Argh - California went over 6,000 new cases yesterday when the previous record had been 4,500.

Honestly, I'd probably send Atossa back to school in the fall and resume business as usual with a clear conscience if they would have her. Cassandane and I can work from home. We have no risk factors and can relatively easily self-isolate from people with risk factors, so if she got it, the realistic worst-case scenario is that she'd just pass it on to someone else at school, which could have happened whether she was there or not. Is that sociopathic of me?

I don't know if they'll have her in the fall but I think it's unlikely, though, and what we're doing in the meantime is very different from business as usual. Right now we're in California with Cassandane's parents. Besides the usual reasons to see family, they can help with child care while we work, and they live in a rural area so it's easier to socially distance here than back home. (The airports were stressful but could have been worse.) We're doing something similar with my parents in Vermont later in the summer, with the bonus of not flying.

That's cute that he thinks he'll have to wait until next month for the numbers to double.

I would really like to be somewhere that isn't my house. I'm still thinking of renting a cabin somewhere and just spending a week someplace different without doing any of the other vacation stuff.

Realistically, I think Option 1. It's not ideal to suddenly start doing three risky behaviors when the first is compelled -- but it feels very much like a threshold situation. Similarly, if you're compelled to work around strangers all day, and so are your friends, what do you gain by denying each other company?

That seems like the big failure in most the the reopening plans -- they're all about when businesses and services can operate, but they seem to treat friendships as valueless. Oddly, they do acknowledge gatherings... in the context of restaurant, church or business capacity, but not in having dinner with another family or couple. It doesn't feel like it's smart to just dive in to all risks at the level of your greater risk... but it sure feels like states allowing gatherings of 50 in businesses or churches to operate at occupancy of 100, but not allowing a kid's birthday party with a dozen friends is missing the mark.

Anyway, I'm sending my son to school if the school is open and finding a way to send him to a different school if it isn't. I had him help me get ready for painting last weekend and he went on and on with jokes based on the word "caulk." I'll be lucky to make August.

6: Cat's in the Cradle, but it's about punning instead of being a distant father.

The apple didn't spray far from the tree's caulk.

Anyway, school needs to start.

2: We've done precisely as you've logicked you will, Cyrus. The day-care opened June 1 with reduced capacity and various hygiene stuff and we sent our kid. In the abstract I'd rather it wasn't open, but since it is, well, might as well be us. There's probably some community caseload that would make us rethink that logic, and I'm not sure if we'll flip back to self-isolation before the county shuts back down. We're in Florida, so I guess we'll find out.

I'm so riddled with anxiety about it.

That one doctor guy from the TV days we may get a vaccine before the end of the year. I kind of doubt it, but it's more likely than any other good outcome.

In general, I'm with Option 2, except I'd probably let my kid (if I had a kid) go to a small birthday party if they're seeing the same kids at school. I'm trying to minimize my time inside of stores (did you know that you can pick up your order from Target without going inside? You let them know you're coming and a store employee comes out and hands your purchases to you at your car. I did it yesterday for the first time and it worked great). But I'm still going to Asian supermarkets and to Trader Joes. Whatever, it's about reducing the probability.

What I'm genuinely torn about: things I really really want to do but I don't have enough information to know what it will be like. I've been playing singles tennis, but they'll be reopening clinics soon. Will there be too many people on the court? And everyone will be touching the slimy ball tubes to pick up the balls? And getting hay fever from all the pollen and ragweed and sneezing all over each other? And I'm trying to figure out a reasonable way to vacation this summer. If I drive somewhere on the coast, rent a cabin (no shared lobby, no elevator or shared stairwell) by the beach, will this be fun, or too stressful to be worth it?

Big enough spaces to accommodate social distancing

How will this will work in the kids' classrooms? Are they reducing the class sizes so that kids will be six feet apart from each other?

12 is disingenuously optimistic; shameful of the doctor to propagate it. This is roughly equivalent to saying "sure, we have not retirement savings, but cheer up we might win the lottery next week".

I find the whole re-opening discussion so bizarre. The combination of Republican cruelty (just pay people to stay home!) and...boredom? from everyone else is making people act like something has changed, when, if anything, it's riskier to go out, because more people have it and more people are out.

Things like Target and the grocery store, from what I can tell, are fine if you're masked. Restaurants seem like a bad idea. Smaller stores, I dunno, but I'm not risking it. And the kids will be staying home even if schools here reopen.

The bar is really low.

I don't have to worry about kids at least, but my friend circle is starting to have backyard distanced get-togethers and I am still demurring (it's not a proper Social Bubble).

