I'm a comfortable person in comfortable circumstances, for now at least. I'm talking to my fellow comfortable people now.
Covid19 is not altering the status quo. Rather, it's exposing an unsustainable status quo for what it always was.
Best to understand that.
The reason that Covid19 is endangering us all is because our status quo puts very little value on human life and very much value on profit, and will consume the former to secure the latter. The more profit is threatened, the more humans our status quo will allow to be consumed.
Our status quo has been endangering a lot of people in exactly this way for a very long time. For a lot of people, the desperation and insecurity and uncertainty and discomfort we currently feel is just normal life.
Best to understand that.
Our status quo has been making people feel threatened and desperate and sick and hurt and dead for a very long time.
Not the way it suddenly is. The way it's always been.
Best to understand that.
It's a status quo that is being *revealed* by the virus, not *created* by it. It consumes people.
A desire to return to the status quo to a point at which it didn't make us feel that way, rather than to fix the status quo, is a very alienating response.
Best to understand that.
If those alienated others don't move you, there's this: it's also not a very wise response.
A status quo that eats people will eat you, eventually, if you are a people.
Best to understand.
Covid19 may well be the sort of thing we could put behind us for a time, and "get back to normal."
But other crises will come, in time
Best to take a survivable lesson and demand a change, before we meet an unsurvivable one
A status quo that eats people will eventually eat you
A status quo that decides who gets medical care based on considerations of cost, who makes caring for the sick a profit center, is a status quo that eats people.
The only way to avoid it is to demand—DEMAND—a status quo that makes medical care available regardless of cost.
A status quo that makes human imprisonment a profit center is a status quo that eats people.
The only way to avoid it is to demand—DEMAND—sweeping justice reform, and a status quo that insists that criminals are human beings, and nobody should profit from their punishment.
A status quo that decides that educating our children is a cost rather than an investment, from which we should receive adequate renumeration, is a status quo that eats people.
The only way to avoid it is to demand—DEMAND—higher education available to all.
And so with housing the houseless.
And so with police reform.
And so with climate and energy policy.
And so with transportation.
Profit is good only insofar as it exists to improve human life. When that fundamental equation gets reversed, the status quo consumes human life.
Covid19 is, I think and hope, a survivable warning.
If so, we shouldn't count on another.
From where we are right now, comfortable people, we should be willing to stay uncomfortable until we change the status quo that has been exposed to one that won't eventually eat us.
/end
Our status quo prioritizes human life low and corporate profits high, and will eagerly consume human life whenever it threatens corporate profit.
Best to understand this.
A status quo that consumes humans will eventually consume you.
If the choice was between losing their 401(k) or murdering their own neighbors with a hammer, all of these hard-nosed pragmatists would go to their tool boxes without even pausing and that’s always been true of them. They’re just revealing it now.
To those who scold that we mustn’t assume evil intentions into the actions of people who consistently pursue absolute evil with steadfast dedication and unshakable resolve: yes, we should.
I guess the ultimate answer to "you don't know what their true motivations are" is "who gives a shit what their motivations are?"
I care *that* you want to burn down my house. I only care *why* you want to burn down my house to the extent it helps me stop you.
Father: *strangles my brother*
Me: help help my father is murdering my brother
Centrist Cousin: it’s that sort of us vs them thinking that’s tearing this family apart
Me: no look literally he’s murdering my brother right in front of us
Centrist Cousin: he’s never going to want to stop if you keep vilifying him with overheated black and white language; I’ve engaged many stranglers and learned a lot about the complexities
Brother: gkkk gkk gk
Me: Look he’s about to die, for real; I really think we just need to stop my dad from killing him right now
Centrist Cousin: that’s exactly the sort of judgemental escalating bad thinking on our side that we need to criticize, I refuse to let myself become just as bad as he is
To be clear, that's any Republicans at any level for any position at any time, and honestly we may want to expand that to include Democrats willing to work with Republicans.
Shut the whole party down, out, and over.
If you want to live in a modern enlightened society and you vote for Republicans, no you don't.
As a Wordle pro on the tour, I feel I should share the best starting word, which all the pros know.
(My own personal favorite starting word is COCCYX, but if I show amateurs how to guess 6-letter words I will be banned from the Wordle Pro Tour and forced to sit next to Bret Stephens in the NYT cafeteria.)
Wordle is a game of constantly shifting strategy; I recommend you get the latest version of my strategy compendium, v14.
Specifically with this order. The one that exists. This reality. The way our systems and laws are set up, the way they’re codified and the way they’re operationalized. What they claim to intend to do, and what they actually do.
“The way things are,” in other words.
Let’s think of conservatism as being, in its essence, an orientation that desires to keep the existing order just as it is, or to make slow and deliberate calculated minor adjustments, to the existing order.
In BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, Mickey Rooney played I. Y. Yunioshi, dressed up in buck teeth and a cartoon squint, a grotesque caricature of a Japanese person.
So I suppose in that sense “you wouldn’t be able” to make BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S today.
Which seems somehow preferable.
Now: what interests me is what it means to say *you can’t* make BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S these days.
It doesn’t mean you CAN’T. Unlike teaching, say,The Bluest Eye to Texas schoolchildren, there exist no laws to prevent Will Ferrell from putting in the teeth and playing Yunioshi.
So actually you *can* make BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S today, I.Y. Yunioshi and all, and throw in Long Duc Dong if you want.
You can if you want wear blackface and dance around in white gloves, like Fred Astaire in SWING TIME, if you want to.