No entendemos – Por Fernando Londoño
Por Fernando Londoño
Claro que es grave y triste el espectáculo de las largas filas de gente tomando Transmilenio para venir de Soacha a Bogotá, sin que nadie sepa para qué. Grave y triste que en barrios de nuestras ciudades mucha gente salga a la calle para volver más dura la bomba biológica que no se demora una semana en estallar. No entendemos lo que pasa.
Todo tiene grados y medidas. Por eso se hace más grave que no entiendan los que debieran entender mejor.
Cuando el Gobierno no entendió que los aviones venían de Europa, y de España muy principalmente, cargados de coronavirus, cometió un error monumental de costo todavía incalculable. El Gobierno no se puede equivocar. Tiene que entender.
Se supone que los jueces entiendan y duele que no entiendan. Cuando la Corte Constitucional le pregunta al Presidente cuáles razones lo llevaron a decretar la emergencia económica y social, es porque no ha entendido nada de lo que pasa.
Cuando unos cuantos congresistas exigen, por el bien de la democracia, que se los junte en el Capitolio Nacional, y a todos ellos con su gran séquito de asesores, secretarios, vigilantes y el resto de su parafernalia, es simplemente porque no entienden.
Y ahora nos agravan la taza que hemos de beber, con que el Banco de la República es el que menos entiende. En estos momentos cruciales, todo lo que se le ocurre es tomar medidas baratas para tiempos normales y bajar la tasa de interés en cincuenta puntos básicos. ¿Quién entiende tamaño disparate?
No hemos entendido que el problema no radica en una crisis económica como hubo tantas, o en un conflicto social o político como los que resolvimos tantas veces. El problema es de supervivencia frente a un enemigo que puede derrotar al género humano y convertir este país, en particular, en un montón de cenizas. ¿Lo entendemos?
La palabra maestra de la hora es “refinanciar”. Como la gente tiene problemas de pago, alarguemos los plazos y bajemos un punto, o cuatro, la tasa de interés. Eso significa, lisa y llanamente, que no entendemos.
Ya andan por ahí expertos que dicen posible que crezcamos negativamente este año. En otras palabras, que salgamos más pobres de este endiablado problema que cuando estábamos al entrar. Ya es algo. Algunos empiezan a entender.
El primero que se empobrece, o el último dependiendo como se mire la cosa, será el Gobierno. El petróleo, su gran fuente de ingresos, ha bajado en precio de sesenta a veinte dólares el barril. A la tercera parte, amigos queridos. ¿Lo entendemos? Y el problema no es pasajero, como viajera golondrina. No. El petróleo no tiene por dónde subir, en muchos meses, porque media humanidad está encerrada, dato de hoy, lo que significa que no viaja, no comercia sino para sobrevivir y no está en plan turístico. Lo que eso significa para las cuentas de un país que se dedicó a vivir del petróleo que apenas producía, es cosa que nadie calcula. No hay para qué amargar la cuarentena.
Los gobiernos viven de lo que la gente produce para pagarles y cuando no produce, no hay ingresos para nadie. No nos hemos atrevido a calcular la caída de los recaudos, hermana siamesa de la parálisis económica. Porque no entendemos.
Las empresas no están produciendo, porque las fábricas están cerradas, los trabajadores no pueden llegar a ellas y no tendrían a quién venderle lo que producen. Los videos que muestran desiertas las calles de todas partes son la prueba de que esto no podría ir peor. Y no hay tendencia ni esperanza próxima y razonable de mejoría. ¿Lo entendemos?
El Gobierno está tomando medidas valerosas y sensatas. Que pudieran ser todavía mejores. Pero algunos las critican porque son de corte “uribista”. La estupidez suele rebasar sus propios límites.
Así que la cuestión no está en refinanciar. Entre otras cosas, porque los bancos refinancian o se declaran en quiebra. Nadie les va a pagar a tiempo. La cuestión está en habilitar a los empleadores para que presten dinero a los que no les prestarían de acuerdo a sus manuales operacionales. Para que esos que reciben créditos que nunca se otorgarían, paguen nóminas que nunca pagarían. Nadie paga al que no trabaja. Hasta ahora. Es el momento de pagarle al que no puede trabajar. ¿Lo entendemos?
Nadie está suficientemente preparado para un naufragio o para un terremoto de 8 en la escala de Richter. Nadie. Por simulacros que haga. Y naufragio y terremoto como los que padecemos nunca los afrontó la especie humana. ¿Lo entendemos?
