Your least favorite two-thirds of Cast Iron Brains is here once again with another episode chock full of news and culture commentary. (Lori, sadly, wasn’t able to join us until the very end.) Also, an apology! There is some fuzziness on Bob’s microphone for a little bit in the middle of the episode. Hopefully we’ll have that cleared up by next week. In the meantime, we’re yapping about the plague of modern certainty under which we’re all suffering, the easing of CDC covid-related guidance, the Supreme Court, and plenty of other fun stuff. Got something to say about anything we said? You can find us on Facebook or Twitter, and you can send us an email here. Enjoy!
Show Rundown:
04:21 --> Bob blabbing “On Certainty,” and a follow-up discussion
26:35 --> WGAS News --> CDC adjusts mask guidelines
47:08 --> GOP doesn't actually want a January 6 Commission
55:55 --> SCOTUS talk
1:14:45 --> Pipeline ATTACK!!! and Lori finally turns up
1:21:27 --> THRILLING MEDIA MERGERS
1:29:28 --> Tony LaRussa and more of baseball’s stupid unwritten rules
Here’s the mini-essay Bob read at the start of the show, if you’re the sort of weirdo who wants to follow along.
One of the first points I tried to make on this podcast when we first started back, a little over a year ago, was that it felt like Trump had infected every aspect of life, that he transcended politics so completely that by the last year of his presidency, five years into The Trumppening, it was difficult to talk about anything at a cultural level without feeling the presence of Trump, directly or indirectly. This was his whole game, of course—all he cared about was dominating the national attention, making sure that everyone was talking and thinking about him all the time, whether it was national politics, where it made some sense to be focused on him, or any of a countless number of domains where it did not, such as college football, a hurricane in or around Alabama, the use of the words “merry Christmas,” NBA or awards shows television ratings, wind turbines, or pandemic response. He was the ultimate blowhard, someone with a definitive opinion on every possible subject, someone for whom the only way to be wrong was to not have a take.
This absolute constant certitude of Donald Trump is what made him such a fundamentally political creature, whether he ever ended up president or not. Even when our political leaders are professorial types who offer measured and thoughtful and nuanced responses to difficult subjects, the thing that appeals is their certainty—their certainty that they embody the hope and change for which America is so hungry, for example. The certainty that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. The certainty that we have a collective understanding of what that justice even is. The certainty that we are on God’s side, and the Axis of Evil is not. The certainty that there is nothing that is wrong in America that can’t be fixed by what is right with America. The certainty that we are some shining city on a hill, God-blessed and providence-dictated to succeed, worthy and deserving of all our good fortune, and the pitiable victims of malevolent forces should we falter. Certainty itself as infallible moral compass. Certainty itself as proof of its own righteousness.
When I say things like “Donald Trump has infected everything,” or “everything is Culture War, now,” I think what I’m actually complaining about is how thoroughly certain everyone seems to be about everything. Probably this is not actually anything new. But social media, and the current wider mass media environment, seem to demand absolute certainty more than ever. The hot-take economy is not new, but social media and a consolidating, increasingly subscription-based mass media environment encourage stories, headlines, and opinions that are more and more certain, more and more strident. If you run The Atlantic or The New Yorker, or the New York Times or The Washington Post, your business model depends on readers becoming frustrated with the monthly paywall and forking over their credit card to buy a subscription, so you choose stories and generate headlines that will command the most attention. And it is stridency and certainty that commands attention. Derision of those who have it wrong. The shame and opprobrium of your ideological enemies and inferiors. If you run a Twitter account, the incentives are precisely the same.
