Life In A Global Pandemic, Part 11

When the pandemic first struck, the world was overcome by a mantra of "stay home." At first, this was a sort of communal and positive message, but soon it morphed into a terrible kind of moralizing. Old ladies would call the police on kids playing ball in the schoolyard. People turned on each other.

Eventually, the case rates started to decline, and the country started to "open up" again. That was short-lived. Now we're confronting another round of closures. The difference this time is that there is no longer a "stay home" mantra. Now the mantra is "wear a mask."

Intelligent people should be able to understand that the pandemic wasn't just going to go away because people "stayed home," but if it wasn't clear at the outset of all of this, it should at least be clear in hindsight. Now, however, we're in round two. We already know to be an empirical fact that we can't fight a pandemic with platitudes like "stay home." Fighting it with "wear a mask" will be no different.

Unfortunately, as the pandemic wears on, people become progressively more moralistic. "Wear a mask" started out as ugly as "stay home" ended; what it grew into was a tortuous act of moral grandstanding. It got so bad that I had to take a break from social media and just play with my kids for a month. Now I'm back, and I can confirm that it's even worse.

To be clear, both "stay home" and "wear a mask" are useful pieces of advice to the extent that they work to reduce viral load. What we must keep in mind at all times is that the goal here is to reduce viral load. Wearing a mask isn't a failsafe, nor is it the single act of all acting that will result in a better outcome. Wearing a mask is just one personal hygiene practice among a whole set of skills that we all ought to practice in order to reduce viral load.

When you see someone wearing a mask, you still have no idea whether that person washes his hands after using the restroom or blowing his nose; you still have no idea whether that person practices social distancing; you don't know if he just spent last night in a crowded bar or at a big political rally. You basically know nothing about that person's life, experiences, or hygiene practices. If you were to suddenly conclude that this person is on "your side," the side of "SCIENCE," the side of good and right-thinking liberal people who want the pandemic to end as soon as the research will allow, you'd be making a big mistake.

Likewise, if you see someone without a mask, you know equally little about the other 23 hours and 59 minutes of his day. Don't jump to conclusions.

This kind of knee-jerking is, sadly, what I've come to expect from my American community, as is the moral grandstanding. I've simply grown tired of it, exhausted by the perpetual moral outrage expressed twenty-four hours per day. (Or Tweeted, ugh.)

What I've also, sadly, come to expect from my fellow Americans is a lack of true efficacy. That is, those who wear masks likely don't change them and wash them often enough. They probably don't wash their hands often enough, or thoroughly enough. (At the beginning of the pandemic, there were memes about washing your hands for a full twenty seconds. I wonder who still does that anymore? It's only been a few months.) They don't engage in time-tested hygiene habits like using a bidet, sterilizing their kitchen countertops and bathroom surfaces. They don't wipe down the interior surfaces of their cars.

All that is to say, people talk quite a big game about wearing masks, but when push comes to shove, no one is willing to do what truly needs to be done to reduce viral load. People are still as filthy as they ever were. I had gotten used to how dirty people are; now I have to get used to their being both dirty and sanctimonious about masks.

I sure hope someone develops an effective vaccine for this.

Slate Star CoDoxxed

Get it? Because he says they're "doxxing" him.

"Doxxing" is a type of cyber-bullying in which the bully publicly reveals private information about the target, such as their home phone number or address, their employer's information, photos of the target's children, and so on. This is considered to be extremely threatening. Imagine that someone publicly posts a photo of your small child playing at the park, along with the Google Maps link to the park and a comment to the effect of, "This is where that racist Joe plays with his kids." That's doxxing. Yes, it's bad.

But that's not what's happening to Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So. Let's dive in.

First, The Back-Story

Go ahead and cruise on over to slatestarcodex.com to get Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So's version of the story. It goes something like this: A writer from The New York Times wanted to write a story about a popular blog that generates a lot of interest and that maybe got some things right about COVID-19 early on. That was fine with Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So until the journalist said, "By the way, I've been able to figure out what the So-and-So stands for, and I'm going to put that into my story." Dr. Scott freaks out a little and says no, don't do that. The journalist says it's company policy.

So, Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So deleted his whole blog, saying that The New York Times was trying to endanger him by doxxing him "for clicks."

Before I go on, I would like to remind my readers of my previous posts about Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So. Here's a link. You will see from what I've written before that I consider the guy to be really weird. It's not just that I dislike his blog - and I do - it's that he seems emblematic of a very bizarre strain of Silicon Valley culture, and the deeper you get into this crowd, the heebier the jeebies, if you catch my drift. 

