Hong Hate Horoscope: Week of May 10, 2021
The Lead
The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown
This was so so good about how many liberals have also abandoned science (especially when half of them have “Science is real” signs posted outside their doors….) Also, people are so mad about this article online, which I feel like pretty much proves the point. I definitely feel bad for Emily Oster:
Scientists, academics, and writers who have argued that some very low-risk activities are worth doing as vaccination rates rise—even if the risk of exposure is not zero—have faced intense backlash. After Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University, argued in The Atlantic in March that families should plan to take their kids on trips and see friends and relatives this summer, a reader sent an email to her supervisors at the university suggesting that Oster be promoted to a leadership role in the field of “genocide encouragement.” “Far too many people are not dying in our current global pandemic, and far too many children are not yet infected,” the reader wrote. “With the upcoming consequences of global warming about to be felt by a wholly unprepared worldwide community, I believe the time is right to get young scholars ready to follow in Dr. Oster’s footsteps and ensure the most comfortable place to be is white [and] upper-middle-class.” (“That email was something,” Oster told me.)
This is borderline insane behavior to purposefully make yourself suffer all the time. I’m into doomscrolling and even I think this is a bit much:
Goldstein and his wife decided early on in the pandemic that they were going to take restrictions extremely seriously and adopt the most cautious interpretation of when it was safe to do anything. He’s been shaving his own head since the summer (with “bad consequences,” he said). Although rugby teams have been back on the fields in Boston, where he lives, his team still won’t participate, for fear of spreading germs when players pile on top of one another in a scrum. He spends his mornings and evenings sifting through stories of people who have recently died from the coronavirus for Faces of COVID, a Twitter feed he started to memorialize deaths during the pandemic. “My fear is that we will not learn the lessons of the pandemic, because we will try to blow through the finish line as fast as we can and leave it in the rearview mirror,” he said.
This also describes SF:
Months slipped by, and evidence mounted that schools could reopen safely. In Somerville, a local leader appeared to describe parents who wanted a faster return to in-person instruction as “fucking white parents” in a virtual public meeting; a community member accused the group of mothers advocating for schools to reopen of being motivated by white supremacy. “I spent four years fighting Trump because he was so anti-science,” Daniele Lantagne, a Somerville mom and engineering professor who works to promote equitable access to clean water and sanitation during disease outbreaks, told me. “I spent the last year fighting people who I normally would agree with … desperately trying to inject science into school reopening, and completely failed.”
And the final capper on this:
In March, Erika Uyterhoeven, the democratic-socialist state representative for Somerville, compared the plight of teachers to that of Amazon workers and meatpackers, and described the return to in-person classes as part of a “push in a neoliberal society to ensure, over and above the well-being of educators, that our kids are getting a competitive education compared to other suburban schools.” [The Atlantic]
Good journalism/Cool shit
This is great from the Atlantic on Critical Race Theory, what it is, and the bullshit behind turning it into “radicalism.”
Most legal scholars say that these bills impinge on the right to free speech and will likely be dismissed in court. “Of the legislative language so far, none of the bills are fully constitutional,” Joe Cohn, the legislative and policy director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, told me, “and if it isn’t fully constitutional, there’s a word for that: It means it’s unconstitutional.” This does not appear to concern the bills’ sponsors, though. The larger purpose, it seems, is to rally the Republican base—to push back against the recent reexaminations of the role that slavery and segregation have played in American history and the attempts to redress those historical offenses. The shorthand for the Republicans’ bogeyman is an idea that has until now mostly lived in academia: critical race theory.
And this first sentence in the passage below really hits hard (emphasis mine):
As with other academic frameworks before it, the nuances of critical race theory—and the debate around it—were obscured when it escaped the ivory tower. It first entered public discourse in the early 1990s, when President Bill Clinton nominated the University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Lani Guinier to run the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Republicans mounted an aggressive and ultimately successful campaign to prevent her appointment, tagging her the “Quota Queen.” Among the many reasons her adversaries said she was wrong for the job was that she had been “championing a radical school of thought called ‘critical race theory.’” The theory soon stood in for anything resembling an examination of America’s history with race. Conservatives would boil it down further: Critical race theory taught Americans to hate America. Today, across the country, school curricula and workplace trainings include materials that defenders and opponents alike insist are inspired by critical race theory but that academic critical race theorists do not characterize as such.
