The Big Stupid Elephant in the Room

The Federal Department of Education is investigating states which are prohibiting mask mandates in schools on the grounds that this may be endangering disabled schoolchildren.

I'm glad the Biden administration is doing something. The problem is that anti-mask measures are an attack on all children, and all adults, and science, and sanity, etc. 

We (by "we" I mean the non-stupid majority) have been much too nice about this. 

There's a time and place to be considerate of idiots' feelings. This is not the time and place. When a house is on fire, and a maniac is pouring gasoline on the fire and raving about how this is the correct way to put out fires, we don't stand off to one side and try to reason with the maniac, being careful not to insult him. For some time now, the deadliest enemy in the US, the one killing the most people, is no longer COVID. It's human stupidity. It's yahoos refusing to wear masks or get vaccinated or let their kids wear masks or get vaccinated, and comparing masks and vaccines to Nazism, trying their damnedest to make it impossible for any of us to have any masked, vaccinated place we can go. 

It's idiots. It's morons. It's stupidity.

Since long before COVID appeared, since long before Trump ran for Persidunt, I've maintained that mankind's deadliest enemy is human stupidity. First Trump, and now COVID have made this point increasingly clear.

And yet, we refuse to say it. For fear of hurting stupid people's feelings, we are greatly endangering their lives by coming right out and saying that they are stupid. For the sake of political correctness and misplaced librul over-sensitivity, we are greatly hindering our own efforts to end a plague.

If ever there were a perfect example of the uselessness of political correctness, we are living in it now. And dying for the sake of it.

Things actually could be worse. They have been worse. During the flu epidemic in 1918 and 1919, public officials thought it was a good idea not to let the public know there was an epidemic. We learned from that disaster that it's better to talk openly and publicly about disasters.

We partly learned it. Hopefully we're still learning. We've got a long way to go.

Covid, Today, June 28, 2021

When I enter the search term covid stats on Google, the first thing I see is a database right there on the search results page. Sez it's from the New York Times, a source I've criticized often on this blog, for not being nearly as liberal as they claim to be, but when it comes to information like this, I trust them. 

The database sez there were no new cases reported yesterday in Washtenaw Country, Michigan, where I live, and an average of 4 new cases per day over the past 7 days.

The database says there were no new cases yesterday in the entire State of Michigan, and an average of 153 cases per day over the past 7 days. 

It shows 4,087 new cases yesterday in the entire US, and an average of 11,880 cases per day over the past 7 days, and 408,990 new cases yesterday in the entire world, with an average over the past 7 days of 371,504.

All of which makes me think that we are taking off our masks much too soon, bowing to pressure from idiots. Which is the last way people should react to pressure from idiots. 

I hope I'm wrong about that, and that this plague is actually much closer to over with than I realize. But I'm not taking off my mask yet.

Science, Art and the Coronavirus

Perhaps you've heard: the unfortunate conflict between scientists and artists is still going on. This conflict is not always such a big deal, but, perhaps you've heard, there's a deadly worldwide plague going on.

Not every scientist is in conflict with every artist. Some scientists are deeply knowledgeable about and appreciative of the arts, and some artists are deeply knowledgeable about and appreciative of science. These people -- I don't know how large a group they represent, I can only hope the group is large and growing quickly -- have grasped that neither science nor art by itself can address all human needs. They realize that art and science can compliment and help each other.

Then there are people like Frank Castorf, an idiot and perhaps Germany's most famous living theatre director. He's become even more famous in the past couple of days by publicly complaining that he doesn't like being told by Angela Merkel to wash his hands, and that he resents not being able to shop and dine out as he is accustomed to do.

And so, since he is one of Germany's most prominent representatives of art, he's causing a lot of damage. Who knows how many deaths he will be directly responsible for.

I wonder, does Castorf resent Merkel telling him what to do because she's a woman? If Germany had a male Chancellor at the moment who was passing along the advice of scientists -- that's all that Merkel is doing, of course: passing along the advice of scientists about how we can best hope to survive this epidemic, not exercising any sort of personal authority over Frank Castorf -- would Castorf enthusiastically support social distancing and masks and hand washing? I suspect he might. He might think of it as a paramilitary sort of discipline. He has some stupid macho tendencies.

Castorf is also, like Donald Trump, making this worldwide crisis all about him. He claims that before the coronavirus outbreak, young people in the theatre wanted old men in the theatre to die as soon as possible. (Castorf is 68 years old.), and that now they want to save every old man they can, even with such allegedly fascist measures as compulsory hand-washing.

No sensible person I know agrees with Castorf that young theatre people were ever wishing old men dead. I suspect the truth may be more something such as that now and then, some big-mouthed, wise-assed young people have said that they wish that Castorf would retire, and Castorf is blowing that way out of proportion and using this particularly thin excuse to wallow in self-pity, at a particularly bad time and in a particularly destructive way.

This conflict between art and science comes from artists and scientists not appreciating what the other group can do. Some scientists think that science can solve all of humanity's problems, some artists think that art can solve all of humanity's problems, and, of course, they're all mistaken. We need both.

Social distancing, masks and hand-washing will save lives. Science has told us that, and there is no doubt at all that science is correct about that. We still have a problem, though, because many people are not listening to this very simple and important message from science. Scientists know how people should best respond to a pandemic, but they don't know how to convince people to respond in the best way. Convincing people to take scientifically-sound, live-saving advice is something that artists are good at -- or, at least, something they can be good at, if they're not completely infantile self-pitying idiots.