May 30 -- News and Notes

Just a heads up regarding two things:

1) Former federal prosecutor Paul Butler has a wonderful opinion piece in The Guardian. "Policing in the US is not about enforcing the law. It's about enforcing white supremacy" impressed on me that America's police kill about a thousand people a year, as opposed to the two who annually die in the UK. He also mentions the idea that perhaps U.S. police should not be tasked with arresting people who commit non-violent crimes, which I had never previously considered.

2) As reported by CNN, the CDC has begun its own series of regular briefings, which should occur at least several times a week.

I had to roll my eyes at the CDC announcement. This means, in essence, that people in places of power expect things to go off the rails fairly quickly and don't want to be the ones detailing the disaster. Let's face it, if things were going swimmingly, the president and his folks would be giving us the good news in first person, so to speak. We're going to switch on over to the CDC. That means questions will be answered after the briefings. It also means we're about to hit deep water without a paddle. I think former Bears' defensive coordinator, Buddy Ryan (1931-2016), referred to this handing off of responsibility as "chucking and ducking." God bless us all.


Bob Dietz
May 30, 2020

The Equivalent Deaths Debate -- Part Two

In the first installment (May 23), I tried to define the nature of the equivalent deaths or equi-misery debate. Then I discussed how proponents of early re-opening are trying to assign a misery heft to the consequences of delaying a return to "normal" economic life.

These consequences are usually listed as increased suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence. The early opening supporters fail, however, to assign any kind of misery heft to the tens of thousands of additional lives lost to the virus because of early opening. They ignore the "spin-off" miseries of the added deaths, as if those deaths stood alone and had no impact on others. At its core, this is an asymmetrical and dishonest argument.

Today, I'd like to discuss some additional problems with the equi-misery argument for early opening. The first has to do with a basic structural issue that renders the argument virtually impossible to prove.

Early re-opening supporters attempt to balance additional lives lost to COVID-19 with a counter-tally of suicides prevented and depression/drug use/domestic violence averted by "getting people back to work" quickly. It is impossible, however, to attribute increases in suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence solely or even primarily to something called "economic hardship due to delayed re-opening." The reason you cannot do this is because the economic hardship is taking place during an actual, life-threatening pandemic. The pandemic creates an immersive cultural and psychological context in which the additional economic hardship is occurring.

You simply cannot assign suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence solely or primarily to economic hardship because all of the aforementioned misery indices may be more the result of an existential disease threat than any economic factors. It appears impossible to tease out consequences of economic hardship from the consequences of disease stress hardship. Any data from 1918 would face similar difficulties and would not be applicable anyway, given the vast cultural and social psychological differences between the 1918 and 2020 milieus.

Economic hardship does indeed correlate with increased suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence. However, so too does an ongoing, months-long omnipresent viral threat that kills people. There is no way to separate one or the other out of the real-world equation, and therefore no way to assign cause-and-effect to one rather than the other. Americans are experiencing the pandemic and economic hardship simultaneously. Labeling economic hardship as the primary cause for increases in suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence is a political assignation, not a scientific or even necessarily a logical one.


Libertarian Angles

The equi-misery argument for early re-opening has some libertarian underpinnings. Eventually, these libertarian underpinnings come into self-conflict.

For example, early re-openers emphasize a "right to work," regardless of lack of COVID-19 testing and the resulting inability to ascertain who is asymptomatically contagious. Similarly, themes of libertarianism are invoked to provide support for protest rallies which feature few masks and little social distancing. Libertarianism is used to argue for the rights of Kentucky shopkeepers and Texas bar owners to ban people who are wearing masks, despite overwhelming evidence that masks protect public health. "My body, my choice," is now a libertarian battle cry for people who do not want mask-wearing or social distancing laws. In all of these examples, the historical libertarian ideal is hailed as on the side of early re-opening and personal choice.

Curiously, however, when the equi-misery proponents try to balance additional lives lost to the virus with other events, libertarian perspectives are completely abandoned. Suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence have historically been considered, from a libertarian perspective, to contain significant elements of self-choice. The equi-misery arguers ignore these self-choice components when they make their case for early re-opening. Economic hardship becomes some irresistible force that whitewashes personal choice from the equation. Suicides, depression, drug use, and domestic violence become forces of nature not amenable to personal or societal intervention.

I'm not trying to channel Thomas Szasz here. I'm simply pointing out the convenient parlor trick of relying on libertarian views to anchor Part A of an argument while abandoning these same views (and in fact arguing against them) in Part B. This is what early re-opening supporters are doing.


