By David Futrelle
People often ask “who funds The Federalist,” assuming that the answer is some shadowy right-wing billionaire who finds the site’s crackpot conservatism congenial. But I think I’ve found the actual answer: it’s the coronavirus. Yes, that’s right: the coronavirus is funding The Federalist.
I was led to this conclusion by a pair of articles that went up on the site today arguing, quite seriously, that hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of coronavirus deaths might be a fair price to pay for an early end to the not-quite-national shutdown that has millions of Americans now “sheltering in place” to help control the virus’ spread.
If you think I’m exaggerating or engaging in rhetorical overkill, nope. I’m basically just paraphrasing. In an article posted on The Federalist today, Hillsdale College grad student Jonathan Ashbach writes
It seems harsh to ask whether the nation might be better off letting a few hundred thousand people die. … Yet honestly facing reality is not callous, and refusing even to consider whether the present response constitutes an even greater evil than the one it intends to mitigate would be cowardly.
In addition to the economic costs of the shutdown, and what he sees as a fundamental loss of freedom, Ashbach worries that all this social distancing is making our lives a lot less fun.
“[C]onsider the massive sacrifice of life Americans are making in their social distancing campaign,” he writes.
True, nearly all are not literally dying, but they are giving up a good deal of what makes life worth living — work, classes, travel, hugs, time with friends, conferences, quiet nights out, and so forth. Probably almost everyone would be willing to live a somewhat shorter normal life rather than a somewhat longer life under current conditions. The abandonment of normalcy, therefore, is in many ways equivalent to shortening the lives of the entire nation.
He’s rather have hugs and death than a temporary loss of hugs. One wonders if his blithe acceptance of the possibility of mass death may have something to do with the fact that as a grad student (presumably in his twenties or early 30s) he is much less likely to be one of the dead than, for example, those over the age of 70.
When it comes to Federalist executive editor and self-described “happy wife” Joy Pullman, one does not have to wonder: she plainly acknowledges that she’s unlikely to die if the current state lockdowns are brought to an early end. But when it comes to the country as a whole, she’d prefer mass death to massive deficits.
“My point here is not that I like people dying,” she wrote.
It’s that very often our society chooses to allow deaths because the alternative is worse. I’m suggesting the severe social and economic tradeoffs of unlimited quarantine are an important consideration that is not being taken seriously enough. …
The costs Americans are being forced to bear may be more than is rational to impose.
She’s well aware that the cost of abandoning the current lockdowns could be utterly devastating; indeed, she begins her article citing a report predicting that without social distancing the deaths in the US alone from cornonavirus could reach 4 million, two million more than the deaths that could result if we stay locked down. Naturally, she prefers the considerably more optimistic takes on the subject that have come from others on the political right, but she knows that serious researchers think the cost in lives could run into the millions.
Nonetheless, she suggested in one of the article’s subheads that “a depression will ruin 330 million lives, not 4 million.” She worries that cash payments from the government to ordinary Americans will “[addict] millions to welfare … transform[ing them] from workers to takers,” while “many” others will “die due to poverty, lack of medical care, and despair.”
Huh. That last bit sounds like a plug for socialized medicine and a stronger welfare state, but of course to Pullman the very idea is anathema.
In the end, she decides that she’d rather risk coronavirus than a massive economic slump. I mean, why should she and others like her suffer economically when they’re not even part of the group of people most likely to die from the disease?
Why would the entire nation grind to a halt when the entire nation is not at a severe risk? I would rather have a flu I am 99.8 percent likely to survive than the nation plunged into chaos indefinitely because we pulled the plug on our economy during a stampede.
In other words: I’ve got my health, fuck the rest of you.
It would be one thing if this thinking was confined to the fringes of the crackpot right. But it’s not just Federalist writers who see the disease this way. Indeed, Donald Trump himself seems to be suggesting in one recent tweet that he’s getting pretty annoyed with the effect all this social distancing is having on the stock market, and that he might be considering a more laissez faire approach.
