Boy, it sure is nice to see so many old names.

Sam

KY

Halfway through my thirties

Current situation: ER RN, but my wife and I have been discussing the prospect of both going back to (the same) school (at the same time) for our DNPs so we can become family practitioners. There's a lot of comfort in the idea- she's the smartest person I know, and my best friend. Think it would help get through another school slog.

Had passions, but the Nintendo Switch took care of those. Civ VI is alternately the stupidest thing I've ever wasted time on and the most addictive. I haven't made a song in months. Waiting for my birthday, and I'm gonna ask birthday santa for an old tascam portastudio tape four track. Then I plan on making a set of songs with it. Until then, I'm slowly bleeding money into mastering old stuff with the tentative plan of putting it on bandcamp for the world to ignore.

My oldest daughter asked me to teach her how to play Magic: The Gathering the other day and that reminded me, once again, how awesome parenthood is.

Apologies for the delayed response- I spent almost all of yesterday driving.

I think the issue I hold with the above thought experiment is that you've managed at once to overly narrow and broaden the subject of the discussion to a point at which the original subject matter gets lost in the shuffle. We're no longer talking about racism versus nationalism versus xenophobia, we're talking about the merits and pitfalls of Sharia law- essentially a policy discussion. And we can argue the benefits and pitfalls of Sharia, but it's a little like listening to somebody complain about the Jews' conspiracy to control world media and then say, "let's dig into that, though; would a worldwide monopoly on the media really benefit us as a polity?"

Reading Roseanna and Amy's comments as charitably as you have for a moment, I'll discard nearly every other portion of the original quote; I'll ignore the part about "stinkin' Muslim crap" and "Muslim through and through" and "that's not America" and the speculation of whether or not this Somali immigrant-cum-stateswoman is here legally, and focus solely, as you'd have it, on her passing reference to Sharia. We then have to examine where she got this "Sharia" notion. Is there anything in Omar's voting record that indicates an affinity towards Sharia law? Have Rosanna and Amy studied Sharia? Do they even know what it means? In order to have the discussion you want, we have to take it as a matter of course that when they say "all that Muslim crap," they only take issue with the specter of Sharia, and that they are coming to the discussion with a viewpoint as informed as your own vis-a-vis apostasy, vis-a-vis state response to homosexuality, vis-a-vis capital and corporal punishment, etc. Furthermore, we have to grant that they care to recognize that "Sharia" only encompasses one practical portion of a fundamentalist minority of the world's second largest religion with a history spanning several millennia.

But ultimately, to do so would be absurd. I think you and I can agree without too much controversy that in the above case, "Sharia" is shorthand. It's a condensation of a rich and broad culture into a bogeyman signifier. Look, here's Islam:

And here's Islam:

And here it is again:

So why is it that in these discussions we always have to approach it from the terms of this

and this

and this?

You opened the discussion searching for a working definition of racism. I'd say that when person A narrows the culture, religion, and physical characteristics of person B down to the basest caricature, and then rejects person B based on that caricature, that's as good a definition of racism as one might need.

So, then. If it's not too hypocritical (I'll leave that up to your good judgment), I'd argue a sort of like-for-like. If someone is comfortable simplifying my cultural standpoint down to a cartoonish shorthand, I'm comfortable discarding the finer distinctions between xenophobia, racism and nationalism in favor of a catch-all term, in this case racism. The problem with ten-dollar words is that they have a way of sterilizing subject matter. As a for instance, "nationalism" has recently been re-introduced into the American lexicon as a non-pejorative. If we call all of what was discussed above "ethno-nationalism" rather than "racism," isn't it entirely possible that we might then inadvertently deem such behavior acceptable? Better to err on the side here of stigma rather than normalization, I think. Racism is a fine word for it.

For all that, though, your point is well taken. We could be only a little less charitable to the above actors and assume that their issue with Rep. Omar has nothing to do with the color of her skin in conjunction with her cultural background, and only has to do with her religion. When John F. Kennedy ascended to the presidency, there were those who vocally decried his "Papist" affinities and wondered whether the Vatican would now run the White House. This isn't a perfect analog for our current discussion, but it subtracts the thornier issues of phenotype. In which case, "racism" wouldn't exactly fit the bill, would it? Taken in this light, I can respect your original point. I ask you, then, to reconsider mine. Whether or not the dumbing-down of a religious or cultural group to base signifiers, and then ascribing nefarious motives to this simplified Other is racist or xenophobic or ethno-nationalist becomes extraneous. It all merits an unequivocal condemnation.