Certainty is what leads John Oliver to deliver a preachy 10 minutes on the doubtless fact of Israel as war-crimes’ing evildoer, and Palestine as blameless victim, and for that video to be shared widely as somehow “explaining it simpler and better” than the media has in 50 years. Because apparently the real problem with the Israel/Palestine conflict is that we’ve been blinded to the truth by the obscuring haze of complicated uncertainty—that instead there is always a simple truth, it is knowable, and I, of course, know it. Certainty allows people to make grand pronouncements about who is with us and who is against us, such that anybody not wearing a mask is an enemy, and a threat. That same certainty that collapses into terrified neurosis when somebody tells them that they don’t need a mask any longer. That same certainty that prevents us from admitting, probably, kids never needed a mask outside. The certainty of “trust the experts” or “trust the science,” when an honest expert would be telling us “well, we’re not sure, actually—we just don’t know.”
In this environment, the few skeptics unwilling to accept the absolute certainty of the world as presented to them by what has been reduced to a mere two competing totalizing worldviews are perceived as mere contrarians, and usually dismissed--as either secret double agents for the other side, or nihilists. It’s all so simple, the certaintists tell us, what can’t you see? You must be one of them. Or worse, you must not really believe anything at all.
If there’s anything I really like about Catholicism, it is its deeply embedded cultural commitment to doubt. The competing certainty of evangelical Christrianity always weirded me out, on the other hand—oh, I’m saved by Jesus, I’m going to heaven no matter what. Really? It’s just that simple?
The bizarre, contradictory instinct that lets the God-fearing types sneer at the agnostics that it’s the non-believers that are the arrogant ones, while those who believe they’ve discovered the fundamental truths of life and the universe are the humble ones—that same instinct thrives in our current cultural moment. Certainty of belief, the conviction that it’s all actually very simple--we’ve got this all figured out, don’t you understand how progress even works?--is but humble deference to obvious truths. Doubt? Arrogance! Uncertainty? Both-sides-ism! Wondering if, maybe, we just don’t know? Heresy!
And it’s this same certainty that, when proven wrong, retreats into shriveling denials that they were claiming anything like that at all. It never looks back. Certainty is for this moment, it is of this moment. It doesn’t matter what came before--what matters is now. They’re sure of it.
Here are some links if you’d like to read up on the COVID-19 “lab-leak hypothesis.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/05/covid-lab-leak-hypothesis-just-got-a-big-credibility-boost.html
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038
https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-lab-leak-theory-f4f88446b04d
Here’s David Leonhardt’s piece that may well have put a boot up the CDC’s ass with regard to mask guidance—and that updated guidance here.
Anthony Fauci still thinks the public is too stupid to follow simple directions. Maybe he’s right!
Kevin McCarthy says the Republicans aren’t particularly interested in a 1/6/21 commission that doesn’t include investigations into Black Lives Matter and Antifa, too, for some reason.
Mitch McConnell over in the Senate is now also opposed to such a commission, which he says would be “slanted and unbalanced” against Republicans, which isn’t true.
The New York Times thinks that Justice Stephen Breyer might be leaning away from retiring anytime soon, because he doesn’t think lifetime judicial appointees should take crass political considerations into account when determining when to quit.
This fall, the Supreme Court will hear a case out of Mississippi that is a fairly direct challenge to Roe v Wade.
Scotusblog: Supreme Court rules that there will be on retroactive application of last year’s ruling on non-unanimous verdicts.
The DarkSide “ethical hacking” collective shut down a major east coast gas pipeline. The company paid the ransom, and service has largely been restored.
AT&T is selling off WarnerMedia to Discovery+, a merger that will result in a massive media operation that will likely force further consolidation in the sector. This is bad! Amazon wants to buy MGM, too.
Tony LaRussa is a cranky old baseball man who doesn’t like it when his players hit home runs. If you’re not a baseball fan, you may not realize that home runs are, in fact, very cool. Here is an example of an unrelated, but cool, home run:
Jake Tapper has a book to sell, and he’s using his celebrity pals to do it. It’s apparently not that good!
We didn’t talk about this in this episode, but we did talk about it in the Lost Episode from Monday night, so watch this clip and then imagine what Abe and Lori and Bob had to say about it.