Photo of the day

I love Alan Taylor’s annual review of great photos. Here’s his selection from the first part of this year. Oh, for simpler times when we just worried about burned Koalas.

Simon Adamczyk, a wildlife rescuer, carries a rescued koala at a burning forest near Cape Borda, on Kangaroo Island, southwest of Adelaide, Australia, on January 7, 2020. During the disastrous 2019-2020 fire season in Australia, more than 46 million acres were scorched, and as many as 3 billion animals were affected. #David Mariuz / AAP Image / Reuters

Vaccine public opinion

The latest on vaccine public opinion from Gallup.  Encouraging to see that overall willingness to take the vaccine is rising:

Discouraging?  This is entirely due to change in Democrats:

As for that Democratic dip, my hypothesis is it basically represent a time when Democrats feared any vaccine approved “right now” was almost surely unsafely rushed to approval to aid Trump’s re-election.  Once that fear disappeared, Democrats started to rebound to previous levels.

It will, of course, be especially interesting to track this as the vaccine actually rolls out in the months ahead.  And, who knows what policies various schools, organizations, etc., will implement, but as far as I’m concerned, anybody unwilling to take the vaccine does not need to attend NC State or Wake County Public Schools in the Fall.  

When partisanship breaks democratic accountability

This Will Wilkinson piece on how Iowa was basically the control group of what not to do was so good.  Ultimately, though, it is a super depressing story.  What if your government screws up the most important issue in a generation leading to needless loss of life and nobody cares because… polarization

This is hard to take. It makes me more than a little crazy. In retrospect, I feel I should have known better, but I honestly didn’t think this would work. I don’t know how many times over the past year I’ve thought, “What the hell does Reynolds think she’s doing? What do Republicans think they’re doing? They’re gonna get slaughtered over this.” Because … how could they not? 

Well, I knew how they could not. I grasped that elections won’t function very well as referenda on the performance of incumbents when perceptions of performance are laden with partisan bias. I grasped that polarization just is growing partisan disagreement over the standards we ought to apply to judge performance in office, as well as disagreement over basic empirical facts that figure into these judgments. I grasped that Trump masterfully inflames polarization and leverages negative partisanship to turn supporters into a captive audience hostile to credible sources of information. But I assumed that the reality distortion field would glitch out when imposed on something so existentially consequential. Surely the awful reality of ubiquitous mass death and our disastrous economy would break through…

If you think these claims are plainly, obviously true—and they are—you won’t be inclined to see it as a partial, partisan opinion. It’s just reality, man. But that reality made it hard not to think Republicans would pay for their catastrophic failures. Of course, Trump did everything in his power to turn plain truth into something only an un-American, pro-looting, fetus-slaughtering Democrat would believe. I just didn’t think it would work as well as it did. That is to say, I wasn’t cynical enough about negative partisanship. I could see it working right under my nose—shutdown protests, family and old friends indulging in science denialism on social media, angry anti-maskism—but I guess I just couldn’t accept that so few Republicans would see through it or grasp how dangerous it all is…

Here’s what I want for Christmas.

I want it to matter in the 2022 gubernatorial election that Kim Reynolds did this to us. That is to say, I want her political career impaled on a spike. We’re doomed if causing this much suffering and death—if making your state the control group of what not to do—doesn’t wreck an incumbents’ prospects for re-election. Also, I want to not hear the helicopter of the damned this Christmas—not just because it pains me to hear it, but because no one should needlessly perish miles from home and utterly alone on Christmas day. Did I say I want Kim Reynolds’ political career drawn and quartered? I want it drawn and quartered and then impaled on a spike. She needs to become an infamous case study in what not to do. As it happens, the cosmos is indifferent to injustice, doesn’t care what we want, and Santa Claus doesn’t exist, so I’m probably not going to get any of this. Still, a guy can hope. What is life—what is Christmas—without hope?

Good and depressing stuff.  We’ve reached the “lol nothing matters” phase of partisanship.  And, that, for sure, is no way to have a democracy.