Another Comment on COVID Psychology

And on the subject of COVID psychology, many people on my side of the aisle have commented on the irrationality of believing at once that COVID is a bioweapon and that it is no big deal.  What is the point of a bioweapon unless it is a big deal?

So far as I can tell, it is something like this. Blame COVID on a bioweapon and you have determined whose "fault" it is.  And if it can clearly be determined to be the fault of the Chinese government, then there is no reason why honest Americans should be "punished" for it.  Because I think that is one reason there is such strong resistance to COVID restrictions, even less intrusive ones like masks or vaccines -- the conviction that they are a punishment of some kind and carry an implication of blame.

 

Back to COVID

 So, if I am dunking on Biden, what about COVID.  Clearly that is going disastrously. James Fallows had a fascinating article making that case that Trump really does deserve blame for not acting promptly when the disease first started in China.  Does Biden deserve similar blame for not acting when the delta variant got started in India?  I don't know, but that is really not my focus.

 The fact remains that, despite a good start with vaccines, the delta variant has swamped our effort and now we are back where we started.  Part of that is the result of vaccine and mask resistance by Republicans, but not all.  Even the countries with the highest vaccine rate are seeing serious resurgence due to breakthrough infections with the delta variant.  

Let's face facts. WE WON'T BEAT COVID WITH VACCINES ALONE.

Fortunately we have other options. So why aren't we using them?

Rapid, affordable tests by now are technically possible and a reality in some countries.  So why don't we have cheap and abundant tests here?  The answer appears to be that the FDA has not approved them.  At the same time, we also have an effective treatment.  The monoclonal antibodies that were only available to a select few when Donald Trump was treated with them are now produced on a large enough scale to be available for high-risk patients in general.  But the treatment is not widely known, largely because it is being discouraged for fear people will regard is as an alternative to the vaccine.

So, what is Joe Biden to do?  I can think of four steps.  Three are purely technical and should be doable if he puts is mind to it.  The fourth is psychological and is most vexing.

First, get the tests approved.  We are right back where we started at the beginning of the pandemic. The FDA delayed in approving tests then.  I did not let Trump off the hook in the belief that an ingenious President knows how to overcome this sort of bureaucratic delay.  The Biden Administration has not impressed me with its ingenuity, but it needs to get some NOW and find a way to clear the bureaucratic hurdle.

Ramp up production and distribution.  Use the Defense Production Act to speed up production of both tests and monoclonal antibodies.  Use the distribution networks you used for getting out vaccine (very well done) to get out tests and treatment.  I saw an article (can't find now) complaining that Regeneron antibody treatment requires not just the antibodies, but delivery materials like IV bottles, syringes, etc.  Well, fine, use the Act to ramp up production of those, too.

Focus on export as well as home consumption.  We need the same multi-layered approach to defeat this disease the world over, before some new and even more alarming mutation arises.

Get the anti-vaxers to use the products.  OK, I admit this one is probably the biggest challenge of all. People who won't get the vaccine and won't wear masks, people who prefer horse dewormer, and even boo Donald Trump when he recommends getting vaccinated, will probably also resist taking home tests or using monoclonal antibodies.  A sizable portion of the population will reject anything associated with the Biden Administration, or even with any branch of the federal government.  The best option, in that case, is to encourage private actors and Republicans to do as much of the promotion as possible, if they will cooperate.  But get the word out, along with the product.

Further on Afghanistan

 I haven't written much about the situation in Afghanistan because I have not felt qualified to express an opinion on the subject.  Too much contradictory information is coming in.  Reports from the ground about absolute madness and chaos, versus happy talk from our government about the number of people gotten out about 117,000, at latest count).  I wasn't quite sure how to reconcile these accounts, but I had a suspicion.

My suspicion was this.  The evacuation was an allied attempt.  The reports kept giving raw numbers of people airlifted out of Afghanistan, but never the composition.  So I suspected that many people in the 117,000 were not Afghan allies in danger because of their association with us, but allied nationals.  And nothing wrong with that, exactly.  Other countries quite reasonably want to get their people out.  But if that was the composition, it suggests that a lot of our Afghan allies are being left to their fate.

And this thread appears to confirm my suspicion:

[W]hen they say 100,000 they want you to feel we’ve accomplished a lot. Actually, we’ve only taken out 5,000 US Civs and it’s unclear how many Afghans;The rest of those figures are everyone who’s passed though the airfield no matter which country airlifted them out or what the nationality: Iranian, Pakistani, Indian, etc. WH argues “we provide security so we get the credit.” It’s misleading.

