The ability to cause pain is the goal

On Sunday evening I watched the movie The Artist. It won a few Oscars in the 2012 ceremony. George Vallentin was a silent movie star. He met Peppy Miller after the premier of one of his films. As sound came to movies George didn’t manage the transition while Peppy did. I very much enjoyed it. This film was mostly a silent film (though nearly constant background music) and was in black and white, paying homage to the time it portrayed. However, since it was made in the modern era it could have fun with it too, such as a dream in which George could hear setting a glass on a table, but couldn’t hear his own voice. After watching I went to the movie’s page in IMDB and read the goofs page. I had caught one of the errors – wrong date for the 1929 stock market crash. But there were lots of others – this car or that device or even the type font on a reporter’s press pass were from years or decades after the time depicted in the movie. There was even a problem with an important plot point (spoiler alert) – George set fire to some of his old movies, but burning film of that era would have released toxic fumes, which would have killed him. When I was in college for my bachelor degree I took a course in statistics. That was appropriate for a major in computational mathematics. But that was a long time ago and I haven’t had a big need to use statistics since, though I hope I remember some of the concepts. One thing I remember is that it is easy to play games with numbers, to come up with conclusions that make no sense logically. Cathy O’Neil writes opinion pieces for Bloomberg. She is also a mathematician, has worked as a data scientist, and wrote Weapons of Math Destruction. So I think I can trust her statistics. And if she didn’t get it right, or I didn’t understand her right, my friend and debate partner will surely step in. What prompted O’Neil to write was a statement by a friend that said since the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are 95% effective, one in 20 vaccinated people will get COVID. We got that 95% figure because Pfizer (for example) gave the test vaccine to 22,000 people and gave a fake vaccine to 22,000 more. Eventually 162 of the people who got the fake dose got sick and only 8 people who got the real vaccine did. That’s 95% fewer cases. Another way to look at it is 1 in 2750 who got the real vaccine got sick while 1 in 135 who got the fake got sick. And 1 in 2750 is 0.04%/ Another part of this: To get sick one must actually be exposed to COVID. As the number of cases goes down so does the chance of being exposed. A third factor is vaccinated people are much less likely to die from COVID. Breakthrough cases are people who got sick after getting the vaccine. According to government data out of 87 million fully vaccinated people, only 88 have died. That’s a death rate of less than 1 in a million. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Daily Kos, quoted Sabrina Tavernese of the New York Times who discussed vaccine skepticism. Tavernese wrote:

“The instinct from the medical community was, ‘If only we could educate them,’” said Dr. Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, who studies vaccine skepticism. “It was patronizing and, as it turns out, not true.”

Laura Clawson of Kos reported that due to the slowing rates of vaccination some scientists are now saying herd immunity is not attainable. Herd immunity is when enough of a population becomes immune (through surviving the disease or through vaccination) that a virus can no longer spread. For COVID this has been placed at 70%. This virus could be a public health threat we try to manage for a generation or more. Mark Sumner of Kos suggests there might be one group that could carry us into herd immunity – the youth. Vaccines should be approved for them soon. And getting vaccinated may be a requirement for returning to school in the fall. Ted Cruz tweeted about the corporate CEOs who are speaking out against GOP voter suppression:

To America’s watch-me-woke-it-up CEOs I say: When the time comes that you need help with a tax break or a regulatory change, I hope the Democrats take your calls, because we may not. Starting now, we won’t take your money either.

Leah McElrath responded:

Ted Cruz translation: I am corrupt af.

That last little bit are initials that include a swear word. Imani Gandy tweeted:

All the “woke” language being coopted is language that was created by Black people and originated in Black thought. So yes it is still emancipatory and no we will not get new language as if that new language wouldn’t immediately be coopted. Come on now. Stop it. White people have turned woke into a racial slur. And we have the dirtbag left to thank for that since deploying that term derisively started with the white Twitter left.

At noon yesterday Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported that Biden is getting ready to say we’ve tried to negotiate with Republicans in Congress, but they’re only interested in obstructing, so we’re not going to worry about reaching out to them. We going to go on our own. At 1:30 yesterday Eleveld reported that Moscow Mitch

effectively shot an arrow through the heart of any negotiations over President Biden's revolutionary proposals to invest some $4 trillion in the country's future. "I think it's worth talking about but I don't think there will be any Republican support—none, zero—for the $4.1 trillion grab bag which has infrastructure in it but a whole lot of other stuff," McConnell told reporters in Louisville.

