Wearing a mask is for smug liberals. Refusing to is for reckless Republicans. – Mask-wearing and other pandemic protections have become political virtue-signaling.
Good article, but I think it overstates the polarization. Most Americans recognize that the current situation is both unsustainable and necessary.
The people ranting about rights and Communism are lunatics. A tornado doesn’t care about your property rights when it knocks down your house.
John Belushi reportedly visited the set of “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” on the day he died. He wanted to work on his William Shatner impression.
For those of you who are not Trekkies, that was the one with Ricardo Montalban rocking the daring decolletage.
The U.S. Needs Way More Than a Bailout to Recover From Covid-19 – We need a new New Deal to fix structural problems with the US economy that long predate the current crisis.
If we want to restart the engine that made this nation a superpower, we need to do something big. I mean really, really big: defeat-the-Nazis, land-a-man-on-the-moon, invent-the-internet big.
By my college pal Barry Ritholtz (and by “pal” I mean we talked a few times and said hello).
When videoconferencing meetings go wrong, you get to see flossing, naked husbands and more.
… I could tell both his dogs were barking frantically but couldn’t figure out what the rest of the noise was, and I was concerned. “Are you OK?” Deep sigh. “We have a parrot, and the parrot has learned to call the dogs. He waits until the dogs come in the room and then imitates my wife. When the dogs can’t find her, they lose their minds.”
Airplane Mode – For grounded frequent flyers, this web page replicates the experience of being on a long flight and staring out the window. Via Mike’s List @mikeelgan
Pluralistic: 02 May 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
++ The mistrust epidemic
The pandemic isn’t the only disease that’s annihilating our society: alongside of it, there is an epidemic of mistrust in institutions and a growth in conspiricism, a panic to save yourself and let everyone else fend on their own.
Blaming Big Tech for the collapse in trust and commonly held truth is backwards: Big Tech’s bigness is en effect, not a cause, of the corruption that made our institutions so untrustworthy.
++ Prisons, meat packing plants and nursing homes
Coronavirus outbreaks are concentrated in three places: Prisons, meat packing plants and nursing homes – industries that are built on treating people cruelly, like disposable components.
“Public health has always known the truth. The care of the most margnialized members of society is important for fighting infectious diseases.”…
… the GOP’s emphasis has been on shielding employers whose employers or customers die of coronavirus due to unsafe conditions. These industries are designed to run in unsafe ways and can’t conceive of operating safely.
++ Contact tracing apps could be worse than useless.
Too many false positives and false negatives. It’s like those security warnings you see on websites that are so noisy that everybody just clicks past them and ignores them.
An exposure-notification app that forgets to notify you when you’re at risk AND often notifies you when you are not at risk becomes a worse-than-useless frippery, as well an expensive boondoggle and distraction.
And security defects in those apps could literally increase a population’s exposure to terrorism, crime, election fraud and authoritarian governments.
However, contact tracing can be useful and safe, with the right precautions.
++ Ticketmaster sold a $500M stake to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who ordered the murder, torture and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
++ And a hopeful note from Kim Stanley Robinson.
Monty Python, 1976 via