Todo esto viene a propósito de la decisión de la Junta del Banco de la República. Si los sabios que la integran, tan previsivos, tan ilustrados, tan capaces, no entienden ni jota, como solemos decir, vaya esperanza de que otros entiendan.
Hay una burbuja lógica en cada cristiano, Londoño. Que yo me cuide de contagiar a otros no me favorece en nada, así que para estar yo bien lo importante es que otros se cuiden y se jodan, y de mi parte viene sobrando. Si soy banquero me conviene ahora comprar hipotecas, hipotecas de primer grado y a bajísimos montos, así me quedo con bienes por una fracción de su valor. Si soy policía, me autorizo éticamente por la crisis de supervivencia, para negociar con el hampa y los saqueadores y exigirles mi cuota del botín. Si soy político…
Por eso, y por defensa propia, el principal activo son ahora buenos fierros, municiones y dólares. Cordialmente.
“Las armas son necesarias
Más nunca sabe uno cuando
Por eso si andas paseando
Y de noche sobretodo
Debes llevarlo de modo
Que al salir salga cortando.”
José Hernández.
Viste a Edmundo, ya viste a mis padres, hermanos, tíos, y abuelos
Edmundo que no se rinde
https://youtu.be/LFhvkYq9JR4
Vi a su familia jajaja, la mía era zurda pero dubitativa. Parece que es abundante esa clase de idiota en Cuba. Aquí mismo tenemos a Humberto, y en parte a Cubano. Son personas de pensamiento concreto totalmente fanatisadas. No es totalmente el caso de Cubano que no está fanatisado como Humberto, pero sí se cree cualquier cosa, como esos parientes suyos. Un saludo.
Yo tampoco ¨entiendo¨ 🙂
Por si no se entiende a que me refiero con que no entiendo, no soy “entendido”.
Otro que lo ha hecho muy bien es Alemania
0.87 de mortandad
EEUU tiene el doble; 1.7%
Mientras el gueto ya anda por 0.18 🙂
“Coronavirus will change the world permanently,” said Katherine Mangu-Ward in Politico.com. It’s “reshaped” how we socialize, work, eat, shop, even greet each other, and once it’s safe to leave the house, some transformations will stick, “for better or worse.” Maybe most of all, “Covid-19 will sweep away” any remaining resistance “to moving more of our lives online.” There will be more internet-based education, whether it’s homeschooling or classrooms going digital. More work will be done remotely, now that it’s clear many meetings can be conducted on Zoom. Workers will resist going back to “having to put on a tie and commute for an hour.” Now that we’ve seen the capabilities of digital life, “it will be near impossible to put that genie back in the bottle.”
“Hollywood is wonderful. Anyone who doesn’t like it is either crazy or sober.”
Raymond Chandler, quoted in The Irish Times (Ireland)
Por supuesto que a Chandler le gustaba Hollywood. Con ese monstruo que era Bogart como protagonista y directores de la talla de Howard Hawks, las adaptaciones de sus novelas al cine eran casi obras maestras.
Creo que no entendiste J, el tipo dice
Que para que no te guste Holliwood
O tienes que estar loco
O sobrio
Otro strike 🙂 Pero de todas formas Chandler tenía buenas razones para que le gustara Hollywood. Y el Hollywood de entonces no tenía el sesgo a la izquierda que tiene el de ahora.
“Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work—that goes on, and it adds up.”
Barbara Kingsolver, quoted in GoodReads.com
Creo que voy a hacer una excepción y postear esto que me mandaron, porque aquí hay 3 médicos y quiero preguntar. ¿Qué volá con la hydroxychloroquina esa? (Aparte de lo de alimentarse bien, Cubano)
https://techstartups.com/2020/03/28/dr-vladimir-zelenko-now-treated-699-coronavirus-patients-100-success-using-hydroxychloroquine-sulfate-zinc-z-pak-update/
Como dato curioso, el gluconate de zinc, ya lo estamos tomando todos en la familia. Saludos.
La mortalidad es mucho menor aún, “doctor” Manuel. Si lo calcula debidamente, somos 7000 millones de habitantes, lo que los divide por 37000 muertes, y obtiene menos del 0.000..1 por ciento.
“…para que te rias J.”
