Progressive Economics, Dying Anti-Vaxxers, and Failed Prophecy - Dinner Table Digest № 18
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!
In today’s #DinnerTableDigest we have a piece from Ezra Klein at the New York Times on progressive economics, Sam Kestenbaum, also of the NYT on the Pentecostal media empire Charisma’s reckoning with failed prophecies, and a piece by Lili Loofbourow from Slate on how a subreddit dedicated to ‘celebrating’ the death of COVID deniers is able to show people the way out, if only because they’re not trying to do that in the first place.
The Economic Mistake the Left is Finally Confronting - Ezra Klein - New York Times
In this piece, liberal opinionator Ezra Klein offers some ideas on how the political left can move beyond stagnation. In particular, he points us towards the old Utopians, the ones who dreamed dreams about their communities, rather than the ones that wanted to talk dollars and (common) sense all the time.
“…I want to widen the definition of “supply,” a dull word within which lurks thrilling possibilities. Supply-side progressivism shouldn’t just fix the problems of the present; it should hasten the advances of the future. A problem of our era is there’s too little utopian thinking, but one worthy exception is Aaron Bastani’s “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” a leftist tract that puts the technologies in development right now — artificial intelligence, renewable energy, asteroid mining, plant- and cell-based meats, and genetic editing — at the center of a postwork, postscarcity vision.
“What if everything could change?” he asks. “What if, more than simply meeting the great challenges of our time — from climate change to inequality and aging — we went far beyond them, putting today’s problems behind us like we did before with large predators and, for the most part, illness? What if, rather than having no sense of a different future, we decided history hadn’t actually begun?”
Life After Proclaiming a Trump Re-election as Divinely Ordained - Sam Kestenbaum - New York Times
What happens when a Pentecostal media empire ‘prophesies’ in the name of Christ with respect to President Trump’s divinely ordained second term in office, and then he doesn’t win a second term? They ignore their failed prophesies, mostly.
Beyond the spiritual test of unrealized prophecies, there are very earthly stakes here: Under Mr. Strang’s stewardship, Charisma had grown from a church magazine to a multipronged institution with a slew of New York Times best sellers, millions of podcast downloads and a remaining foothold in print media, with a circulation of 75,000 for its top magazine. It is widely regarded as the flagship publication of the fast-growing Pentecostal world, which numbers over 10 million in the United States. With its mash-up of political and prophetic themes, Charisma had tapped a sizable market and electoral force. In 2019, one poll found that more than half of white Pentecostals believed Mr. Trump to be divinely anointed, with additional research pointing to the importance of so-called prophecy voters in the 2016 election.
A beautiful piano cover of one of my favourite melodeath metal songs, ‘Heart Like a Grave’ by Insomnium
The Unbelievable Grimness of HermanCainAward, the Subreddit That Catalogs Anti-Vaxxer COVID Deaths - Lili Loofbourow - Slate Magazine
I haven’t been on reddit much lately. This piece explores the unbearable reality that many anti-vaxxers will lose their lives with COVID-19. More specifically, it highlights how active these folks were as anti-COVID-Vaxxers, posting about 30 or so of the same kinds of memes, often shouting down folks who were pro-vaxx, in contrast to the sedated and matter-of-fact way that their deaths are announced. One of the biggest problems in our highly specialized culture is that specialists don’t talk very often to non-specialists. Nobody is out explaining to people on a regular basis about the intricacies of molecular biology or virology, as if the hoi polloi would listen. Instead, because we have pushed death and dying to the side, as if it were not part of the cycle of life, we are forced to come face to face with its reality in other scarier ways. COVID-19, which - to be fair - has borne out patterns from the past in terms of resistance to public health measure, is just one more example of what happens when we can’t figure out how to marry specialized knowledge with the more general knowledge that we need to live our basic lives.
It has always been and remains a problem that COVID is functionally invisible to so many Americans. We already medicalize death more than most cultures, but the sensible restrictions on visitors to COVID wards have meant that the disease crippling hospitals across the country goes mostly unwitnessed. We all know getting on a ventilator is bad and having to go on an ECMO machine is worse, but most of us have not heard what lungs sound like when they have that by-now-classic “ground glass appearance” in scans. We have not watched people panicking and yanking tubes out because they can’t breathe. [Ed. - I yanked out my ventilator tube while in recovery from surgery. It set my healing back by two weeks, and has resulted in long term damage to my vocal chords.] We have not seen patients swollen and full of air, unrecognizable. Or proned. Or having their last conversation before they go on the ventilator.
You don’t see most of this stuff in these r/HermanCainAward screenshots, either, but you do see a lot you just wouldn’t otherwise. Specifically, you see the suffering. It’s filtered, of course, usually through collapsing defiance and positive thinking that fails. People post that they’re not feeling well when they’ve already become patients. They usually put it simply, with a request for prayers. The contrast to their grandstanding in prior posts acts as an intensifier; that they aren’t commenting on the very thing they’ve preached about so much comes to serve—cumulatively, as you read these—as evidence of just how awful they feel. The selfies can be brutal. The photographs family members post are worse because the patient is frequently unconscious, bloated, clearly in a bad way. Relatives’ updates tend to feature obsessive medical details like ventilator settings and oxygen saturations, and you learn to recognize the time course of the disease: When mentions of dialysis start up, you know, as a reader, that the prognosis is poor. The death announcement—once the requests for prayers and hopes for miracles are over—frequently reveals how much worse it really was than anyone let on: You find out the patient also had MRSA, or had developed an autoimmune disease, or had struggled with strokes and clots.
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