Caught up for the next few days in major administrative work, so I’ll stick to short takes. (Short for me, at least.)
With China’s easing (whatever that ends up meaning in practice) of its zero-covid policies, I can’t help but think that the point of those policies was not epidemiological management but instead a kind of experiment with the upper limits of state power in China. The global press persists in hand-wringing concern about whether there will now be serious outbreaks of covid in China (while also wanting to have their cake and eat it too in passing judgment on the severity of zero-covid policy). I’m not sure that the people responsible for the policies in China ever cared deeply about whether their citizens got sick or not.
Moreover, I hate to say it but this does demonstrate that the paranoia of the anti-vaccine crowd in the US, Canada and the EU, while destructive, frequently based on grotesque falsehoods and disinformation and aligned with all sorts of malevolent undercurrents, still wasn’t entirely unfounded in the sense that campaigns to control the spread of covid could also simultaneously be about testing the limits and capacity of state and civic authority. I mean, we discovered in the US that workplaces can be used to impose some pretty striking constraints on individual mobility and behavior that are harder to contest or grapple with than outright governmental mandates. That was good in this case, and might be good in others, but it still ought to inspire some watchful wariness.
I’m glad Warnock won. I wish pundits favoring the Democrats (and Democratic leaders) would be less quick to claim larger meanings from thin margins of victory. I suppose I am a “glass half empty” person in this respect but if I were going to come to any big conclusions from this one election it would be that a candidate like Herschel Walker getting 48.6% of any vote in any constituency is a sign of a very large and fervent voting constituency that officially gives absolutely zero fucks about the capabilities or morality of elected representatives, only that they’re an obedient vote on a set of existing issues. Which is a sign that democracy is in really bad shape even if this election managed to hold off the people who actively wanted to destroy key underlying systems necessary for democratic selection of elected representatives.
The conference I attended last Friday was most interesting to me in the panel of three Ukrainian journalists and documentarians who made it crystal-clear that as far as they’re concerned truthful journalistic coverage of the war is indistinguishable from being a weapon in the war on Ukraine’s side and that most of the usual noise about false equivalencies of the “both sides do it” type or performative objectivity in journalism is a morally stupid and useless kind of talk. God bless them. I wish American journalists would learn the same thing.
If a corporation is a person, why can’t you lock it up? Or to put it another way, what would we think of a felony where, if you as an individual are convicted of it, you only get a suspended sentence and there’s vague noise about your reputation but you otherwise go back to work tomorrow unhindered? I would think that’s a misdemeanor that somehow got misclassified as a felony.
I don’t have any doubts about how the Supreme Court is going to rule on a lot of opportunities to push forward far-right policies—everyone is properly already certain of what they’re going to do to affirmative action, for example. But I’m genuinely in suspenseful terror about how they might come down on “independent state legislature theory”. (Even if that means that they have to admit that Bush v. Gore was wrongly decided, more or less.)
Image credit: Photo by Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash
A busy week of thinking and unthinking. Another view of the Georgia thing is that it represents a very slow shift to the left, unbearably slow. Might be going a little faster if voting processes there resembled Washington state or Michigan. But that’s the catch.