"I have news for everybody: Get over it. There's going to be political influence in foreign policy,"

- A totally unironic Mick Mulvaney

I'm done with nursing school. Top of class, for what it's worth. Feels good, man. I've now got a BSN, and I'll be starting in the Emergency Department in a month or so after passing boards. Surreal.

Workload was shitty, but the curriculum was fascinating. Studying the cardiovascular system was as close as I've ever come to believing in a higher power. Makes me a little sad I never went to med school. Will probably go back at some point to get a DNP, but for the time being I'm good with turning my brain off, getting back into dad mode and making music on my off days.

Can't argue with you. I've been thinking for weeks now that the current situation has really monkeywrenched conservative/libertarian arguments in favor of small government and free market capitalism. I've ALWAYS thought that libertarianism of all stripes has only ever come off as appealing in times of plenty. Which of course is self-defeating, since one of the points of modern liberal democratic government is to provide a safeguard against instability. Come to think of it, that's just about any government. And a government small enough to drown in a bathtub may look good as long as the boom times are keeping cash in your pocket, but as soon as an uncontrollable calamity hits and you realize you don't have the funds or the institutions in place to organize a collective, central response and states start to look like independent fiefdoms and local governments have to bid against each other and the federal government and private actors and extra-national entities for supplies and there aren't enough tests around to properly contain the spread of a deadly disease because the government couldn't or wouldn't get their shit together in time and now there is no standardized test but a balkanized system of six or seven tests all with their own flaws and wait times and people are dying like crazy... yeah. Maybe we should have a stronger federal government. In case something like that happens.

Fun anecdote. Last week we started a new policy at work. We're given one surgical face mask to use for the whole day; at the end of the day we drop our used mask into a box so it can be sterilized and recycled. We're now on the second cycle of masks. You can see smudges on some of them from the makeup of whoever wore them before. I have to take it on faith that they're actually clean. But the elastic on the ear bands? Already giving out. And the metal that shapes to the contour of your face is weirdly flimsy, so the masks hang loose now. And everybody is just glad that we haven't yet resorted to bandannas. Why does capitalism feel so much like one big Soviet workaround right now?

At a fundamental, Lockian level, the point of modern liberal democratic government is to address the externalities produced by capitalism. Collective security? Externality. Consumption or national resources? Externality. Rampant inequality? Externality. But shortsightedness is an externality as well. Maybe the biggest, least-addressed of a free market system. And unfortunately, shortsightedness feeds itself until we as a society convince ourselves that government isn't useful. And then when we're reminded again of the whole point, it's too late, and we are forced to eat each other to make it through the winter.

That said, I'd be interested to hear the stance of those here who are dyed-in-the-wool libertarians or conservatives. I know there are a few kicking around, and like you, am_Unition, I really want to understand the counterpoint.

The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.

FTFY:

The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as THE REPUBLICAN PARTY have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.

Hey, I'll even take "not enough" at this point. But the numbers are selective. Ventilators are important, but actually not indicated or advised for all cases (some populations are at much higher risk for death by secondary VAP in these situations- early reports by professionals working with COVID patients recommend avoiding ventilation for certain populations). High PEEP devices such as BIPAP will also be used. As will ECMO.

The article also notes critical bed shortages, but ignores measures taken in already hard-hit communities re. expanding capacity by transforming non-essential facilities into more critical bedspace.

Is it enough? No. Is it still going to be totally overwhelming? Yes. But calling all efforts to lessen the impact "a deadly delusion," and then closing the argument by saying "but this is all back of the napkin stuff, please don't quote me" seems... unhelpful?

Not to mention, after all that, he says "you know what helps? Containment." Which last I checked was one leg of the curve-flattening stool. Is he NOT recommending hand hygiene and social distancing when isolation isn't possible?

I've heard it further suggested that NYC public schools aren't closing because fully 113,000 of their students are legit homeless so the whole "your college food bank is unavailable because of pestilence" is just the tip of the Dickensian spear here.

When I think about it, this waaay more sad than funny? But gaddamn if I didn't laugh out loud. Which I've found myself doing at all the least appropriate moments in the last two weeks. Like all that's left for us is to dance in front of the fire.

I'm not worried about supply shortages or the logistics of tele-educating. The JCPS system is such a shitshow that my kids' school could burn down tomorrow and we wouldn't see a blip in either direction in their MAP scoring. Might go up, seems like they learn more on the weekends anyway.