Interesting finding that the marches and protests may have cancelled out any spread as non-participants stayed home to avoid them.

the other crazy thing about re-opening discussions is so far as I can tell they are largely unaffected by local state of virus progression, other than vague hand waving about looking at the data. Significant reduction in case loads and known transmissions? Great, must be time to open up some restaurants. Everything progressively getting a bit worse for the last two months? Great, must be time to open up some restaurants.

We were very slow to get take out food. But we'll be even slower to go to a restaurant.

16: I don't think it's boredom. Earlier in the pandemic we were hoping (I guess unrealistically) that our government was capable of having a thoughtful response, and that we were going to shut down until that response (testing, tracing, effective quarantining) was activated. Now it's clear that there's no thoughtful response, so the picture changes dramatically. We might have been willing to hunker down in our homes, forego income, stunt our children's learning, etc., if it was clearly to some purpose, but if there's no end in sight we can't do it forever. We have to just individually navigate our own dumb way through through a bunch of risks we don't understand.

Yep. That's my thought.

21 The American Individualism people rarely want to talk about.

4: I was looking at treehouses on air b n b. I'd like to get out of town for a couple of days, go to some tiny place in the woods in Vermont, and be by myself, outside without people.

I'd love that too, but my family would be pissed, so I have to bring them.

16: I went to a clam shack and felt comfortable eating at the bench tables. Plenty of breeze. I would not eat inside of a restaurant. If everybody was religious about wearing masks all the time, I would feel better. As it is, things are better here than in most places. Arizona and Texas look like complete disasters.

Very little has changed for us since mid-March. We podded with one other one-child family in April, which has truly been sanity-saving for everyone, and now we have an extended bubble of five families (five kids? maybe one kid has a sibling?) for summer, although I don't think all five kids have been together at once yet. But that's it. Everyone who can is still effectively sheltering in place, and it's really hard to imagine when that will stop. I'm expecting our status quo to persist well into the fall and maybe for another year, although there is the question of the elections causing disruptions (of whatever sort -- mass demos? martial law? sudden magical return to normalcy?).

The mental health cost of all this is hard to calculate. Mine is sort of simultaneously stable and wretched. I think I'm becoming a shittier person.

Newsom just said another shut down is on the table if hospitalization trends continue. Possibly paywalled link. I think the next stage is for reasonable people to figure out how to maintain and reinforce social cohesion as the split between flouters and shelterers continues to widen, and continues to affect policy adversely. I am definitely sick of

why am I typing so much

I think the UK is bound to have a second wave, very soon. Unless the whole immunological dark matter herd immunity thing turns out to be true. On top of that, I think a lot of people are being over-confident about mild infections, since it's looking like the after effects of those might have long term consequences. Where I live, apart from a little lip service in queues and on public transport, people are basically acting like CV-19 has gone away. I suppose people are still largely not socialising indoors, though.

But, we are a long way away from where we were in March, as a family. We've been meeting fairly regularly with friends outdoors, and since some of those friends are little children, we aren't really maintaining 2 metre distances all the time. We're heading to the beach again at the end of the week. I'd be a hypocrite and a liar if I claimed we'd religiously stuck to social distancing all of the time.

I dropped in at a friend's 50th birthday party last weekend, just to say hello (I wasn't on the official guest list) on the way to somewhere else, and it was mental. 50 or 60 people or more, all crammed on his front driveway/car port. I was only there a few minutes, but, it made me nervous. It was just too many people, too close together.

How will this will work in the kids' classrooms? Are they reducing the class sizes so that kids will be six feet apart from each other?

Most likely split the school into 2-3 cohorts, and each cohort attends part time.

The implications for childcare for financially precarious families are staggering.

28: I saw some stuff about people who've had relatively "mild" COVID they just can't shake in the Atlantic.

I'm still working at home but they are trying to get clinics opening up faster to bring in revenue, and I'm not sure how spaced out they are now. I had a follow up AppT with the ENT for tomorrow, but his wife just gave birth, so that's next week, and they are every 15 minutes now. Same as before COVID. I asked his admin if he was going to be off for a while, and she said no, he felt that he'd already taken his leave, so it's rescheduled for next week. I should have scheduled a couple of weeks ago, I guess, when they were every 45 minutes.