Justamente mencionaba a Julián en la otra columna, la incapacidad de los técnicos y especialistas para hacer proyecciones. No se diga ya de un “hombre nuevo” cubano jaja (o J, L. que es lo mismo). Saludos.
Jajaja divide los 37.000 por 7000 millones…
Qué raro no, siempre que tiro parezco Ambrosio. Debe ser que el karma me hace cobrado de una vez jajaja, o que a la fuerza me estoy haciendo bueno jajaja
“True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.”
Karl Popper, quoted in The Times (U.K.)
With the power of 200 petaflops, or the computing speed to perform 200 quadrillion calculations per second, IBM’s Summit supercomputer ran simulations of more than 8,000 drug compounds to see if they might effectively stop the coronavirus from infecting host cells. From those, it identified 77 possible candidates, and will run simulations of them in an effort to narrow down the list even further, before experimental studies are done to “prove which chemicals work best.” Summit has already been used to identify “patterns in cellular systems that precede Alzheimer’s, analyze genes that contribute to traits like opioid addiction, and predict extreme weather based on climate simulations.”
Now you need 52:
Narula and his team looked at the number of active smokers and secondhand-smoke victims around the world from 1990 to 2016. They found that in 1990, it took 31 lifetime smokers to produce enough secondhand smoke to kill one nonsmoker. By 2016, that number had increased to 52, thanks to the spread of smoking bans in restaurants, bars, and offices. “There’s a sense of secondhand smoke being benign, or not as damaging as the actual smoking is,” Narula tells CNN.com. “But it’s truly deadly.”
Another test
https://www.viacharacter.org/survey/surveys/questions/13263733?startingQuestionNumber=1&isMobile=True
Especial para Cubano (ya verá por qué) y para los que le guste la ópera.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5qi_4DnpKg
El coro de Nabucco, fue una de mis arias preferidas alguna vez.
Par de monstruos. El mejor dúo de todos los tiempos en la ópera.
https://youtu.be/S7s2SeEuyE0
J,
There are many obstacles to getting a treatment out of the lab and into the hospital. First, clinical trials must show that the drugs work safely, and many drugs typically fail this test. A cocktail of the HIV drugs lopinavir and ritonavir, which were being tested in China, was reported to have no benefit to patients. The effectiveness of HIV drugs against COVID-19 remains largely anecdotal and unproven. And chloroquine in high doses can prove toxic.
Once a drug is proved safe and effective, getting it to millions of patients around the world requires a massive manufacturing capacity. Ramping up can take months, says Prashant Yadav, a visiting fellow at the Center for Global Development and an expert on healthcare supply chains. For instance, he estimates it would likely take six months to a year to sufficiently ramp up production to meet the potential global demand for remdesivir, should it prove effective and safe
Pero qué importa, idiota. Si cuantos más se contagian más se reduce el porcentaje de mortalidad.
we look at the race to identify and test drugs that might treat covid-19 (page 8). Caution is needed: many celebratory reports and announcements are premature, and we are still without a drug that can help those who are seriously ill.
the World Health Organization (WHO) is coordinating an international trial of the most promising drugs – and with case numbers soaring, we should find out soon if any of them work.
“This trial focuses on the key priority questions for public health. Do any of these drugs reduce the mortality? Do any of these drugs reduce the time the patient is in hospital? And whether or not the patients receiving any of the drugs needed ventilation or an intensive care unit,” said Ana Maria Henao-Restrepo of the WHO at a briefing on 18 March.
The WHO trial will include the long-used antimalarial drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, a new antiviral drug called remdesivir and a combination of two HIV drugs called lopinavir and ritonavir. The HIV drugs will also be tested in combination with an antiviral called interferon beta.
“What we need most is a drug that can save lives when covid-19 is identified in severe cases”
On 22 March, several countries in Europe, including the UK, launched a collaborative trial of the same drugs, which will complement the WHO effort.
There has been a tremendous buzz about chloroquine after it was highlighted first by entrepreneur Elon Musk and then US president Donald Trump, who wrongly claimed it was already approved in the US for treating covid-19.
There have also been reports from China that chloroquine is beneficial when given to people with covid-19 associated pneumonia, but the findings have yet to be published. “It looks promising,” says Robin May at the University of Birmingham, UK.
However, some excitement over these drugs stems from a study of just 42 people in France that said those who received hydroxychloroquine cleared the coronavirus from their bodies days faster, with the effect being even greater in those also given the antibiotic azithromycin (medRxiv, doi.org/dqbv).
