Hong Hate Horoscope: Week of January 10, 2022
Happy new year, welcome to 2022, hope you don’t have Covid (ugh)!
The Lead
This was really good (I’m not at this level because I think I’m further left and the GOP is a bag of flaming poo, but I’m very very sympathetic).
I kept hoping that someone in our all-Democratic political leadership would take a stand on behalf of Cleveland’s 37,000 public-school children or seem to care about what was happening. Weren’t Democrats supposed to stick up for low-income kids? Instead, our veteran Democratic mayor avoided remarking on the crisis facing the city’s public-school families. Our all-Democratic city council was similarly disengaged. The same thing was happening in other blue cities and blue states across the country, as the needs of children were simply swept aside. Cleveland went so far as to close playgrounds for an entire year. That felt almost mean-spirited, given the research suggesting the negligible risk of outdoor transmission—an additional slap in the face…
By the spring semester, the data showed quite clearly that schools were not big coronavirus spreaders and that, conversely, the costs of closures to children, both academically and emotionally, were very high. The American Academy of Pediatrics first urged a return to school in June 2020. In February 2021, when The New York Times surveyed 175 pediatric-disease experts, 86 percent recommended in-person school even if no one had been vaccinated.
Echoing my own thoughts on schooling being equally important:
Compounding my fury was a complete lack of sympathy or outright hostility from my own “team.” Throughout the pandemic, Democrats have been eager to style themselves as the ones that “take the virus seriously,” which is shorthand, at least in the bluest states and cities, for endorsing the most extreme interventions. By questioning the wisdom of school closures—and taking our child out of public school—I found myself going against the party line. And when I tried to speak out on social media, I was shouted down and abused, accused of being a Trumper who didn’t care if teachers died. On Twitter, mothers who had been enlisted as unpaid essential workers were mocked, often in highly misogynistic terms. I saw multiple versions of “they’re just mad they’re missing yoga and brunch.”
Twitter is a cesspool full of unreasonable people. But the kind of moralizing and self-righteousness that I saw there came to characterize lefty COVID discourse to a harmful degree. As reported in this magazine, the parents in deep-blue Somerville, Massachusetts, who advocated for faster school reopening last spring were derided as “fucking white parents” in a virtual public meeting. The interests of children and the health of public education were both treated as minor concerns, if these subjects were broached at all.
Obviously, Republicans have been guilty of politicizing the pandemic with horrible consequences, fomenting mistrust in vaccines that will result in untold numbers of unnecessary deaths. I’m not excusing that.
But I’ve been disappointed by how often the Democratic response has exacerbated that mistrust by, for example, exaggerating the risks of COVID-19 to children…
Less extreme, but perhaps just as harmful to social cohesion, was the widespread refusal among rank-and-file Democrats to seriously wrestle with the costs of pandemic-mitigation efforts. Beyond the infuriating nonresponse to school closures—“kids are resilient”—the discussion regarding masks has also been oblivious at times. Research shows that good masks worn correctly can slow the spread of the coronavirus, but it’s silly to suggest that they have no drawbacks. They are uncomfortable and a barrier to communication—and that’s just for adults.
Because masks took on symbolic importance, however, simply attempting to add nuance to the debate—cloth masks versus KN95s, masking adults versus masking toddlers—was treated like vaccine skepticism: beyond the pale.
And about calculating our risks:
Many liberals and institutional leaders thought that no one could fault them for being too cautious, especially when it came to children. But I can, and I do. The University of Oxford medical ethicist Euzebiusz Jamrozik said recently on a podcast that ethical public-health responses must rely on a few key principles. One of those is “proportionality,” meaning that the intervention must be proportionate to the risk. A Bloomberg article noted in March that children in the U.S. were about 10 times as likely to be killed in a car crash as by COVID-19. Closing school for more than a year was disproportionate the same way that forbidding parents to drive would have been. [The Atlantic]
Good journalism/Cool shit
The Alternative to Closing Schools
Hey, let’s do this.
