Do They Even Math, Bro?

Shorter Douthat: TBF, a merely mediocre president probably would have killed a lot of people too. https://t.co/jPbOrZXtOU

— It's Just Soup For My Family (@Yastreblyansky) September 8, 2020

Honest to god that's the column ("How Many Lives Would a More Normal President Have Saved?"). Maybe a great president would have been OK, the monsignor allows, but an ordinary president would have been more or less as bad as our psychopath, therefore maybe he's really not so bad, or so he implies (not saying, just saying).

the peer-country evidence suggests that to take the pre-emptive, creative and draconian steps that might have actually suppressed the virus, and in the process saved that hundred thousand or more extra lives, would have probably required presidential greatness, not merely replacement-level competence. We can say without a doubt that Trump whiffed when this call for greatness came. But distinguishing between Trump’s incompetence and what an average president might have managed is harder, so long as so many peer-country death tolls look like ours.

Really?

Conservatives don't know how to math, part 5,043:

You can't compare US cumulative deaths to Spain's or France's until they've stopped cumulating; we're still in the middle. pic.twitter.com/FkBsyrGBIm

— It's Just Soup For My Family (@Yastreblyansky) September 8, 2020

The column isn't worth fisking in detail, because this stupidity makes it nonsensical, but I had to say something. If US Covid-19 deaths per million in today's official figures are 571.61 and Italy's are 588.32, then Italy's numbers are not much worse, but Italy is basically at the end of its wave and has been for some time, since late May, while ours is continuing to climb and about to bypass theirs; that's a curve that hasn't flattened at all.

According to the projections of the so far pretty reliable Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), the US is on a path to add another 225,000 deaths between now and 1 January, for a cumulative total of 410,000 by then, or a rate of around 1,240 per million, more than twice as high as Italy's (which will be a bit higher by then, no doubt, but not a lot).

That's a slightly pessimistic projection, based on the assumption that vigilance will keep relaxing as it has been doing. It could be a lot worse, or a lot better, depending on what we choose to do:

• If a herd immunity strategy is pursued, namely no further government intervention is taken from now to January 1, then the death toll could increase to 620,000 by January 1. Compared to the reference scenario, this would be 210,000 more deaths from now to the end of the year.  

• Increasing mask use remains an extraordinary opportunity for the US. Increasing mask use to the levels seen in Singapore would decrease the cumulative death toll to 288,000, or 122,000 lives saved compared to the reference scenario. This would be a 30% reduction in the deaths expected from now until the end of the year.  

But even in that best-case Singapore-style scenario we'd be hitting about 873 deaths per million, or still a hell of a lot more than Italy will have by that point, to say nothing of France (currently 470.73 per million) or the deservedly maligned Sweden (577.96), and almost certainly beyond the horribly handled UK (612.11) too. And it still won't be over!

Douthat's transparent desire to make excuses for the president would be funny, but he's also such an idiot.

Sex, lies, and Catholicism

Seventh-century icon of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus, 4th-century martyrs who some believe united in a wedding-like ritual of "adelphopoiesis". Via Wikipedia.

The money grafs, for me, in the Times coverage (by Jason Horowitz, and really worth reading) of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò's lurid accusations that Pope Francis has been orchestrating a multiyear coverup of the sins of Cardinal McCarrick isn't the fact that Viganò was involved in a coverup himself, while he was serving as nuncio in the US in April 2014, when he ordered a halt to investigations of sexual misconduct with adult men and seminarians on the part of Archbishop John Niestedt of St. Paul, which I more or less knew, or that he was responsible for embarrassing the pope by arranging a meeting for him with Kim Davis, the gay marriage-license martyr town clerk from Kentucky, which I used to know, but the way he fought against being shipped to the US in the first place:

Throughout his power struggle, Archbishop Viganò had been writing urgent appeals to Benedict to stay in the Vatican.

He said he needed to stay because his brother, a Jesuit biblical scholar, was sick and needed care, and he accused Cardinal Bertone of breaking his promise to promote him to the rank of cardinal....