We have enough medical weirdness that I want us to behave as if we're high-risk even though technically we probably aren't. We've been visiting my parents and brother (one household) and Selah goes to Lee's and has seen several friends there, some masked. Lee has also taken her to Target I guess, for no good reason. (I mean, some people consider buying an Elsa doll and then two weeks later to get a replacement Elsa doll and the matching Anna doll after claiming to have lost the first is a good reason. I certainly heard whining to that effect.) I'm enrolling the older girls in online school for fall. I don't know what to do yet with Selah. I think state guidelines are supposed to come out tomorrow and then the school district will have to decide how to apply them. I don't want to be responsible for homeschooling proper, but I could probably force more learning through NTI than we managed in the spring. She's doing very well with Zoom therapy. I did leave the kids at my parents' and they ended up running around with the kids in that neighborhood, who are not distancing at all. I haven't decided whether that means I should just give up and let them run because it clearly matters so much to them or halfass reminding them about six feet or what. Being entirely enclosed is much easier on that front, especially with Odile here much of the time. It's also working well to have only Selah going between houses. Mara is so much more calm (I realize I wrote about her one violent outburst, but still) and relaxed here without the back-and-forth. Lee is getting frustrated because Mara won't speak to her or reply to texts or anything, but I'm trying not to get in the middle of it unless I have to because Mara just holds THAT against me. But in a lot of ways this time is letting us connect more as a family and I hope we can continue that part.

Kid had his first playtime with another kid in three months today; it seems to have gone well. We're dubbing this "Camp Someone Else's House", and are going to trade off having the pair of kids, but otherwise remain isolated. The numbers in Massachusetts are steadily if slowly improving and I wonder at what point we become more worried about visitors from the rest of the country.

My FIL is flying back from CA where he's been in a bad part of the state for recent trends. And it sounds like he's been pretty irresponsible- going to restaurants, haircut, shopping (on top of the decision to take a 6 hour flight). I assume but don't know for sure if he's been wearing a mask- AIMHB he's been converting into a conservative crank the last year or two. We're not really comfortable seeing him at least until he's been here for the standard 14 days. Maybe we'll meet him outside somewhere.

How about some kind of armband denoting "Yes, I do expect you to follow the 6ft rule around me!"

I rather liked an idea suggested.... somewhere, sorry... that until we get a vaccine, or herd immunity, or a love of death, the best way to manage "the hammer and the dance" was to organize EVERYBODY into groups that could isolate from each other when needed. Like, a factory is a village, or maybe each shift is a village, because the workers on a shift can't really isolate from each other. Add enough teachers to teach their kids, a restaurant, a plumber; any contact jobs the household member of anyone already `in' does *for people in the village* is okay, because that contact is kind of built-in.

When there's an outbreak in the local city/county/state, no contact except in your village. When there's an outbreak in your village, you all go into real lockdown (but it's small enough to TeTrIs pretty quickly).

As outbreaks fade, villages can merge in pairs, fours, eights, until the city is open.

.... There are so many problems with this but I have to have something to think about when I remember that we might get no vaccine or long immunity, and worse longterm outcomes for the young than we hope now. Mentally rearranging jobs for no-contact and villages for maximal mutual comfort is kind of videogame fun. (Plus, it means rich people's kids have to go to school with their service workers' kids, which I find pleasing.)

16
The combination of Republican cruelty (just pay people to stay home!) and...boredom? from everyone else is making people act like something has changed, when, if anything, it's riskier to go out, because more people have it and more people are out.

In addition to boredom I'd cite parental stir-craziness. This will obviously vary by family but every minute we're trying to work and Atossa is not watching TV is hell.

Beyond that it's a sad commentary on our society, no offense, that we're wasting any pixels on "boredom" or similar problems as opposed to Republican cruelty. People who can't telework still have to buy groceries. Where's the contract tracing? Am I forgetting something or did they just give people a lump sum of $2,000 to stay home two and a half months ago?

Mask-wearing by political orientation. 76% of Democrats "all or most of the time", 53% of Republicans. Similar continuuum broken out by conservative/moderate Rep/moderate Dem/liberal Dem.

To the OP, I don't get the logic of option 1. Each activity is a discrete amount of added risk and by doing additional nonessential activities you're increasing the risk by the same amount regardless of whether the obligatory risk was happening or not. If you wouldn't go to Target etc. while staying home 99% of the time, it doesn't make sense to do it when you can only stay home 50% of the time. Altruistically, the fact that you have to take on more risk means you should expose yourself to fewer people to protect them.
I mean, I get it if it's a "fuck it we'll probably be infected anyway" mentality but unless you think you're highly likely to be infected by school or work you should still treat other choices the same way you would have in the absence of required activities.
Seeing the same kids at a party as at school is a different situation because the risks are correlated. Doing additional activities with the same people doesn't add much more risk, unlike seeing kids at school and strangers at Target.

