Moderates United

If we slow the spread of the virus to a virtual standstill, with empty medical centers, we are getting the WORST of all worlds.  It is textbook stupidity.

OF COURSE the plural of anecdote is evidence.  An anecdote is a story, something that happened to someone.  A lab report is a carefully annotated and documented anecdote.  If enough people see the same things and say the same things–tell the same stories–we call it evidence.

If 5,000 doctors report a particular finding, then that categorically is evidence.

But here is the relevant point, at this moment in global time: the plural of “expert opinion” categorically IS NOT evidence.  Why?  A guess about the future is not evidence and can never be evidence.  Only things which HAPPEN, which are seen and described, can EVER be evidence.  This is the case no matter how many “experts” are singing in the chorus.

This is the same scientific problem with global warming, as I’ve pointed out over and over: hypotheses are being treated as facts, as evidence.

I keep getting told what is “going to happen”.  I’ve been called a “dangerous person”–those exact words–three or four times on the internet in the past week.

But this fact is basic, vital, and irrefutable: a hypothesis–a model, to be perfectly clear–is not evidence, and if the hypothesis is not falsifiable–if nothing can happen which would cause the person proposing it to say “I was wrong”–then it is not even an hypothesis: it is a raw conjecture, which is literally a synonym for an unscientific guess.

By and large, in this COVID-19 crisis, it is my view that conjectures are being treated as established facts, and used to upend hundreds of millions of lives, largely to no purpose.  A few lives will no doubt be saved, but a larger number will be lost in the economic flood to come.  We learned recently that ventilators seem to do more harm than good, so their potential shortage can no longer be used to keep the world locked up.

This whole thing is ridiculous and getting worse by the day.  Two weeks ago everybody was scared.  Now, the scary scenario, the scary model, the scary HYPOTHESIS, has been falsifed.  Our ER’s and ICU’s are not filled, and we now know that treatment in the hallway or even in a tent somewhere will be nearly as good as in any other scenario.  It’s the drugs and the drips.  Those we are not, as far as I know, short of.

And I would hazard a guess that at this moment suicide and overdose deaths are at 2-3x their normal rates in all countries where those are a problem, and certainly in America.

What happens when you lay a campaign of social distancing on a reality of social isolation and loneliness?

To speak heartlessly and to the point, what happens to the immune systems of the already lonely?

As I’ve said elsewhere–I can’t remember if I’ve noted this here–if suicide rates had DOUBLED nobody would be reporting it.  Sociology was in some senses invented by Durkheim’s seminal treatment of the topic, and a robust finding was that knowing other people are killing themselves leads to more suicides.

But what happens to the people who were on the edge when this STARTED?

Is it not a reasonable question: what is the fucking PLAN to end this?  Vaccination?  Go fuck yourself.

And if not vaccination, then it is a cure or Herd Immunity.  The latter is the only thing we can RELY on.  I say get it on, among the young at least.

And our “leaders” need to be telling us SOMETHING about what to expect.  Leader that he is, Trump wanted this to end in a week.  He may renew that call as the massive nation wide policy failure continues over the next 7 days.  He is surrounded, it seems to me, by idiots.

One of the particularly infernal aspects of this grotesques assumption of historically unprecedented power by, mainly, State Governors, is that they mute resistance by the very form it takes. 

When governments in the past enacted idiotic or abusive policy–and I would argue these quarantines are both in the forms they are being implemented in–people would gather, listen to speakers, then get angry and go storm the Statehouse, or Governor’s mansion, or something.  I am speaking generally and probably not completely realistically, but ponder that most people are not hearing sermons in churches.  They are not hearing their legislators speaking to assemblies.

We’re not even supposed to gather, in most States, in groups large enough to have a badminton or chess tournament.

Whatever complaining that is going to happen, happens on-line, and all of that can easily be monitored.

My past comments notwithstanding, I’m on the fence as to whether or not this is a planned, engineered event.  But I have ZERO doubt that the many, many people in our State, Local and Federal governments who have latent authoritarian tendencies are seeing this as the opportunity of a lifetime to crack the whip and remind all of us how important they are.  I think many Governors never want this crisis to end. It’s just too beautiful.

It is only possible to be large within a box.

Put another way, if you want to be powerful, you must first make sure you live in a cage.  If the cage does not exist, you must create it, and accept living within it.

Imagine a world where a social media campaign got started where young healthy people INSISTED that they be allowed to get the coronavirus.  Imagine they had underground COVID-19 parties, against the wishes of the Party.  Imagine we lived in a world where the young were strong, rebellious free.