At 3:30 Eleveld posted an update:

Biden’s itching to have this fight. From a Monday event promoting his Jobs/Families plan: “So for folks at home, I’d like to ask a question: Do we want to give the wealthiest people in America another tax cut, or do you want to give every high school graduate the ability to earn a community college degree on their way to good-paying jobs, or on the way to four years of school in industries of the future—healthcare, IT, cybersecurity, you name it?”

Mark Sumner reported a chorus of outrage to one line in Biden’s speech to the joint session of Congress. Biden began:

As I stand here tonight—just one day shy of the 100th day of my administration, 100 days since I took the oath of office, lifted my hand off our family Bible, and inherited a nation in crisis. The worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.

Yeah, that last sentence. Sumner wrote there are a few reasons why that line caused a storm. * Biden’s comment is true. The Capitol attack in January is fundamentally worse than Pearl Harbor, 9/11, a change in immigration law, or the Kennedy assassination. * They want to distract us from the promise in the rest of the speech. * The right has nothing else to offer. Bree Newsome tweeted:

Biden is correct that the 1/6 insurrection is the most significant event since the Civil War, in part b/c it is directly connected to the Civil War & involved a sitting president trying to overthrow the recent election & assassinate the line of succession. It was a failed coup. People have been trying to downplay the events of 1/6 ever since it happened because: 1) they failed 2) it’s an indictment of white supremacy & the US political right 3) it implicates ppl who are still in power 4) the effort to overthrow free & fair elections is ongoing

Matt Negrin, of MSNBC’s Hardball, tweeted (a couple days ago):

It's been 116 days since the Jan. 6 insurrection and the network media has responded by forgiving Republicans who incited the attack and allowing them virtually unfettered access to their platforms while promising to treat everything they say as if it's true and not a lie. Republicans are getting away with this as individuals and as a party because network media is run by people who believe Republicans are good people at their core or are Republicans themselves.

...And want what Republicans are doing to the country. Sumner posted another article to Kos that reaches the same conclusions about the GOP and conservatives that I’ve reached, that all they are after is supremacy. Sumner describes what they are doing using supremacist language. He told of an incident at at Lost Angeles middle school in which adults were harassing children wearing masks, the masks that protect them from COVID.

One thing is abundantly clear: The anti-mask crew actually has no agenda. Or they do have an agenda, but it has nothing to do with masks. They’re at the school simply to generate a confrontation. To cause anger. To capture a few minutes of video they can post on line and say, “See? See how much we owned or pwned or simply infuriated these liberals?” In this way, the anti-mask protesters are a perfect emblem of the Republican Party—a party that has lost all semblance of purpose other than the joy of knowing they can still cause pain to other people.

To cause anger and to cause pain are things supremacists do. It has been years since I’ve heard of the Westboro church. I checked – the last time I wrote about them was five years ago.

The Westboro Baptist Church nature of all this isn’t accidental. There have always been fringe groups that existed simply because they realized that operating on hate was enough to generate income from others who shared that hate. But what’s changed—and changed very rapidly—is how protests like this have become central to the Republican Party. It doesn’t matter if the protests are anti-maskers in Los Angeles or people waving AR-15s overhead in Frankfort, Kentucky, the point is the same: The ability to generate discomfort and anger isn’t a means to an end, it’s the goal. ... The primary purpose is simply convincing Republican voters that their representatives are with them in doing everything they can to hurt Democrats. Bills to torture trans youth? Check. Bills to roll back the voting rights of Black Americans? Check. Bills to make it legal to drive over those protesting murders committed by police? Check. Even the idea that these bills could give Republicans a competitive advantage in the next round of elections could be a secondary effect. The primary purpose is in service of the narrative, and the narrative is: “We’re doing this because it hurts them.” ... Jan. 6 wasn’t the expression of a rational party seeking redress to genuine issues. It was the product of a hate machine that burns conspiracy theories as fuel, and produces white-hot hate for fellow Americans. That’s where the Republican Party is now. In terms of a positive agenda to move the nation forward … They have nothing. Which makes them extremely dangerous.

Deliberately causing pain in others is supremacist. A person is saying because I can cause pain I have control over you. I can make your life worse, which shows my life is better. Therefor I am higher in the social hierarchy. As for causing pain driving voters towards Democrats, Sarah Kendzior tweeted:

Very good shot GOP takes control of the House unless the filibuster is abolished and voting rights laws are passed quickly. The Dems saying “wait until we get more seats in 2022” are delusional or hucksters. The GOP are changing voting laws right now to prevent that.

Clawson reported on one of the types of laws being considered – legalize voter intimidation. When I visited Brother in Germany almost two years ago I, of course, needed to do laundry a couple times. When his dryer finished its cycle it would play a cheery tune. These guys have that beat.