At the daily coronovirus briefing today, Trump went further. ”
“America will again and soon be open for business — very soon,” he said. “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”
The Federalist is providing Trump with handy talking points for whatever terrible policy — or non-policy — he decides to enact when the 15 days are over on March 30. Depending on what he does or does not do,4 million deaths may turn out to be too optimistic a projection.
H/T — Dr. Nerdlove, who drew my attention to these articles
UPDATE: Story updated with quote from the coronavirus briefing.
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For those who might be interested, a rebuttal to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s wish for the ‘old people’ to hurry up and die so everything can go back to normal again:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/thoughtfulpastor/2020/03/25/older-people-useless-dan-patrick-husband-die/
Basically she listed many of the ways she and her husband and friends are helping out during this crisis, things that aren’t exactly ‘useless’ to other people.
@Lainy:
“Aerial silk”?
Are you Spiderwoman?! 🙂
@surplus
I’ll get you a video of it
I’m practicing with my air guitar, in my aerial silk pajamas.
Well the link I post didn’t post. Any ways to be honest with y’all I wanted to try aerial silks because I watched the youtuber markiplier try out a class for it and it seemed really fun, challenging and a little scary. plus like pole dancing it has a kind of elegant sexiness to it that I really like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwHIKlK-4Dg&t=1096s
Gotta say love how none of them ever assume it’s going to be them or their loved ones dying because of it.
Thank you. Seems like this would almost allow the sort of things that you could do in weightlessness. I wonder if we’ll see an explosion of new dance, acrobatic, etc. art forms when there’s a substantial population living in space?
@Surplus
I can imagine we would. And if we have lots of people living on other planets, the separation would allow for very different cultures to develop on different worlds. Each world would be a blank canvas culturally, to develop new cultures from those brought by settlers (assuming no sentient extraterrestrial life, of course). Who knows what religions would develop on Mars, or what language would evolve on Titan?
@Naglfar:
One thing we don’t know is how much gravity humans, as well as earth life in general, needs in order to grow and function properly.
We know humans can handle 1.50 G to 0.98 G long term with no issues. We know that virtually no earth life functions quite right at 0.001 G, and our bodies slowly fall apart, in more ways than just muscular dystrophy. Mars is 0.38 G. Which side of the line does it fall on? What happens if the line is fuzzy and it falls in that fuzzy area?
The answer to that will determine whether we end up with humans living on Mars, or humans using Mars as a mining base and living in rotating space stations around it. In the latter case, we probably won’t get any new cultures which are heavily shaped by life in lower gravity. At least not until we’re able to use genetic engineering to splinter ourselves into countless new species.
[Edit] There is some optimism that humans can function properly long-term on Mars, given that the Chang’e 4 Mission proved that crop plants can sprout on the moon in a sealed environment (0.16 G). That’s not nearly enough evidence in itself, obviously.
@Snowberry
I think we’d still develop new cultures regardless of whether we live on space stations or on the ground. Telecommunications would be out due to the latency, internet would be unusable, and travel would be months. There would be a degree of disconnect from other humans not seen since before the telegraph era, so it seems likely that new dialects and rituals would develop.
@Naglfar: True, but my answer was meant to be in the context of low-gravity culture, not culture in general. Thing is, Luna is right there and easier to get stuff off of, and there are like a bajillion asteroids, so if Mars ends up not having enough gravity then we can expect the vast majority of civilized development for the forseeable future will be in Cislunar space. That’s close enough to be heavily influenced by Earth cultures. Given the time and expense needed to create a giant space station to begin with, I don’t think those will see a lot of deviation from their founding culture in the vast majority of cases… unless the Earth goes kaboomey and they’re on their own, or the super-rich try to create exotic isolated cultures as a hobby.
We can expect at least a few attempts to crowdsource Galt’s Space Gulch, obviously. Probably all end up being scams.
@Snowberry
Definitely a possibility. Elon Musk would probably be the first to try, seeing as he is very wealthy and tries a lot of strange ideas.
That will probably happen pretty quickly, seeing as libertarians would be all over the idea of a place without laws (because presumably they haven’t heard of the Outer Space Treaty and there’s no one to enforce it anyway) yet they tend to be short on actually thinking things through.