Hard to do, isn’t it?  Equally hard to imagine a government that would support such a thing even though it would be logical and contribute in immediate and useful ways to the resolution of this economic collapse through stupidity and inaction.

What happens to the people who spent all day worrying about pronouns before this whole thing?  Do they grow balls–wherever they started from–and find courage to face and see the truth?  Not at all.  They default to fear and obedience.

I think of Bertolucci’s “Il Conformista”, of people who just bounce from here to there, always in fear, always hiding, never seeing, never deciding for themselves.

It’s hard not to conclude that America is ripe for some form of technocratic Fascism.  People do not think for themselves.  They seemingly have lost the capacity to reason.  They follow even idiotic orders blindly, and demand others do the same.

As I posted elsewhere, I think most of America, if some noted expert came on their favorite media outlet and told them the sky was now green, would doubt their eyes, not the expert.

It’s unbelievable.  For me, I am pulling inward somewhat.  Fuck these people.  Not everyone is an idiot, but most people are.  Perhaps it has always been so.  But we all get ‘educations” now.  Why–and of course I know the answer but will ask the question anyway–is it so damned ineffective?  Why have our allegedly best and brightest repudiated everything that makes our culture work, and which has done so much to promote global peace and prosperity?

Anyone who condemns sexism, or racism, or discrimination against homosexuals, etc., does so using WESTERN IDEALS.  There is no analogue anywhere else.  These ideas were created and promulgated by dead white males.

Oi.

We could give young healthy people the option to self infect.  Subject to reasonable restrictions, we could let healthy people under the age of say 40 volunteer to be infected with this virus.  People who live alone, in groups of other young healthy people, or couples–gay, straight and other– without children: all good candidates.  Most of them will get over it quickly, and they could actually be studied to see how many have no symptoms at all.   This would add to our knowledge of this virus.

Everything which gets some part of the population past the rapids makes this whole thing less dangerous for everyone.  I would volunteer, personally.

And I will say again: this time is a blessing for me, personally.  I am not worried for my sake. I am really valuing and using this time to take stock, and slow down even more.  I think I’m pretty slow by most standards normally, but I’m trying to get down to sloth proportions, relatively speaking

I think most of us live on manic energy.  It is helpful in our climate.  It has survival value.  But it makes life LESS FUN, or even NO FUN.  It sucks the joy out of everything when everybody needs every last fucking thing immediately and will fire you if they don’t get it.  It’s a drag.

We don’t “recreate” so much as recover.  We rest just enough to survive, but not enough to feel like we are living honest, engaged, complete lives.

There are forces out there making it like this.  There are people out there laughing at all of us running around like hamsters on wheels.  At a minimum, it  is certainly the bankers robbing us blind, with not one person in a thousand able to see the subterfuge.  It was the same a century ago, almost to the year, when Keynes said the same thing, when he was still being honest.

I’m treating this whole thing as an opportunity for a reboot and upgrade.  Sad that I would choose computer imagery, but it is the myth of our times, isn’t it?  A guy argued to me in a bar once that we are already cyborgs, since for all intents and purposes most of us are attached to our phones.  I think he was right.

Put your phone away right now. Bury it, and only check it a couple times a day.  Or bury it, turn the ring tone way up if there are any people you actually care about who might REALLY need to get a hold of you, then don’t check it until you reemerge into the sunlight of a freed world.

The opposite of evil is not a moral code: it is feeling the life within you and feeling the joy it brings, like a continually bubbling fountain.

The problem with all historical religions is they don’t really have a method for describing how evil happens, why one person chooses to inflict pain on others and themselves versus living happily and in harmony.

This problem has, in my view, been largely solved with Developmental Psychology.  It may be that some people are born no good, but most people who choose darkness are hurt in primal, primitive and imprinting ways at very early ages.  They are not loved enough, one way or another.  Perhaps they are tortured, as in some respects I was, although that was not the goal. 

But whatever it is, some part of them fails to build a connection to human life, writ large.  And it is easy to assume the worst, and do the worst, when you are dealing with a group “over there” which has no actual, real connection to you.

We are in the position on this planet of developing a useful, comprehensive, lasting global religion, one based on science.  I pray daily to be able to play a role in the creation of this thing.  It’s so large, such an idea. 

But relative to what I’ve already endured in my life, the world is not too large.  As with everything else, you just have to start small, small wheels, and add larger wheels as you can.

The Great Pause might be building the soil I need.  I hope so.  Certainly, my work on myself continues, because I am far from being done with the first large phase.

