puts it that way. We hold only highly defensible positions, not these obviously absurd ones that are widely adopted by the most prominent proponents of the discourse.” This is the same move Hannah-Jones herself made when people started getting mad at her for the very things she herself wrote in and about the 1619 Project—”Yes, the literal founding…no not literally the founding, who said that?”
Of course, all of this can be written off as WHITE SUPREMACY striking back in a systematic way to oppress those hard at work dismantling it, so fuck ‘em! It’s all so exhausting, after all.