And the point behind all this:
Although free-speech advocates are confident that bills like Ammon’s will not survive challenges in court, they believe the real point is to scare off companies, schools, and government agencies from discussing systemic racism. “What these bills are designed to do is prevent conversations about how racism exists at a systemic level in that we all have implicit biases that lead to decisions that, accumulated, lead to significant racial disparities,” Gilles Bissonnette, the legal director of the ACLU of New Hampshire, told me. “The proponents of this bill want none of those discussions to happen. They want to suppress that type of speech.”
For Republicans, the end goal of all these bills is clear: initiating another battle in the culture wars and holding on to some threadbare mythology of the nation that has been challenged in recent years. What’s less clear is whether average voters care much about the debate. In a recent Atlantic/Leger poll, 52 percent of respondents who identified as Republicans said that states should pass laws banning schools from teaching critical race theory, but just 30 percent of self-identified independents were willing to say the same. Meanwhile, a strong majority of Americans, 78 percent, either had not heard of critical race theory or were unsure whether they had. [The Atlantic]
This Is the Anti-Asian Hate Crime Capital of North America
Really liked this on anti-Asian hate in Vancouver.
Covid-19 was the trigger. But the resentment had been building for decades. Few cities have been so visibly transformed by Asian immigration—and money—as Vancouver, a struggling industrial backwater that morphed into a glittering cosmopolis of luxury condos and designer boutiques. The disproportionate rash of incidents has raised an unsettling question: Maybe Vancouver isn’t the bastion of progressive multiculturalism it thinks it is.
“Covid has just revealed what’s always been there,” says Trixie Ling, 38, a Taiwan-born immigrant who runs a nonprofit called Flavours of Hope that assists refugee women. She was accosted in May 2020 by a man who spewed a stream of racist and sexist insults before spitting in her face. “There is so much anti-Asian racism in our past that carries through.”
And I’ve often been uncomfortable with things like vacancy taxes for apartments and homes, which on the surface seem like potentially good ideas to solve housing issues, but often also seem like dog whistles of racism:
The latest spike in hate crimes also draws from a more recent chapter in Vancouver’s history, one in which Asians, once stigmatized as an immigrant underclass, have been increasingly perceived as elites with rancor-inducing wealth. By the 1980s, close to half of all immigrants being admitted into Canada were from Asia; most weren’t rich, but increasingly the country was tweaking its policies to attract the wealthy. In Vancouver, a conspicuous group of well-heeled newcomers emerged, none more visible than Li Ka-shing…
Starting in 2016, Vancouver and the rest of British Columbia became a laboratory for policies designed to deter rich foreigners from investing in real estate. A series of measures rolled in: first a foreign-buyer tax, then an empty-homes tax, followed by a so-called speculation tax targeting nonresidents and “satellite families”—a term associated with households where the breadwinner stays in Asia, while the spouse and children live in Vancouver…
“It makes for a tempting narrative: them, not us,” Evan Siddall, then head of the federal housing agency, cautioned in a 2016 speech in Vancouver, pointing to evidence that Canadians were more likely to buy investment properties than foreigners. “The scapegoat is obvious: blame foreigners.”…
Yet perplexingly, the province exempted nonresident buyers in places such as Whistler, a resort town just two hours north of Vancouver with an even more acute affordability problem. In 2016 foreign buyers accounted for some 10% of property transactions, according to local real estate agents. But in Whistler the foreigners are mostly Americans—not Chinese. [Bloomberg]
Do You Live in a Political Bubble?
Love it when the New York Times does maps like this.
Texas’s population and political power are growing. Here’s why.
Cool data viz on how Texas is growing. [Washington Post]
THE ART IN THE OVAL OFFICE TELLS A STORY. HERE’S HOW TO SEE IT.