The researchers speculated that hydroxychloroquine can prevent infection as well, but other researchers say the small size of the study and other issues mean we can’t rely on its results.
What’s more, while hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are safe when taken properly, there are already reports of people overdosing on chloroquine in an attempt to protect themselves, which can cause lethal heart problems.
Meanwhile, people who need this drug for lupus or arthritis are finding it hard to get hold of.
Hunting for antibodies
Even if chloroquine does stop people becoming severely ill if given when symptoms are still mild, it wouldn’t necessarily be a game changer. At the moment, most countries are detecting coronavirus infections only once people develop severe symptoms, so what we urgently need is a drug that can save lives at this stage. “Whether that’s going to crop up is anyone’s guess,” says May.
Unfortunately, it already seems that the lopinavir and ritonavir combination doesn’t do this. A randomised trial in China found no evidence of any benefit (NEJM, doi.org/ggpcms). As for remdesivir, the results of trials in China haven’t been made public yet.
Many other potential treatments are being explored, particularly the possibility of developing antibodies against covid-19. Antibodies are the proteins our immune systems use to kill the virus, but it takes weeks for our bodies to ramp up production after we are infected.
In theory, injecting antibodies made in a factory should be an effective way to both prevent and treat covid-19. US company Regeneron says it has already identified hundreds of antibodies against the coronavirus and plans to start mass-producing the most potent ones in mid-April.
Another way to get antibodies is to extract them from the blood of people who have recovered from covid-19. At least 250 people in China have received treatments made this way. According to the Xinhua news agency, it was safe and effective, but the findings don’t yet appear to have been published.
All the approaches described above are based on trying to kill the virus or prevent it replicating. However, it appears that most deaths from covid-19 are the result of a severe immune reaction called a cytokine storm. So another path is finding ways to prevent or dampen this response. A small study in only 19 people suggests that an immunosuppressive antibody called tocilizumab is highly effective (ChinaXiv, DOI: 10.12074/202003.00026).
This approach can be risky, though. “Immunotherapy is really challenging because you’re messing with the immune system of people who are very sick,” says May. ■
“… At a White House press briefing on March 20th, a reporter asked Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whether hydroxychloroquine could be effective in treating covid-19. “The answer is no,” Fauci said, before yielding the microphone to Trump, who countered, “May work, may not. I feel good about it. That’s all it is, just a feeling, you know, smart guy.” A few days later, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, said, “Using untested drugs without the right evidence could raise false hope and even do more harm than good.”
Trump’s quackery was at once eccentric and terrifying—a reminder, if one was needed, of his scorn for rigorous science, even amid the worst pandemic to strike the country in a century. Yet his conduct typified his leadership as the crisis has intensified: his dependency on Fox News for ideas and message amplification, his unshakable belief in his own genius, and his understandable concern that his reëlection may be in danger if he does not soon discover a way to vanquish COVID-19 and reverse its devastation of the economy.
New York City now faces a “troubling and astronomical” increase in cases, according to Governor Andrew Cuomo, and the emergency is overwhelming hospitals, straining drug and equipment supplies, and threatening to cause a shortage of ventilators. The grim course of events in the city is a “canary in the coal mine” for the rest of the country, Cuomo said, and leaders elsewhere must take decisive action lest they, too, become inundated. Trump, though, spent much of last week promoting a contrarian gambit that has been percolating in the right-wing media. He said that, to revitalize the economy, he would like to lift travel restrictions and reopen workplaces across the country within weeks, perhaps by Easter, which is on April 12th, because, as he put it repeatedly, “we can’t let the cure be worse than the problem.”
f0011-02
(ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA)
Public-health experts immediately warned against such a reversal of social-distancing rules. “The virus will surge, many will fall ill, and there will be more deaths,” William Schaffner, a specialist in preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University, told the Times. When a reporter asked the President whether any of the “doctors on your team” had advised him that a hasty reopening was “the right path to pursue,” he replied, “If it were up to the doctors, they may say, ‘Let’s keep it shut down … let’s keep it shut for a couple of years.’” Public-health specialists have said no such thing; they have spoken of a conditions-based approach (“You don’t make the timeline, the virus makes the timeline,” Fauci has said), while advising that, to save the most lives, local leaders must wait to lift restrictions in their areas until the data show that the virus has stopped spreading. Trump said that any loosening of rules he might seek around the country—he mentioned Nebraska and Idaho as possible sites—would be “based on hard facts and data,” but he also said that he chose Easter as a target date because he “just thought it was a beautiful time.”
