The Crowhill Journal

We all know that Uncle Joe is a handsy, sniffy, weird dude. But has he assaulted women?

I don’t know.

What I do know is that the allegations against Sleepy Joe are far more serious (in the sense of being substantiated by corroborating testimony) than anything brought against Kavanaugh. So this, as we’ve all heard, is a test for #metoo. Will they stick to their principles, or will they stick to their politics? (A couple prominent people in the #metoo crowd have come out in support of Biden’s accuser.)

But then again, is this really the right test?

A proper test would be when they’re faced with a candidate they like, who has a chance of winning, but is credibly accused. Then they’d have to decide whether losing the election is worth sticking up for the accuser, “believing all women,” and so on.

Is that a fair description of the current situation? Probably not.

Biden doesn’t seem to generate much enthusiasm. People support him because they see him as the best shot to beat Trump, but not because they particularly like him.

That in itself is not remarkable. We often vote for candidates because we dislike them less than we hate or fear the opponent. In fact, most of the votes in my life have been that way.

Still, I sense a strong lukewarmness about Biden. Despite the fact that I live in a blue state, I have not seen a single Biden bumper sticker. It’s also weird that Obama was so slow to endorse him. There seems to be a reluctance among the Democrats to come out with a full-throated endorsement of Creepy Joe.

Why?

It may be because he’s not far enough to the left. There is an alleged pattern in politics: when a party is out of power, they go extreme in the next election, then swing back to the middle four years later. Or so say some of the talking heads.

That may be an explanation for why Bernie did so well, and it provides some small hope that the Democrats will come back towards sanity in 2024.

Those explanations don’t cut it for me. I think the lukewarm attitude towards Uncle Joe is because we all know he’s suffering from dementia, and we can’t imagine him making it through the campaign, let alone four years in the White House.

There are other calculations going on among the Democrats. I suspect it’s something like this. Joe is a lousy candidate, so how can we replace him (with whom?) and still save face? We can’t go with Bernie, because he’s not even a Democrat. So how do we slide somebody else onto the top of the ticket?

#Metoo might be a convenient excuse to force Joe out, force a brokered convention, and find somebody who has a chance against Trump.

Given all that, I say that Biden is not a fair test of #metoo. Even if they use #metoo to dump the guy, it won’t be clear that they put principles above politics.

(P.S. — Yes, I’m aware of the polls that show Biden beating Trump. I’m also aware that polls this far out don’t mean a thing.)

People sometimes speak of the 50 United States as “laboratories of democracy.” The idea is that different states can do things their own way, and the other states can watch and see what works the best.

I like the concept, but I haven’t seen a lot of evidence that actually happens. States do different things, but I’m not sure they learn from one another. (People rarely learn from somebody else’s example, unfortunately.)

Something similar is going on right now with coronavirus response. Different countries are responding differently, sometimes because of a strategic decision, sometimes because of circumstances beyond their control.

Belarus is apparently doing nothing.

Sweden has taken a different course, sheltering those at high risk, but allowing most of life to continue normally.

Some U.S. states are starting to open back up. (Here’s a list.) The cretins in the media are caricaturing this in all kinds of horrible ways, but especially when the state has a Republican governor. And, of course, the Swedes don’t get the same treatment, because they’re “democratic socialists” or … something. (It doesn’t matter. Idiotic American reporters can’t be expected to know the details. They just know, deep down, that Europeans are more enlightened than we are, while Republican governors are evil monsters.)

What continues to get lost in all these discussions is the goal of the shut down.

It was not to stop total infections, or even total deaths.

The intent was to “flatten the curve.” The area under the curve — that is, the number of people infected, hospitalized, and killed — might be the same in either case. The point was to keep us from overwhelming the health care system. Which was a perfectly reasonable goal.

Somehow we’ve lost sight of that.

The people who have especially lost site of that are the little Napoleons who are issuing idiotic orders. It does almost nothing to flatten the curve if you prevent people from buying spinach seeds, or if you send cops to round up people who are jogging on the beach, or playing at a park, or sitting in their cars in a church parking lot. These idiots prove the old rule that power corrupts.

This paranoid and over-bearing response treats the virus like some sort of zombie apocalypse germ, where one more infection might be the tipping point to total annihilation.

It seems that the public perception has changed from “slow the burn” to “I want to stay safe in my bunker until the Evil Thing is over and I can come out again.”

It’s not like that. At all. What we’re trying to do is slow things down. That’s it.

The response is getting a little too close to madness, in my opinion. We can’t all stay locked in our houses until it’s safe, because it’s never going to be safe. At best it’s going to be many months before we have a vaccine, and we may never have one.

But … that’s a tangent. My real point is that different countries (and states), taking their own approach to this mess, will give us the data we need to move forward.

How much worse will Sweden be than Norway? How about Belarus vs. Poland? Or Colorado vs. Kansas.

Wouldn’t it be nice if people were paying attention to that, rather than whether the president really said to inject bleach?

This morning I was listening to a “My fake history” episode in which Sebastian (the host) mentioned a quote attributed to Ghandi (which he might not have said). The exchange went like this.

Reporter: What do you think of western civilization?
Ghandi: It sounds like a good idea.

This made me think about levels of education.

Un-educated: never heard of the quote or of Ghandi.

Somewhat educated: has heard of Ghandi and the quote, but didn’t know it was Ghandi who said it.

Educated: Knows the quote is from Ghandi.

Very educated: Knows the quote is attributed to Ghandi, but that he probably didn’t say it.

And then you have another perspective altogether, which goes beyond the pedantic details. I might simply call this version “Jordan Peterson.” Viz., the important question is why the quote resonates, and why it was attributed to Ghandi in the first place.

I like that perspective, except that it can go too far, e.g., when people think that the truth or falsity of a claim doesn’t matter. All that matters is the analysis.

Pigweed and Crowhill drink and review Pigweed’s delicious homebrewed sour beer, then discuss bumper stickers.

Every day, each of us projects an image to the world — how we want the world to perceive who we are, what we like, and so on. We do it in our clothes, the magazines and books we buy, the way we cut our hair, and …. in these weird stickers we put on the backs of our vehicles.

P&C analyze a few interesting bumper stickers and discuss what image the person is trying to project. Or at least how we interpret it.

“Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign!”

The Five Man Electric Band didn’t like being told what to do and not to do. And while those weird hippie folk might have gone a bit far, it’s very American to resist orders from the government.

However, in the last 30 years or so, we’ve seen more and more executive orders, and now they’re flying fast and furious. Wear a mask. Don’t by seeds for your garden. Don’t take your kids to the park. Don’t go for a private run on the beach.

How are we going to restrain this?

There are crisis situations where we need the public to act a certain way. But does that have to be an order? Can’t we appeal to people and ask them to act responsibly?

Also, it seems un-American to give one person power without giving someone else the power to hold them in check. We seem to have missed that part.

Pigweed and Crowhill discuss.