I am absolutely worried about the fact that three weeks ago, our hospitals had no tele beds available, no ICU/CCU beds available, and we were boarding septic shock patients in ER overflow. That was BEFORE all this tomfuckery. I'm worried about the fact that our ER's plan for how to deal with COVID19 patients is to slap a mask on them and move them into one of our negative pressure rooms. Of which we have two. I'm worried that respiratory therapy's best estimate on how many vents our hospital has approaches 80, which is a far cry from, you know, building an entirely new hospital for COVID19 patients in a matter of a few days. I'm worried about the reports from medical staff in Italy which amount to "hey guys, so woah, we are way over our heads here and it's just spooling up for us, so y'all best pucker your butts." Meanwhile, Louisville is essentially a straight split between newlyweds and nearly-deads. We got old people for days. And I'm wondering what'll happen to all the really, really sick people we see NOW when our cup overfloweth with ARDS patients.

just let me tell ya bout/this fuckin' day I'm havin'. Sailing along midday when a patient's dropped into one of my rooms: left-sided weakness, right-sided facial droop, disoriented to time/place/situation, found by her friend on the floor, last known normal yesterday 1pm. So we're thinking stroke, although left weakness and right facial droop make no fucking sense for stroke but whatever she's out of the treatment window no biggie. Drag her to CT and nothing shows- she's not stroking, but she's definitely Ay-1 fucked up. Getting an IV in her takes forever because she's big and old and dehydrated and UGH so it's a good hour and a half before she's lined and phlebotomy can finally get all the blood we need; BUN comes back in the 40s uh oh Creat comes back 3.3 nonono K comes back 6.1 oh come the fuck on lactic comes back 7.2 7.2 FOR THE LOVE OF GOD

back it up

Lactic is an indicator of how much oxygen the cells in your body are working with. It's the best indicator of sepsis, wherein due to a major infectious process your cells are working on anaerobic metabolism and pumping out lactic acid and basically that's not supposed to happen for protracted periods of time and it's not a good sign if your lactics are high. Normal lactic is 0.6 to 1.2.

So this lady is basically circling the drain and I'm in the weeds and my other three patients are just treading water while I flounder and I'm still on orientation and my nurse preceptor has to jump in and save me and

back it up

You may not know me at this point. I'm seeing a lot of grey names in this thread and in general and that means I've been gone awhile and there are new faces or else old faces stopped giving a shit about me which is fine. Either way, let the record show that I once said some stuff here and posted some content here and I may again at some point in the future. For the time being, here's me:

A year and change ago I joined an accelerated nursing program- BSN in one year, which for those in the know is fucking crazy, the normal accel program is two years compressed from four. We started the year with 120 students, ended with 78. I made it through not to toot my own horn (totally to fucking toot my own horn) top of class with all sorts of silly awards to show for it. I managed to postpone the nervous breakdown I'd been denying all year until graduation day, which I skipped in favor of staying in my bed, terrified that I was dying. For the better part of two months. Happy graduation, I guess. Five months and a Buspar prescription later, I'm a nurse in the ER, and by God I feel like I'm helping people. 60 percent of the time. The other 40 percent I feel like I'm just constantly fucking up.

And now here I am, month three into my orientation and holy hell, some days I just don't know if I can do it. Most folks on my unit started somewhere sleepier, like telemetry or general med-surg. I'm beginning to see the benefit to that. It's like picking up a pair of skis for the first time after watching some skiing videos and being like "I'm a skier now!" and then heli-dropping into some triple black diamond in the swiss alps and there are hungry bears on surfboards riding an avalanche after you.

Days like today, I feel like just disappearing, not showing back up to work or anywhere day after tomorrow. And I don't have many friends and I don't have many outlets so here I am, ghosted for the better part of a year only to show up briefly to shit out my worries in the corner of an imaginary bar. You're welcome, world

Haven't had time to make real music recently, but I've been puttering around on a new (to me) analog drum machine I bought myself for my birthday. So I've been making beats. Like so:

Soon I hope to have the requisite time again to make songs out of said beats. Until then, just beats.

This is exactly what my wife heard from her old work cohort. This feels like a waking nightmare.

We're not yet out of surgical masks or respirators, but with conservative use we'll still be out by next week, just before the shit is really projected to hit the fan. The president of our ED physician's group has told us not to bother soliciting the community to sew masks, as there's essentially no evidence to suggest that they're at all effective.

CDC, as I'm sure you know, is recommending bandanas. It's like if we sent our soldiers to war without body armor. And then recommended that when they ran out of bullets they should just point their finger at the enemy and make a shooty sound.