Conclusion

Using the equi-misery argument to justify tens of thousands of additional lives lost to COVID-19 is logically flawed, impossible to clearly demonstrate in any provable way, and simply a political point of view clothed with some self-contradicting themes. Equi-misery is an excuse to impose a non-scientific pandemic strategy on the American public instead of a scientific one. Viewing the U.S. as an economy rather than a society, its supporters attempt to elevate untethered economic values over intricately connected familial, cultural, and religious values.


Bob Dietz
May 30, 2020

More Popular Delusions

"Those who believe without reason cannot be convinced by reason."  James Randi

Gallup surveys taken in April showed that just 40% of Republicans believe that COVID-19 has a greater death rate than the seasonal flu.

The seasonal flu has a roughly .1% fatality rate. That is 1 in 1000. The absolute most conservative estimate I have seen for COVID-19 is five times that. The majority of epidemiologists have estimated it's closer to 10 times that. In some areas, such as the United States, it superficially appears to be much worse. So how or why would anyone decide that they, as civilians, are more expert than physicians and infectious disease specialists? What mechanisms allow Americans to blithely go through day-to-day life presuming to know more than experienced credentialed professionals? 

My first thought is that Republican survey respondents were simply giving "cheerleading" answers to such questions. The questions themselves have been yoked to political commitments, so some U.S. citizens decided they'd make statements about what they prefer to believe whether they actually believe it or not. 

My second idea is that Americans really do think the individual is omniscient via some sort of direct gnosis. I find this an incredible development for the world's technological leader, but perhaps it's the inevitable destination for a population bloated with an unrelenting national narcissism. When the president points to his temple as the source of his expertise on subjects in which he has not been trained and has no expertise, it's a flashing guidepost for cultish supporters. 

My third theory is that maybe Americans are so rocked by an actual threat to their existence that they revert to very childlike magical thinking. Believing something, so the idea goes, makes it so. Retreating to an inner psychological sanctum that rejects evidence provides both stress reduction and the solace of routine, where one year's flu is like any other. 

All of these paths combined have helped lead to 100,000 deaths. If 100,000 deaths haven't cleansed political vanity, narcissism, and magical thinking from the American psyche, nothing will. 

Bob Dietz

May 28, 2020

May 28 -- Articles of Note

It took seven or eight weeks for journalists in the United States to get some kind of handle on the pandemic, but they have finally risen to the challenge. American journalists have more or less figured things out and synthesized the available information. They're not just flailing at the crisis/confusion of the day, but asking the right questions in a targeted way while grasping the speed and consequences of COVID-19 as it permeates the United States.

Here are a couple of grounded insightful pieces that became available in the last 48 hours.
The first, at medium.com, is "The Psychopath in Chief" by Tony Schwarz, President Trump's ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal. Schwarz spent hundreds of hours with Donald Trump while writing the book over an 18-month period. He brings a deep experience to bear on the subject of the president's behavior.

The other article is Politico's "Bad state data hides coronavirus threat as Trump pushes reopenings." Darius Tahir and Adam Cancryn sort and collate the numerous data tweaks, spins, and manipulations being employed to boost the case for reopening. A third of states, they advise, aren't reporting hospital admissions data. Although I anticipated data editing and suppression, as I said below in the quote from May 8th's "Every Which Way but Truth," even I am surprised by the immediate and ubiquitous attempts to obscure what's actually happening.

Check out both pieces of solid writing.


"It's a cynical, barbaric strategy. Open the red states, where the GOP has great information control, and then spin and depress numbers and hope for the best. The way they lose is if things get really, obviously bad. Then the GOP will rotate a daily spotlight on whichever states are not taking a virus beating. If things go as anticipated, the GOP will eventually become an extension of the Montana chamber of commerce."  Bob Dietz (May 8, 2020)

Articles of Note

I'm somewhat stunned by what I've seen on television this Memorial Day weekend. I'm hoping that CNN, MSNBC, and other news outlets have used shock value interview snippets and footage of various beaches and restaurants, because if what I have seen is representative of widespread behavior during the preceding 72 hours, this country will be in far worse shape in a month than I thought. And I was not an optimist to start.

For now, here are some insightful pieces that have appeared in the last few days.

The first is by one of my favorite authors, conservative national security expert Tom Nichols. In The Atlantic, Nichols' "Donald Trump, the Most Unmanly President" asks many common baffling questions regarding the president, but manages to hang a coherent theory on the answers. One of Nichols' explorations particularly resonated with me, namely the similarities and differences between President Trump and Howard Stern, who share both a fanbase and a history of ubiquitous media presence.

If you pair Columbia University's John McWhorter's linguistic analyses of President Trump with Nichols' arguments, you'll notice some thematic overlap. Clips of various McWhorter interviews from years past can be found on MSNBC.