It is true, as Trump also argued, that enormous job losses and an all but certain recession caused by the pandemic will harm many vulnerable Americans, and claim lives, as ill people without health insurance, for example, forgo care or struggle to get it at stressed clinics and hospitals. Yet, at least in the short term, over-all mortality rates fall during recessions; the reasons for this aren’t fully clear, but social scientists think they may include the public-health benefits of a decrease in pollution, as a result of the slowing economy. In any event, the case the President made for hurrying an economic revival against the advice of scientists was morally odious; it suggested that large numbers of otherwise avoidable deaths might have to be accepted as the price of job creation.
Public-health officials spoke frankly to the press about the catastrophic prospects of the President’s Easter folly. (“President Trump will have blood on his hands,” Keith Martin, the director of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health, told the Times.) Trump responded on Twitter by lashing out at the “LameStream Media” for reporting such forecasts, calling the press “the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success.” Last Wednesday, after Mitt Romney, the only Republican who voted to convict the President, on a charge of abuse of power, during the Senate impeachment trial, announced that he had tested negative for COVID-19, Trump tweeted mockingly, “I’m so happy I can barely speak.” At the White House briefings, surrounded by the sorts of civil servants and experts he habitually disdains, Trump has adapted awkwardly to the role of solemn unifier. When he leaves the podium to tweet nonsense at his perceived enemies, he at least provides his opponents among the country’s homebound, screen-addled, and anxious citizenry with a galvanizing dose of his immutable obnoxiousness—a splash of the old new normal.
The journal Science asked Fauci why he doesn’t step in when the President makes false statements in the briefings. “I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down,” he said. America’s public-health system is fragmented and market-driven, conditions that only compound the challenge of quashing COVID-19. In the Trump era, however, decentralization has a benefit: the President is not solely in charge, and in the months ahead governors and mayors will continue to shape the odds of life or death for great numbers of Americans. Last week, Trump reviewed the possibilities for quarantine in New York City, his ravaged home town. He rambled about the stock exchange (“It’s incredible what they can do”), before going on to pledge, “If we open up, and when we open up … we’re giving the governors a lot of leeway” to decide how this should be done. We can only hope so. ■
“… There are various regimes including the 16:8 diet, which involves completely eschewing calories for 16 hours and only eating in an 8-hour window. Even done once a week, this is an effective way of slowing ageing and strengthening the immune system. Exercise is also a proven mTOR inhibitor.
Even if a fasting diet isn’t for you, simply keeping your weight down can have immune-boosting effects. According to Bonnie Blomberg at the University of Miami in Florida, being obese suppresses the immune system to a similar extent as being immunosenesced. Ageing is associated with a decline in the function of the immune system’s B-cells and low production of antibodies in response to vaccines, and so is being obese. “Adipose tissue negatively impacts the antibody response,” says Blomberg. “So obesity is associated with poor vaccine response, even in people who are young.” ■
dwindling resources in the most effective manner: plan
What nobody has done yet:
“… track virus counts. These parameters could be gauged using fairly inexpensive and easily available laboratory methods. Imagine a two-step process: first, identifying infected patients, and then quantifying viral loads in nasal or respiratory secretions, particularly in patients who are likely to require the highest level of treatment. Correlating virus counts and therapeutic measures with outcomes might result in different strategies of care or isolation…”
United States of America is a different nation from virtually any other nation in the history of the world. It has a different history. It has a different composition. It is a collection of many nationalities. There’s that old phrase blood and soil nationalism. That’s difficult to translate into the U.S. I mean, whose blood? Which soil? So if you’re going to water nationalism down into, “Well, we have shared historical stories,” or “Most of us like the flag,” or “We’re stirred by specific events from our history, like Normandy Beach,” these things are symbols that matter. But as far as an organizing principle for a coherent politics, I think nationalism is dangerous.
What would nationalism look like as a political organizing principle?
In my view, it’s hard for nationalism to avoid becoming very centralizing—to avoid becoming statism, with the principal actor being the national government. Nationalism is in many ways a direct challenge to the fact of American pluralism. America is a continent-sized, multi-faith, multi-ethnic, constitutional republic. It’s hard to think of a nation anywhere in the world combining so many different nationalities and so many different and often competing strains of faith, with so many different geographies and subcultures.