The first cases are trickling into our hospital. Had one guy last week in a serious way and his chest CT was sobering. He's now on a vent and people are saying critical but stable, but given that average stay in ICU before death was something like 19-21 days in China, I'm betting his ticket comes pre-punched. Then two days ago we had two more like him. I'm off until Tuesday, and I have no idea what I'll go back to.

I'm a hundred percent gonna get it at some point in the following months. 35 is not young enough to feel like I'm gonna glide through. And I'm relatively healthy? But I've also had a chronic cough since I was about 15 and I'm betting my cilia are beaten all to hell. I've had at least one major panic attack per day, but I'm back on my anxiety meds so I got that going for me. But until they kick into full effect, I feel like I'm constantly progressing through finer and finer striations of dread. The dread of what work will be like when I go back. Dread of whether I'll be the one assigned to the COVID-heavy pod. Dread of what my PPE will be like. The dread of waiting for symptoms to kick in. When they inevitably do, eight to twelve days of dread waiting for my breath to get shorter and shorter until I can't talk in full sentences.

jesus christ

Just finished The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. All mixed up. Not sure whether I liked it or hated it. I've never had to read something that so regularly refers to my specific demographic- white, straight cis-male- with a kind of easy, backhanded disdain . But the fact that it rankled definitely forced me to step back and identify why I should get so butthurt about it. And fact is, those references were mostly tangential to the point of the book anyway, so then I had to examine why I should focus so much attention on those small asides.

When it gets down to the meat and potatoes of the book, half of me wants to like it; Nelson is fucking smart, and she writes sentences that I have to sit and diagram, and then kind of walk around and squint at from every angle before I get the full meaning. And then those sentences interact with others in a way that changes the color of both and then I have to start all over. There's a joy to her writing that I haven't had to contend with in a long time of reading easy escapist fiction. Also, she just talks about worlds I'm only familiar with in the kind of glancing, benign ways afforded by a comfortable, cloistered progressive lifestyle. Gender fluidity, you say? Empowerment? Sounds nice, sure! But then she follows through and approaches my particular lifestyle with the reflexive dismissal that I imagine much of the country reserves for any facet of queer culture and wait, what the fuck did I do to YOU, lady? Don't pigeonhole me in with the knuckledraggers, some of my BEST FRIENDS are gay! I have a trans cousin, that's gotta count for something, right? And so on, etc. Which is exactly the kind of knuckledragger reaction I generally sneer at in others, and thus a great one to pick at and try to correct. I dunno whether she purposefully tries to elicit this response or whether she's just not writing for my demo and she really feels this way; either way, it achieves the same purpose, and it's pretty good food for the soul.

The other half of me hates it, for reasons I think are legit, or noble in a literary sense, but I dunno, maybe I'm just being a misogynist? Which is a great illustration of why I hate it; the book in both subject matter and style inoculates itself from any "mainstream" criticism. At many junctures, Nelson highlights her own uncertainties and hypocrisies- acknowledges, for instance, that she fights her own urge to categorize, sometimes unsuccessfully. She wants to believe that there are no obvious taxonomies when it comes to human experience, esp vis a vis love and family structure, but her pedigree as a writer and an academic make it difficult. Which I get. But then she turns around and says something blithe like "heteroromanticism has always left me feeling icky," or something of the sort. Which, what the fuck? You can't say that all love should be approached from an individualistic point of view, but then write off an entire subset of love. Or rather, you can, but it makes you look like a hypocrite and a schmuck. Even if you acknowledge in the same breath that you recognize your own biases.

Another example: early in the book, Nelson refers to a symposium she attended where one feminist philosopher was torn apart by another for publishing photographs of her (the first) with her kids in domestic settings. She was railed for basically trying to elevate humdrum family dreck into high feminist art/philosophy. Nelson uses the anecdote to elucidate her own point of view; essentially: "I side with the first lady." She then ends the book with a blow-by-blow account of her labor and the birth of her son. Spoiler alert: that shit is boring. No, man, you're just a straight white cis-male and you'll never get to fully appreciate the experience no. Shut up. It's boring. Nelson is a great writer, and this portion of the book reads like every other account of every other birth. It's like the two hundred and sixty photos of your vacation to Belize that you put in an iPhoto slideshow to play for the family at Thanksgiving. It's important to you, and that's great. But it's not singular. And you can't make it singular by pre-emptively discrediting critics of your point of view on the matter.

