Laying Low

This is for my conservative friends, especially my older conservative friends. My libertarian friends tend to take a rational and scientific view of things. My Democrat friends tend to believe what they hear from the government - at least from the public health side of the government. Friends from both groups probably are taking the epidemic seriously. It is some of my Republican/conservative friends that I am a little worried about.

I am  following the recommendations for older people during the epidemic. We made our last trip to a restaurant three weeks ago. Since then I have been to the grocery store, the post office once to mail our tax return,  a Home Depot and a local lumberyard for things for a couple of things I am doing in our backyard, and  the ATM at our bank’s closest branch. Otherwise we have stayed away from people. We are doing the "social distancing" (a term surely coined by someone fluent in bureaucratese), washing our hands more often and especially vigorously after going out, and following other recommendations.   We will obey  a directive for complete isolation if it comes to that in our town. 

I understand why some  conservatives  are or have been skeptical.  The federal government is generally incompetent and untrustworthy.  Many people in the traditional media are liars, ignoramuses, or both and blatant public relations flacks for the left to boot. There was an attempt to use the epidemic as a way to damage Trump as was done with poor old Bush with Katrina. Officials do manufacture crises and exaggerate  problems in hopes of scaring people into giving them more power and authority. They also  have strong incentives to overreact to dangers and difficulties so as not to be seen as behaving like poor old Bush at the time of Katrina.  Some Democrats are hoping to use the epidemic as a means to damage the economy in time for the coming election. People have been told falsely a lot of times about a lot of different things that the sky is falling in or would be by date x, only to have x pass with nothing much happening.

However none of that changes the facts and the unknowns.  From the time the disease spread from China to other places, serious, objective experts in public health have seen reasons to worry that things could go bad quickly. Covid 19 is a new virus, and so there are  no historical data on its behavior or course in populations.   People do die from it, and old people die more frequently than younger ones.  It is very contagious.  It would be useful to know if being old per se makes one’s risk of real trouble higher, or if higher percentages of old people get really sick because higher percentages of old people are already in poor health. I have seen no data on that.  Given all that, following the recommendations seems the reasonable thing for older people to do. It is a good idea for younger people too, though they are not in as much danger.

Conservatives who are not taking this seriously, may be making the sort of mistake some of George W. Bush’s people are said to have made before invading Iraq.  Authors have written that they disregarded advice from career people in the State Department not to invade  because of their contempt for the diplomats having been wrong  about the chances of winning the Cold War. Well on Iraq  the wimps were right, and the tough guys were wrong. The past behavior and reliability of those  making an assertion of course matter, but one should  look at the facts instead of dismissing  things automatically. The facts as now known point toward being careful and following the recommendations of the experts in public health and the rules from various governments. 

Learning from Phoniness

It is not news that most politicians and their media flacks are phonies. They produce evidence of that routinely day by day. People are so used to it that many expect nothing else and scarcely notice it anymore.  However sometimes  our civil masters and their friends display their phoniness in ways that tell people something interesting.   

A few years ago in  the Kelo case, the  Supreme Court ruled  that it was permissible for state and local governments to seize people’s property through eminent domain and hand it over to  private individuals or companies the governments favored.  Republicans like to claim they are defenders of individual rights and opponents of arbitrary government power.  The decision gave them an opportunity to show it by passing legislation banning the practice- either directly or indirectly by withholding money from governments that did it.  They  controlled the White House and both houses of congress, but  no bill was passed. (The president did issue an executive order, but it had little effect.)  One does not have to be a cynic to wonder if that was because some important donors to the Republican party were wealthy real estate developers who preferred having a government steal property for them to having to acquire it through voluntary exchange. Whether or not that was the reason, their  behavior told people something worth learning.

A while back Hillary Clinton let a large cat out of the bag when she  explained that she left Margaret Thatcher out of her supposedly apolitical compendium of gutsy women because she did not approve of her politics. It has been obvious to some people for a long time that Clinton’s style of feminism is less about women’s independence, accomplishment, or gutsiness than about leftist politics, and that to people like her the lives and accomplishments  and gutsiness of women who do not fit the political mold are to be ignored or disparaged. Still it was useful  though  a little unusual for her to proclaim her phoniness directly, out loud, and in public, but she is neither as clever nor as shifty as her husband.

  

A few days ago Trump appointed Richard Grenell to be acting director of national intelligence.  He is the first openly homosexual person to  have a cabinet level position in the United States. Activists and people in the traditional media have generally seen such firsts as beneficial and important whether by football players, police chiefs, elected officials, or whatever. One might have expected a similar reaction here, but it did not happen. The obvious reason it didn’t is that Grenell has the wrong politics, and that to them breaking down barriers does not matter if the politically wrong sort of people are doing it. That too is useful information.