The great British PM, the Marquess of Salisbury, warned: "If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe." At some point, it's the job of politicians to decide: we're safe enough
Unless the US moves to vastly stricter vaccine mandates - which I would favor, but which is plainly not going to happen - the US will stall at present vaccination levels. 1/x
@HotlineJosh So the practical political choice is: keep schools and businesses on the present hobbled footing indefinitely - or return fully to normally as boosters become available to all, accepting the inherent risks of "normal" in a 30% unvaxxed society? 2/x
@HotlineJosh You want to fulminate against the dumb-ass malignity of the anti-vaxxers and their (quietly personally vaxxed) media and political enablers? Go ahead, I do it myself almost every day right here in this space. 3/x
@HotlineJosh But the malignant minority is not yielding to reason any time soon. And even such seemingly basic mandates as "no jab, no fly" seem beyond the enforcement capability of the US federal government. So what now? 4/x
3) Otherwise return to normal as fully as we can, especially the schools; and
4) Let hospitals quietly triage emergency care to serve the unvaccinated last
Reading the reactions to this tweet, I am impressed by the immense self-pity of the anti-vaxxers - who see themselves as bottomless victims, even as their own bad choices deny hospital care to so many others in desperate need.
If, at this point, you are still unvaccinated, you are not a victim. You are a cause of the victimization of vulnerable others
"Knowledge in the abstract ... is not enough. ... [I]nstitutions and culture shape the application of scientific knowledge. Improvements in life expectancy are generated not by ideas alone but by ideas that are put into action ...
... especially by capable governments that care about the health of their citizens, and by cultures that translate scientific advances into behavioral adaptations." - Plagues Upon the Earth, p. 384
"The control of infectious disease, by its very nature, requires collective and coordinated action. ... Societies that were good at solving collective action problems were thus most effective in controlling infectious disease." - Plagues Upon the Earth, p. 385
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The defendant's presence at his criminal trial is not an inconvenience or imposition, as Trump's partisans complain. The defendant's presence is a *right,* guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. 1/x
The right to be present at one's trial is precious. But it is not absolute. The Supreme Court has ruled that presence at a trial can be forfeited by persistently bad behavior. 2/x
In Illinois v Allen (1970), the Supreme Court considered three options for dealing with "disruptive, contumacious, stubbornly defiant defendants": binding and gagging them, holding them in civil contempt, or temporarily removing them from the courtroom until they behave. 3/x
No big deal, just the second-largest newspaper in French Canada caricaturing Jews as vampires. lapresse.ca/actualites/car…
The Jew as vampire is one of the deepest myths of western culture. The 1922 film Nosferatu that inspired the La Presse cartoon also inspired Nazi cartoonists of the Third Reich anumuseum.org.il/blog/myth-vamp…
La Presse has removed the image, here's a screen shot. It substitutes Benjamin Netanyahu's face in an iconic still from the 1922 movie, Nosferatu. That film was riddled with antisemitic images and themes and directly inspired antisemitic cartoons in the Nazi press of the 1920s and 1930s.
Why was the Alger Hiss case such a big deal? The secrets Hiss betrayed to the Soviets were not so important. (He gave them, eg, blueprints for a new design for a Navy lifeboat.) It was Hiss's career trajectory that alarmed: the potential for a Soviet asset as secretary of state.
The Hiss case convulsed the country. But we've now had eight years of people with deep connections to the ex-KGB dictator in Moscow arriving at the very highest levels of US politics, media, and government - and that's become business as usual.
One conservative radio host used to - maybe still does - open his interviews by asking guests whether they believed Alger Hiss was guilty. Today, the answer might be, "Hiss was just a little ahead of his time."
News reports don't get more disturbing than this, from @propublica about the president of Mexico. propublica.org/article/mexico…
The @propublica story deals with Lopez Obrador's first run for president, in 2006. Lopez Obrador lost, a result he never accepted and tried to overturn. When he ran again in 2018, Lopez Obrador promised "hugs, not bullets" for the cartels.
@propublica As president, Lopez Obrador has shown favor to cartel criminals in many ways - perhaps most notably, by pressuring the Trump administration to release a former Mexican defense minister arrested in the US for drug corruption. Lopez Obrador then bestowed a medal on the ex-minister
Which is true, if by "existed" you mean "has been continuously sovereign under its present government."
It's also true that as a country founded in 1948, Israel is older than 134 of the 193 member nations of the United Nations.
The weird fact of the modern world is how *new* most countries are, even seemingly ancient ones. EG Egypt re-emerged as an independent sovereignty only in 1922 after half a millennium under Ottoman then British overlordship.
The concept of "indigenous peoples" is incoherent and generally sinister pretty much anywhere except Australasia. But it's an especial mess in the Middle East, where virtually every country is a broken-off bit of a long succession of ancient empires.