@Snowberry:
Probably all end up breathing vacuum. Hull integrity is a public good that will be undersupplied by an unfettered free market.
@Naglfar:
Helps that he is one of the few, even among the überrich, who already has his own personal space launch capability.
@Naglfar: re: languages
Probably no new languages would emerge because that society and ours would still be in constant contact, which makes language change slow down, plus we have a written language, which slows language change even further. What would most likely happen would be like happened in English, Spanish, French, etc. Over time, different accents and styles of speaking and slang have emerged, but when you get down to it, for example, British, American, Australian, and Canadian English are all still English. We’d get a titanese version of English (or Chinese or whatever) but most people speaking the language here would be able to understand.
I hope this isn’t rambly and actually makes some sense.
It would work similarly to how English is now.
@Yutolia
So we’d get new dialects? Still could be interesting.
But even if they were technically speaking the same language, would they still understand each other? The example I’m thinking of is putting a guy with a thick Cockney accent/slang in the same room with a guy who has a thick Texas drawl/slang, and seeing how well they understand each other. Wouldn’t the same things apply for the theoretical Venusian and the Titanian when it comes to understanding each other?
For that matter, plenty of the people in India hired to do American tech support are native speakers of English, it’s just not American or British English, nor yet Cameroonian English. And then there’s things like Scots, Krio, or Gullah, which are loosely based on English but aren’t really the same language. Catalàn still isn’t Spanish either, as far as I know, and in the event that off-Earth settlements become feasible it’s totally plausible that many such settlements would be founded by ethnic and/or religious separatists of various stripes, which us the kind of thing that can spawn novel language variants surprisingly quickly.
@Dalillama
Catalan is rather different from Spanish, to me it sounds more like French in the pronunciation and orthography. When I was in Barcelona a few years ago, I was unable to understand Catalan despite my knowledge of Spanish. Though I don’t speak Catalan, so someone who speaks it would have a better perspective.
The thing is that the boundary between dialect and language is fuzzy and often political. There’s a saying attributed to Max Weinreich that “a language is a dialect with an army and navy.” For example, Moldovan was not considered its own language until 1991 when Moldova became an independent country despite it having been considered a dialect of Romanian before. Or how Catalan is often called a dialect despite being quite different from Spanish.
I would expect that that could happen, seeing as a number of present-day countries (such as much of the Americas) were settled by religious groups.
@Dalillama
It’s funny, I find Scots perfectly comprehensible, even the words that have no English analogue like “scunnered.”
Apparently many other non-Scots speakers have far more difficulty. For example, the Wikipedia article on Robert Burns’ “To A Mouse” features a line-by-line “English translation” that “translates” many words that mean the same thing in 21st-century English as they did in 18th-century Scots. Most egregiously “beastie” into “beast,” which actually causes it to lose the meaning the word conveyed. “Beastie,” in both languages/dialects, is diminutive and affectionate. “Beast” is neither.
@Redsilkphoenix:
In evolutionary biology, an analogous phenomenon is called “ring species”. It’s one more reason for “dialect” vs. “separate language” to be fuzzy: even the seemingly objective standard of mutual intelligibility may fail, because as a relation it is not transitive: A and B may be mutually intelligible, and B and C may be, without A and C being. (Consolation prize: speakers of B have guaranteed employment as translators when A and C need to communicate.)
@Naglfar:
Could you understand Portugese? I’m curious if it’s closer to Spanish than Catalan is. I take it all of them (and French and Italian, and probably others) derive ultimately from Latin.
As I recall the real oddball in Europe is Basque, spoken in some enclaves inside present-day France but not even derived from Proto-Indo-European. Likely a remnant from some aboriginal population that was all but wiped out by some ancient conquest circa six or seven thousand years ago, if not even older. (Perhaps Neandertals spoke it!) Certainly it’s in the expected location for such a remnant: along the west coastal region of the continent, in the areas that would have held out the longest when the Proto-Indo-European army came marching and pillaging across the landscape lo those many millennia ago.