School closures offer one of the clearest illustrations of this split. European countries generally regarded school closures as a measure of last resort, which is why schools here were closed for much shorter spells than in America. Many of my American family members and friends are surprised to learn that schools in the U.K. have never entirely shut down. Even during the strictest portion of last year’s lockdown, when all pubs and restaurants were closed and sitting on a bench with someone you ran into at the park was illegal, in-person schooling remained available for vulnerable kids and children of essential workers…
In the days leading up to England’s first lockdown, the nursery where my daughter was slated to begin preschool sent out a digital survey to all parents, asking what we did for work. Schools and day cares, we learned, had been instructed to close to all but vulnerable children—such as kids with special needs, those living in temporary accommodations, or those whose families had histories of drug abuse or domestic abuse—and children with caregivers “whose work is critical to the coronavirus response.” This group included not just people in health care but teachers, nursery workers, police, and firefighters, as well as anyone working in food distribution, transportation, or the justice system. [The Atlantic]
Health, politics, and academia
The Cost of Engaging With the Miserable
The internet was a mistake:
Misery trickles down in subtler ways too. Though the field is still young, studies on social media suggest that emotions are highly contagious on the web. In a review of the science, Harvard’s Amit Goldenberg and Stanford’s James J. Gross note that people “share their personal emotions online in a way that affects not only their own well-being, but also the well-being of others who are connected to them.” Some studies found that positive posts could drive engagement as much as, if not more than, negative ones, but of all the emotions expressed, anger seems to spread furthest and fastest. It tends to “cascade to more users by shares and retweets, enabling quicker distribution to a larger audience.”
Tech executives thought that connecting the world would be an unmitigated good. Widespread internet access and social media have made it far easier for the average person to hear and be heard by many more of his fellow citizens.
But it also means that miserable people, who were previously alienated and isolated, can find one another, says Kevin Munger, an assistant professor at Penn State who studies how platforms shape political and cultural opinions. This may offer them some short-term succor, but it’s not at all clear that weak online connections provide much meaningful emotional support. At the same time, those miserable people can reach the rest of us too. As a result, the average internet user, Munger told me in a recent interview, has more exposure than previous generations to people who, for any number of reasons, are hurting. Are they bringing all of us down?…
“Our data show that social-media platforms do not merely reflect what is happening in society,” Molly Crockett said recently. She is one of the authors of a Yale study of almost 13 million tweets that found that users who expressed outrage were rewarded with engagement, which made them express yet more outrage. Surprisingly, the study found that politically moderate users were the most susceptible to this feedback loop. “Platforms create incentives that change how users react to political events over time,” Crockett said.
This is the irony of the democratization of speech in action: The platforms don’t just spark unrest and incubate hatred; they also show us a depressing truth about the state of this country offline, independent of technology. In a recent essay, the journalist Joseph Bernstein asked whether social media is “creating new types of people, or simply revealing long-obscured types of people to a segment of the public unaccustomed to seeing them.” Both things can be true.
Technology platforms must be held accountable for their role in our information morass. We need big, structural fixes, including regulation and oversight—though we also have to be careful not to destroy the open internet we cherish.
But the technology is only part of the battle. Think of it in terms of supply and demand. The platforms provide the supply (of fighting, trolling, conspiracies, and junk news), but the people—the lost and the miserable and the left-behind—provide the demand. We can reform Facebook and Twitter while also reckoning with what they reveal about the nation’s mental health. We should examine more urgently the deeper forces—inequality, a weak social safety net, a lack of accountability for unchecked corporate power—that have led us here. And we should interrogate how our broken politics drive people to seek out easy, conspiratorial answers. This is a bigger ask than merely regulating technology platforms, because it implicates our entire country. [The Atlantic]
Hate reading
Why so much Obama-era pop culture feels so cringe now
No really, where do you live “Constance Grady” that this is true at all?
Sunny, wholesome, nominated-for-16-Emmys Parks and Recreation is now widely considered an overrated and tunnel-visioned portrait of the failures of Obama-era liberalism. Iconic and beloved Harry Potter is the neoliberal fantasy of a transphobe. Perhaps most dramatic of all is the rapid fall of Hamilton and its creator and star, Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose reputation is now one of embarrassing earnestness.
I don’t have the freaking energy to respond to this half-baked criticism that somehow combines the worst of wokeness and hipsterdom (two things that I would know a lot about tyvm)
“You know, I saw Hamilton here with Max, before it went on Broadway,” brags one of the teens, hoping to impress his cool new girlfriend Zoya. “You into that play?”
Zoya, the wokest of the group and the one with the most sophisticated literary taste, sighs deeply and rolls her eyes. “No doubt it’s a work of art,” she allows. “But …”
Congrats, you’re letting a terrible character in Gossip Girl of all places define popularity (side quote from Anirudh: “What the fuck is a Zoya, and why do I give two shits what they think”). This is why you’re out of touch! If you literally left your tiny enclave of Brooklyn, you’d realize that these things (along with Obama himself!) are generally widely popular!
But also this was just straight up depressing. Congrats, you wrote an essay that might as well be titled “Against Optimism.” Cool. I’m just gonna end with a meme since that feels apt. [Vox]