Tag Archives: politics

Yet another one of those Matadors  Adorno’s metaphor of the “matadors of the culture industry” didn’t fall out of the sky. Nearly four decades earlier — sometime between 1931 and 1933 — he had written several short pieces, one of which was titled “Applause.”  I came across mention of it when I was looking to see if Susan Buck-Morss had anything to say about pseudo-activity in her The Origin of Negative Dialectics. I didn’t find anything on...

What are leading Democrats trying to accomplish with their current push on voting rights?  It’s far from clear.  One approach to voting rights reform would have been to reach out quietly to Republicans and to try to negotiate a limited bill that could win bipartisan support.  Biden could express optimism that reasonable Republicans would come to the table and work something out.  If that effort failed, Democrats could have blamed Republicans. ...

Today the conservative majority of Supreme Court Justices decided that federal vaccine mandates are unconstitutional, that states rights and employer rights are more important than the public’s welfare in this time of pandemic. It is likely that their decision will result in the unnecessary death of as many as 250,000 Americans. Let it be on their heads. Let history show for all times that these 250,000 unnecessary deaths are upon the heads of...

Some libertarians oppose vaccine mandates by claiming that unvaccinated people only impose costs on themselves. However, as I noted in an earlier post, we’re all paying for the vaccine hesitancy stirred up on the right. From JAMA (footnotes omitted): Findings suggest that insurers heavily subsidized the costs of ivermectin prescriptions for COVID-19, even though economic theory holds that insurers should not cover ineffective care. Wasteful...

The United States is currently recording over 700,000 new cases of Covid-19 per day and the number is rising rapidly.  Fortunately, vaccines are quite effective at preventing severe disease, and Pfizer’s anti-viral drug, Paxlovid is remarkably effective at preventing death and severe illness from Covid-19.  However, only 265,000 courses of Paxlovid are expected by the end of January, and Paxlovid needs to be taken early in the course of illness...

The Central Asian Alphabet Issue  It remains too soon to comment in detail on the current upheaval in Kazakhstan as it is simply impossible to figure out what is happening, with multiple conflicting accounts and claims coming from many sources. Rather I want to comment on a deeper question that has been brought up in connection with this, although not central to it, but one that affects Kazakhstan’s Central Asian neighbors as well: what alphabet...

When a fellow CNN correspondent asked their own Dana Bash what were the underlying causes of the nation’s partisan gridlock, Bash replied, “Three things: redistricting, redistricting, and redistricting.” Congress, let’s get it right. First off, Congressional Districts are under the purvey of federal, not state, law because the constitution says: Section. 4. The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives,...

Politics as a Hobby* In a radio lecture he gave two and a half months before he died in 1969, Theodor Adorno explored the paradox that people do not know what to do with their free time and thus no longer even like it because “[t]hat state of freedom has been refused them and disparaged for so long.” People are generally more familiar with the Kris Kristofferson / Fred Foster version of the same idea from their song “Me and Bobby MeGee”:...

I am temporarily banned by Twitter for “Violating our rules against hateful conduct.” because of the attached tweet. I don’t know if “all men must die” was interpreted as a threat rather than a simple statement of fact by the algorithm or if calling deontological reasoning confused or fanatical was considered hate speach. Maybe I should have writtn “Valar Morgulis”. I do face a problem “By clicking Delete, you acknowledge that your Tweet...

It was this year; a question arose on the distribution of Covid tests to the states and why shouldn’t some states receive more tests than others. The question referenced Florida as one of those states. The question was put to Jen Psaki, White House Press Secretary. I admire Jen for the job she does as there is no mincing of words or delays in her responses to the adversarial reporters in the mix. Her answer was (my memory), the tests are...