20: That was weird for me. I went into a restaurant to pick up takeout, and was stunned by the people eating in the indoor restaurant. There was a lot of spacing between the tables, but there was a table of 6... I'm guessing coworkers. Of the 3 people facing me, two weren't wearing masks, while the third was. They hadn't ordered yet.

Interestingly, the sign on the door required masks for admittance; one couple turned back to their car, grabbed masks, then entered and waited to be seated. Staff was inconsistent; the host was masked, but when he got tied up on a call an unmasked supervisor came up to take over. Little circles scattered on the ground in the former bar area to spread out while waiting in line for takeout, but optimized for individuals -- any couple would destroy the spacing layout unless they separated to stand on their own circles.

It feels a little surreal... and also very much like individuals trying to solve plastic waste by turning down straws.

wasting any pixels on "boredom" or similar problems as opposed to Republican cruelty

I thought the point here was to waste pixels on game theory, which might be too closely related to boredom to be defensible. Pressuring elected officials in a coordinated way is also possible, but no one seems to be doing that at the moment.

I've eaten in two restaurants since re-openings were allowed. In both cases we went at an off-hour and were, literally, the only people eating. That made the risk feel lower but is not something one can count on (and not sustainable for the restaurants).

The number of active cases in the county is fairly low, but also not dropping, and are slightly above the WA state target for the current phase of re-opening. I feel somewhat in limbo; I am inclined to be cautious but I am allowing slightly more risk (like the restaurant visits), I'm trying to be smart about it, but it feels stressful.

5489 new cases in Texas today. That is a new record, and it beats our old record (from Saturday) by over a thousand cases.

Option 2.

Your mathematician's intuition is telling you, correctly, that your order-of-magnitude risk of getting it depends only on the giant breach.

But you should still minimize exposures outside of that breach because you're more likely than most to be a carrier. A low-order exposure for you might be their highest-order exposure.

This doesn't apply to your birthday party example, but does apply to Target.

I am really hoping (Option 3) that everything has shut down again by then, and the second time we re-open, say in October, we take the time to implement mask-wearing and contact tracing.

But I do think that I'm getting persuaded that Option 2 is the right way to think about it.

45: Yes, me too. Given the huge governmental neglect, it's tempting to act like Option 1, but if we're denying ourselves to save others (like mask wearing), then Option 2 makes more sense. Torque's point that other people, when they come in contact with higher risk people are unavoidably subject to higher risk people's exposures even while they go about only essential business is persuasive to me.

It still doesn't address the mismatch with the government's encouragement of restaurant and church restoration above any non-economic lower risk behaviors -- and I can't tell if that's something they missed (since that's not aligned with their mandates), if they assume that people will cheat -- they maintain strict rules so that when people inevitably do more than allowed, they still won't cross into becoming superspreaders, or an actual thought out component of risk management.

34: I want a face mask that says something like. "I'm wearing a face mask to protect you. I expect the same courtesy from you. If you're not wearing a mask, you're an asshole."

Long statement, small print, they have to get up close to read it... I dunno there.

If you have a big face, it works.

Necessary risks, whatever you decide those are, constitute a sunk cost and are irrelevant to the rest of your behavior.

I'm struggling with what's necessary. I'm pretty sure I'm going to send a son to college and a daughter to high school in the fall, provided we're satisfied with the precautions.

I avoid Target and whatnot, but The Missus goes there a bit more than is strictly necessary -- maybe once a week. I don't think that's so bad. You can maintain reasonable distancing and masks are required. Similarly, I roam freely outdoors, but of course not around crowds.

I think the three keys are distance, being outdoors and wearing a mask. If you've got two of the three, you're good.

I don't really expect to return to the office on a regular basis this year.

Our office has a bathroom with zero ventilation. It was unpleasant at the best of times, but now it seems like a big barrier to returning.

40: fair enough, I shouldn't complain about wasting pixels around here and don't need to be leftier-than-thou. I just resented the idea of blaming individual private citizens getting bored for this collective action problem.

I think the three keys are distance, being outdoors and wearing a mask. If you've got two of the three, you're good.

And minimizing time of contact -- if you have 3 of the 4 you're good. I'm not sure which combinations of 2 of 4 are okay and which aren't (short time of contact, with distance is probably fine even indoors without a mask; but long time of contact indoors might not be okay even with a mask and distance).

