The Zero Room

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The “herd immunity strategy” isn’t part of a scientific debate about COVID-19. It’s a well-funded political campaign. — Abby Cartus and Justin Feldman in Medium: This “herd immunity” strategy is not part of a legitimate scientific debate. It has been rejected by key scientific leaders in the US, UK, Germany, and World Health Organization. Proponents of “herd immunity” haven’t tried to address even basic questions about the strategy, such as how many households would need to be locked down or how many people would still get sick from endemic COVID-19 once herd immunity was achieved. The proposal is not evidence-based and does not reflect even a minority view in the scientific community. Rather, it appears to be the product of an organized, well-funded political campaign in the US and UK. The UK campaign has been described elsewhere. In the US, the campaign appears to be largely coordinated by two right-wing think tanks — the Hoover Institution and the American Institute for Economic Research — in coordination with the Trump administration. [And, in more detail:]
• Scamademics? Right-Wing Lobbying Groups Reviving ‘Herd Immunity’ in the UK — Nafeez Ahmed in the Byline Times: A pernicious but flawed narrative has come to dominate the public debate over the second COVID-19 wave. It is the idea that the science is somehow irreparably divided on what to do about the pandemic. This notion is encapsulated in two different letters sent to the Government by what the press has portrayed as two groups of esteemed scientists – one group supporting the reintroduction of social distancing restrictions, and the other criticising efforts to ‘suppress’ the Coronavirus. Widespread media coverage of the letter has suggested a deep-seated schism at the heart of the British scientific community about how to respond to the crisis. In reality, the authors of the letter that is critical of a COVID-19 suppression strategy have numerous ties to Conservative and Republican Party lobby groups as well as to various agencies of the Government, including HM Treasury, the Ministry of Defence and the ‘Nudge’ Unit – ties which represent potentially serious conflicts of interest. Worse, this group’s claims about the Coronavirus have no basis in peer-reviewed scientific literature. Instead, it represents what one top British epidemiologist has described as “a fringe group of scientists”, out of sync with “most of the public health experts in the world”.
• Good Intentions, Bad Inventions — Amanda Lenhart and Kellie Owens at Data & Society: The tech companies that design and build so many of the devices, platforms, and software we use for hours each day have embraced myths that push a flawed under-standing of digital well-being. While we are encouraged that these companies are dedicating greater attention to social media’s effect on the mental and physical health of users, their current approaches to improving user well-being fundamentally misunderstand how people engage with technology. At its worst, this approach funnels time and resources to making technology more “enriching” for middle-class white users, while failing to address the systemic harms that minoritized communities face. The heart of this misunderstanding is biological determinism, which suggests that our “Paleolithic” brains cannot resist “God-like” technology, placing too much power in the hands of tech companies to both create and destroy our capacity for attention. But attention is not a fixed biological entity, it is a value-laden social category; people stop using social media of their own volition all the time. Current approaches to improving digital well-being also promote tech solutionism, or the presumption that technology can fix social, cultural, and structural problems. At their core, these approaches lack empirical evidence to support them. We want to replace these myths with new evidence-based narratives that shift the conversation toward agency and equity.
• Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing — Jesse Frederik at the Correspondent: I’ve been hearing a lot about blockchain in the last few years. I mean, who hasn’t? It’s everywhere. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who thought: but what is it then, for God’s sake, this whole blockchain thing? And what’s so terribly revolutionary about it? What problem does it solve? That’s why I wrote this article. I can tell you upfront, it’s a bizarre journey to nowhere. I’ve never seen so much incomprehensible jargon to describe so little. I’ve never seen so much bloated bombast fall so flat on closer inspection. And I’ve never seen so many people searching so hard for a problem to go with their solution. […] Enlightened – and thus former – blockchain developer Mark van Cuijk explained: “You could also use a forklift to put a six-pack of beer on your kitchen counter. But it’s just not very efficient.”