Cool stuff on the art in the Oval Office over time. [New York Times]
Health, politics, and academia
As Schools Spend Millions on Air Purifiers, Experts Warn of Overblown Claims and Harm to Children
Sweet, we’ve got a bunch of snake oil salesmen selling useless purifiers to schools based on commission.
In the frenzy, schools are buying technology that academic air-quality experts warn can lull them into a false sense of security or even potentially harm kids. And schools often overlook the fact that their trusted contractors — typically engineering, HVAC or consulting firms — stand to earn big money from the deals, KHN found…
Zaatari said she was particularly concerned that officials in New Jersey are buying thousands of devices made by another company that says they emit ozone, which can exacerbate asthma and harm developing lungs, according to decades of research.
“We’re going to live in a world where the air quality in schools is worse after the pandemic, after all of this money,” Zaatari said. “It’s really sickening.”
Glenn Morrison, a professor of environmental science and engineering at the University of North Carolina, reviewed a March GPS study on a device combating the covid virus in the air. The device appears to reduce virus concentrations, he said in an email, but noted it would not be very effective under normal building conditions, outside a test chamber. “A cheap portable HEPA filter would work many times better and have fewer side effects (possibly ozone or other unwanted chemistry),” he wrote.
Academic air-quality experts agree on what’s best for schools: More outside air pumped into classes, MERV 13 filters in heating systems and portable HEPA filters. The solution is time-tested and effective, they say. Yet as common commodities, like a pair of khaki pants, these items are not widely flogged by a sales force chasing big commissions. [Kaiser Health News]
In an Indian city, obituaries reveal missing coronavirus deaths and untold suffering
Her death notice was one of more than 240 spread across seven pages in a local newspaper in the western Indian city of Rajkot one day in late April — a fourfold increase from early this year. Yet the rising tide of pandemic deaths — evident not only in obituaries but also at the city’s crowded crematoriums — was not reflected in the official data. According to the authorities, the number of deaths from covid-19 in the city and its surrounding district on that day was 12.
As India reels under a devastating surge of coronavirus cases, it is increasingly clear the situation is even worse than statistics indicate. The country has shattered global records for daily infections, most recently on Thursday when it recorded 412,000 new cases in the prior 24 hours. It also reported nearly 4,000 deaths, India’s deadliest day to date in the pandemic. [Washington Post]
Why stocks soared while America struggled
On the stock market:
“No matter how many times we keep on saying the stock market is not the economy, people won’t believe it, but it isn’t,” said Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist. “The stock market is about one piece of the economy — corporate profits — and it’s not even about the current or near-future level of corporate profits, it’s about corporate profits over a somewhat longish horizon.”
The issue is, the Fed is a much more powerful force on Wall Street than it is Main Street. Its programs to help small and midsize businesses and states and cities have been far less effective than those set up to help corporations and asset prices.
“It now feels like policy, be it the Fed or something else, that the stock market should really never go down,” said Dan Egan, vice president of behavioral finance and investing at Betterment. [Vox]
Hate reading
Seeing the Real Faces of Silicon Valley (ed. note: seriously how did you find these terrible people?)
Ah, my favorite type of article: profiles in people I hate. Some of these people are fine, two stand out for being extraordinarily terrible:
Diane lives in a spacious house in Menlo Park, the city where Facebook is based. Her home is filled with beautiful objects from a life of travel with her husband, a Chinese businessman and philanthropist, now deceased. The couple moved to the Bay Area over 30 years ago when he retired, and they loved the area — the sunshine, the ocean, the wide-open spaces.
Since then, Diane has watched the area change: “It’s overcrowded now. It used to be lovely, you know — you had space, you had no traffic. Here it was absolutely a gorgeous place. Now it’s heavily populated — buildings are going up everywhere like there’s no tomorrow.
“The money that rolls here is unbelievable,” she continued, “and it’s in the hands of very young people now. They have too much money — there’s no spiritual feelings, just materialism.”
Yes Diane, it’s the young people with money and no spirituality, that’s the issue, wise words coming from someone who *checks notes* married a fucking Chinese businessman and philanthropist, you fucking hypocrite. Awesome that you love the Bay, hate that you don’t wanna share good things, you absolutely decrepit pile of filth.