Incidentally, Nelson tries to elevate this anecdote by interspersing it with an account, written by her partner, of her partner's vigil with their(?pronoun still unclear?) dying mother. It only serves to subtract from Nelson's account of her labor- both by making the whole thing feel like a cheap, overused trick (juxtaposition of new life on top of death and the beauty therein) and thus a little bit exploitative, and also because Nelson's writing compares unfavorably to her partner's, which is plainspoken, beautiful, and cuts like a knife.

Still not sure where I stand on the book, and I really don't know if it deserved the unanimous praise it got when it came out (mostly by people who are way smarter and "in the know" than I am, so I guess that's points for praise), but goddamn did it make me think.

Now I'm reading The Dark Tower series by Stephen King for the umpteenth time, and I'm not thinking at all, and frankly it's great.

There's a peculiar subset of ultraliberals I followed on Facebook before they drove me screaming away from the platform entirely- acquaintances from when I was in Seattle. One had been my landlady. She would make giant dinners for the neighborhood every two weeks and feed anybody who walked in the door. Another was the doula we used for my wife's first labor (regrettably, it turns out- she had no formal training, hated hospitals, and charged us $500 for nothing more than a desultory offer to pour holy water on my wife's back during the process). Another was a second grade teacher at the public school down the street. All of them voted for Bernie in the primaries. All of them excoriated Clinton in the generals. All of them vowed not to vote if given the choice between her and Trump. All of them- ALL of them- are curiously supportive of Trump now on social media. To a point of mania.

He stands against everything they purported to support before the election. He's the embodiment of white rich male priviledge they rail against. "grab 'em by the pussy"? "Shithole countries"? "Good people on both sides"? This is gruel that, from anybody else, they would not stomach. But every time a new negative story emerges, they cry fake news, or they find a way to spin it, or they mention how Obama did the same but worse.

They're not Russian bots. They're not sleeper conservative agents. They're true blue, dyed-in-the-wool liberals. And I'm convinced the only thing holding their tattered souls together right now is, as you say, cognitive dissonance. These were the people who not just refused to vote in the generals but when the grease hit the pan ACTIVELY CAMPAIGNED against Clinton. It could be argued that this is the demographic that gave Trump the election through intransigence, antipathy, bullheadedness. And all on the precept that neither candidate was any better than the other. I had discussions on this very site with people who said the same. And of course it's nonsense. Clinton wouldn't have made the court nominations that Trump did. She wouldn't have gutted Obamacare from the top down. She wouldn't have shut down government in a quixotic mission to build a two thousand mile wall (how absurd does that sound when you read it out loud). She wouldn't have used the bully pulpit to dog whistle racism, cheerlead intolerance, insult women, muslims, south and central Americans, Africans... she wouldn't.

But to admit this, or even to admit that the current president is wrong in doing so, would be to admit that of course there was a better candidate and a worse candidate. Which kicks a central strut out from beneath the Bernie-at-any-cost ethos. To admit such would be to admit that, okay, not only was I wrong, but I was so wrong that I set my own stated goals back by years, possibly decades, and when you take the supreme court into account, perhaps even generations. I voted America's screaming, pants-shitting id into the most powerful station in the country, maybe on earth. So what do they do? Dig in, drink the piss-flavored kool ade and insist that things are, in fact, going better than when that horrible Obama was at the catbird seat. Cognitive dissonance.

I understand it, but it still infuriates me.

Fair enough, man. Yeah, I'm in a shitty frame of mind today. It's unfair to take it out on you.

I don't believe that choosing to focus on one facet of an article constitutes cherry picking; nor does it demonstrate anything about my grasp of the article. It was just a comment I made when I woke up and decided today was the day I'd speak up on hubski after some silence. Ultimately, my point: while the author makes good arguments about how all-encompassing these companies have become, it doesn't serve her argument to belabor minor inconveniences like not getting to share pics on instagram and having to carry cash and having to buy a paper calendar. At best, those arguments just make it sound like she's trying to make living without those services more inconvenient than they are. Which she doesn't need to do. At worst, they sound like some upper cruster sneering at the hoi polloi: "who has to pay their babysitter in cash anymore? What's the point of taking a picture of your child if you can't easily quantify how much people approve of the picture?" It's one quibble with one part of the article. Never meant for it to be anything other than that.

You are welcome here, as I was when I wandered over, as is anybody. I encourage you to dig around a little and get to know people before jumping in.

No, I can see that. I get it the point. Hence opening with the part about appreciating the article's "salient points." But whinging about how there's no impetus to take pictures if you can't put them on instagram, or trying to illustrate how difficult life is without google and amazon because you need to carry cash and write on a physical calendar still comes off as absurd. It's almost as if... as if there could be several takes on several aspects of the same article! Crazy, I know.