But Archbishop Viganò’s brother, Lorenzo Viganò, told Italian journalists that his brother “lied” to Benedict that he had to remain in Rome “because he had to take care of me, sick.” To the contrary, he said he had lived in Chicago and was fine and hadn’t talked to his brother in years over an inheritance dispute.

Viganò is really a big liar, a shameful thing to say about a 77-year-old archbishop. If you read his scabrous letter with the understanding that he's probably lying, it reads more coherently, and if conservative Catholics down to our own nuncio Monsignor Douthat are taking it seriously, it's because they really, really want to—Douthat shows he doesn't really believe it by offering his own fictional account of the McCarrick business in which Viganò's accusations are false but Francis is still sort of guilty:

The Fire Next Time. II

The important part about the David Brooks flood column that commentators seem to have missed is asking, if Noah had such terrible leadership qualities—

What does Noah do now? Once again, Noah is silent. He does nothing. He sits in the ark for another seven days twiddling his thumbs. He is waiting for God’s permission to disembark.

—why did old JHWH pick him for the gig in the first place? I'm sure there must have been some much more suitable candidate.

Look at ingenious Greeks Deucalion and Pyrrha, who figured out how to broaden the gene pool for repopulating the earth after their flood (the Titaness Themis gave them the oracular advice to "throw your mother's bones behind you", so they threw stones—the bones of Mother Earth—over their shoulders and these turned into new people). Did Noah think of anything like that?

Deucalion and Pyrrha casting stones, from relief in the Labirint d'Horta, Barcelona, via Encyclopedia Brittanica.

All Our Base Are Belong to Sam Bee

Does Ross Douthat read The Rectification of Names? Redux.

The heretic Pelagius and his learned opponent St. John Chrysostom, depicted in the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1459, via Wikipedia.

Last time I thought he was borrowing my two-headed calf. This time Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, seems to have picked up ("Right-Wing Books, Wrong Answers") on my preoccupation with the execrable Trumpist wormtongue Dinesh D'Souza, and specifically the idea that that repellent poisonous newt has something in common with an apparently respectable Republican who angrily opposes Trump. But where I was thinking of former senator John Danforth and the party's misreading of American history, the Monsignor is picking on current senator Jeff Flake and the party's economic policy:

D’Souza’s book embodies the outrageous right-wing style that Flake’s book condemns. Which makes it all the more striking when D’Souza, the Trump-defending huckster, comes around to many of the same economic policy prescriptions as Flake, the Trump-abjuring would-be statesman. Whether in the name of honorable libertarianism or frenzied, “I’m not saying they’re Nazis, but they’re Nazis” anti-liberalism, the senator and the demagogue both
think that conservatives need to … cut social programs in order to cut taxes on the rich.

(And an "I'm not saying, I'm just saying" crack for good measure.)

I'm having trouble finding any statements on tax policy by D'Souza more recent than 1999, though The Economist pulled out this delicious bit in 2010—

I'd say: The Damore Memo

Image via Phawker.

David Brooks ("Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google's C.E.O.") picking villains:

There are many actors in the whole Google/diversity drama, but I’d say the one who’s behaved the worst is the C.E.O., Sundar Pichai.

Am I alone in thinking there's something weird about conducting an examination of this case around the question "who has behaved the worst?" There are many actors in Shakespeare's Hamlet, but I'd say the one who behaved the worst was Polonius. What a dick that guy is. I'm glad he's dead.

No, I'd say the job is to understand what happened and what, if anything, it means. I'm fond of worrying through the argument of who was the worst person in the George W. Bush administration (on the whole, I go for Wolfowitz, who was better intellectually equipped than Cheney or Rumsfeld to know what they were doing and thus has a greater responsibility than those two simple-minded sociopaths), but only in the context of a broader analysis of the story.