In 2016, Gee and Virginia bought a five-bedroom house in Los Gatos, a pricey town nestled beside coastal foothills. Houses on their street cost just under $2 million at the time, and theirs was big enough for each of their two children to have a bedroom and for their parents to visit them from Taiwan.
Together, the couple earn about $350,000 a year — more than six times the national household average. Virginia works in the finance department of Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, and Gee was an early employee of a start-up that developed an online auctioning app.
They have wanted to buy nice furniture for the house, but between their mortgage and child care expenses, they don’t think they can afford to buy it all at once. Some of their rooms now sit empty. Gee said that Silicon Valley salaries like theirs sounded like real wealth to the rest of the country, but that here it didn’t always feel that way.
I… uh cannot even understand how tone deaf this is. You bought a house in freaking Los Gatos, one of the wealthiest suburbs, and not just a house but a huge freaking house (which probably that $2 million price underestimates that cost). You bought it 5 years ago, so it’s definitely risen in value since then, maybe even doubled. And I’m supposed to feel bad that it look maybe more than a few weeks to furnish your home…? On $350k a year. Get out of here man with this shit man. [New York Times]
Is this the moment San Francisco turns against fnnch’s honey bears?
This article definitely made me dumber for exposing me to a controversy that really doesn’t need to exist.
Artist Melanie Getman, who declined an invitation to collaborate with fnnch last fall, says that for her, the bears have always felt “more akin to logos than art,” and she thinks the work “felt designed to be an Instagram background.”
really curious to see what her understanding of Warhol is.
“You understand that these f—ing bears have become synonymous with gentrification in San Francisco and displacement of the artists that come from here?” Dro says in the video.
In response, fnnch cited his charitable collaborations and said that he wants to “empower artists in San Francisco.”
But his attempt to explain himself only ignited more controversy. “I was born in Missouri,” he told Dro. “I immigrated here.”
Many expressed outrage at his description of himself as an immigrant, including those in the local art community, feeling he had co-opted the term for his own benefit. In an Instagram post, fnnch apologized for his use of the word “immigrant.”
uh what. dude, he used “immigrate” instead of “move,” that’s really hardly a huge offense. (i actually don’t know if this is the offense or if he’s just pissed off that anyone not originally from sf is a “gentrifier” but i’m willing to give him at least some benefit of the doubt.)
Dro said fnnch has not contacted him since the encounter but found it “dehumanizing” that fnnch called him “a detractor” in the apology post.
dude. you are a detractor. literally that is what you are bro.
“I am sorry about what I said when I was confronted at that mural, and I have apologized to the Center and the public for the pain I caused,” he told The Chronicle. “I appreciate that this city welcomed me, a nerdy kid from Missouri, and allowed me to pursue my passions and create art. I believe gentrification in San Francisco is a problem, and I accept that I need to hear and support more local artists and their stories.”
the guy paints honey bears. he personally is not responsible for gentrification, any more than you are. hate on his art all that you want if you don’t like it, but this is just such a huge stretch.
By April 29, the bears had been erased, and the words “this city means more to me than most” sprayed over the white paint.
this type of gatekeeping in SF just pisses me off. no more than me controlling what race that i am when i’m born, i don’t control where i was born. the amount of vitriol towards those who aren’t native is bullshit man.
Sister Roma of the drag community group the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence helped organize the painting of a nun-themed honey bear mural on the South of Market gay bar Powerhouse, as well as an accompanying fundraiser that generated more than $34,000 for the Sisters’ grant fund.
what have the rest of you guys done lately? so let me get this straight: an out of towner comes here, make art people enjoys, donates to good causes, and seems to genuinely care, but native SFers are pissed off because people like his art more than them and are using him as a scapegoat for their own insecurities and angry and work to vandalize his art? got it, cool. shit like this is why actual social activism can’t get ahead. [San Francisco Chronicle]
Et cetera
The dumb trainwreck that I can’t look away from. This lady sucks, absolutely just a bully hiding behind her idea of racist justice while all the same also being racist herself. [San Francisco Chronicle]