You hear frequently this phrase used, real America. All of America is real America. The whole thing.
And you say that as somebody who lives in Franklin, Tennessee, a place that conservatives would call real America.
Oh, I’m in the middle of real America. The fact of the matter is that we have many different American experiences, many different American stories, many different perceptions of this country. And I agree: When you have that degree of pluralism, unity is a challenge. But I believe that unity is harmed more than it is helped when you try to centralize.
One complaint that nationalists make is that there’s a liberal elitist pastime of crapping on America. They think we need a renewal of basic pride in our country. You’re a veteran. You enlisted in the Army Reserves after 9/11. You served in Iraq. I imagine you’re a patriotic person. So do you feel like the nationalists have a point?
Yeah. I think that there are people who tell a very flawed story about this country, and I do think there are people who live within this country who don’t particularly like it. But because politics is the art of overreaction these days, I think that we conservatives paint with way too broad a brush about that.
There are people—I experienced that when I was in law school—who just look at the United States as this dreadful beast that was 200 years of greed, exploitation, and genocide followed by a couple of halfway decent social reforms that have made us only marginally less awful. I met people like that. They’re out there. But the idea that that is sort of a dominant strain of thinking—you see this all the time. You’ll hear someone on the right say, “They hate America.” That’s just false. You can nut-pick, and you can find an individual here and there, or even some sort of coherent intellectual movement coming out of some university, that does hate America. But this sort of “they hate America” talk, which is a tool of mass mobilization, is just a flat-out overreaction.
You and your family have been targets of some pretty heinous and horrible speech online. In the time since that started, this has become a highly politicized topic. There’s a lot of talk about needing to regulate social media companies to require them to monitor their users’ speech and make sure that users are not doing things like bullying or spreading false information. Where do you come down on that?
Just going back to my family’s experience: To the extent that true threats are communicated through social media, they should be prosecuted.
Social media companies…should have the liberty to be able to build and foster the kind of community that they seek to cultivate with their product. My general view is the government should take its hands off of social media companies, but that social media companies, when in doubt, should privilege free expression. What I’ve long argued is that social media companies should voluntarily try, as much as is practical with their given platforms, to track the First Amendment. Now, it’s different with different platforms. If you’re a Facebook and you want Instagram to be a much more kid-friendly space, sure. Fine. No nudity. Just like broadcast television without violating the First Amendment restricts profanity and nudity, etc. You can build the kind of community that you want. But as much as possible while doing that, try to avoid outright viewpoint discrimination. When in doubt, err on the side of free speech.
That’s not the government’s business. You hear a lot of argument right now that the government needs to step in to make sure that Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or whoever is sufficiently protective of “free speech” as the government defines it. And they pinpoint Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act [which says that web platforms are generally not liable for the speech of their users], and they say, “That needs to be repealed or substantially reformed.” Let’s be super clear about this: If the government repeals Section 230, it would ultimately create one of the biggest waves of censorship in the whole history of the United States of America. It would not have the effect that people think that it would have.
“I would not take my children to Drag Queen Story Hour. But I don’t have to go to Drag Queen Story Hour, and…they enjoy all the protections of the First Amendment that everybody else enjoys.”
Why is that?
Section 230 basically says you can have good-faith moderation of user content without turning the moderator into the speaker. What does that mean practically? It means if I write a comment on Facebook, I’m responsible for my comment. Facebook is not. And Facebook can even moderate my comment and delete it if it has racial slurs or whatever. But the moderation of my comments does not make Facebook liable for my speech.
This was enacted as a reaction to two different cases, both out of New York. In one, a court said that an early internet platform that moderated user content was going to be responsible for user speech. In another, the court said that you’re not responsible for user speech if you don’t moderate at all.
What’s the problem there? If you don’t moderate at all, then you’re Gab [a social media site popular on the far right]. And Gab is a sewer. I know there are people who are on it, but Gab is an absolute open sewer, and a company like Facebook will not exist like that.
Because not enough people will want to use it.
Nobody wants to play in the sewer, right? These companies are not going to become the raw open sewage of the internet.
What’s the alternative? If they’re responsible for user speech, they’re going to be vetting your speech. Which means the voices that will exist will be voices that have access to the levers of power [and the ability] to speak in the way that journalists speak or the way that celebrities speak. Average people will not have an opportunity to speak.