The author goes on to warn that, because of shifts in paperwork requirements, people are being admitted to the airport and then turned away, effectively painting a target on their backs.  "[T]his remains one of the must dysfunctional train wrecks I’ve ever seen or, as a historian, ever studied."

I don't like hearing this, but painful facts have to be faced.  I do not know what planning would have made this work better, but it is clear that the Biden Administration should have been working on this from Day One.  Yes, I realize they had their hands full with getting out COVID vaccines (handled well) and COVID relief (handled well) and dealing with the southern border (handled badly).  An infrastructure bill has always struck me as something nice, but not really essential.  This is essential.  I will let others decide when the execution should have started.  Should we have started earlier, or would that just have precipitated the crisis sooner?  Could we have started in winter and would the Taliban have been unable to launch a military campaign?  Or would winter also have prevented an evacuation?  Should be have kept Bagram airbase, or was it to inaccessible?  I don't know and I don't pretend to.  But the lack of planning and preparation is inexcusable.  

Nor is this an isolated incident.  The Biden Administration has shown itself consistently unable to anticipate and prepare for the unexpected, even if the unexpected was highly foreseeable.

But will this make me vote for a Republican next time?  For the party of Gaetz, Gohmert, Gosar and Greene? For a party that is objectively pro-pandemic at best?   For a party that seems to be nothing but competitive insanity, and that gives all signs of wanting to undo democracy completely?  Until the Republican Party regains its senses, I see not choice but to vote for the Democrats, no matter how badly they do.  But I don't know how many others will agree with me.

Just Because Right Wingers are Abandoning Economic Royalism Doesn't Mean We Should Adopt It

 

Anything but vax or mask mandates

A funny thing seems to be happening to right wingers.  After generations of making economic royalism their central ideological principle, they are now starting to move away from it.

In some ways, I suppose, this was inevitable.  Liberals have been expecting for a long time that there will have to be a breach between economic and social conservatives because sooner or later social conservatives will have to notice that the unregulated workings of the free market in general, and large corporations in particular, are not very socially conservative.  It is happening now.

Liberals have vainly argued for a long time that government does not have a monopoly on oppression,  and that large concentrations of private power can also oppress.  And conservatives are finally coming around to agree.  We just disagree on when private companies oppress.

Liberals believe that private companies oppress when they sell unsafe products, when they hide slanted terms in the fine print, when they pay non-living wages, when they have unsafe working conditions, when they pollute the environment, when they build mines or factories that disrupt communities’ peace and quiet, when they consume a community’s infrastructure but demand tax exemptions to stay, when they do things that endanger health and safety.

Conservatives are still fine with all those things, but they have found other reasons to object to what large corporations do.  Conservatives see corporations as oppressive when they try to protect their employees and customers by insisting on vaccines or masks.  Or when social media companies impose some sort of standards on right wing posters.  Or when conservatives don’t get as many likes and shares on social media as they thing they ought.  Or when corporations advocate for a liberal viewpoint, like pro-voting rights.  Economic royalist who for years have been defending corporations free speech rights to bribe politicians with unlimited campaign contributions believe the corporations are going altogether too far when they directly express opinions that conservatives don’t like.  And although right wingers remain dead set against any sort of health and safety regulations, they don’t actually mind regulations to ensure that things are less healthy and less safe.

So what is a liberal to make of all this?  As least some responses I have seen sound downright economic royalist.  Social media companies have the complete First Amendment right to exclude any viewpoints they wish.  Employers have the right to put any conditions on employment they want.  Businesses have the right to exclude unwanted customers, or to impose any conditions on customers that they wish.

These are all essentially “procedural” arguments, making the case that corporations, as non-state actors, are free to do things not allowed to the state.  Granted, this is not quite the same as an argument that corporations can do no wrong, but the arguments easily blend into one another.  If a corporation has the right to ensure a safe workplace, why shouldn’t it have the right to have an unsafe workplace, and anyone who doesn’t like it can work somewhere else?  If social media companies have the complete right to remove false, inflammatory, or defamatory posts, why not true and restrained posts that the mediators just don’t agree with?

Rather than make the procedural argument that corporations should be free to do whatever they want, I would rather our side step forward and argue that these corporations are doing the right thing.