His blog rose to prominance when some well-regarded bloggers started linking to his posts. They all seemed to consider him very smart and thoughtful. Soon enough, "everyone" was reading him. Over time, his posts have become more performative. He started out writing like a self-conscious nerd, and now he writes as though he is playing the part of a self-conscious nerd who thinks he is a really smart and funny guy. That's fine. Fame changes you. I don't care.

What I do care about is the content of his blog. Each post tackles any number of topics. He's written on climate science and economics and technology and artificial intelligence and psychiatry and biology and sociology and anything else. He always presents his views as though he is an expert, but quite often it's painfully obvious that he's just done a couple of hours of internet research. There's no shame in doing some casual research and blogging about it, but when everyone starts calling you an expert, and you keep doing light research and presenting it as Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So Presents The Answer To A Problem That People Have Been Trying To Solve For Decades, then it starts to get on my nerves.

I mean, it's dorky to do what effectively amounts to college homework assignments as an adult passing the time. But it's problematic to be taken seriously for it.

An "Anonymous" Blogger

Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So openly admits that his name is a pseudonym. First question: Why is he using a pseudonym? Maybe it's like a stage name. Lots of people have stage names. Stage names can be a lot of fun. But that's not why Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So says he uses a pseudonym. Instead, he says it's because he wants to remain anonymous.

But Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So also says that Scott Alexander is his real-life first and last middle name. That sure is an odd choice of pseudonyms for someone who wishes to remain anonymous. The legendary whistleblower "Deep Throat" wasn't a guy named Deep Throat McInnis, and if he was, going by "Deep Throat" wouldn't exactly be a cloak of anonymity. "Deep Throat" was not a pseudonym that resembled his or her real name at all. It was an obviously made-up moniker; it was intended to be obviously made up, because if everyone knows that Deep Throat's real name is nothing whatsoever resembling Deep Throat, then no one has any idea what Deep Throat's real name is. That's true anonymity. That's not what Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So wanted, obviously. If he wanted that kind of anonymity, then he would have chosen a pseudonym more like "Deep Throat," or "Alone" (the pseudonym of the writer of The Last Psychiatrist blog), or "Slate Star Codex Guy" or something.

Pretty much everyone knows that Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens. Samuel Clemens didn't choose "Mark Twain" as a pen name because he wanted to be anonymous. He chose it because he thought he could sell more books under the name "Mark Twain" than under the name "Samuel Clemens," and he was probably right. Mark Twain sounds way better. But when the press discovered his real name, Samuel Clemens didn't delete all his books and complain about being doxxed. He just did what any normal person using a pen name would do: He said, yep, but I write books under the name Mark Twain. And there was no issue.

The matter was slightly different with "Publius," or "Publicus," or whatever name they were using to write The Federalist Papers. In that case, they had to be anonymous because they could have been killed for treason. Notice again how "Publius" bears scant resemblance to "John Jay" or "John Adams."

It gets worse, of course. Not only did Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So choose a "pseudonym" that was actually just his real name, he published many old links to all his old blog posts, in which he discussed personal details of his life. He discussed the experiences of the patients he saw in his clinical psychiatric practice. He held public meet-ups, advertised on his blog and on his social media accounts, where he agreed to meet with pretty much any old person who happened to read his blog or follow him on Twitter. He didn't meet strangers with a cloak and a mask, either. He met them using his real face and his real name and as his own, real, self. In short, he presented himself publicly as Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So, Please Don't Use My Last Name Because I Want To Be Anonymous, Honest.

Not exactly the behavior of a man who seeks anonymity, is it?

Playing At Being Famous

But okay, maybe he was just naive about the matter. That could be the explanation, right?

Still, fifteen years of naivete over the course of progressively building internet fame seems to strain credulity. Once you start getting calls from The Times, wouldn't you reconsider your willy-nilly attitude toward divulging personal details? I mean, if it mattered to you that you remain anonymous, and you started to become famous, wouldn't you then quietly cull your blog of all references to your real life and real identity, and then just stick to publishing bi-weekly homework essays? Wouldn't you cool it with the public meet-ups and stuff?

You would indeed, if you cared about anonymity.

So, another possible explanation here is that Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So liked being famous and well-regarded for publishing homework essays on the internet. He liked being able to organize meet-ups and watch strangers show up, wanting to meet him. He got a taste for fame, and decided he wanted to keep up with it. That's find and dandy, too. I don't fault a man for wanting to be famous. Lots of people want that. 