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• A New American Manifesto — AbsurdistWords updates the US Declaration of Independence: Nobody is suggesting that we take the dismantling of a government lightly. Things must have gotten really bad for this to be the only option left. Humans by nature don’t like change and even when they’re being harmed, they’re more likely to just endure that harm than to break down a whole system that they’re comfortable with and used to. But if things get so bad that the government starts abusing and harming its citizens in the name of gaining more power, it’s every human’s moral duty to burn that government down and build one that protects them better from would-be dictators. The American people are now facing down these exact same kinds of abuses. We have tried to be patient, but now we’re fed up and the whole thing needs to come down.
• John Yoo: The Man Who Would Make the President King — Gene Healy reviews Yoo's latest: Defender-in-Chief has already earned Yoo the coveted tweet-blurb from @realDonaldTrump, so it's unlikely anything I write here will put much of a dent in its sales. But ye gods, this is a terrible book: a lazy, turgid, error-ridden mess, perched atop an appallingly silly thesis. Yoo forgets history he learned in high school, announcing that the Mexican-American War kicked off with an "attack on Sam Houston's forces along the Rio Grande." (Zachary Taylor's, actually; Houston was a U.S. senator at the time.) He forgets history he actually lived through, declaring that President Barack Obama "launched attacks on Syria for its use of chemical weapons." (Er, he didn't.) Through large stretches of the book, Yoo even forgets what he's just written, as when he deploys the same damned passage from the Federalist three times in seven pages. You get the sense that with this book, unlike the Torture Memos, his heart really wasn't in it. As for that thesis: What makes a president a defender-in-chief, anyway? The answer is in the book's subtitle: It's the "fight for presidential power." You earn your laurels by defending the office's prerogatives—genuine or imagined—thereby keeping the flame of "energy in the executive" alive for future presidents. Trump amply deserves the honorific, Yoo argues, because he fought back against the special counsel investigation, defended his travel ban in court, dropped bombs without congressional authorization—or, as Yoo frames it, "stood up for traditional executive leadership in foreign affairs and war"—and made some judicial appointments Yoo likes.
• The Election That Could Break America — Barton Gellman in the Atlantic: December 8 is known as the “safe harbor” deadline for appointing the 538 men and women who make up the Electoral College. The electors do not meet until six days later, December 14, but each state must appoint them by the safe-harbor date to guarantee that Congress will accept their credentials. The controlling statute says that if “any controversy or contest” remains after that, then Congress will decide which electors, if any, may cast the state’s ballots for president. We are accustomed to choosing electors by popular vote, but nothing in the Constitution says it has to be that way. Article II provides that each state shall appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late 19th century, every state has ceded the decision to its voters. Even so, the Supreme Court affirmed in Bush v. Gore that a state “can take back the power to appoint electors.” How and when a state might do so has not been tested for well over a century. Trump may test this. According to sources in the Republican Party at the state and national levels, the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority. With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly.
• Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
  
• Down with meritocracy — Michael Young writing in the Guardian about 20 years ago: I have been sadly disappointed by my 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy. I coined a word which has gone into general circulation, especially in the United States, and most recently found a prominent place in the speeches of Mr Blair. The book was a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say has not been heeded) against what might happen to Britain between 1958 and the imagined final revolt against the meritocracy in 2033. […] It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others. Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed between the classes more or less at random, has become much more highly concentrated by the engine of education. A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education's narrow band of values. With an amazing battery of certificates and degrees at its disposal, education has put its seal of approval on a minority, and its seal of disapproval on the many who fail to shine from the time they are relegated to the bottom streams at the age of seven or before. The new class has the means at hand, and largely under its control, by which it reproduces itself.
• Democrats Need to Wake Up: The Trump Movement Is Shot Through With Fascism — Rich Benjamin in the Intercept: In order to win this presidential contest, liberals need to accept that Trump supporters do not care if he were to scrap millions of mail-in votes or to welcome, and even solicit, Russian interference for his cause. Not only do some Trump supporters understand that he is an autocrat who will cheat the rules to stay in power, that’s precisely what they like about him. The left should understand that many Trump supporters inherently believe that they would fare better under an autocratic system of white supremacy than under a multiracial democracy. So many white liberals and moderates are invested in the idea that authoritarianism can’t happen in America, because to question whether authoritarianism exists here is to question what they’ve achieved. Such white people, figuratively and literally, have so much money, property, social status, and self-image invested in the mirage that this country is based on merit and fair play. They have so much invested in the illusion that their political institutions and white cohorts are good actors that will keep everything nicely afloat. Questioning all that fervent, widespread Trump support would force them to question how their neighbor, their cousin, their uncle, their co-worker, their favorite vendor is complicit to a regime that prioritizes their well-being and social privilege as white people, second only to Trump’s greed. To acknowledge your aunt’s or your own complicity in Trump’s nationalist autocracy might make you feel accountable for what this country is. And that accountability to the problem damns you to an accountability to the solution.
• Houses are becoming commodities to buy and sell and not homes — John Menadue, Pearls and Irritations: It is no accident that Scott Morrison was a senior executive in the Property Council. So it is no surprise that the ‘housing minister’, Michael Sukkar is not even in the Cabinet. He is in the ‘Outer Ministry’. That demonstrates to me more than anything that Morrison regards property as a commodity to be traded in the market and not a social good like education or health. We need major reforms in our health and education sectors but the failings in our housing sector tell me that housing and particularly social housing for rent is of the highest priority. Housing policy should be based on three important principles. First, we should value housing for its use-value, not its exchange-value. Second, housing policy should be part of community and neighbourhood building. Third, housing policy should promote social mixing and sharing, rather than stratification.
• Bizarro — by Dan Piraro:
  