What happened at Google was that sometime in July a software engineer called James Damore attended a mandatory company diversity training session that made him really mad (he said it was "secretive" and "shaming"), so on a flight to China, to while the time away and assuage his hurt feelings, he wrote a lengthy note under the title "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber"

Global Tepiding

Via Guardian, where there's more on global lukewarming as the third stage of denial

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street ("Neither Hot Nor Cold on Climate"), illustrates an emerging reactionary approach to climate change, the non-denial denial of the "lukewarmers": sure it's happening, but do we have to make a federal case out of it?

Lukewarmers accept that the earth is warming and that our civilization’s ample CO₂ emissions are a major cause. They doubt, however, that climate change represents a crisis unique among the varied challenges we face, or that the global regulatory schemes advanced to deal with it will work as advertised. And they raise an eyebrow at the contrast between the apocalyptic, absolutist rhetoric with which these schemes are regularly defended and their actual details, which seem mostly designed to enable the globe’s statesmen to greenwash the pursuit of economic and political self-interest.

Shorter:

1. It's not "unique"—my goodness, we have lots of problems, so why should we try to solve this one?
2. The proposed solution might not work, so surely it's better not to try it! That smallpox vaccination sounds like a far from decent operation, putting some sort of pus in my arm, and you're not even 100% sure it will keep me from getting the disease!
3. Dark forces (i.e.,  my political opponents), may benefit from these efforts, so that even if they did save the human environment from destruction, as I just acknowledged they might, that's not the real reason. Better to burn than to allow those dreadful people to gain some advantage from putting the fire out.

Followed by a very Douthatian denial non-denial critique of the position he just laid out:

Bret Smart

Sugarcane field burning in Brazil, 2007, in a consequence of the drive to replace fossil fuels with "renewable" biofuels. UN photo by Eskinder Debebe via NASA's earthobservatory website, part of the NASA climate research program Donald Trump proposes to shut down because as Mick Mulvaney says, "We're not spending money on that anymore. We consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that." But Bret Stephens, while he certainly would say that's not smart, thinks it's more important to remind us that scientists do bad things too.

Shorter Bret Stephens, "Climate of Unintended Consequences", New York Times, May 4 2017:

What part of "I'm smarter than you" don't you understand?

Actually, he wrote his own shorter,  published on Monday, in replies to questions on his awful début:

A decade ago we were plowing money into ethanol subsidies as one response to climate change. But that turned out to be not just environmentally destructive but was also arguably responsible for the spike in food prices that soon followed, as farmers turned away from cultivating corn for human consumption to cultivating it for ethanol production. 

And today, still defending himself, spinning that bit out to 14 paragraphs plus a conclusion tacked on to the effect that we really can't do anything about global warming until we've done some more research because biofuels are a failure, and already Germans are paying the highest electricity bills on earth, which I'm not going to get to in this piece if ever.

Only for one thing the biofuels movement, as it worked out in the US under the George W. Bush administration ethanol push, wasn't a response to climate change.

Bret and Butter

Update: Now with a newly improved paragraph somewhere near the bottom!

The "butter" in the headline refers to the oleaginous tone with which Stephens tries to lull or perhaps lubricate the reader into acquiescence in his revolting project.

Klezmer band from Munkács, Hungary, in the Subcarpathian Rus' region, between the wars. From the World Holocaust Remembrance Center at Yad Vashem.

Rectification Central welcomes Bret Stephens, late of the Wall Street Journal, to the pages of The New York Times, and his maiden effort, "Climate of Complete Certainty", which showed up online Friday afternoon. Shorter:

Hillary Clinton thought she was 100% right or thereabouts in the presidential election last November, and yet she didn't win. In the same way, global warming crusaders think they're 100% right, but there's a chance they could be wrong. Even the liberal Andrew Revkin agrees people would take it more seriously if you'd admit it might be trivial.

Yes, it's pretty dispiriting. It seems a lot longer than it really is, too, perhaps because it wanders so widely, and starts off with a rather lengthy epigraph:

Douthat just sayin, on the ACA

Via.