What the article isn't about: reddit, or alternatives to reddit, or my choosing to post on hubski. So I guess the real irony is scolding a stranger for "missing the point" of the article and then capping your response with a remark that truly doesn't at all address the content of the article.

Additionally, now that you mention it: when I joined hubski with my FIRST account well over five years ago, it really did feel like an escape from reddit. People seemed more interested in getting to know each other before jumping into debate mode. It was nice. There were, and still are, some great folks here. But now I lurk more and don't comment or post frequently; the people I knew don't seem to be around as much, and I'm far more likely to be pecked at by some guy who just joined an hour ago and immediately resorts to the same lazy, reflexively adversarial tone that makes reddit such a trash heap. So thanks for the remind, I guess

Dude, did you see the press conference last night? I'm not sure Pence is feeling all that chipper this morning.

I couldn't help imagining the interactions between congressional Democrats and Trump yesterday-

PELOSI: All right, boys, let's give him just enough rope to hang himse...

TRUMP: Is this all the rope you got? I need more rope. This knot only has seven coils, I need to make thirteen. Only the most beautiful knot. Hey, that guy doesn't have rope. Get that guy some rope, too.

So here's a thought. The gist of the Mueller report: it's unclear whether or not Trump obstructed justice; since he ordered his administration to obstruct, but they didn't, the case for obstruction isn't as cut and dry.

Now there is, absurdly, new dirt. How did we get here oh my god. The acting director of National Intelligence presumably has the dirt. The acting director of National Intelligence has been asked by Congress to deliver the dirt: the acting director of National Intelligence refuses to give the dirt, citing orders from on high.

Mr. Schiff told CBS that Mr. Maguire had told him he was not providing the complaint “because he is being instructed not to, that this involved a higher authority, someone above” the director of national intelligence, a cabinet position.

-NYT

Is the director of National Intelligence then actually protecting Trump? Or, by following orders not to comply, actually providing grounds for unequivocal obstruction of justice charges?

BONUS QUESTION: does any of this matter, or will status quo be upheld no matter what this guy does? haha JK rhetorical bonus question

BONUS BONUS QUESTION: remember when a bunch of people decided they were gonna sit the last election out because Trump and Clinton were equally unpalatable and Bernie was the only reasonable choice and since it wasn't Bernie it didn't really make a difference? Remember that guys haha remember hahaha

I'm drunk but waaaaay not drunk enough. For the last three years and probably the next five

People took everything here. Kroger, TJ's, Meijer... flour is straight up gone at every price point. Cake flour, even. Who uses cake flour? Do you even know what you're buying? Do you know what that's going to do to your recipes?

Things here are fine. Our governor did an incredible job of taking this seriously early in the game and then enacting incremental changes over the course of ten days to lessen the blow to quality of life. By all reliable accounts and metrics, it's made a difference. Our cases are still increasing across the state, but not exponentially. Our hospital is experiencing its projected peak right now, and we still have space in our ICU and inpatient areas. We'll see if that holds, but for the time being, it means we still have gowns, gloves and goggles. We're still recycling masks.

The joke about ER nurses is that we don't generally give a shit about precautions, so the biggest change has been going from laughing in the face of certain C. Diff to sob choke actually having to gown up to see patients. About 75% of what we see now is rule-out COVID, given that it's presenting as everything from SOA to broad abdominal complaints. And for the most part, that's fine. But it gets scary when you have to deal with a critical. Going into the negative pressure rooms wearing the garb plus CAPR feels like diving into the hot zone. It's eerie.

And then I go home and count out the days and look for symptoms. I was scared a month ago. I'm still scared, but now I'm used to being scared. So I've got that going for me. Humans are so resilient. We can get used to just about anything.

I'd appreciate updates on how things look on the ground in Seattle over the next few days. Kentucky is up to four cases now, one in Louisville that we know of. I'm thinking we're about twenty days behind Seattle, and given that I'm on the front lines, I'd like to know what I'll be up against. My immediate hunch is that our hospital is woefully unprepared for the next two months. Getting a little anxious.

Trump’s young staffers also rely on old standbys near the White House: POV, the rooftop bar at the W Hotel that overlooks the White House; Old Ebbitt Grill, a quintessential antebellum Washington establishment; and Joe’s, a seafood and steak spot, are favorites. So are the nearby restaurant-bar The Hamilton and Blackfinn, a gastropub off Farragut Square. Some staffers prefer the Exchange Saloon, a no-frills sports bar just west of the White House. One young former Health and Human Services official confides that Rebellion, a Southern-themed establishment farther north, near U Street, is “one of the few closet Trump bars” in town.

