Vigilantism is All the Rage!

The vigilantes are the new cool kids on the block!  Kyle Rittenhouse, a mentally challenged policeman wannabe, self-appointed militiaman and gun nut, is acquitted of all charges after killing two and wounding another at a violent protest that would otherwise have ended in property damage but no fatalities.  His claim of self-defense in an open carry state with a loosely interpreted castle doctrine was too difficult to disprove.

A Texas law deputizes private citizens and promises them financial gain for investigating and suing patients or providers of abortions performed after 6 weeks, which is close to the time that most women even know they are pregnant.

Three armed men pursue an unarmed black jogger in trucks and confront him in South Georgia, ultimately killing him.  The case is being tried now.

People armed with semi-automatic and automatic weapons assemble outside of state houses and at meetings throughout the COVID pandemic, protesting any restrictions on their lives and threatening governors, legislators, school board members and other public officials.

Yes, vigilantism is alive and well in the USA!  If you were wondering what in the world Americans would do with the sea of guns that has inundated our country, here is one answer.  Another answer is that they would turn ordinary disagreements or domestic disputes or road rage into shooting fatalities.  And yet another is that suicides by gun would climb ever higher.  But I digress.  Back to our proud vigilantes.

There is nothing American men love more than to strut around with a cool gun in their hands.  And they often add a camo outfit as a great accessory, along with sunglasses and an ammo belt or two.  After all, the more you can pretend to be a Navy SEAL, the manlier it makes you feel.

The nation is going to hell in a handbasket, so we need all the good guys with guns we can get, right?  Even though we have endowed the police with SWAT teams galore and wet dream-worthy piles of military equipment, they clearly need the help of testosterone-addled, social-media-brainwashed wingnuts with AR-15s and Glocks. 

God Bless our brave patriots!   With all those lefty judges, socialist legislators, election-stealers, Marxist professors and looters (i.e. people of color), the only hope we have is to let loose a big wave of armed vigilantes to keep America safe (and white and virginal and heterosexual and segregated).

Our favorite American myth is the Wild West, so it is only fitting that we are regressing back to the days of vigilante justice and gun-toting machismo.  But the eager vigilantes fearing the decline of the American Empire might be surprised to discover that they are actually at the very core of that decline and accelerating it with each act of armed protest or insurrection.

Supreme Court Mythology

With the Supreme Court about to rule on several abortion lawsuits that could reshape Roe v. Wade, it seems like a good time to try to understand what the hell the Supreme Court is actually supposed to do.

A warning:  my take on this is a bit glib and very contrarian.  Lawyers will scoff and deride my analysis as simplistic and totally off base.  And to be honest, what follows is a bit tongue and cheek and takes some liberties with the complexity of Supreme Court decisions.  The Supreme Court has been instrumental in making some very important progress in our society.  However, I don’t think it has a damn thing to do with the constitution or legal precedent.

 

Here is an excerpt from the government site on the history of the Supreme Court:

 

“The best-known power of the Supreme Court is judicial review, or the ability of the Court to declare a Legislative or Executive act in violation of the Constitution. It is not found within the text of the Constitution itself. The Court established this doctrine in the case of Marbury v. Madison (1803).”

 

The Supreme Court is the court of last appeal.  Its purpose is to interpret and enforce laws in ways that support the constitution, since that document is the primary source for how we want the nation to function.

 

But let’s face it, the constitution is a pretty terse document.  The bill of rights is a paltry 462 words.  Nuance is not its strong point.  Like most things in life, the constitution is rife with ambiguity and can only really serve as a general guidebook.

 

Yet somehow everyone wants to pretend that this document is some sort of holy grail that we can use to precisely define the way we live, even though it was written when slavery was legal (and many of the authors were slaveholders), when native Americans were being exterminated, when women had absolutely no rights, when the majority of Americans were citizen-farmers, before any significant industrialization had occurred and when science was only beginning to inform our understanding of the world.

 

But putting the question of how sacrosanct this document really is aside, the absurdity of grown men and women with prestigious pedigrees pretending to be able to adjudicate issues based on interpreting this document is rich.  It is pure farce! 

 

The reality is that the justices may convince themselves that they have some rationale for their opinions based on previous case law and the constitution itself, but it all really comes down to how they personally view what are basically social, economic and political issues, and how they interpret and either embrace or object to the Zeitgeist of the times.  And then they justify these highly personal views or interpretations with long diatribes that pretend to be academic and technical.