Another striking piece is "America's chilly experiment in human sacrifice" by Lynn Parramore and Jeffrey Spear. Nineteenth-century political economist John Ruskin features prominently, and the authors use a number of gambling references throughout the article.

I highly recommend giving both pieces a read. Meanwhile, sometime today, the "official" U.S. death count will reach 100,000. We are just 90 days into this pandemic. If Memorial Day weekend was any indication, we will have a long and painful way to go.


Bob Dietz
May 26, 2020

Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

"When you test, you have a case. When you test you find something is wrong with people. If we didn't do any testing, we would have very few cases."  President Trump (May 14, 2020)

"No one in this world, so far as I know -- and I have searched the records for years, and have employed agents to help me -- has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."  H.L. Mencken


When I was 10 years old, at the height of the Apollo program, I had great respect for the American public's science savvy and ability to think critically. It's been all downhill since.

I am trying to process the latest tidbit regarding populist critical thinking. As reported by Business Insider, a survey by Yahoo News and YouGov revealed that 44% of Republicans think that a COVID-19 vaccine is an excuse for Bill Gates to microchip everyone. Swirl that around in your mind for a bit. Not only do we have a microchipping conspiracy theory, but we have a Bill Gates-specific microchipping conspiracy theory. Here's a great additional detail:  among those who use Fox News as their main TV information source, the number goes up to 50%.

This was a poll, by the way. So it didn't necessarily count everyone who actually believed it. It counted just those with the audacity to report that they believed it.

Americans' grasp on reality must be really tenuous these days. The poll indicates that half of Fox News viewers are delusional, as in clinically delusional. Imagine, if you will, that your grandma or neighbor told you that Michael Jordan or Clint Eastwood or the Pope was behind the COVID-19 virus and wanted to microchip everyone. I don't know about you, but to me that suggests my grandma or neighbor is a danger to themselves and others. I'd contact the police so somebody could do a psych evaluation. Now does the fact that Bill Gates (as opposed to, say, Lex Luthor) is the stated villain supposed to make it all okay? No, it's still serious paranoia and delusion.

Basically, a poll has just revealed that 44% of a major U.S. political party is delusional. Clinically delusional. And this is a par-for-the-course bit of everyday news in 2020. The fact that we accept such a thing as a normal news item is delusional in itself.

The poll explains much, I suppose. On this day before Memorial Day, out of the televised hundreds on Georgia's Tybee Island, none were wearing masks. In Kentucky, some shop owners have banned people with masks from entering their stores. In North Dakota, the governor asked people to refrain from shaming or threatening those wearing masks.

I have absolutely no idea what is going on in my fellow Americans' minds. Maybe they want to die. That's mental illness. Maybe they want to kill. That's mental illness, too. A quarter of an electorate tasked with guiding the most powerful military in history believes that a vaccine is a mechanism for Bill Gates to microchip them. While I suppose that this may appear more reasonable than believing that giant invisible rabbits escort people through life, it is no less worthy of intervention, mainly because the microchip delusion promises more dangerous consequences.

This microchip fantasy will prove impermeable to disconfirmation. When no microchips result from the vaccinations, the belief will simply swing to another conspiracy with the same thrust but different details. When Bill Gates dies, either his persona will allegedly have been transferred to a computer program or someone else will take his place.

Americans have been heading down the road to irrationality for a long, disturbing time. When a president and a major political party shine light down this road for their own advantage, we have reached the point where promoting clinical insanity has become an everyday political strategy. A party that values voter eligibility over voter sanity is a threat to every living thing on the planet. Yet we're doing nothing about it. Instead, we acknowledge that clinically deluded is the new voter normal.

Blithely accepting voter insanity, however, may be worse than the insanity itself. It means that we too have become a danger to ourselves and others.


Bob Dietz
May 24, 2020

Fudging in Arkansas

Arkansas' governors have a fine history of fudging and squirming with the facts. That old bit about, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," is one of the all-time great lines.

Governor Asa Hutchinson made his contribution to the cause yesterday. As reported by CNN, Hutchinson described this week's increase in COVID-19 cases as a "second peak." Well, there's fudging, and then there's just plain making stuff up.

I squinted at Arkansas' numbers for a good long while, and if there was a first peak, I just cannot figure out where it was. Arkansas' numbers have continually climbed from the get-go. Up and up and up. As one of the states that failed to enact a stay-at-home order, Arkansas has evidently committed to the fiction that at some point they had seen the worst. Not true. Arkansas is in the same boat as other southern and midwestern states. The first wave has now reached them, and it's likely to get ugly.


Bob Dietz
May 23, 2020