Imagine if I can’t comment on Yelp about a restaurant unless Yelp fact checks me. I can’t comment on Facebook about my beliefs about the flaws of the University of Michigan football coach unless Facebook fact checks me. What? So this notion that good-faith moderation is key to allowing the internet that we use and take for granted, it’s absolutely true. It’s indispensable for regular, average, ordinary, everyday Americans to have a public voice. You revise this and you’re going to place these companies in a box: Submit to the government or be a sewer. And that would be a tremendous practical act of censorship.
Let’s get a little more explicitly political. Nobody saw Donald Trump coming, but everybody seems to have a pet theory about how he got elected. Do you have an explanation that you think is the most plausible?
I think there are a couple of factors that are underappreciated in the rise of Trump. One is just his raw celebrity. How many hundreds of millions of dollars were spent by the [Mitt] Romney campaign to brand him with the American public? Hundreds of millions of dollars. And this is a guy who was a governor. He headed up the Salt Lake City Olympics. He had run for president before in ’08. And still, if you’d ask an average American to name three facts about Mitt Romney, even the average American voter, what would they have been? So politicians have to spend a ludicrous amount of money [to brand themselves]. A lot of us who live and eat and breathe politics don’t fully appreciate this.
“What we face now isn’t so much the government imposing its values but private actors using the power that they have, whether financial or cultural, to try to crowd out competing voices.”
Donald Trump has been one of the most famous Americans for decades. And his brand, which was particularly enhanced through [his game show] Celebrity Apprentice, is “I’m an entertaining, super smart, super successful businessman.” And then because of his massive celebrity, think about the free media he got. As much as all politicos were like, “Oh, Marco Rubio: rising star. Ted Cruz: the new constitutional conservative,” millions of Americans just didn’t know those guys, and they knew Donald Trump.
And then Donald Trump—the very famous, successful celebrity—sold a very simple, potent message. I should’ve been more aware of just how potent this message was with voters who are not super political but really tired of the status quo. I was buying a truck in Columbia, Tennessee, and I was talking to the salesperson…and he said, “I like Donald Trump because he won’t apologize for America and he kicks ass.” And I thought, “You know, that’s a pretty compelling, simple message: He’s strong. He’ll fight for America.”
You briefly thought about running as a conservative challenger to Trump in the 2016 general election. Do you think that’s why you’ve become the subject of so much ire?
There were a couple of waves of anger. One wave was in late 2015/early 2016, when I wrote very critically about the alt-right, and that triggered just this awful backlash. Then when I considered running, there was another wave. And then I think the most recent [reason] is that there are very few Christian conservatives who were publicly Never Trump in the election who have maintained that stance. Very few.
Why have you been so stubborn on that?
I’m every bit as conservative as I was the day before Trump came down the escalator. I just think Trump is fundamentally incompatible with what I thought the conservative movement was, and I’m not willing to concede what I believe the conservative movement should be to him.
I reject this idea of all of these Americans sitting around going, “I need a president to fight for me.” You don’t. You’re a free American citizen. There is a level of panic and catastrophizing about American politics that’s way out of proportion. And that is dangerous to our body politic. I just do not believe that the defense of the values that I care the most about and have fought the hardest for in my life—I don’t think those values need Donald Trump as their champion. I don’t believe the pro-life movement needs him. I don’t think the argument for religious liberty needs him. I don’t think the argument for free speech needs him. I don’t think we need him.
We already were living in a world where progressives watch MSNBC and conservatives watch Fox News. With sites like The Dispatch and Breitbart and Jacobin, now everybody can choose the precise echo chamber that they want to live in. Does that worry you at all?
It worries me a ton.
This is a large issue, and it’s creating huge gaps of knowledge in the politicized portion of the American electorate, those people who pay close attention to politics. It’s creating a complete distortion field in our perceptions about each other.
I don’t know if you saw the More in Common research that said that the people who are most well-informed about politics are most wrong about the political beliefs of their opponents—they tend to believe that their opponents are far more extreme than they really are. That’s the product of people engaging with media that feeds that perception. It’s exacerbating divisions. If you think the Democrats are 25–30 points more extreme than they really are, doesn’t that raise the stakes of the election a lot in your mind?
Yeah, we’ve got a real problem. And I live in the heart of Trump country, and I see it every single day. If you read Twitter, progressives will say, “Look at all those bad people in Trumpland who see all of these terrible things that Trump has done and love him anyway. What a pile of hypocrites those people are.” Well, that applies to some people. It applies to an awful lot of the very vocal Trump supporters you’ll see online, because they know everything Trump does. They have histories of condemning the same behavior in Democrats and then they just flip around.