It's Propaganda Wednesday for Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street ("Is Obamacare a Lifesaver?"), out to let us know we shouldn't be too triumphant over the prospect of living with the Affordable Care Act "for the foreseeable future", as Ryan has said:

now that every G.O.P. policy person who ever championed a replacement plan is out wandering in sackcloth and ashes, wailing, “The liberals were right about my party, the liberals were right about my party,” beneath a harsh uncaring heaven … now, in these hours of right-wing self-abnegation, it’s worth raising once again the most counterintuitive and frequently scoffed-at point that conservatives have made about Obamacare:

It probably isn’t saving many lives.

Note how he stacks the argument in advance by calling it a "point" rather than "a basically unfounded assertion". And the weakness of restricting the issue to that of "saving many lives" (it doesn't mean anything if it improves the quality of life of millions? it doesn't matter if it only saves a relative few? how many lives would be worth the trouble?). And the hedge of "probably", which has no technical meaning here (how would you calculate the probability?) but is merely a way of saying, "Well, who knows?" Just sayin, as usual. But just sayin in italics, so we'll know it's serious all the same.

Make America Kampuchea

Can't find credits for this image of Phnom Penh in 1976.

For the past month or so Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, has been serving up a series of "immodest proposals"

floating genuinely radical visions of how policy makers might respond to our order’s slippage toward something worse than stagnation. These will not be ideas that I find entirely convincing, they will not be fully fleshed-out, and I will disavow responsibility if they’re ever put into disastrous practice.

Which is kind of the ultimate in "just sayin". If you like it, I'll gladly take credit for it, but if you don't, remember I said it wasn't serious at the outset.

But then the first one was just a laundry list sounding an awful lot like a marriage between the Trump campaign at its most "populist" and the "Reformy Con" agenda to which Douthat himself sometimes likes to suggest he adheres, with tax expenditures for everybody, a kind of WPA for the middle-aged, massive deficits, and little bits of gratuitous Douthat nastiness so you don't think he's turned into a Reagan liberal:

One-percent solutions

You know who else was a fanatic about border protection?

Kellyanne Conway (via Tengrain, and credit for the headline):

“You’re talking about 325,000 people from overseas came into this country just yesterday through our airports... You’re talking about three hundred and some who have been detained or are prevented from gaining access to an aircraft in their home countries and must stay for now.”

“That’s 1 percent,” she pointed out. “And I think in terms of the upside being greater protection of our borders, of our people, it’s a small price to pay.”

Simon Wiesenthal Center:

By 1933, German Jews were largely urban, middle class, prosperous in business, and well represented in the professions (especially medicine and law). They were culturally integrated but represented less than 1 percent of the total population.

Conway's math is wrong, of course; if you accept her numbers, it's a tenth of one percent. But just sayin.

Today in The Normalizing

Eliot Ness, by an unknown photographer. Via Fine Art America.

Monsignor Douthat doesn't think Trump should necessarily "send in" the feds to Chicago, just sayin', but he hates it when we talk like that would be a bad thing:

.@DouthatNYT I don't think so. Depends on what you mean by "send in". You (and Trump) seem to assume they aren't already there... /1

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 25, 2017

.@DouthatNYT ...but there are already several Safe Streets and Gang Unit task forces coordinating with local authorities in Chicago. /2

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 25, 2017

.@DouthatNYT Trump's threat “If Chicago doesn't fix the horrible 'carnage' going on, “I will send in the Feds!” seems to propose... /3

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 25, 2017

.@DouthatNYT that federal police will REPLACE the local authorities, which is how martial law pretty much works. /4

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 25, 2017

.@DouthatNYT That's very different from the G-Men helping out with investigation of federal crimes only during Prohibition. /5

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 25, 2017

Deep in the weeds with John Bolton

James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd in Henry Koster's Harvey (1950). Via.

Everybody needs to take a deep breath & reread the John Bolton remarks. He did not in fact accuse the Obama administration of hacking.

— David Frum (@davidfrum) December 12, 2016

Uh, OK, let's see...

BOLTON: It's not at all clear to me just viewing this from the outside that this hacking into the DNC and the RNC computers was not a false flag operation.