"Necessary risks, whatever you decide those are, constitute a sunk cost and are irrelevant to the rest of your behavior. "

That seems utterly backwards to me -- taking a risk makes me a more dangerous member of society, I need to *reduce* the behavior that spreads that risk on towards other people.

Even if I'm just thinking of my own chances of getting sick, the meeting Monday and the party Tuesday are independent risks, and maybe together they go over my sense of safe-enough when neither would individually.

We are trying to weigh risks as well. Things are opening in Michigan, but we're in contact with lots of people at work, so everything we do other than work, we're probably increasing everyone else's risk. Nieces and nephews are probably a risk to us and our coworkers; we're probably a risk to our parents and other older adults we'd see. AJ's mother is moving next weekend; she's asked him to install shelves, along with another member of the extended family. He should wear a mask, right? My father wants us to go to a barbecue with his girlfriend's extended family. Both seem low-risk; there are only 200 new cases per day in the state, fewer than ten in our county, but it still seems like stuff we don't need to do. Friends jokingly told us we were their "most likely to survive a pandemic," by which I guess they meant we're both smart and paranoid.

I'm not sure. Utah is about ten days away from overrunning ICU capacity and everyone is being asked nicely to think about wearing a mask but we can't require it because of a combination of muscular Christianity, libertarianism and a catastrophic failure to understand math.

But most instances of exposure are workplace, church, or big family gatherings. None of this apply to us now, so we're doing hiking playdates and cycling group rides and the kids wear masks to piano lessons. We're doing swimming lessons but I'm watching the county numbers. Once the university starts I'll remove myself from anything but groceries.

The risk corresponds to "area under the curve", right? So yes, you're taking a big risk, but unless you're -certain- that that risk is enough to get you infected, minimizing all other risks is still useful, isn't it? And even for that big risk, there can be things you can do to reduce that risk, no? And in the meantime, this summer, -before- school restarts, you might as well pretend that it isn't going to restart, perhaps? Because then if it doesn't, you'll have been careful all summer. And if it does restart, you can then try to minimize your exposure at school.

And in the meanwhile, pushing all your fellow faculty members to push the administration vigorously and in unison, to make conditions as safe as possible for you all.

54 is a good point. Yes, necessary risks are sunk costs with regard to your personal safety, but they also increase the chance that you will infect others - so if you're now having to do one thing that increases your chance of catching COVID, you should in fact actively reduce your exposure to other people in all other areas of your life, because you're now more likely to have it.

Also 53. The way to think about it is: you have to have taken on a certain minimum dose of virus to actually catch COVID, and the higher above that minimum, the more likely you are to catch it and the more serious it will be.

You could do that very quickly by, say, having a carrier cough right in your face from 1m away. Or you could do it more slowly by working in the same office as a carrier or by having brief chats with lots of carriers. A mask will reduce the number of particles you take on per minute. Some carriers will emit fewer particles per minute than others - either they're just producing fewer, or they're not exhaling as heavily, or they're wearing a mask too. And the further you are from them, the fewer of their exhaled virions will actually reach you.

I think the UK is bound to have a second wave, very soon. Unless the whole immunological dark matter herd immunity thing turns out to be true.

I've been worrying about this for some time, what with people gradually becoming more relaxed about lockdown, but so far it hasn't happened. London figures in particular are still low and getting lower.
Possible reasons for optimism:

A lot of the precautions put in place during lockdown (like the obsessive not walking within 2m of anyone else) probably did nothing to stop the spread. No one was catching it from walking past a carrier in the street anyway. Virtually no one was catching it from door handles and grocery packaging. So we can relax those and not worry. Case studies of individual spreading events are from things like nightclubs, call centres and churches; sustained proximity, lots of talking/shouting, indoors - not from casual contact with carriers or surfaces, especially not outside. Now, maybe the next round of relaxations will include some things that actually were doing a lot to retard spread; but so far it looks like that hasn't happened.

About 10% of the population has already had it - and they will, in general, have been the 10% most likely to get it. The people in high-contact jobs or who lead high-contact lifestyles. That means they're also the people most likely to pass it on to lots of other people. So the first wave has in fact taken out all the virus's best (inadvertent) allies.

re: 59

I suspect a lot of it is dependent on the base level of infection in the population.* Things like that birthday party I dropped in at last week are almost text book examples of how to create a nice cluster of infection. But, if there just aren't that many people around who are carriers, it's probably fine. But if we start getting a gradual creep up, because of simultaneous relaxation of lots of measures, none of which were doing much to retard infection on their own, but which collectively were retarding it by just about enough to keep R below 1, then we could see a fairly steep ramp up.

I'm not convinced that it's _only_ sustained indoor contact that leads to spreading, although that's obviously the highest risk activity. But yeah, I agree things like sitting in the park with friends or briefly walking past someone are all low risk activities.** So we are definitely reducing our paranoia levels and doing more social stuff.

Literally everyone I know who has had the antibody test, has had it. But I live in London, with lots of friends who work in the NHS, or are teachers. So that's not a representative sample.

So the first wave has in fact taken out all the virus's best (inadvertent) allies.

Taken out for how long, though? There's some fairly worrying research that's questioning how long immunity will last.

* epidemiologists roll their eyes at the pointing out of the bleeding obvious.
** although I do still want fucking runners to stop running 10cm from me and covering me in their damp panting breath.

More good news on outdoor surface contact transmission risk: https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/infdis/jiaa334/5856149#.XuoyVzEOPRY.twitter

90% of virions in saliva inactivated by summer sunlight in six minutes. Without sunlight, 90% dead in 2 hours.

61Now if we could get that sunlight into the body either through the skin or some other way. We're looking at this very strongly.

Deprecated for not linking to the Sarah Cooper version.

63 You didn't click on it?

For some reason that took me to a completely different video.

Should be the Sarah Cooper "How to medical" video.

Now it is. Weird.

The link in 62 took me to Sarah Cooper, after an ad played.

21 is right, couple an incompetent government with ignorant hordes of people who have politicized mask-wearing, of all things, and we have a situation where the risk calculating will be ongoing until there is a vaccine and since a lot of Americans won't submit to the tyranny of vaccination we will be struggling for years trying to figure out how to deal. It's the child factor that brings the most anxiety to any decision-making.

From talking to my mother in Orange County it sounds like people in Southern California are going back to full on "Virus? What virus?" behavior, which sounds worrisome.

I'm actually sort of surprised by how readily Baltimore has adapted, despite the fact that our case load & death rates have been low throughout. We're in stage 2 reopening and mask wearing is pretty much universal except in places like parks where people can walk around without getting close.

Argument in favor of immunological dark matter. T cells against the virus can be present without detectable antibodies so none of the existing mass-market tests will pick up that immunity.

I thought the mass-market antibody tests were crap even at detecting antibodies.

71. So it would seem. CDC agrees.

I have absolutely no idea how to reasonably factor stuff like 70, or the entire contents of that "good news" feed, into my risk assessment. I wish there were some way to see how the experiment with small outdoor summer camps is going -- maybe by the end of June.

I also feel like my workplace (and most similar workplaces?) are agreeing to polite denial about the stresses of parenting-while-working on employees, despite occasional soothing comms from HR and extra holidays. Everyone is convincingly able to fake making it work, or is actually making it work. It's amazing to me, because it cannot possibly be working this well at scale. Maybe the kids really are absorbing most of the cost, sigh.

re:72

https://fullfact.org/health/coronavirus-antibody-tests-accuracy/

73. Hypothesis: less unnecessary work being done? Also, definitely much easier to remote work with people I already know than new people in any mode other than "wtf is this, lets figure out together"

73: for me it's been a mix of taking advantage of the slack that my job used to have (definitely not much slack this week, two people out of four are on vacation even though we've got some important deadlines. A week ago or two weeks from now, more slack than now but probably less than six months ago), and bad parenting.

|| Posting here because the other threads are under 40. Bad news today from the Supreme Court on habeas -- does anyone think Boumediene or even Rasul would get through with this court? -- and, once again, everyone should start wearing Sotomayor t-shirts, and maybe leave their RBG t-shirts in the drawer for a while. |>

I mean, I'm assuming that everyone burned their Alito t-shirts years ago.

|| I feel there are a lot of people out there who simply don't like statues:

https://www.helensburghadvertiser.co.uk/news/national-news/18514321.robert-bruce-statue-vandalised-racist-king-graffiti/

A statue of Robert the Bruce has been vandalised with graffiti labelling him a "racist king".

The words "racist king BLM" have been sprayed in white paint on the plinth of the statue at the Battle of Bannockburn site in Stirling, along with "Black Lives Matter" on the ground in front.

On the wall of the A-listed rotunda nearby, the words "Robert was a racist" and "bring down the statue" have been scrawled.

The National Trust for Scotland (NTS) condemned the vandalism and said a contractor would clean off the paint.

|>

After all, his best friend was black: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Douglas,_Lord_of_Douglas

re: 79

I suppose he was in favour of the Crusades (although not actually a crusader). But otherwise, it seems hard to understand the justification behind the claim. Unlike a bunch of 18th and 19th century Scottish imperialists who do have statues.

In Wisconsin yesterday the statues torn down were an immigrant abolitionist and an allegorical figure celebrating women's suffrage.

There's no rhyme or reason to most of it. People just like to vandalize things because or course they do.

82.1 who died at Chickamauga fighting the Confederates. I'm willing to accept some collateral damage as the price to pay for removing all of the slaver/Confederate statuary but JFC man, google is your friend.

People are generally angry, mostly for sound reasons.

I mean, I'm not in favor of the war on statues, but it's way down my list of problems.

The Wisconsin statues are interesting. I could see that as being equally likely to be: confused/stupid leftists who don't understand the political valence of the statues destroyed; apolitical vandals who like seeing statue go boom!; or right-wing jerks getting payback for Confederate statues by taking down an abolitionist and a symbol of sufferage. I wouldn't know how to begin to have an opinion without interviewing the person who did it.

If we don't take down the statues they will rise up to fight us again.

If you don't believe me check out Ghostbusters 2. Not all the statues will be on our side like Lady Liberty.

80 The 1901 census of Canada has entries for name, sex, color, status in family, marital status, date of birth, age, racial origin, etc. On a quick sampling, I see that my French Canadian relatives are given "black" as color, and then "French" as racial origin. My Douglas relatives are "white" and "Scotch."

All of the people sampled are of exclusively European heritage.

86: My impression is that sometime during the past week attacking statues simply became the hip thing to do.

The arbitrary nature of the targets supports that.

It's annoying, because getting rid of confederate statues is completely justified. I'm not usually very receptive to progressive complaints about appropriation, but this really does feel like white people appropriating black people's protest.

Every Confederate general should be replaced with a statue of Justice Sotomayor.

I was just talking to my sister about the statue of Col. Hans Christian Heg, whose name I just had to look up again, because I'm willing to bet real money that no one born in Madison after about 1950 was taught his name or what he did in school. Not defending the destruction, but it's a striking little testament to the massive failure of anti-racist education in this terribly self-congratulatory bastion of white liberalism.

As for the suffrage statue... you're all aware of the current state of democracy in Wisconsin?

I'm a little surprised that all of southeastern Wisconsin is not on fire, tbh. The reckoning is long, long overdue.

I suppose this exaggerated gotcha rhetoric will only result in misunderstandings. I don't think any of the vandalism or violence in Madison is great, but I have a hard time getting too worked up about it being stupid and counterproductive, because Wisconsin is a nationally somewhat unusual case of a state with "good" liberal anti-Confederate bona fides that is also racist as all fuck and has been for decades. So no, there isn't a convenient state of Robert E. Lee serving as a symbol of that state of affairs. Maybe there isn't a good symbol, period. What should people target? It's a silently pervasive ideology; it's like microplastic pollution.

As for the suffrage statue... you're all aware of the current state of democracy in Wisconsin?

Did they repeal the vote for women?

More seriously, I'm not actually up to date on Wisconsin. What voting related shenanigans are you referring to?

What should people target?

If there's a fund to put up a statue of Scott Walker for people to tear down, I'd donate.

People are always graffitiing trans-rights stuff on my favorite mural of trees in all seasons on my walk to work. It makes me angry and I don't like whoever's doing it. But they're not doing it because the trees are transphobic, it's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, and it doesn't say anything about the value of the underlying cause. You can't let a few jerk get you all worked up or let it change your views.

Some of my kin look just like trees now, and need something great to rouse them; and they speak only in whispers. But some of my trees are limb-lithe, and many can talk to me. And some are TERFs.

95: Let's see... there's lots of stuff, but here's one article around the time of the infamous judicial election that describes the gerrymander in stark terms:

Republicans could act brazenly without fear of electoral blowback because gerrymandered maps make it virtually impossible for them to ever lose their legislative majority. Wisconsin's maps were crafted with such micro-precision that even if Democrats managed to win a historically high 54 percent of the two-party vote - a level they've reached only once in the last 20 years -- Republicans would still end up with a solid nine-seat majority in the state assembly.

In fact, Wisconsin's maps are so gerrymandered that Republicans can win close to a supermajority of house seats even with a minority of the vote. Analyses of the maps in the lawsuit challenging the maps showed that Republicans are a lock to win 60 percent of statehouse seats even if they win just 48 percent of the vote. This is precisely what happened in 2018, when Democrats won a majority of the statewide vote and swept statewide offices, but Republicans saw the size of their state-house delegation reduced by only a single seat, going from 64 of 99 seats to 63 seats.

Walker is a high-profile accelerator of this process, but I think it's a serious mistake to scapegoat Republicans for the racial oppression that has been going on for generations. Here's an article on racial disparities in incarceration:

Indeed, in Wisconsin, although white incarceration rates are lower than the national average, current disparity rates are twice the national average, with blacks being incarcerated 11.5 times more often than whites, giving Wisconsin the second highest rate of black-white incarceration disparity in the country. Wisconsin also has one of the highest rates of disparity in the incarceration of Native Americans compared to whites.

The Minnesotans might be able to back me up on some of this stuff with more firsthand accounts from their activist/social circles, but the bottom line is that Wisconsin is a bad place to be black (and not a super place to be Native), and our national dialogue on the subject doesn't have great language or frameworks to talk about upper Midwestern racism effectively, or racism in the North in general.

I suppose this exaggerated gotcha rhetoric will only result in misunderstandings. I don't think any of the vandalism or violence in Madison is great, but I have a hard time getting too worked up about it being stupid and counterproductive, because Wisconsin is a nationally somewhat unusual case of a state with "good" liberal anti-Confederate bona fides that is also racist as all fuck and has been for decades. So no, there isn't a convenient state of Robert E. Lee serving as a symbol of that state of affairs. Maybe there isn't a good symbol, period. What should people target?

Assuming "target" means "attack", I don't know, how about the police? That was working. Or something neutral, instead of something actively good? Bus stations get destroyed in riots a lot, start with that.

It's a great step up from burning Targets or iconic science fiction bookstores. Instead of 'call in the Army' what you get is 'well, actually . . .'

The Wisconsin statues are interesting. I could see that as being equally likely to be: confused/stupid leftists who don't understand the political valence of the statues destroyed; apolitical vandals who like seeing statue go boom!; or right-wing jerks getting payback for Confederate statues by taking down an abolitionist and a symbol of sufferage. I wouldn't know how to begin to have an opinion without interviewing the person who did it.

I extremely doubt that right-wing jerks would have the communication skills, or the bravery, to successfully get to the head of an angry left-wing mob and fool it into accidentally tearing down progressive things. They tend to hide among the left-wing mob and try to start fights, or do something provocative to the cops and then run away. Not any sort of teamwork.

There have been reports of people unknown to local activists suddenly being at the head of marches and talking on behalf of everyone. I think these people are attention seekers trying to make a name for themselves, or maybe they are just really good-looking and outgoing so the police think they are in charge

I see that my French Canadian relatives are given "black" as color, and then "French" as racial origin.

Wait, wtf? Really? I've seen "FB" for "French breed" for Métis, but that seems completely bizarre. I wish I could see it...

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Leeches on Mudskippers: Host-Parasite Interaction at the Water's Edge

Actually, it's Ancestry that's fucked this up. Their English language summary for an individual entry says "Black" but the census workers are surely using the abbreviation for "blanc."

I'd been wondering. Oh well, never mind . . .

That is hilarious.

Wow, everyone in 19th-century Quebec is listed as either Bl for black, N for none, or Me for Mexican! Time to overturn some dogmas!

¡Tabernáculo!

98 so the Entwives were TERFs? That explains everything.

No. The entwives were feminists, full stop. Some of the ents identified as feminists but still contributed to driving off the entwives by holding rigid views on gender and agriculture.

Nobody reads the appendix.

To be clear, I'm not saying that fictional talking trees justify vandalism of painted trees.

For the record, I think both statues should be replaced as quickly as possible. (At least the Heg statue, ffs.) My point was to reflect on the tragic/grimly ironic side of the whole affair, and maybe to darkly hint that Madison deserves the embarrassment.

111 I was such a nerd when I was I kid that I read the books and the appendices so much the covers fell off and so I separated the appendices, bound them in cardboard, and wrote "Parma Eldalaboren" for "Book of the Elven Tongues" in Tengwar on the front cover.

And the entwife stuff was in the main text.

111, 114. My friends and I used to exchange notes in class written in Tengwar. I created an enlarged map of Middle Earth that covered most of my bedroom wall. Nerds unite!

112. I've often wondered if the Entwives also looked tree-ish, and shepherded domestic plants, bushes and vines the way the Ents did for trees. Maybe that's a sexist view and they were tree-oriented, too. The concept of tomato plants and vinca minor marching on Isengard is attractive!

116.2 Probably more bush-like is my guess.

Sorry, I'll let myself out.