A cynical reader might interpret this as less of a human interest piece and more of a map of where to go to heckle beleaguered Trump staffers...

absurd interaction I had the other day while walking to a dentist appt:

Approaching this sweaty, shifty-looking dude who kept plucking at his clothes, adjusting his belt, looking around. As he passes:

SWEATY DUDE: "hey bra, you mind if we switch shirts real quick?"

ME: "Uh. No, that's alright, I need my shirt."

SD: "Yeah, but, like, we'd switch, you could have this one." (gesturing at my rather nice t-shirt and then to his drenched Seahawks jersey)

ME: "No, yeah, I need this shirt. Sorry."

SD: "Shit, just, whatever."

I was surprised at how hard I had to work internally not to immediately just start switching shirts because the request was so unexpected and presented in such a tone to suggest that the notion was completely reasonable. Got me thinking, are people hardwired to follow requests without resisting, or am I just a pushover? Coincidentally, a similar interaction went down a couple days later wherein some dude walked up to my car while stopped at a red light and tried to convince me that I should a) give him a ride to the Seven Eleven south of us; then, when I pointed out that I was going north, b) I should give him a ride north; then when I pointed out that I didn't want to give him a ride anywhere, c) why was I so uptight; when explained to him that I wasn't in the business of letting strangers in my car and especially strangers who didn't care which direction they were going, d) how was he supposed to not be a stranger if I didn't let him in and get to know him. Again, through all of this I had to fight the voice in the back of my head saying, "why are you not following this request?" Again, pushover, or just human hardwiring?

In any event, I hate my neighborhood and can't wait to get out of here.

NO QUID PRO Q... wait never mind.

Did you play it on speakers and record it? I'd offer to send the actual .wav, but I actually like the quality the re-record gave it. Dark. I like it!

Bernie Sanders is finally demonstrating what the Republican party has understood for a long time, and what the Democrats either don't seem to care about or else just aren't very good at: it's as important- or more important- to shape the social discussion as it is to present good facts or write good law.

Ted Cruz:

In both law and politics, I think the essential battle is the meta-battle of framing the narrative[...] as Sun Tzu said, 'Every battle is won before it’s fought. It’s won by choosing the terrain on which it will be fought.' So in litigation I tried to ask, What’s this case about? When the judge goes home and speaks to his or her grandchild, who’s in kindergarten, and the child says, ‘Paw-Paw, what did you do today?’ And if you own those two sentences that come out of the judge’s mouth, you win the case.

from this article.

In the liberal democratic tradition, it's actually a pretty old idea (I mean, ignoring the Sun Tzu reference)- think Rousseau had a few things to say about culture-shaping- but up to now, I've only ever seen it effectively utilized by the right. Not to say that Democrats don't use it, but their track record at using it effectively is a lot more checkered than that of the Republicans. I see this most prominently in the gun debate, in the framing of the weird "industry versus environment" dichotomy, in abortion politics, and of course in the immigration clusterfuck, which seems to gain traction no matter how many times one points out that immigrants are in fact voluntarily moving back across the border these days, or else not effectively crossing, or else getting booted out in greater numbers now than ever before. Even the fact that I have to type that out as some sort of positive argument is infuriating, and a good illustration of the point.

Bernie Sanders, god bless 'im, is a fantastic framer-of-the-debate. He's arguably at his best when he's tugging from the outside. That's where he can be polarizing without having to make all the necessary concessions to compromise. That's the correct position from which you effectively frame the narrative.

I'll say it again as I've said a thousand times: for the duration of this primary, Sanders hasn't demonstrated any of the qualities necessary for strong, effective executive leadership. But he's got pretty much a goddamn monopoly on the qualities required of a strong, effective culture warrior, and that's what I applaud him for. I hope he keeps on pushing, both in this contest and afterward, no matter what office he achieves.

I don't wanna jump into this mudpit

but

"we should aspire to be harder to offend" sounds like the rallying cry of a group of people who've enjoyed the benefit of generally not having a bunch of bad shit dumped on them.

I don't particularly think we should try to be more offended, but not responding to shitty behavior is its own sort of poison. We're beyond an age (if ever there was one) where you can just ignore it 'till it goes away. Think it's more constructive to aspire to be as decent a people as we can. That involves not cheerleading intentionally offensive rhetoric (no matter how facetious) AND calling people out when they do so

The hot brown:

Sounds like a euphemism for a filthy act; eating it feels like you're complicit in a filthy act. Digesting it closes the loop.

