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Randall's avatar

I feel like a bad liberal for saying this, but I’ve recently been pretty happy about living in a red state. That’s a problem.

I don’t know how to make this happen, but we have to find a way to get masks off of the poor service workers. They’re miserable, and the ones that I know are sick to death of wearing them while few of the customers do (again, red state).

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City Of Trees's avatar

Outstanding article. With over 250 comments already, and us Westerners regularly getting the short stick of these articles being published too early while we're still sleeping, I apologize if someone has already made this point or something similar to it, but here goes:

There's been a weird, disturbing, and bad strain of sentiment among some of the left that could be termed as a "politics of asceticism", an opposite of the politics of abundance Matt described here: https://www.slowboring.com/p/abundance-scarcity. The core of the strain is that the only solution out of major problems is to sustain long, indefinite sacrifice toward pursuing that sole solution.

This is seen all the time in global warming discourse: so much emphasis on solely reducing GHG emissions to the point that it would lead to a drastic reduction in the quality of life, as opposed to building as much clean energy as possible to create a cascading effect to address AGW even more furtively (again, as Matt said here: https://www.slowboring.com/p/energy-abundance). And you see it in the housing discourse where so many are convinced that building more housing of any kind doesn't work, and to the extent that you are going to be abundant, it has to be solely toward what's deemed as affordable housing, and barring that, you can only deal with redistributing the existing scarce stock. (There's a zillion articles from Matt I could cite so I won't bother here.)

And so it goes for covid. We've invented excellent vaccines that have significantly and consistently blunted the virulence of SARS-CoV-2. But that's not sufficient for the ascetic covid hawks out there wanting a sustained and vigilant abstinence from some very basic human qualities, like being around other people and seeing them smile. It is a dead end as far as politics and policy goes.

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