• Will citizen assemblies change local government? — Bill Garner in Pearls and Irritations: With the local elections on the way in Victoria democracy could get a surprising boost. If instead of merely voting in councillors, what if citizens were able to directly set the strategic directions councils must follow? This may seem far-fetched yet it is exactly what the new Victorian Local Government Act enables. The Act places community engagement at the core of municipal governing. It is intended to encourage a much greater degree of participatory democracy. It is potentially revolutionary. […] Where citizens actively take up this opportunity it could go a long way to restoring the democracy deficit that resulted from the council amalgamations of the 1990s when more than 100 councils were sacked. This managerialist reform resulted in the old cities, towns, suburbs and neighbourhoods being submerged beneath newly-created megacities. […] The council amalgamations were justified by the claim that the admitted decrease of democracy would be more than compensated by an increase in efficiency and effectiveness. People would be better served if local government was primarily an exercise in management. […] While the democracy deficit became increasingly apparent, the promise of large economic gains in efficiency was never realised. But for a quarter of a century this has been the largely unquestioned way of running local government in Victoria.
• From the FSF Bulletin: Trial by proprietary software — John Sullivan, Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation: Unfortunately, with the shutdown of in-person institutions around the world, people have turned to the proprietary software companies that had the sales and marketing resources to quickly insert themselves as "solutions." Among these institutions are courts of law, many of which have been conducting some proceedings over Zoom. While Zoom is a "service," it also requires those using it to run nonfree software on their local devices -- either the official client application, or downloaded nonfree JavaScript when connecting via a Web browser. While Zoom's software itself doesn't cost an individual any money to use, it raises two clear categories of concern: requiring people to agree to Zoom's arbitrary demands as a condition for access to justice, and the state's public endorsement of Zoom.
• So an ancient TV set can bring down the mighty broadband? Good... — David Mitchell being all David Mitchelley in the Guardian: Not being able to access the internet is a plus as far as I’m concerned. I look back fondly on the afternoon in 2009 on the Isle of Skye that I spent waving a Samsung flip phone around my head in the hope of it coinciding with a big enough blob of reception to get a text to send. I was significantly more likely to catch a flying splat of seagull shit. But the inconvenience makes you feel remote and, for me, that was the point of going there. Nowadays, I could probably get streaming HD. Which sounds like a disease. And maybe it is.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• No, Animals Do Not Have Genders — Cailin O'Connor in Nautilus: How do we know that gender is not simply a biological fact? What makes it cultural, rather than analogous to sex-differentiated behavior in animals? Here is some of the key evidence. Unlike in any other animal, gendered behavior in humans is wildly different across cultures. What is considered appropriate for women in one culture might be deemed completely inappropriate in another. Even the number of genders is culturally variable. While most cultures have settled on two genders, associated with biological sex differences, others settle on three or more. Relatedly, the rules and patterns of gender change over time. While in the early 1900s women in the United States were forbidden from wearing trousers, it is now perfectly acceptable to do so. And while pink is now considered the color of femininity in the Western world, this association only emerged recently. In other words, there is a lot of arbitrariness to gender—it is flexible, it can be done in many ways. And this indicates that it is deeply shaped by culture.
• This Modern World — by Tom Tomorrow:
  