Social media companies are not just exercising their First Amendment rights to exclude viewpoints they disagree with.  They are benefitting from a special privilege granted by the state, the notorious Section 230(c), which makes internet service providers immune from suit for any post they publish, and also to be immune from suit from any post they remove.  The privilege that the state grants, it can also withdraw. The government could repeal the first part of Section 230(c) and make internet service providers liable for content they publish, wich would shut such providers down altogether.  Or it could repeal the second part, and make internet service providers liable for anything they remove.  

Many right wingers think they want to end all content moderation and require social media to publish anything that shows up.  But really they don’t.  Gresham's Law applies to social media as well as to currency – the bad drives out the good.  A social media company with no content moderation will be overrun by pornography – or even jihadi recruiting and beheading videos.*

And if we believe that social media companies should be free to take down pornography or jihadi terrorists, then why not false, inflammatory, or defamatory materials, materials that promote crime, etc. So far as I can tell, right wingers ultimately, at some level, agree.  They just think they are targeted too often.  To which I can only reply, Twitter keeps track of the top 10 Facebook links.  Right wing sites routinely outperform leftwing or mainstream new sites.  The party of personal responsibility should show a little.  If right wing sites get removed or banned more often than left wing or mainstream sites, maybe it's because they lie more often and engage in more inflammatory and defamatory posts.  

And as for business vaccine or mask mandates, let's come right out and say it.  Instead of arguing that businesses should be free of regulations, either to make them more healthy and safe or less healthy and safe, let's take the opposite tack.  Rules to promote health and safety are good, whether enacted and enforced by government or private actors.

I have discussed before what makes democracy hard:

[Democracy] values procedure over substance. It demands obedience to leaders who are chosen by the right procedure (i.e, who win the election), regardless of how loathsome their values or policies may be to us. It expects us to treat abstract procedural details, such as federalism or separation of powers, as more important than the actual merits of what policy to adopt. It insists that we respect the rights of people we despise (sometimes deservedly). Freedom of expression makes no distinction between good and bad ideas, but expects us to give equal privilege to even the vilest ideas that surely have nothing to contribute. And, to people who believe that their religion is the sole path to Heaven, freedom of religion requires us to allow the spread of false doctrines that will condemn countless people to Hell. These are not easy rules to swallow.

Well, the good news is that we don't have to apply these rules to economic royalism.  In discussing whether an economic regulation is justified, if we oppose a rule, say, banning private business from imposing vaccine or mask mandates, or requiring social media to publish all right-wing posts, no matter how false, inflammatory, or defamatory, we don't have to oppose them with the procedural argument that all regulations are bad and the private sector can do no wrong.  We should be free to argue for or against regulations on the substantive merits.

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*And, in fact, even Trump's GETTR network as terms of service applying some standards.

Defeating COVID Will Have to Be Multi-Layered

 

It should be clear by now that vaccines alone will not defeat COVID.  That is the case not only because there are a lot of stubborn people who refuse to get the shot, but because no vaccine is perfect, and even countries with the highest vaccine rates are still experiencing outbreaks.  

But even the delta variant is (hypothetically) beatable (in the sense of allowing us to resume normal lives) if we recognize there is no one magic bullet, and that it will take a multi-layered approach to defeat this thing.

So, what should be do.

Vaccines.  Vaccines are still our first line of defense.  The more people are vaccinated, the fewer cases there will be.  But it is increasingly clear that the delta variant is so contagious that vaccines alone will not stop the pandemic.  So what is next?

Restrict Access.  People on my side of the aisle are not going to like this, but we are going to have to use testing and/or quarantining of people coming into this country.  Yes, granted, that will be difficult to do for a country as large as the US, with as many border crossings.  And it is certainly not the entirety of what we should be doing.  But it is not a coincidence that the countries that have been most successful in fighting COVID are Taiwan and New Zealand -- both islands.

Good ventilation.  COVID is an airborne disease, and good ventilation appears to be one of the keys to preventing spread.  Let's get to it.

Testing.  We now have rapid testing and even home testing (still have to be sent in to a lab), people who have symptoms or have been exposed can get fast results and not have to wait around.  Needless to say, anyone who has symptoms or potential exposure should be tested.

Contact tracing.  Alas, I can no longer find the link, but there was a recent outbreak in Massachusetts that was quickly contained, largely because the people exposed and infected did their own contact tracing, by social media, phone calls, e-mails and the like, reaching out to contacts to let them know.  What could be more American than that?  And it goes to show that the most effective was to manage unmanageably huge amounts of data is to decentralize.

 Quarantine.  This really can't be a do-it-yourself.  People quarantining will need someone to bring food, medical supplies, etc.  And a huge obstacle to many people has been the lack of paid sick leave.  Somehow we have to assure that people who quarantine receive an income to keep them going.  If employers can't afford it and government has to pay, so be it.  