Am I "jewish?" According to the Law of Return I'm jewish, regardless of the fact that my grandmother disavowed her faith. Her husband's family were DAR. I have a great uncle that traced the other side of the family clear back to Old 300 so by any reasonable definition, I'm the most White Anglo Saxon Protestant American I know. Yet by Hitler's standards me and Sammy Davis Jr would both be lampshade fodder.

[...]People forget that 20 years later the Supreme Court actually did come up with a definition of pornography [...]That, of course, led to predictable amounts of margin-sniping [...]Which, of course, leads to people arguing about what "community" is and eventually having whole sections of laws struck down because fuckin' hell, it's a violation of first amendment rights.

Often in rhetorical discourse, here or anywhere else, I eventually reach a point where all I can think of is semantic satiation- that phenomenon where if you say a certain word enough times, it loses all meaning. That's the problem with applying Socratic dialogue to any situation that isn't an ancient Greek drinking party. It doesn't really get you anywhere but your navel. "What is racism? But what is race? What is prejudice? What is ill intent? What is bad about being afraid of a bad thing? What is a bad thing? What is thing?"

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate it here; it's one of the reasons (besides true-blue human connection) I didn't ghost this account ages ago. But when applied to real life- say, legal theory or whether or not one should feel bad about denigrating Muslims, or whether or not one should feel bad about denigrating those who denigrate Muslims- such discourse too frequently turns into a sort of real-world moral Gerrymandering. I can't be racist, because I have mixed race grandchildren, and I won't engage in this one clearly proscribed activity that has been narrowly defined as racist. I can't be racist, because although I gormlessly equate Islam with Jihad and Sharia, those are objectively bad things and everybody should fear them. Maybe I've said some racist things in the past, and yesterday, and right now, but that doesn't make me racist, it just makes me terminally misinformed. Or maybe they're not racist things at all; after all, what is racism?

If treated cavalierly, the Socratic method can metastasize into moral relativism like that; most people out and about probably couldn't discern an appreciable difference between the two.

Again, none of this is to discourage the type of discussion engaged in above. It's just a caveat. Words and ideas have power. It's our duty in a free society to examine our words and ideas.

It's a privilege to do it here with people who are a) super smart and b) don't necessarily agree with one another. As we move back down the gradient, however, from the rhetorical to the practical, it's kind of on everyone to make sure we all know the difference. Otherwise, an idea that's bandied about only in academic circles might slip into a news cycle, and then condensed to a hamfisted tweet by a ham-fingered head of state, and then get repeated until we're no longer sure whether nativism is something to be avoided. Or it could slip into the canon of fringe elements, and then get repeated and further distorted on 8chan, and then somebody decides that Mexicans pose a great enough danger to our country that they need to be exterminated, Walmart by Walmart.

When the dust has settled, bad things are bad, and they should be addressed as such. I'm not calling Roseanna and Amy racists to change their mind; they're a sunk cost. I'm calling them racist to reinforce a very useful societal norm, and to make sure that racism stays unacceptable, and that successive generations don't forget what everybody has already been through, and to fight the troubling resurgence of white nationalism.

edit as an aside, that patch is incredible.

She then shared her thoughts on the chant’s target, Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who came to America as a refugee from Somalia.

“Look, but she is gonna get—you know, I don’t want her stinkin’ Muslim crap in my country,” Roseanna said.

“Sharia law,” Amy chimed in. Her iridescent CoverGirl highlighter glinted under the stadium lights. “Sharia law.”

“That’s not America,” Roseanna said. “She is a Muslim through and through …She wants that all here.” She wondered aloud whether Omar had come to the U.S. illegally. (There is no evidence this is true.)

"I'm not racist, but..." does not an effective argument make. "I won't join in the chant, but I don't want her stinkin' Muslim crap in my country." Didn't she just?

I appreciate the shades of nuance between racism and nationalism and xenophobia. Does she? Does it matter? This is a constellation of worldviews that all draw their power from hate and fear. All of them can be weaponized, and all of them have. So what if calling this racism shuts down argument? Some arguments don't merit serious discussion.

Oh, I'm sure there's a list of liberal operatives totally unknown to me that any conservative could spout off like an Old Testament lineage. That I could halfway understand. It's when "FLYNN RESIGNS" is (rightfully) front page news on WaPo and co., but it doesn't show up until halfway down the Fox feed and then only in small print and then only in the context of it underscoring the threat of leakers within the inner circle. That's not even counter-propaganda, that's ignoring really really big stuff that should matter to everyone.