For how long can you ignore this evidence?

I know that I keep coming back to the topic of the folly of opposing vaccinations but I simply cannot wrap my mind around this willful blindness. A host on the the extreme right wing station Newsmax argued that vaccines ”go against nature”, as if countering debilitating illness and early death is somehow a bad thing.

Newsmax anchor Rob Schmitt cavalierly suggested on Friday night that vaccines are “against nature” because some diseases are just “supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people” since that’s just the “way evolution goes.”

In recent weeks, right-wing media has seamlessly shifted from casually pushing vaccine hesitancy on its viewers to outright advocating for vaccine resistance, culminating in a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas this weekend cheering at the fact that the federal government hasn’t met its vaccination goals.

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The joy of watching Foley artists

What goes on behind the scenes in films has as much fascination for me as the story I see on the screen. And some of those people whom I find particularly fascinating are the Foley artists, who provide almost all the ambient sounds that we hear, such as footsteps, water flowing, doors opening, keys clicking, and pretty much everything other than the spoken words of the actors.

I have written about Foley artists previously and came across this video of a group of three people in the profession who walk us through the steps of how they do what they do, which involves collecting what looks like a whole lot of junk and having a sharp ear for the sources of sounds and then being able to exactly synchronize the sounds they create using this junk with the action they see on a screen.

Does this really show what it purports to show?

I came across this article that started as follows:

Ask a child to draw a scientist, and research says they will often draw the typical stereotype of a “mad scientist” – an older, usually white, man, with wild hair, wearing a lab coat and goggles. This mental image perpetuates myths about who can and can’t work in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) careers. The reality is that anyone can be a scientist or support the work of scientific institutions, regardless of age, gender, race, personality, or even perceived predisposition.

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Great moments in decision making

The flood of tell-all books about Donald Trump’s words and actions during his presidency keeps gushing forth. As I said in an earlier post a couple of weeks ago, these books appear to be largely just insider gossip that tell us little that was substantive but instead add to the picture of a petulant man-child who should never have got anywhere near a responsible high office. The books are all unflattering and now Trump has chosen, unwisely I think, to hit back at his critics and his own comments reveal more damaging things about him than what are in the books.

I was particularly struck by a statement put out by him is response to the reports that the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff General Mark Milley had been highly critical of Trump and had warned that he was trying to stage a coup but that he (Milley) would not allow it.
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What’s going on in Texas

There are all manner of political shenanigans going on in Texas as Republicans try to legislate even more restrictive voting practices. Most Democratic members of the state legislature left the state to prevent a quorum and the governor Greg Abbott has threatened to arrest them if they return. Yes, this is what democracy has come to.

One reason that Texas has become such a focus is that Joe Biden narrowed the gap in that state even though he lost it to Trump. The margin was the smallest in 24 years. Republicans seem to fear that if Democrats start winning Texas, they will have a lock on the electoral college, and they are pulling out all the stops to prevent that outcome.
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Are they actually trying to get people killed?

It is bad enough that in the US people are killed by police when they have toy guns or toys that look like guns but do not fire anything or guns that are less lethal, like BB guns. They have even been killed when they had a cell phone or a wallet in their hand that the police claim they mistook for a gun. What is one to make of a company that markets real guns that look like toys?

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The curious use of the label ‘un-American’

One of the features of being an immigrant (like me) is that one has a natural frame of comparison when observing certain patters of behaviors and language. One that strikes me in the US is how frequently one hears politicians use the term ‘un-American’ when describing a practice or person that they deplore. Take for example this speech recently by Joe Biden castigating the efforts by Republicans around the country to make voting harder, especially for poorer communities and communities of color, under the belief that those people are more likely to vote for Democrats.

Speaking at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Biden called state efforts to curtail voting accessibility “un-American” and “un-democratic” and launched a broadside against his predecessor, Donald Trump, who baselessly alleged misconduct in the 2020 election after his defeat. Biden called passage of congressional proposals to override new state voting restrictions and to restore parts of the Voting Rights Act that were curbed in recent years by the Supreme Court “a national imperative.”

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What happened to the British queue?

Growing up in Sri Lanka, a former British colony, while we deplored the imperial exploitation, there was also admiration for many qualities that the British displayed, in particular the orderliness of the British general public. Specifically we marveled at the fact that the British people would spontaneously form a line whenever there was a need to get in somewhere or get something, even in the absence of railings or someone to enforce the line. One example is at the bus stop. In Sri Lanka, as the bus arrived, there would be a free-for-all as people tried to get in ahead of the others irrespective of the order in which they arrived at the bus stop. I used to wish that we would emulate the British in this regard.
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The forces driving ‘white fright’

The blame for the seeming rise of racist words and actions targeting people of color and immigrants has sometimes been placed on what might be called ‘white fright’, the fear of the white majority that changing demographics might undermine their position of power and put them in the second class category of citizenship that they had been able to impose on others up until now. Mark R. Reiff argues that that view is too simplistic and that we need to look deeper into the dynamics at play.

Why are so many white people throughout the liberal democratic world moving to the illiberal Right? The conventional explanation is that they are being driven by fear of the ‘demographic shift’. That is, because of immigration, both legal and illegal, and differing fertility rates among the relevant groups, white people of specific ethnic and religious backgrounds will soon no longer make up the electoral majority in the regions they currently dominate. Losing their majority status, in turn, is understood as meaning that the days of white privilege and political dominance in liberal democratic societies are now numbered
…

But the demographic shift explanation is in fact both unconvincing and dangerous. It is unconvincing because it is built on a series of what are in fact highly implausible presumptions. It is dangerous because it disguises the fact that what is really going on is not a battle with what philosophers call akrasia, or weakness of the moral will – the struggle to live up to our moral ideals when doing so seems contrary to our self-interest. Rather, the battle is over what moral values society should embrace. It is a battle over whether society should remain committed to liberalism, even if imperfectly so, or whether it should reject the aspirations of liberalism entirely and embrace illiberalism and all the consequences that flow from this.

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