Early treatment.  When I first heard that Donald Trump had been treated by monoclonal antibodies and made a remarkably rapid recovery, my immediate reaction was that that was all fine and good, but would the treatment scale up to be available to the general public.  Well, it would appear that Regeneron monoclonal antibodies are becoming increasingly available in Florida, Texas, and other high-caseload states. Better still, since the main promotors of this treatment appear to be red state governors like Ron DeSantis or Greg Abbott, and Trump himself, we may yet hope that it the MAGA crowd will not be as resistant to this treatment, at least.  The bad news is that supplies are still limited.  Florida (population 20 million, experiencing 20,000 new cases per day, at least until recently) has only 21 sites offering treatment, each treating about 300 people per day.  Treatment is therefore mostly being limited to people who are high risk.  And it is not a recognized treatment for advanced stages of the disease, only for early stages to keep the disease from getting worse.  But the vaccine was also limited when it first came out and has become more widely available since. Maybe the same will happen for Regeneron.

Masks.  These should be used during an active outbreak.  Unlike lockdowns, masks can be sustained indefinitely, even if they are uncomfortable and something everyone would rather do without.  If we can defeat COVID through vaccines, rapid tests, tracing, quarantines, and early treatment, there will be no need for masks.  But if an outbreak is ongoing, masks will be necessary until it quiets down.

This multi-layered approach can work.  It has just one flaw.  All these approaches require compliance by the general population.  With the possible exception of Regeneron, they are meeting with widespread resistance.

At Least a Partial Understanding of Vaccine Hesitancy

 

While I really do believe that a lot of Trumpster opinion leaders are working to spread the pandemic for political gain, what about their followers?  What makes so many people react so strongly to masks or vaccines and be indifferent to the prospects of a deadly virus?

I can see several psychological phenomena at work here.

One is simply the well-known phenomenon that people respond more strongly to swiftness and certainty of consequences than to severity.  The consequences to any individual of catching COVID can be severe, although not necessarily.  The consequences to the community of large numbers of people with COVID can also be serious.  (See, for instance water shortages in Orlando due to liquid oxygen being diverted from water processing to treating patients).  But the consequences of a shutdown or wearing a mask or even taking a vaccine are more immediate.*  Furthermore, healthcare privacy laws** are contributing by forbidding the news from broadcasting COVID wards without the consent of patients, so the realities of the disease are not fully sinking in.

Another is the highly technical, specialized nature of the information people are being asked to process.  In the end it is not facts or evidence or proof that convinces.  Only intuition is really convincing.  I learned this first hand in the most non-ideological way possible—by taking classes in calculus.  (I would not go so far as to say I actually studied it, let alone learned it).  Differentiation was easy.  I had no trouble at all understanding how to calculate the tangent of a curve.  And it made perfect intuitive sense that doing the same process backward yielded the curve.  But I was completely uncomprehending of why doing the process backward for the curve yielded the space under the curve.  No number of complex mathematical proofs made any difference.  Sure, they might convince me at the most rarified intellectual level , but my gut remained unconvinced – not disbelieving, you understand, just baffled.  It finally fell into place when my father explained that what calculus concerned, not the space under the curve, but how the space increases as you move along the curve, and my younger brother said, "But of course the higher the curve the faster it adds to the space underneath it."  Maybe if the class had begun with that understanding, I would actually have learned it.

But no matter how much calculus baffled me, I never took to the next step, to go from "I don’t understand this" to "This is false."  Some people do take that next step, and assume that if they don't understand it, it must be false.  And if so many people are working so hard to convince us of something false, they must be doing it for a sinister motive.  To take a fairly mild and understandable example, as a lawyer I regularly deal with people trying to navigate the legal system who do not understanding how it works.  Running into rules they do not know and suddenly finding that they are breaking them without intending to, people operating on their own become suspicious and frustrated and convinced the system is rigged against them.  

 There are other, more dangerous examples as well.  A lot of people, confronted with incomprehensible talk about microbiology, take it as a sinister plot by microbiologists to steal our liberty.  Or people confronted with incomprehensible computer data tallying election totals start looking for sinister patterns in it to prove the election was stolen.  And this tendency is not limited to the ignorant.  Andrew Schlafly is a highly educated man with a law degree from Harvard who served on the law review and a background in microelectronic engineering.  Yet when confronted with the theory of relativity or complex numbers and unable to understand them, he automatically concludes that they must be false.  And if scientists and mathematicians are promulgating false doctrines they must be doing it for some sinister purpose, which Schlafly assumes to be to undermine traditional religion and morality.

