URLs du Jour

2021-12-28

  • Give me liberty or … get me off Instagram? Interesting claim in a tweet.

    It is apparently a non-bogus quote from Paine. (Third sentence of the first paragraph in this essay.) So that's not the problem.

    Further down in the twitter thread, it's claimed that Facebook treated the image similarly. Living dangerously, I posted it myself. And, as near as I can tell, it's still up. So perhaps saner heads prevailed.


  • Not even considering that whole "killing people with bureaucratic delay" thing. David R. Henderson and Charles L. Hooper take to the WSJ to argue (convincingly) that Coercion Made the Pandemic Worse.

    The online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “anti-vaxxer” as “a person who opposes the use of vaccines or regulations mandating vaccination.” Where does that leave us? We both strongly favor vaccination against Covid-19; one of us (Mr. Hooper) has spent years working and consulting for vaccine manufacturers. But we strongly oppose government vaccine mandates. If you’re crazy about Hondas but don’t think the government should force everyone to buy a Honda, are you “anti-Honda”?

    The people at Merriam-Webster are blurring the distinction between choice and coercion, and that’s not merely semantics. If we accept that the difference between choice and coercion is insignificant, we will be led easily to advocate policies that require a large amount of coercion. Coercive solutions deprive us of freedom and the responsibility that goes with it. Freedom is intrinsically valuable; it is also the central component of the best problem-solving system ever devised.

    Free choice relies on persuasion. It recognizes that you are an important participant with key information, problem-solving abilities and rights. Any solution that is adopted, therefore, must be designed to help you and others. Coercion is used when persuasion has failed or is teetering in that direction—or when you are raw material for someone else’s grand plans, however ill-conceived.

    It's kind of a lonely position, but I share it: pro-vaccine (especially Moderna) and anti-mandate. (And, if you're interested, a pre-Covid story about the FDA killing people here.)


  • We hardly knew ye. Also, we didn't really believe ye. Matt Welch writes an obit for a stupid slogan: RIP, 'Pandemic of the Unvaccinated'

    If you spend too much time observing the way politicians speak, you'll pick up an almost perceptibly mechanical gear-shift in their heads when the brain-groove reminds them to reproduce an anecdote or talking point they have formulated so many times before. Occasionally the subconscious rebels against the alienating monotony with apologetic prefix clauses like, "That's why I like to say," or "I always tell the story that," but the pre-sets mostly override such human twitches to deliver the desired political result.

    So it was for President Joe Biden's counterproductive "pandemic of the unvaccinated" slogan, which the White House COVID-19 Response Team introduced in mid-July, and which the president was still regurgitating inaccurately as late as December 14.

    In a local TV interview with News Center 7 in Dayton, Ohio, the president was asked about whether his administration would continue fighting his contested employer vaccine mandates in court. The politician-brain quickly whirred into gear.

    "This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated. Not the vaccinated, the unvaccinated," Biden emphasized, on the same day that the omicron variant produced a one-day positive-case increase of 16 percent in highly vaccinated New York City. "That's the problem. And so everybody talks about 'freedom,' and not to have a shot or have a test. Well guess what? How about patriotism? How about making sure that you're vaccinated, so you do not spread the disease to anybody else? What about that?"

    How about you kiss my vaccinated keister, Joe?


  • I detect possible headline sarcasm. Jim Geraghty asks us: Americans, Are You Enjoying All of That ‘Immediate Relief’ from High Gas Prices? (Quick check on Betteridge's law of headlines… Yup.)

    On November 24, one day after President Biden announced the release of 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline was $3.39.

    Biden characterized the the release from the reserve as “a tool matched to today’s specific economic environment, where markets expect future oil prices to be lower than they are today, and helps provide relief to Americans immediately and bridge to that period of expected lower oil prices.”

    This morning, more than a month after the announcement of the SPR release, the national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline is $3.28, according to the American Automobile Association. Eleven cents saved per gallon! That’s almost as much as the 16 cents the Biden administration saved Americans at their Independence Day cookouts.

    That's… a 3.2% decrease. See keister suggestion above, Joe.


  • WIRED makes its articles harder to read. I came across this in my dead trees issue: At the End of the World, It’s Hyperobjects All the Way Down. It's about Timothy Morton, who… well here you go:

    You might think, in this time of profound human and climate trauma, that the world is coming to an end. Timothy Morton disagrees: It has already ended, and not a moment too soon. Not because doomsday has arrived, Morton clarifies, but because what we call “the world”—a place that revolves around human beings and is defined by what we can see and feel—is simply too small to cope with reality anymore. Faced with massive forces whose impacts defy our physical perceptions, from global warming and extinction events to the Covid-19 pandemic, our parochial idea of the world falls away like the set of a movie being torn down.

    Morton, a kind-faced, 53-year-old professor and author with uncannily penetrating blue eyes, has spent the past nine years teaching in the English department at Rice University in Houston, Texas. But they are known less for their contributions to Romantic scholarship—which are many and insightful—and […]

    Whoa. Wait a minute. His eyes are known for their contributions to Romantic scholarship?

    No, of course not, "They" is (apparently) Professor Tim's preferred pronoun. But for (I assume) most readers it's a speedbump, where one has to go back, pick up the mental bumper, and try again.

    Here is Professor Tim's faculty page at Rice. Scary picture; "kind-faced" is not the adjective that leaps to mind. And, interestingly, the department has no problem using "he" as the pronoun in the bio.


Last Modified 2023-05-30 7:45 PM EDT