It’s not the only one. Many of the others are around the edges of Europe, including Sámi and Finnish in the north, but not all. The Ural Mountains provided shelter to tribes speaking such languages as (ancestors of) Estonian and Hungarian. There’s also a hybrid of Latin and Arabic languages, Maltese, in the Mediterranean, the result of the long-running intellectual (and often military) tug-of-war between Christendom and the Islamic world over the last millennium or so.
In biological species, isolated habitats such as islands and valleys with a different surrounding biome provide shelter to diversity, while large expanses of a single biome become melting pots and hotbeds of competition. With human languages (and cultures and everything else “memetic”) a similar thing happens: anywhere naturally militarily defensible (mountain redoubts, islands) allows for preservation of culture against would-be conquerors and their penchants for assimilational and sometimes exterminational genocide. From these seeds can sometimes sprout fresh descendants of a once-besieged culture, starting with as little as a monastery up some mountainside or a village in a valley surrounded by defensible passes and judged “too much blood for too little treasure” by tyrannical rulers of nearby polities. (Deliberately avoiding having treasure helps a lot here. Monasteries with their vows of poverty are not very tempting targets, especially when, as they usually do, they claim to have supernatural friends in extremely high places that might smite anyone who dares desecrate them.)
Plains full of arable land on the other hand get washed over by army after army, empire after empire, and become recombinating melting-pots where cultures are readily obliterated and new ones readily arise by the amalgamation of existing ones. So there are all these interesting little languages in rugged coastal regions, up the mountains, and on Mediterranean islands, but only a few big language groups in the central plains of Europe, where Germanic, Latinate, and Slavic languages predominate now.
Oh, one more thing found on a Mediterranean island, eventually, was the culture that spawned the peculiar Voynich Manuscript. It turned out to be Latin-derived, but having completely reinvented the writing system, just about.
@Allandrel
My experience of Scots is that with context I can usually understand it, but individual words by themselves often are different enough from English for me to miss them.
@Surplus
When it’s spoken, I can’t really understand it much, but I can read it to some degree (the pronunciation is rather different from Spanish). Maybe a native Spanish speaker would have more understanding of Portuguese?
FWIW it seems linguists class Spanish and Portuguese closer together than Catalan is to either of them, as Catalan is usually placed as a Gallo-Romance language like French and Occitan while Spanish and Portuguese are Ibero-Romance.
If Neanderthals spoke anything resembling Basque, it would be very different than the modern language, as even isolate languages shift over millennia.
I’ve heard multiple theories about the Voynich Manuscript, but was unaware that any had been confirmed. I like the XKCD comic about it, however improbable:
When I was younger I didn’t realize how many Indian and Pakistani people spoke English as their first language. I might not realize that now, but my college had a ton of South Asian students. Although I don’t think South Asian English is super different than British English, just with a different accent. I actually first learned a lot of Britishisms from my friend who’s from Karachi.
Surplus wrote:
It’s interesting to speculate on what factors have driven linguistic takeovers in large areas. Of course, while languages do evolve phylogenetically, they can also absorb aspects (more than just vocabulary) from competing, unrelated or distantly related languages.
The original Indo-European expansion is thought to have been driven by the military and economic advantage gained from horse domestication, horse riding and wagon transport in primitive farming societies. Later on, IE languages spoken in central Eurasian steppe zone were displaced by Turkic language expansion, driven by more sophisticated horse warfare technology.
I should note that Proto-Uralic also had a major expansion several millennia ago, across the hunter-gatherer societies of northeastern Europe and western Siberia. The reasons for this seem to be unclear. Later on, some Ugric branch speakers from western Siberia went along with the horse-riding Turkic language expansion, and eventually managed to establish their language in what is now Hungary.
It seems that in the northern areas, unsuitability of the environment for agriculture (or suitable for only marginal agriculture) slowed down Indo-European language encroachment over the less competitive Uralic languages. Eventually, fairly recently, Slavic took over what is now northern European Russia. The survival of remaining Uralic speaking communities is generally not tied to mountain areas, but rather (apparently) to random chance, and in some cases to either far northern areas, or marshy and remote areas (marginal for agriculture, and less connected to the main Russian speaking population).