Now admittedly, the Supreme Court is not quite as partisan and venal as congress.  They do seem generally to take their jobs very seriously and earnestly investigate the issues at hand.  However, in the end, they are human beings with their own biases and given the lack of detailed guidance in either the constitution or the other laws of the land, they will ultimately find ways to argue on behalf of their own political, social, economic or moral philosophies.

 

The examples of the court flip-flopping on issues are numerous:  slavery, rights to vote, civil rights, affirmative action, abortion, gun control, unionization.  The constitution has absolutely nothing to do with all of this!  It is just partisan, contemporary politics, plain and simple.  The court tries to rise above partisanship, but there is simply no way to avoid it.

 

Take abortion.  Does the constitution really have any bearing on this issue?  Where to draw the line between the rights of the fetus and the rights of the mother is purportedly the key question.  But the arguments quickly go into biological and religious territory that the constitution does not address at all. 

 

I guess if you put robes on people and allow them to keep their office forever it lends a certain aura of respectability and seriousness, as though they are above the fray.  But it doesn’t really fool anyone.  I believe we all know deep down that the Supreme Court is simply a group of people that politicians have chosen to represent their strongly held beliefs and put up a good façade of intellectual credibility, and that this whole constitution ruse is one big smokescreen!

 

 

A Reasonable Approach to COVID in 2022

A pandemic is a confusing event, as we have discovered.  It is science in real time.  Much has been said about the sometimes puzzling and occasionally even contradictory messages coming from governments and scientists.  But our understanding of COVID-19 and its ramifications is constantly evolving, and it is extremely difficult to chart a perfect course of action and recommendations.  We should all be extremely grateful to the scientists and medical professionals who have worked tirelessly to confront this crisis.

Europe now appears to be entering its fourth wave of infection.  If the past two years are any guide, the USA will follow in a month or two.  Vaccinations have reduced the relative number of hospitalizations and deaths, but there are still large numbers of unvaccinated people and there is almost zero probability of achieving true ‘herd immunity’.

Should we view COVID-19 as an endemic disease now?  Should life go on as normal with a few basic restrictions?  These are difficult questions, but I believe there are a few basic guidelines that make sense.

First, vaccinations should be strongly encouraged for everyone and even mandated in certain areas (healthcare and retirement communities for example).  There is enough data available now to prove that the risks of any vaccine side effects are vastly lower than the risk of COVID in an unvaccinated adult.  Any responsible leader should emphatically endorse vaccination.

It is reasonable to raise the question as to whether instituting or continuing draconian shutdown measures may have more negative impact than the virus itself at this stage in the pandemic.  It was, however, unreasonable and highly unethical to argue against those measures at the outset of the pandemic.  The ultimate metric for those decisions is clearly the burden on the healthcare system.

When hospitals and healthcare workers are overwhelmed by serious COVID cases, as they were at the onset of the pandemic and several other times in the past two years, society must do everything in its power to reduce that burden.  A full breakdown of the healthcare system - doctors and nurses dying or abandoning their practices from fatigue or discouragement – is a catastrophic event with very long-term consequences.  Moreover, such an event will precipitate higher death counts because of the saturation of available ICU’s and ventilators. 

The UK data from before and after the vaccine gives us some encouragement for hoping that we can treat the pandemic with more moderate measures.  It is a good test case because the country is highly vaccinated (over 90% in adults over 40 - see the chart below) and has essentially eliminated all protective measures in the general population.

The UK CFR (case fatality rate) for the period from late November2020 to late February 2021 was about 2.5%.  For the post-vaccine period from late June to today, the CFR was about 0.3%, or about one eighth as much.  That is a dramatic decrease in the death rate.  This is especially interesting because the average daily number of new cases in the latter period was significantly higher (35k/day) than during the earlier period (29k/day). 

The USA will have a more difficult time unless vaccination rates improve dramatically.  During the same time that the UK had a CFR of 0.2, the USA had a CFR of 1.1, more than five times that of the UK.  This can only really be interpreted as an emphatic endorsement of the vaccine.  Sadly, our political polarization has made the vaccine a tribal litmus test for many in this country.

Whether the UK healthcare system is still under tremendous pressure is difficult for me to discern in a quick look online.  My guess is that there are pockets of distress and that the future will be a whack-a-mole game of employing vaccines, surgical shutdowns or protective measures and new treatment regimens to minimize the hospitalizations and deaths while allowing life to go on as close to normal as possible.

In my opinion, the reasonable way to proceed is to recognize that our healthcare systems must be protected at all costs.  Life can go back to semi-normal, but the minute we see a region where the healthcare system is in grave danger we must act decisively and initiate whatever measures are necessary.