But your average, regular, everyday Trump voter doesn’t see the world like that. The media that they watch is very effective at defending Trump and very effective at highlighting Democratic excesses and Democratic wrongdoing. So if you talked to somebody at random in Franklin, Tennessee, about Donald Trump and they pay attention to politics, they’re going to know all the best defenses of Trump about Ukraine, and they might believe that they know terrible things about Biden that have been spread around conservative media. Is it really true that they have accepted all the bad that Trump has done? No. They don’t believe it.
I’ll never forget, I had a conversation with a sweet lady at my church. She said, “Why do you, David, still not support our president?” And rather than have a long conversation…I said, “You know, I just want a president who doesn’t lie all the time.” And she looked at me, and she said, “Donald Trump lies?” with all sincerity, with every ounce of sincerity in her. This is somebody who watches Fox primetime, who listens to Rush [Limbaugh] or Mark Levin. She would be able to talk to me about the basic outlines of the Ukraine controversy or the basic outlines of the Russia investigation. But the defense of Trump comes through so powerfully that there is no perception of the truth of the underlying indictment.
Do you have any optimism about our ability to break out of this place that we’ve gotten into as a country?
Not in the short term. I don’t think that there is any significant social, cultural, political, religious trend that is pulling us together more than it’s pushing us apart. Politics is only one part of that.
There was a book written several years ago called The Big Sort. All of the trends that were identified in that book have only accelerated. We tend to live around like-minded people more than we used to. The percentage of Americans living in landslide counties, counties that went for one candidate or another by 20 points or more, is higher than it’s been since we’ve been measuring the statistic. If you look at everything from [college football to Game of Thrones], a lot of pop culture preferences map with political preferences…. And then if you look at the map of faith—where do people who go to church regularly live?—it is not an even distribution across this country. These are tectonic forces that are dividing us.
In my view, that’s one of the things that is so dangerous about nationalist conservatism. The response to these tectonic forces should not be forced centralization. It should be enhanced federalism. Let San Francisco be San Francisco. Let Franklin be Franklin. Nancy Pelosi needs to be less important in my life. And Ted Cruz needs to be less important to a San Franciscan’s life.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity. ■
Ya tenemos casos por barrio, falta saber si son
casos activos, con virus en mucosas, y en que lugares
Públicos
han estado en esos barrios en los últimos 15 días
Ver mapa:
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/coronavirus/map-coronavirus-cases-in-south-florida/2210192/
Atención, información a los aficionados. Resultados parciales del juego COVID-CITIES…
Bueno, puede que por counties Broward siga ganando, no sé, pero por ciudades Miami va ganando de calle. Tamarac todavía no juega en esa liga. Aparecen solamente 16 casos. Y eso que en Tamarac viven muchos viejos.
Deltona no sale porque es South Florida solamente. Miami-Dade y Broward. Nada de Orange, Seminole, Volusia, etc.
Breaking news: El coronavirus puede ser bueno para el planeta (según la CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/16/asia/china-pollution-coronavirus-hnk-intl/index.html
Pensándolo bien, según sus premisas es de una lógica aplastante:
La raza humana es la mayor amenaza para el planeta.
El corona ataca a la raza humana (y podría hasta exterminarla).
i.e. El corona es bueno para el planeta
No propiamente, Julián. La atmósfera con más de 400 ppm de COx nos está ofreciendo un aporte extraordinario de nutrientes al plancton y a las plantas. También los nitratos y otros minerales en la atmósfera (los nitratos por supuesto van al suelo y de allí lo toman las plantas junto con el potasio y el fósforo).
Si se suspendiera absolutamente la “contaminacion” ambiental, en 90 días tendríamos los niveles de partículas suspendidas en la atmósfera iguales a los de la prehistórica. Solamente esta mínima relentizacion del trasporte, bajará los niveles de contaminación que andan en cerca de 415-420 a menos de 400, el planeta entonces dejará de ser tan verde como hoy. Un saludo.
Termina marzo en el gueto,
Dos mil casos, 6 muertos
Para un terrible por ciento
De cero punto tres
Y no es cuento
There is evidence for reduced production of type I interferons by epithelial cells from asthmatic patients, resulting in increased susceptibility to these viral infections including coronavirus and a greater inflammatory response.