• How Conspiracy Theories Are Shaping the 2020 Election—and Shaking the Foundation of American Democracy — Charlotte Alter in Time: When asked where they found their information, almost all these voters were cryptic: “Go online,” one woman said. “Dig deep,” added another. They seemed to share a collective disdain for the mainstream media–a skepticism that has only gotten stronger and deeper since 2016. The truth wasn’t reported, they said, and what was reported wasn’t true. This matters not just because of what these voters believe but also because of what they don’t. The facts that should anchor a sense of shared reality are meaningless to them; the news developments that might ordinarily inform their vote fall on deaf ears. They will not be swayed by data on coronavirus deaths, they won’t be persuaded by job losses or stock market gains, and they won’t care if Trump called America’s fallen soldiers “losers” or “suckers,” as the Atlantic reported, because they won’t believe it. They are impervious to messaging, advertising or data. They aren’t just infected with conspiracy; they appear to be inoculated against reality.
• Dinosaur Comics — Ryan North:
  
• Night and Day — Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books: The message is that Biden’s terrible excess of grief leaves him with plenty left over to share with the whole country. […] But when we bring it back to real politics, the notion is at once deeply affecting and highly problematic. On the one hand, there is something appropriate about the image of America as embodied in a man with a deep black hole in the middle of his chest: that hole is a portal through which the Democrats have passed into a language of brokenness and grieving. Perhaps, in this, there is evidence that something has been learned from the debacle of 2016. Trump won in part because both Obama and Hillary Clinton explicitly countered “Make America Great Again” with “America is already great.” It might have seemed like a smart soundbite, but it reeked of smugness and it was, for millions of voters, patently untrue. It relied on the clichés of American exceptionalism that so many citizens knew to be hollow. Trump ruthlessly exploited the gap between the rhetoric and the reality. At least this time, “America is already great” is off limits. Democrats obviously cannot use it when fighting a Republican incumbent, but what is striking now is how stark, how dark, the alternative is. Under the pressure of the political chaos of the Trump presidency, the horrors of the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests, and Biden’s mournful persona, the party has embraced a radically different image: of an America that is shattered, sagging under the burdens of mass death, economic disruption, malign government, and national impotence. The Democrats’ battle hymn in 2020 is a De Profundis, a cry from the depths.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith:
  
• John Stoehr — in Religion Dispatches: A reporter who spent her life in college prep schools and the Ivy League before moving to Manhattan to work at the Times is vulnerable to media representations of rural life, because they’re media representations created by and for other elites. Fact is, when rural Arizonans talk about “law enforcement” over a plate of eggs and bacon, what they mean is punishing the weak. When they talk about their “liberty,” what they mean is their dominance. When they talk about their “traditional values,” what they mean is their control. A Times reporter can’t possibly know any of that. The problem is made worse when sources give voice to this or that conspiracy theory. She can’t know her sources aren’t delusional. She can’t know they aren’t crazy. She can’t know that conspiracy theories are central to their authoritarian view of the world. So she doesn’t report how dangerous their politics are. She ends up reporting that some Americans believe, for instance, that a “secret cabal” of Democrats and other “radical leftists” in the “deep state” is, in addition to sexually molesting innocent children and perhaps eating them, too, trying to bring down Donald Trump. (This is the QAnon conspiracy you’ve read about lately.) What she should be reporting is that some Americans are willing to say anything to justify any action—violence, insurrection, even treason—to defeat their perceived enemies. Elite reporters, and some non-elite reporters who are following suit, keep talking about conspiracy theories as if they were a “collective delusion.” They are no such thing. The authoritarians who espouse them don’t care if QAnon is true. They don’t care that it’s false. Conspiracy theories are a convenience, a means of rationalizing what they already want to do, which is precisely what elite reporters can’t know and do not report.
• Doonesbury — by Garry Trudeau:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Kansas Should Go F--- Itself — Matt Taibbi review's Thomas Frank's latest book: The average blue-state media consumer by 2020 has ingested so much propaganda about Trump (and Sanders, for that matter) that he or she will be almost immune to the damning narratives in this book. Protesting, “But Trump is a racist,” they won’t see the real point – that these furious propaganda campaigns that have been repeated almost word for word dating back to the 1890s are aimed at voters, not politicians. In the eighties and nineties, TV producers and newspaper editors established the ironclad rule of never showing audiences pictures of urban poverty, unless it was being chased by cops. In the 2010s the press began to cartoonize the “white working class” in a distantly similar way. This began before Trump. As Bernie Sanders told Rolling Stone after the 2016 election, when the small-town American saw himself or herself on TV, it was always “a caricature. Some idiot. Or maybe some criminal, some white working-class guy who has just stabbed three people.” These caricatures drove a lot of voters toward Trump, especially when he began telling enormous crowds that the lying media was full of liars who lied about everything.
• Via Bruce Sterling:
  
