The Washington Examiner is a right-wing paper, and it’s angry at us. It’s trying to cut through this coronavirus noise, and tell us something. My God, why is no one listening? What will it take?
Iran repeatedly attacks US troops while coronavirus outbreak distracts public attention.
Repeatedly! And during a pandemic! The nerve of those people! Continue reading
I just got a frightened text message from a friend who read my last post, and asked me to convince his teenager both to take coronavirus more seriously, and to be more rigorous about social distancing. He’s one of a small handful of people to have expressed horror at that post, either on Facebook or offline.
This is the article that did it for him:
Italy suffered its worst day of the coronavirus outbreak Tuesday, recording 475 deaths. The epicenter of the pandemic in Europe, Italy is further along an infection curve other countries in the west appear to be following, and its healthcare system has buckled under the weight of 35,000 cases.
I agreed to do it. He thanks me for being “Dial-a-Philosopher.” Continue reading
A sample of comments that my wife and I managed to hear in a single day, Tuesday, March 17, from people talking about the coronavirus (except for #9, from different places in New Jersey).
(1) 11:30 am:
This whole coronavirus thing just strikes me as bullshit.
The overture:
I count it as a great blessing that I have so far, at age fifty, managed to avoid becoming a father. Amusingly enough, my ex-wife once told me, flat out, “Before I met you, I was on the fence about having children. I no longer am. You would make a terrible father. So I’ve abandoned the idea.” Music to my ears.
And yet, I’ve just had a phone conversation with one of my best friends, in which he asked me whether I would temporarily take custody of his child in the event that both he and his wife die of COVID-19. “Yes,” I say, without hesitation. I actually like his kid, as kids go. Granted, the custody he imagines is temporary, until family members could come and do a formal adoption. My friend knows me well enough to know that coronavirus or no, it makes little sense to turn me into a bona fide step-father. One catastrophe is enough. Continue reading
I shouldn’t have to make this point in this, our post-Auschwitzean age, but just a quick PSA, FYI: age-based genocide (or even malice or discrimination) is immoral. And PS, a pandemic is not the time to be wishing death on the elderly. Call me crazy, but there’s no good time to be wishing death on anyone. And yet I’ve seen more than one instance, on Facebook and elsewhere, of people’s expressing genocidal or near-genocidal sentiments about the elderly. Genocidal sentiments aside, there’s been no shortage of ageist malice for “Boomers,” or “old people.” Paraphrase of a rant I saw in the comments section of a local newspaper:
The Boomers raised our rents, gouged us on tuition, saddled us with debts, dragged us into unwanted wars, pay us crap wages, and vote the wrong way: so good riddance to them; may they all drop dead.
Substitute “Jews” for “boomers” or “the disabled” in rants of this sort, and you have the logic of the Final Solution-by-viral-proxy. Continue reading
I had a sobering half-hour phone conversation today with my brother Suleman, a hospitalist at Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, New Jersey. Ridgewood lies just a few miles northwest of the current epicenter of coronavirus cases in New Jersey, Teaneck. My own county, Hunterdon, has just seen its first case. Continue reading
Michael Young and I are hanging out at an undisclosed location in New Jersey, riding out the coronavirus by trading barbed moral intuitions with (or at?) each other. We need help. I mean, we need your help adjudicating a clash of intuitions about injustice. I doubt that anything of great significance turns on which set of intuitions is right. But I called bullshit on some of the crap Michael was slinging at me, telling him that I would appeal for a verdict to the Final Authority of All Philosophical Authorities, vox populi. Or at least the voice of a handful of self-selected readers of Policy of Truth, the moral and epistemic paragons of the Internet.
I won’t tell you which of us holds which view until I get some responses. This is my idea of an incentive to get you to respond. Like you care. Continue reading
Most of the world right now is focused, with good reason, on the coronavirus. For that reason, it will probably have escaped most people’s attention that the Iranian proxy war against the US in Iraq continues, and continues to produce American casualties in the quiet, imperceptible way that dust collects on a table. Continue reading
It’s a little known fact that Plato’s truly last and final dialogue was called “The Coronavirus,” took place on a college campus in north Jersey, featured a protagonist named “Khawaja,” and had a soundtrack by Ozzy:
Student 1, walking down the quad: So Khawaja, are we closing or not?
Khawaja: I don’t know.
Student 2: You don’t know? What do you mean you don’t know?
Khawaja: I don’t know.
Policy of Truth 