I did my own research

Other people decide not to jump to immediate conclusions but to "do their own research."  So why does this keep leading to disaster?  People researching a field they have no systematic understanding of are almost immediately bombarded with huge amounts of data they lack the understanding to process. When people are bombarded with huge amounts of data they can’t process, they tend to become suspicious and distrustful. There are plenty of mundane examples.  Deaf people see people talking and wonder if the people are talking about them, or see people laughing and wonder if they are being laughed at.  People with normal hearing who hear people talking in an unfamiliar language react, let alone laughing, react in much the same way. 

Furthermore, people are not comfortable with vast quantities of meaningless data.  We long for a pattern.  People are, in fact, often quite good at recognizing patterns in seemingly disparate information.   But we also tend to impose patterns where none actually exist.  A lot of that is harmless, as when we look at clouds to see what they look like.  We all know clouds are not really whatever shape we see, that they are really just meaningless water vapor, and that the form exists solely in our imagination.  The danger is when we don’t realize that.  The danger is especially when we start sorting through huge mounds of data the we don’t really understand, with a pre-determined hypothesis.  Invariably we will see little bits here and there that support that hypothesis.  Stitch those together – while ignoring the vast mounds of data that do not support the hypothesis – and pretty soon we can find whatever we are looking for.  And there is a word for this.  It is called paranoia.  And it is an occupational hazard of looking for patterns in disparate data.  

And, needless to say, the same rule applies to people looking through incomprehensible computer data for "proof" that the 2020 election was stolen.  Or that 9-11 was an inside job.  Or any other preconception one may be looking to confirm.  

My favorite example of the phenomenon is this link here, taken from the days when the most popular conspiracy theories were about 9-11.  It starts with the hypothesis that the Irish were behind 9-11, looks through the vast mounds of data, and quickly finds all manner of disparate accounts involving the Irish that can be stitched together into something sinister.  Why the Irish?  No reason except, perhaps, that the idea will universally be recognized as absurd.  One could almost make it a game -- start looking through random, disparate data and use it to stitch together any random conspiracy theory you can come up with. But on second thought, don't.  It is far to easy to start believing that it is real.  This appears to be what happened to the maker of the ultimate 9-11 conspiracy movie, Loose Change.

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*And yes, I am no exception here.  
**Real healthcare privacy laws, not the ones anti-vaxers make up.

A Sensible Center-Right Will Recognize Externalities

 

My body, my choice

One thing that I realize is not in the cards any time soon, but will be absolutely necessary to any sort of sensible center-right is recognizing the reality of externalities.  In other words, what one individual does has effects on others, even if it is not purposefully directed a others.

The American right has basically imbibed an oversimplified libertarian view that so long as you refrain from using force or fraud, your duty to society has been met, and nothing more can be demanded.

But there are plenty of actions that do not involve force or fraud, that nonetheless harm others. If a factory dumps its toxic wastes in the river because that is the cheapest way to dispose of them, it is not exactly engaging in force or fraud, but it is clearly harming others.  A hog farm that creates such a stench that it becomes unbearable to live next door and makes houses impossible to sell, and that threatens to pollute the water table is not using force or fraud, but it is harming others.  

Ordinary people can also cause harm without committing force or fraud.  Consider smoking in a crowded room, loud music and loud parties, not cleaning the dog's poop, drunk driving, careless behavior that starts a fire, etc, etc.  

Speaking as a lawyer, there are two longstanding claims for damage to one's property.  One is trespass -- intrusion by a solid object. The other is nuisance.  There is no intrusion by a solid object, but there is intrusion by more subtle means -- noise, smell, flies, etc.  And it is a longstanding rule of common law that you can bring a suit to shut down someone's use of property if it is a sufficient nuisance.  Nuisance suits are painful, since they are decisions which innocent party will get the shaft.  But they drive home a longstanding recognition that acts not involving force or fraud -- some quite innocent -- can cause serious harm to others.

The same rule, of course, applies to contagious disease.  People who increase their own risk of exposure to a contagious disease also raise the risk for everyone around them.  Collective action problems are very real.  The advantage to any one person from wearing a mask is minimal.  The advantage to society from everyone wearing a mask is immense.  Libertarians may not like to acknowledge that collective action problems can even exist, but collective action problems exist whether libertarians like it or not.