• Starbucks, monetary superpower — JP Koning: I don't go to Starbucks very often, so I only recently learnt that the company has succeeded in getting many of its customers to stop using cash and debit/credit cards to buy coffee. Instead, they are using Starbucks's own payments option. […] Starbucks has around $1.6 billion in stored value card liabilities outstanding. This represents the sum of all physical gift cards held in customer's wallets as well as the digital value of electronic balances held in the Starbucks Mobile App. It amounts to ~6% of all of the company's liabilities. This is a pretty incredible number. Stored value card liabilities are the money that you, oh loyal Starbucks customer, use to buy coffee. What you might not realize is that these balances simultaneously function as a loan to Starbucks. Starbucks doesn't pay any interest on balances held in the Starbucks app or gift cards. You, the loyal customer, are providing the company with free debt.
• Bizarro — by Dan Piraro:
  
• The Crowding-Out Myth — Robert Skidelsky at Project Syndicate: But the crowding-out argument is wrong both theoretically and empirically. First, it assumes that all resources in an economy are fully employed. In fact, most market economies normally have underemployment or spare capacity, meaning that public investment can “crowd in” resources that otherwise would be idle. This was John Maynard Keynes’s key argument, and it cannot be stressed often enough. And the superior efficiency of a boom-and-bust private investment system dominated by financial oligarchs is far from obvious. Second, the state has in practice always played a leading role in allocating capital, either through direct investments of its own (including most nineteenth-century railway-building), or by deliberately encouraging certain types of private investment. For example, Toyota, which started out as a textile-machinery manufacturer, became a leading global automobile producer from the early 1960s onward with the help of tariff protection and state subsidies. Nor did Silicon Valley succeed because the state got out of the way of risk-taking venture capitalists and garage investors.
• Tom the Dancing Bug— by Ruben Bolling:
  
• The big Apple — John Quiggin in Inside Story: The protocols and languages that make the internet possible are a public good, created by collaborative effort and made freely available. The information on the internet is generated by households, businesses and governments using these protocols. Without these public goods, Google would be worthless. But because advertising can be attached to search results, ownership of a search engine is immensely profitable. Similarly, Facebook’s value is derived entirely from the contributions of its users. Apple and Amazon are more like traditional businesses, but increasingly rely on internet services for their profits. Thus, a network created in the public sector has become the underlying infrastructure for private monopolies.
• Dependency — xkcd by Randall Monroe:
• Corporate Dems Want You To Shut Up While They Get Loud — David Sirota: The demand to shut up is only being aimed at the progressive base of the party, while the corporate wing floods the zone with rhetoric that could demobilize voters. Indeed, at the very moment many good progressives are blunting their criticism and making clear that defeating Trump is of utmost importance, Corporate Democrats aren’t being asked to wait or hold their tongues. In fact, they are doing the opposite: Rahm Emanuel — who has been advising Biden — just went on television to show that the corporate wing of the party is intent on using the stretch run of the Most Important Election Of Our Lifetime™ not to doggedly focus on actually winning the election, but to instead try to predetermine post-election policy outcomes. […] “Two things I would say if I was advising an administration,” said Emanuel, who left the Chicago mayoralty in disgrace after his city officials suppressed a video of the police murder of a teenager. “One is no there’s no new Green Deal, there’s no Medicare For All, probably the single two topics that were discussed the most. That’s not even in the platform.”
• #1215; One in Hole — Wondermark by David Malki !: