Politics of the Pandemic

By Dom Nozzi

Like it or not, Donald Trump and Republicans win more votes with their position on the pandemic (and Democrats lose votes) for at least two reasons.

First, with about 30 million Americans out of work due to the pandemic lockdown (in the summer of 2020), Dems are seen as callous toward those financially suffering unemployed Americans because they want to keep the economy locked down.

Trump and Republicans are seen as empathetic to those people because they want to accelerate re-opening the economy.

Second, when Dems create the impression that they are very worried about the virus (compared to Trump and Republicans), they perpetuate the Trump and Republican narrative that Dems are weak “snowflakes.”

COVID and Safetyism

By Dom Nozzi

I continue to agree that some people (not all – I cannot recall the last time I wore a mask, for example) will be wearing masks for the rest of their lives. COVID is highly likely to be like the flu. Prudent people will be getting both a flu shot and a COVID shot every fall.

As for the state of affairs, I continue to think that the infection rate, hospitalization rate, death rate, etc., is way overblown by the media.

I’m currently reading a book called The Power of Bad. The authors talk about how humans are hard-wired to be profoundly affected by bad news and hardly affected at all by good news (in other words, bad news tends to stick with us and traumatize us for a long time, whereas good news does not tend to put us in a “good mood” for more than just a brief time. We forget “good” news very quickly).

Examples: what is a word that is the opposite of “trauma”? Does anyone ever have PTSD for good things? What is the opposite of “murderer”? What about the opposite of “disgust”? In each case, there is no “good” example because bad is way more influential and powerful to us than good, so our language has a large number of words for “bad” things and much fewer words for “good” things. The media and the Internet have significantly ramped up this problem of our always being terrified of bad to the point that we think and behave irrationally.

You really need to read the book.

Applying the concept to relationships, the authors note that studies find the most long-lasting relationships are those where both people in the relationship know that avoiding doing or saying bad things is far more important than doing good deeds for (or saying good things to) your significant other.

My on-going advice: stop reading or listening or watching the media – particularly when it is reporting on the hysteria topics such as politics or pandemics. If you don’t ignore the media, you will be gravely and wrongly misled into becoming convinced – like Chicken Little – that the WORLD IS COMING TO AN END. Examples: Steven Pinker and Michael Shellenberger and Bjorn Lomborg reporting that on a huge number of social/environmental well-being indicators, the world is making tremendous progress. Almost none of us know this because the media is manipulating us 24/7 with hysterical falsehoods. A great many of us therefore wrongly think all those indicators are significantly worsening every week. The media no longer reports reality and truth. Their almost single-minded objective is to maximize how much money they make. And the best way to do that is to exaggerate or use dishonesty to enrage and terrify us. I call it the “Daily Dose of Doom.”

I can always tell who watches the news or listens to the news or reads the news too much: They are the ones who are most afraid of such things as crime and environmental ruin and drugs and political doom. So much so that their perception of what is really happening in the world is extremely far from what is really going on. Studies confirm this, by the way. I also believe that those who continue to wear masks in public are nearly always people who watch far more news (the Daily Dose of Doom) than others.

In my opinion, with vaccines and boosters and extremely low rates of infection (or substantially negative infection outcomes) means that lock downs and mask wearing and group size limits and no hand shaking are instances of “safety theatre.” People wearing masks at this point are simply virtue signaling (“look at how safe and virtuous and ethical and wonderful and progressive I am for wearing a mask!”).

I’m not saying I want to force people to stop doing things like wearing a mask, but I am saying that I feel sorry that many people are so infected with the “safetyism” disease that they engage in extreme efforts to be “safe.” At some point, people need to realize that it is impossible to have 100% safety in life. There will always be some level of risk in life (thankfully!), and doing things like mask wearing or reduced socializing severely detracts from quality of life.

Life is too short to significantly curtail pleasant experiences in life due to worry over exquisitely tiny risks.

Did Donald Trump Botch COVID?

By Dom Nozzi

The Democratic Party claims that in 2020, Donald Trump “botched” COVID. While one could certainly argue that Trump could have done more in using his “bully pulpit” to reduce the health impacts of COVID in America, let us not forget that the 10^th Amendment to the Constitution significantly limits Federal powers over states, which means Trump had very little constitutional authority to compel states to take specific actions. That is, unless the Democrats desired Trump to take unconstitutional authoritarian measures to compel states.

But has not the Democratic Party, in 2020, very loudly screamed about how Trump was already taking several unforgivable authoritarian (or “fascist”) measures? Have the Dems changed their tune and now WANT Trump to be authoritarian (unconstitutionally) with COVID?

When we consider the question of messaging to voters on COVID, Trump has scored an impressive victory. In fact, it is the Democrats, not Trump, who severely “botched” COVID when it comes to messaging.

Once again, almost no Dems have enough empathy to realize that it is THEY who botched COVID. By politicizing COVID and screaming that it is too dangerous to start opening up the economy, Dems signal to the 40 million Americans unemployed due to COVID that they are callously uncaring about the huge financial suffering that those unemployed 40 million are experiencing.

Trump is showing, by contrast, that he cares because he wants to start opening the economy. The Dems are cold-heartedly opposing that. This botching of messaging by Dems (something they’ve done over and over again for several years) will once again deliver a lot of votes to Trump and take votes away from Dems. Dems don’t seem to realize that when you are unemployed, you are very likely to want to put re-employment at the top of your priority list (so you can once again be able to pay for housing, health care, food, transportation, education, etc.). For example, my grandfather in Scranton PA several decades ago sacrificed his health (by working in coal mines) to make money for his family.

Limousine liberals living in their air-conditioned bubbles often miss this. Then wonder why Blue Collar, low-income America can be so “moronic” to vote for Trump.

The Propects for Ending the Pandemic of 2020

By Dom Nozzi

Thanks to Democrats and the corrupt mainstream media, we will all be obligated to wear masks for the remainder of our lives — even if a vaccine is developed.

Based on what I have seen and heard, I believe we will be urged to wear masks for the rest of our lives. I can think of at least four reasons why this is true.

(1) Many are saying that like the common cold (which is, like COVID, a corona virus), COVID will never be eradicated. We will need to learn to live with it, like the common cold. (2) In addition, our society is notorious for going way overboard on safety (scholar Jonathan Haidt calls it “safetism”). (3) Even an effective vaccine will never be administered to every human on earth. (4) Because this is a political issue (with Dems being on the side of extreme safetism), no matter how tiny the risk has become in the future, Dems will always fight against returning to normal, because doing so will be considered pro-Republican).

I believe we are now trapped in a hyper-partisan world.

All those things add up, for me, to our having to wear masks for the rest of our lives.

The COVID-19 Pandemic, the Unreliability of Media, and Corruption by Tribal Politics

By Dom Nozzi

Can we get reliable information about the pandemic of 2020?

My worry is that the mainstream media is so corrupt (so single-mindedly focused on terrifying us and outraging us to maximize their revenue), that we are now living in a world where it is extremely difficult to know what information is trustworthy or whether there is a general consensus or not on issues such as this.

The media has very little incentive to report news — even if accurate — that reduces terror or outrage. The reporting on the pandemic would be far different if there was no profit motive on the part of the media.

This issue has been significantly politicized. We need to make it much less political. Mostly because we are far less able to differentiate truth from fiction when the issue becomes politicized.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that it is possible to have TOO MUCH safety (or to go too far regarding safety measures). For example, I believe it has now been clearly demonstrated that over-protecting from germs (Americans tend to be extreme germaphobes — particularly compared to the past) makes our immune system weaker because our bodies have not needed to build immunity to things that they formerly did build immunity to. Along this same vein of thought, I’ve heard that an important reason why there is a big increase in nut allergies these days is that our society has gone overboard on protecting against such allergies. This example was pointed out by Jonathan Haidt in The Coddling of the American Mind.

I stopped paying attention to the mainstream media in 1980, after I realized how sensationalistic, manipulative, and unreliable it was. For the past 45 years, I have maintained and occasionally add to or subract from on a small list of relatively reliable news sources that have proven out to me to be reliable and factual. As of today, the following is my list of relatively unreliable and reliable sources of news. Regarding unreliable sources, there are too many to list. But here I list the biggest, most important offenders. They are corrupt, unreliable, inaccurate, biased, fear- and outrage-mongering, and manipulative:

1. MSNBC
2. CNN
3. The Washington Post
4. The New York Times
5. Fox News

The following are the only sources today that I consider to be reliable and accurate:

1. Jimmy Dore.
2. The Hill with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti.
3. Noam Chomsky.
4. Glenn Greenwald.
5. Chris Hedges.
6. Dylan Ratigan.
7. Aron Mate.
8. Abby Martin.
9. Matt Taibbi.
10. Joe Rogan.
11. Max Blumenthal
12. Christo Aivalis
13. Mike Figueredo (The Humanist Report)
14. Chris Hahn (The Aggressive Progressive)
15. Tim Pool (Host of Timcast podcast)

One of my Facebook friends responded to the above by saying he has listened to and read a variety of news sources he rejected the use of the term “main stream media.” He claimed he was “not seeing evidence of media trying to scare us — responsible journalists are out reporting on the stories where they exist in a chaotic and frightening time.”

To which I responded by asking this politically liberal friend if he thought Fox News was reliable and accurate? Are they not trying to scare us? Are they objective?

He responded by saying “God No!”

I then replied by saying the following. Half of the nation believes Fox News is corrupt, biased, subjective, inaccurate and manipulative of our emotions. The other half of the US population believes CNN and MSNBC are corrupt, biased, subjective, inaccurate and manipulative of our emotions. Curiously and coincidentally, the position people hold about Fox vs CNN/MSNBC is almost entirely correlated with the political beliefs held by that person. Is that surprising at all? Or is it, as I believe, telling?

I firmly believe all major US media sources are corrupt, biased, subjective, inaccurate and manipulative of our emotions, be it Fox or CNN or MSNBC. As for “rejecting the term ‘mainstream media,'” is the following from Wikipedia not meaningful or important? Is there no relationship between where the majority of the millions in advertising dollars comes from and what (and how) the recipient media source reports (or does not report) as the news? Does it not matter if a media source controls, say, 40% of the market?

From Wiki: “In 1984, fifty independent media companies owned the majority of media interests within the United States. As of 2020, 90% of the United States’s media is controlled by four media conglomerates: Comcast (via NBCUniversal), Disney, ViacomCBS (controlled by National Amusements), and AT&T (via WarnerMedia).”

Is it a coincidence that the Washington Post — which gets massive military contractor dollars — was full-throated in support of the Iraq War?

By the way, I am now convinced that the US media conglomerates are almost indistinguishable from the infamous Soviet Pravda, and that the only way the American people will get reliable media information in the future is if media revenue is severed from private profit and instead gets its funding from the public sector. An unbiased, reliable media is such an essential foundation of a healthy democracy (as our Founding Fathers knew very clearly) that it is known as the Fourth Estate.

I’ve read a lot of books about the media. Two of the best, by far, have been Dollarocracy: How the Money & Media Election Complex is Destroying America by Nichols and McChesney, and Manufacturing Consent, by Noam Chomsky.

We must not forget certain things: It is a terrible, unworkable idea to remain in societal lockdown and dedicating too much of our hospital resources to COVID-19 until there is zero chance of infection. Doing that has at least three awful, unintended consequences. First, there can and will be a lot of death and suffering by those who do not have the infection but die or suffer due to insufficient hospital care (care now likely over-allocated to the virus). In addition, those who lived through the Great Depression in the 30s can inform us that there was a lot of death and suffering associated with that economic collapse — a collapse that many are warning will seem mild compared to what we may see happening due to societal lockdown today. Furthermore, we have learned in recent decades that over-emphasis on safety will weaken our immune system and weaken our overall resilience to future challenges, and that by itself will increase future societal suffering. Finally, humans are a social species. Being separated from socializing with others is extremely detrimental to our mental and physical health.

Do not misunderstand my overall message here. This is NOT a call for our abandoning ALL safety measures we are taking on the virus. But it IS a suggestion that we consider a point made by the author: Perhaps public health would be much better served if we put most of our safety emphasis on the most vulnerable demographic groups (older people with a compromised health status) rather than spreading ourselves too thin by dedicating too much of our hospital and other safety efforts toward all demographic groups.

In sum, I have grave concerns that the counterproductive American penchant to strive for zero risk will, ironically, lead to more death and suffering than had we been less extreme, and focused most of our efforts at protecting the most vulnerable rather than diluting our efforts by striving to protect our entire society.

It IS possible to be too safe — particularly when, as many have said, “all of the data about what is going on is not in.” Don’t forget that we do not have a mainstream media we can rely on for accurate information. All we can rely on with the mainstream media is that we will be maximally scared out of our wits by them.

And for those who think about the pandemic in political ways, fear is an emotion that nearly always benefits the political Right far more than it does the political Left. Importantly, this is because the fear emotion tends to shut down our ability to think rationally, and motivates society to engage in many actions that the political Right strongly supports (wars, citizen surveillance, strong-arm police tactics, being suspicious of our fellow citizens, cutting important social and environmental programs, etc.). The political Right has successfully used fear as a weapon throughout history. Because the mainstream media has learned that inducing fear and outrage in their reporting brings them a windfall in profits, our society is being pushed toward paralyzing, extreme political partisanship, and pushing our society further and further to the political Right. For these reasons, it seems to me that those on the political Left are cutting their own throats by joining in on the RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!! Bandwagon. It can — and likely will — lead to a political bonanza for the political Right in November. Tragic how many on the political Left are oblivious to that these days.

Again, fear has been primarily used by the political Right in history to get citizens to agree to fight wars of aggression, adopt Brave New World citizen snooping by government, cut social and environmental programs, and militarize local police.

All too often, many of those on the political Left who should know better make the mistake of ALSO using fear. We see a lot of that these days: It is now being used quite a bit by lot of Democratic governors in these days of COVID-19 pandemic. I believe, again, that it is a counterproductive mistake for Dem governors to do that, for they mostly end up achieving the negative objectives I mention above. We have seen this blunder by Dems a great many times since Trump was elected. Dems are pedaling fear about Russia and China, for example.

Democrats are increasingly and counterproductively using fear as a political weapon, and each time they do, they are making a mistake — assuming they are actually trying to achieve politically progressive goals. I am more convinced each day that Democrats are moving more and more to the political Right, and their promiscuous use of fear, censorship, acceptance of massive donations from nefarious sources, and red-baiting are clear signs of that.

Because of all of this, I no longer believe Dems represent the political Left, but I am referring to Dems because it has long been a convention in America to equate Dems with the political Left.

I believe there are now four US political factions: (1) The Big Business and Pro War Party (mostly the Repubs), (2) the Big Business and Pro War Party that supports sexual minorities (mostly the Dems), (3) the non-“woke,” non-Social Justice Warrior progressives, and (4) the “woke,” Social Justice, and Post-Modernist Cultural Marxists — often incorrectly called “progressives” — who are using Fascist and racist tactics by breaking up society into antagonistic “oppressor” and “oppressed” groups.

It now seems clear to me that many Dems are now becoming hostile, shaming, safety extremists. Why? Because many Dems have now recognized that a cheap, easy way to engage in political virtue signaling is to show how your views are the opposite of Trump. When Trump began messaging in a way that seemed as if he was too lax about virus safety (opening up the economy, etc.), the Democratic “tribal” message was to respond vigorously and regularly about how Dems are virtuous because they care about the value of human life. We virtuously stand against and in opposition toTrump, in other words.

I believe it has now reached a point where Dems are trying to out-safety others: “Shame on you for not wearing a mask 24/7.” Or “I’m safer than you.” The past five or so years of 24/7 mainstream media attacks on Trump have made him one of the most despised, hated, evil, men who has ever existed (so much so that even many on the educated political Left are now eager to vote for a demented, corporate-corrupted, pathologically lying rapist – Joe Biden – to get rid of Trump). Because of this extreme vilification of Trump, ANYTHING he proposes MUST be wrong. If Trump opposed cancer, a great many Dems would surely be strong supporters of cancer.

A similar “tribal” knee-jerk, unthinking dynamic is seen in many Republicans on the topic of climage change. When Dem leader Al Gore strongly messaged that our world faces a massive humanity-caused climate change crisis, the Repub “tribal” message, unthinkingly, became “climate change is a hoax.”

Virtuously proclaiming their allegiance to extreme safety measures — to assure others that you are admirably not agreeing with Trump, when he downplays the dangers of the pandemic and strives to open up the national economy soon — creates two enormous “messaging” problems for Dems in future national voting. First, it bolsters the claims of Trump and many Repubs that a great many Dems are fragile “snowflakes” who are spineless, and too easily offended.

Second, it continues to promote the suicidal perception of the Democratic Party since the 2016 election that it is Trump who cares about the poor and working class, and that the Dems callously disregard the economic suffering of the poor (with tens of millions of Americans now unemployed for months and unable to pay for housing or groceries, this is particularly acute). “It is the snowflake Dems who want to continue the extremist lockdown of our economy!”

Hillary Clinton likely lost the 2016 election primarily because she and the Democratic Party were seen to be unconcerned about the American working class, whereas Trump at least paid lip service to their concerns. The result was that many Blue Collar votes were cast for Trump.

The aggressive, angry, unyielding stance of many Dems on the pandemic and the economy are sure to shift many of those same voters to Trump again.