(Interesting how quiet this thread is now, while the numerous protests thread blow up. Trump’s loving that imbalance, a big reason in itself for him to stoke the protest flames however he can.)
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Exactly. While this is not exactly a “distraction,” it is in fact a critical moment, maybe, for our country, it is also yet more evidence that very few of us can process more than one catastrophe at a time. And the number of catastrophes in this particular point in time keeps fucking multiplying. History is being written right now, all around us. What will our grandchildren learn about us from this?
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That’s hopeful. Could Roberts break with the ideological right wing assholes and actually, oh, I don’t know, uphold the fucking constitution? Not sure I am all that confidant in this possibility, but this might be a step along that path.
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Probably nothing. The Watts Rebellion and the Grant Park Police Riot were both over 50 years ago, and we’ve done little if anything to effectively address the continuing problem of police overreach. For over two generations we’ve had the fact that we live in a police state rubbed in our faces over and over again, and our response has always been to give the police better weapons and more authority.
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You are thinking too small. I am referencing the Trump kleptocracy, creeping white nationalism, Covid-19 pandemic, the global rise of fascism and the May uprising. Among other disasters currently ongoing. Again, processing multiple catastrophes simultaneously is almost impossible. Historians will make careers out of analyzing us and out responses.
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I wish there were more op-eds in American newspapers that were this blunt.
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Another one for the “end of lockdown” file:
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That depends on the direction this all goes in. If we win, make the changes we need to make to right out experimental ship of democratic governance, then we learn that we can grow and change. if the fascists win, we don’t get that story, we get a new iteration of white nationalists glory built on neo-liberal ecological “mastery”.
If we keep destroying our public institutions like we have been, keep ignoring racism, classism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, etc, keep looking to CEOs to swoop in and save us, keep ignoring experts (real ones, not neo-liberal ones that run banks and corporations), keep dismantling our public education system… you get the picture, then they’ll win and the future history will not be the critical, questioning history we need, but that of the power structure.
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We are well into William Gibson’s “Jackpot”.
In Gibson’s 2010 novel Zero History , one character asks Hubertus Bigend “what piece of information he’d most want to have… if he could learn any secret”. If William Gibson was offered the same opportunity, what would he choose? “I would probably ask to know, in a fairly detailed way, what the future – say, 100 years from now – thinks of us,” he says. “History teaches us that it won’t be what we think of ourselves. What we think of the Victorians would have appalled the Victorians, it wasn’t at all what they thought of themselves."
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To quote the so-bad-it’s-good B movie, Red Sonja;
If they win, "there will be no world."
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Sometimes I don’t like it when you’re right… 
@anon29537550 Hopefully the grandkids learn “Hug your friends and family every chance you get, it matters.”
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https://twitter.com/EmmaKennedy/status/1267057312625295363?s=20
ETA: This is why Emma Kennedy is so concerned.
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The latest academic champion of Hydroxychloroquine+azithromycin as a preventative measure.
It’s difficult for me to evaluate. Seems to be published by a legit journal, no obvious strikes against the author. The one thing that is within my expertise is that a lot of the cited references seem to have been pulled from Wikipedia, which raises my eyebrows.
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I’m beginning to think Anders Tegnell is a psychopath.
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When one study seems to contradict the findings of multiple others, it immediately brings to mind the old truism about “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” I don’t recognize this journal, which probably doesn’t mean much, but the fact that they conclude with “this medicine needs to be promoted immediately” sets off my bullshit detector. That is not normal verbiage for a scientific paper.
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There is way too much of
around right now.
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Yes, that and the wall of copy/paste refs from Wikipedia makes it look like a very hasty effort by the “Back to work thralls, you’ll be fine!” crowd.
eta: “Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health” really sets my teeth on edge.
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Why? Do you think Bloomberg should have had first billing over Johns Hopkins? Or that Rockefeller’s name is omitted altogether, even though his money was responsible for the original creation of the school?
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