Quite right in the first place, it's not the case that he accused anybody of mounting a false flag operation (stealing the parties' emails to make it look as if Russians had been stealing the emails, apparently, with no theories on why they would want to do that). He merely didn't not accuse them. It isn't clear to him that they didn't do it, but he isn't saying they did, he's just sayin. The Douthat technique of making you think a potentially slanderous thought without taking responsibility for it.

And then,

Are you actually accusing someone here in this administration of trying -- in the intelligence community of trying to throw something?

BOLTON: We just don't know, but I believe that intelligence has been politicized in the Obama administration to a very significant degree.

Quite right in the second place. He couldn't be accusing anybody of doing something when he couldn't say whether it had been done or not, but he fingers the guilty party just in case. Can't say if there was any false flag operation but knows who did it.

And thus Frum is absolutely right: Bolton did not say that the administration had carried out a false flag maneuver, but he made sure that's what we heard all the same. He didn't say it with the most exquisite care you could well apply to not saying something, the insinuating scum.

The other really weird thing Bolton did that hasn't caught so much attention was his explanation of why he thinks it might have been a false flag operation, which is worth looking at in some analytic detail.

Douthat on the Great Facebook Massacre

Image via Michael Ferry at First Draft.

So apparently deep in the subterranean regions of the Facebook world, the News Curators toil, unseen and unappreciated, writing their headlines and teasers for the trending topics in the upper right of your timeline, and a little bit more. It turns out that the Trending Module algorithm doesn't work quite as well as advertised, or, more to the point, as well as Twitter's, and it needs to be goosed from time to time, and one of the things they do is to "inject" stories that fail to trend on their own into the mix, from the front pages of ten different big-time sources (CNN, the New York Times, BBC, and the like), or just stories that seem so serious that it's embarrassing not to have them (the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, the killings of the Charlie Hebdo staff, Syria stories, #BlackLivesMatter). They're also empowered to switch a story from its coverage in a less respectable source like RedState or Breitbart to a more trustworthy one, or deactivate it altogether, if not enough sources are covering it.

Perhaps because their backgrounds are more literary than techie, they're not regarded as real Facebook people but "disposable outsiders". They're not employees but contract workers, like proofreaders or Uber drivers, supplied by a temp agency, a dozen or more squeezed into makeshift quarters in the New York offices. Though they have fancy degrees from Ivy schools and résumés from the New York publishing scene, they are not invited into the Facebook world. If there's an 8:00 happy hour for the proper employees, the News Curators aren't invited; they keep working, into the night. The turnover is pretty high. They believe that their real function is to train the algorithm—one day it will know how to do their jobs and they'll all be fired.

Douthat, just saying: His angst evident in his hair

Macy's bone structure is completely different, but he could capture some of the psychotic character of Bill Kristol.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, does something really peculiar ("The Dying of the Third-Party Dream"):

Of all the strange images of this strange campaign, I find myself particularly struck by this vision: Mitt Romney, pacing alone in one of his many houses, his angst evident in his faintly mussed-up hair, placing pleading phone calls to Republican politicians asking them to run as a third-party candidate against Donald Trump.

That bizarre, existential one-act play — “Conversations About Trump,” opening Off Broadway, with Josh Brolin as Romney and the voice of William H. Macy as John Kasich — is apparently where the quest for a conservative alternative to Trump and Hillary Clinton ran into a wall.

I'm an idiot about celebrity news, so it didn't occur to me that that bit was meant rhetorically, and I was quite disappointed when the link led not to further information on this imaginary play but to a dumb insider article about Republicans in the Washington Post, by Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, the GOP's earnestly savvy ambassador to the wider world. And Dr. Google couldn't uncover any information about Conversations about Trump either.

Highbrow nihilism

Image via bmxmuseum.

"Highbrow nihilism" is subtype B of the fourth type of contributors to Trumpism, in the Trumpological taxonomy espoused by Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, who spends today implicitly walking back last Sunday's theory that Trumpism is caused by Obama in favor of a new theory, that it's caused as it were by all of us sinners, himself not excluded, since he seems to be one of the highbrow nihilists.

