A few, you might say cultural reactions, to the SCOTUS hearing about the OSHA mandate this morning
Hi all. If anyone is reading this wondering “how are they going to rule, tell us!”, I don’t know so you can stop reading now, sorry. I offer below just a few reflections from an amateur who “watched” the hearing by watching many people live-tweet about it (which tends to be a less painful way to watch painful political things). Also… you know it is easy to state the problem, but I am always thinking “but how do we solve it?”. I welcome your commented suggestions on that point. Here are a few of my reactions.
The three liberal justices live on the holodeck
We’ve talked about the holodeck here before, the alternative reality created by the media. I think the biggest single reaction a lot of people watching the hearing had was just how badly informed the trio of Sotomayor, Kagan, and Breyer were in terms of COVID-19 and what the vaccines even do. You went in perhaps thinking “this is the US Supreme Court, these are the absolute top intellects in the land”, and then found yourself instead faced with the nonsense CNN has been spouting for two years straight. For example:
Sotomayor claimed that 100,000 children were in serious condition because of COVID-19.
This is just absolutely astonishing. "100,000 children in serious condition," per Sotomayor. Where do these people obtain their misinformation? The current national pediatric COVID census per HHS is 3,342. Many/most incidental.
A number of surprises in today's arguments, including Breyer questioning the constitutionality of the OSHA mandate. But most stunning was Sotomayor's claim that 100K kids are in serious condition or on ventilators b/c of covid. These people claim we're spreading misinformation!It is still unclear where she even got this number, which is magnificently wrong.
Sotomayor, who to speak frankly just doesn’t seem to be that intelligent, also claimed that COVID-19 deaths are at an all time high, the omicron variant is just as deadly as the delta variant, and called the disease “bloodborne”. None of these things are true.
Kagan and Breyer both seemed to think that vaccination prevents transmission, an error in knowledge of gigantic relevance to this case.
How do you respond to all of this? I read an article many years ago, which I’m sure I cannot find now, about how some companies in Silicon Valley had all voluntarily agreed among themselves to work through a sort of specialized private court system if they had any disputes with each other. And they made this agreement because they knew that if they brought their highly technical disputes into the normal court system, the judges and juries would have very little idea what they were talking about. You can’t expect a “normal judge” to be up to date on all the latest technical knowledge and language. That came to my mind during the SCOTUS hearing, when the “technical facts” about COVID-19 were quite important and several of our highest judges were getting them very much wrong.
Of course the most comprehensive solution would just be to scale state power back dramatically. Then you wouldn’t have to constantly worry about badly informed officials issuing orders on topics they don’t understand.
Conservative attorneys still think they’re operating in ideal world instead of real world
I said before the hearing even began, actually, that I feared that the good attorneys were going to go in there thinking “I’m going to make an abstract legal case about OSHA’s powers” and largely ignore the details about the actual situation on the ground, and whether an “emergency” vaccination or testing order would even do what it is nominally supposed to do given how omicron is spreading now and what our vaccines actually do (and, especially, do not) accomplish. Alas it seems my prophecy was largely correct on that point. There was a lot of frustration on Twitter expressed that the liberal justices could speak the sort of data-nonsense under our first subheading here and not be corrected by the “good team”. Well that’s probably because the good team went in there thinking they were trained as law people who would talk about the law. They didn’t realize, or didn’t want to think about, the fact that they’d actually have to go in there and argue against CNN’s so-called journalism. But that’s what you often actually have to do in our day. Many of the people making the decisions live on the holodeck. Part of your effort needs to be dragging them back into reality.
This could grow, actually, into a longer discussion about the importance of integrating knowledge in our day and having some boldness to speak beyond the narrow primary training you have received. Many churches have responded poorly to COVID-19 for a parallel reason. Pastors feel, understandably enough, “I was trained in the Bible, I can’t go commenting about health rules, that’s for other people”. But we sometimes need to confront the errors of the world where they are happening and not just stick with our comfortable formal training.
Local culture matters
I can share my most popular tweet from this morning:
Local culture matters. We’ve seen some shocked reactions from New Yorkers over the last few months who get out of New York and have this “what? People aren’t masking? Schools aren’t masking? I can just walk in places? Life is normal? What?” 92% of the votes in the last presidential election from the District of Columbia went to Biden. It is one of the most left-wing places in America, and it has been one of the most COVID-restricted places in America. If you live there, that’s going to affect your perception of what is normal and acceptable. A mass vaccination order is going to feel more reasonable if you think the country is all hysterically afraid than if you think the country is mostly already living normally.
We used to live in Missouri and I thought it was good that the capital of Missouri was Jefferson City. A pretty small city, Jefferson City. I thought the government of the state would probably be worse if it met in St. Louis. Local culture matters.
Bad definitions can confuse people forever (maybe that’s the point)
One more “justice gets something badly wrong” tweet for you here.
The problem here is the failure to distinguish “hospitalized with COVID-19” or “hospitalized because of COVID-19”. Our numbers are almost always with. We’ve had two years to fix this but for some reason (uh huh) never got around to it. The point of Kerpen’s tweet above is that the total number of people hospitalized in the US has been pretty flat. There is a spike of hospitalizations with COVID-19, because omicron is highly transmissible, but that doesn’t mean they are there because of COVID-19. Some are, of course, but especially facing a new variant that is even more transmissible, and even less serious, the failure to distinguish between “with” and “because of” has never been more misleading than it is now, up to and including misleading at least one justice of the Supreme Court.
THE END. But as I say, I’d love your comments about, “and this is how we fix this”.
As I read that a phrase kept coming to mind…”you know nothing John Snow”. Whilst sad that people in a position of such significance are so ignorant they will eventually be educated by the legal process I believe. As to what we can do I believe it’s to educate one person at a time. And how we do that is asking questions. Rather than telling them facts or trying to get them to listen to podcasts or read medical papers, ask questions. And then answer them with questions. For example, are you getting your booster shot? If I may ask, why are you making that decision? Say their answer is so they can keep other people safe. You can then say, how is you getting vaccinated keeping people safe? They may say because if I get vaccinated I can’t give it to my grandma etc. You can say, did you know that the vaccine doesn’t prevent transmission? They say yes it does. Then you ask, so how come so many vaccinated people are in hospital with Covid? Etc. You get the gist. By posing questions hopefully we can get people thinking. That is what we need. We don’t want people to just switch sides. We want them to wake up and start asking questions.
Good thoughts, David. I think the answer to "how do we fix this," is that there is no political solution to this. There is no political path out of the many problems our society has manufactured for itself. We can, however, do what Paul says in II Corinthians 6:14-18 and stop being invested in and "yoked" to these jokers and workers of unrighteousness. We can create parallel economies and a parallel culture. And, with the help of God, when the current system finally falls apart, we'll have something that will survive.
If the Supreme Court gives Brandon a green light, we still have to say no, and refuse to comply.