About 2.8 million Americans die every year, and whatever happens when you die, happens to them. We are born, spend some time confused, certain, or some combination of the two, make decisions, don’t make decision, love, fail, love, succeed, never love, work, toil, sweat, worry, eat, drink, and try to take joy in our work, at least in complaining about it.  Then we die.  All of us, so far as we know.

An added 200,000 deaths, then, would not even constitute a 10% increase.

Are you starting to understand that we are being played for fools, because most of us ARE fools?

An analogy I would use is we are paddling down a river, when suddenly word comes from down-river that there is a torrent nobody knew about that is particularly terrible.  It is killing people.  So we pull over and think “what should we do?”

The Democrats all say “we should just stay here.  It’s much safer”.  Many Republicans concur, although for different reasons.  Democrats think Trump just wants to go down the river, so they want to stay.  Republicans, on the other hand, are by nature security and safety conscious.  They have strong protective instincts, and the media and the most replicated and amplified part of the “expert” class are screaming DANGER DANGER.

So what to do?

The torrent isn’t going away.  It will only cease to be dangerous once everyone is through.  Perhaps a few of the less vigorous and sickly can portage around, but the young and healthy need to just go right through the middle, knowing some of them may die.

No matter how long they stay on the side of the river–in this analogy until a cure or vaccine is found, which most experts and most Democrats seemingly hope will never happen–the problem never gets easier.  But the sun is setting.  And when it is dark, it will stay dark.  The economy will crash.

So why not get moving?  I ask this question every day.  I try to limit what I have to say, but this is one of the first times in my life since the first election of Trump that the issues being pondered seemed to be of existential importance to the future of our nation and people.

We can go in shifts.  We can lift the quarantine in parts, and have good plans to move ventilators around.  For people ACTUALLY trying to solve the problem while realizing millions of bankruptcies is not good for anyone’s health, these are not difficult challenges.

I have proposed even zip codes–either for the business or the person working there, with the latter making slightly more sense to me, since all businesses get somebody in them.  I have proposed names ending, say, A-L.  We could even literally do every other State.  Open up California and New Mexico, but leave Arizona closed.  Prepare to move Arizona’s respirators to California as needed.

Or open up every other county.  Or do sound demographics, build some sort of unit, and then alternate. Or hell open up one quarter of businesses.  ANYTHING is better than the idiocy we have right now.

I literally think an honest case could be made at this moment that those who are infected should make every effort they can to infect as many people as they can. Not because they are bastards.  Not out of spite.  Not to prove a point.  But because they RECOGNIZE that this disease is not traveling fast enough, that some 60% of us need to get it, and that a continued shut down is going to lead to more misery, possibly, than there has ever been in this country.  People are horrified now by pictures of the ER in Brooklyn.  What about tent cities and hungry people?  What about famished AMERICANS?  What about MORE full ER’s from people sick of a variety of diseases that good nutrition would prevent?  There is nothing so bad that sufficiently stupid policy cannot make ten times worse. Just look at Venezuela.  Just look at our own Great Depression.  Absent the mistakes, nobody but specialists would remember the recession of 1929-1930.

These are likely overblown scenarios, but that is the zip code in my view where people’s thoughts should be.

And to be clear, I am NOT, repeat AM NOT recommending people who are sick do anything but stay home and get well

[I will note that all the other usual disease remain in circulation too.  A friend of mine went through the big production of getting a COVID-19 test, since he WAS sick, and he tested negative; meanwhile, people are still dying of the regular flu, of heart attacks and strokes, and of cancer].

The big problem is the policy, not anything any one person may or may not do, so it would in any event be pointless.  It would be a symbolic act that might well prove fatal to someone, which is an awful thought.  So don’t do it.  Don’t always take me literally.  Don’t even always assume I mean what I say.  I don’t. Sometimes I just like to see how things look when written.  It is YOUR job to form your own opinions, and to notice and make allowance for my bullshit. 

I  simply offer that as what Edward de Bono called a “Provocative Operation”.  My intent is to break mental boundaries by crossing into places you never thought to go.

Everyone seems terrified.  Everyone seems to feel helpless.  We don’t need to be terrified.  We are not helpless.

If the way out is through, then this whole fucking country is flunking the Marshmallow Test.

How such a stupid, undisciplined, lazy, complacent rabble can survive as a great nation is unclear to me.  Our best are idiots.  Our average are sheep.

In my more melodramatic moments I like to strike a pose (in my mind) and imagine I am channeling an Old Testament prophets.  Since that is absurd, it makes me feel better.

Well, mid-afternoon: time for my morning shower.  You know, because.