At least a "little bit". You see, type 4 in the taxonomy are the "inevitabilists", who did not support Trump but enabled him

by acting and talking as if the support of 35 percent of the primary electorate means Trump Cannot Be Stopped.

Of these, subtype 4A are the intoxicated:

Zombie rhetoric: A facet of the fact

Marion Davies in King Vidor's Show People (1928).

Speaking of Ross Douthat and the rhetorical strategy of "I'm not saying—just saying", here's cand. doc. Fredrik De Boer, literally a student of rhetoric, with an elegant variation: "I don't say it, I've never in my life said it, but some of my friends say it, and evidence shows that they are right":

I’m regularly accused of believing things that I’ve never said and don’t believe. That’s largely a facet of the fact that, on the internet today, arguing with people is really a matter of misrepresenting what they’re saying and then attacking the misrepresentation. One of the most constant of these is that I say “both parties are the same.” I’ve never said that. Ever. In my life. But over time, the claims of friends who do say that have been vindicated over and over again.

Douthat's not saying. Just saying.

Oddly enough, George W. Bush does resemble Cato the Younger, a bit. Image via Barry Strauss. But as far as imperialism goes, there's a reason Mr. Pierce named him our C-Plus Augustus.

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, "From Obama to Trump", New York Times, February 27 2016:

I'm not saying Trump is all Obama's fault, but I can think of about a million reasons for saying it, and they're ever so intellectual-sounding. I'm just saying.

Because he's so saddened, right, by the Democrats' unseemly glee at the Republican pickle, or fear of what might happen if the Trumpster succeeds. Think it's funny, don't you, liberals? Or inspires you with terror?

What it hasn’t inspired is much in the way of self-examination, or a recognition of the way that Obama-era trends in liberal politics have helped feed the Trump phenomenon.

Yes, we have to ask ourselves what we have done to encourage the Donald and Donaldism. Look into your heart, libs!

The devil is a concern troll

Juan de Flandes, The Temptation of Christ (ca.1500-1504). Image via David Lawson/Pinterest.

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, "The Tempting of Bernie Sanders", New York Times, January 14 2016:

I'm just so concerned about Bernie, you know. He's so high-minded. He doesn't sling enough mud, and if he doesn't get more vicious fast he may not win the nomination, I mean sometimes you wonder if he even really wants to win as much as he wants to achieve some noble goal like making the Democrats a better party. When he criticizes Hillary Clinton it's over these wonky issues like her failure to support single-payer universal health care or to object to regime change policies, do Democrats really care about that shit? He should be talking about the intersection between character and policy, like the sordidness of the Clinton Foundation, with its slimy and rapacious funding of things like relief and economic development for Haitians, local projects around the world for combating climate change, and focusing on the health and well-being of American kids under five ("Too Small to Fail"), and connecting the dots between that and her immoral email account, which not only exposed national security secrets by the ton to our enemies and caused the deaths of Americans at Benghazi but brought on the entire Iraq War. And he needs to express himself pithily when he talks about foreign policy,  I just happen to have this 400-word diatribe right here he could use. You know me, I just have his best interests at heart.

Don't know much about Islam, but we know what we don't like

Safavid 16th c. miniature from “The Seven Thrones” of Jami, from Mehdi Khansari, Persian Gardens, 1997, via  Electrum Magazine.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, thinks he's spotted an amusing difficulty in the way we opponents of Islamophobia think about "The Islamic Dilemma":

for several reasons — because we don’t understand Islam from the inside, but also because we’re divided about what our civilization stands for and where religious faith fits in — we have a hard time articulating what a “moderate” Muslim would actually believe, or what we expect a modernized Islam to become.

You see the assumptions built in there: "we" don't know anything about it, but we're sure what we'd like doesn't exist, as yet, and is waiting for "us" to tell them how to do it. We say we're sure they're good at heart and then we can't even help them with their theology homework.