Then, this feature in the New York Times should be his big break, right? Finally he gets his big spotlight in the press. Finally he can divulge his true identity, set up a Patreon account, publish a book, and maybe secure a regular writing spot at Slate Magazine, or Vox, or The Atlantic or something. If you wanted to be a famous public intellectual, isn't that what you'd do? That's what I would do. I would work hard for my big break, and when it finally came, I would try to make the most of it. I'd try to capitalize.

But that's not what Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So would do. What would he do? Delete his whole blog and complain that he's being persecuted. Weird, right?

Another Possibility

I'm just going to float this theory. I have no idea if it's true, and no skin in the game one way or the other. But it's a theory that makes sense to me.

Imagine you did homework essays for fun. Imagine you were kind of a nerd who lived with ten other people in the same house, you've gone on record saying that you don't have much luck with women, and you're basically just a clinical psychiatrist somewhere. Then imagine one day a lot of genuinely smart public intellectuals start reading your homework and say, "Hey, look at this guy. He seems smart."

So then imagine that you decide to keep up with the homework. People are reading your posts. You feel well-regarded. Heck, you are well-regarded. You get a taste of fame, and you decide you enjoy it and you want more of it. So you keep at your homework, and people keep reading you and linking to you.

And it's all pretty nice because it comes easy to you. You can do a couple of hours of internet research and write about it, no problem. So that's what you do. But at the bottom of it all, you know you're not really solving any problems. You know that your lengthy essays aren't really all that meritorious. You don't think you're all that smart, but everyone keeps saying that you are anyway. Thus, you enjoy the position you're in, you love the fame and the accolades, you like the meet-ups, maybe you even get more romantic attention than you did before.

But you don't have what it takes to capitalize on your fame because, at the bottom of it, you only have the willingness to do a couple hours' internet research per week. You know that people who write books - people like Malcolm Gladwell and James Altucher - actually spend a lot of time and money on research and interviews and collecting information. You know that it's their full-time job. And you know that, while you'd love to give a TED Talk and be interviewed by Tyler Cowen, you don't actually want to spend all your time researching the information you write about.

You know that because you've done enough internet research to understand that there is a HUGE difference between really knowing something and just sounding like you know something. And you know that your expertise is in the latter, not the former.

So things are going well. You have lots of readers, including some incredibly smart people who say nice things about you. When occasional readers point out the flaws in your arguments, you now have a legion of fans to do the additional legwork for you. All you have to do is sound kind of plausible, and there will be enough grains of truth in what you write that your fans can fill in the blanks on their own. In this way, you get them to do the legwork on your most controversial claims, and you get credit for it without having to do the hard work.

Well, that sounds a bit phony, doesn't it? Isn't that what fakers in the business world do? They get really good at sounding good, and then they pass off all their work to underlings, taking all the credit for themselves, and scaling the corporate ladder without ever having to do the hard work. This is classic charlatan behavior.

And when charlatans in the business world get caught, what happens next? They usually quit the job in a blaze of glory, finding a way to spin it such that they get a similar job elsewhere, hopping from job to job until they either get promoted or outed as a fake. And the story is always the same: "I did this amazing thing and that amazing thing, and then someone tried to take credit for my work, so I left." It's always that somebody set them up or something.

So, if you were a faker, if you were this kind of charlatan, only instead of being in the business world, you were in the world of internet blogging... imagine this. Imagine that a real reporter, a real professional writer, asked you for an interview and hit you with some hard-hitting questions that you couldn't answer because, let's face it, you're not who everyone says you are. Imagine that these hardball questions were difficult enough that you started to fear that if your fans got to read your poor responses, the veil would come off and you'd no longer be seen as Mr. Smart Well-Regarded Blogger.

What would you do?

Some people might delete the whole blog, in a blaze of glory, and claim that the reporter was trying to cause you personal harm.

I've seen similar things in the business world. I won't say for sure that this is what happened to Dr. Scott Alexander So-and-So, but it's a story that is consistent with a particular and plausible set of circumstances.

We shall see how it pans out.

Life In A Global Pandemic, Part 10

From my vantage point, it is safe to say that, after those who have unfortunately lost their lives to it, children have suffered the worst from Covid-19.

We adults tend to be quite comfortable in our daily routines. Assuming we have jobs and can earn a living, we spend our time in consistent ways, day-to-day. Even adults with a robust and active social life only have time for a few hours of such socializing per week, and this often comes in scheduled ways: "date night," "girls' night," "poker night," golf on Sunday mornings, etc. For the most part, it has been possible for us adults to modify these activities to account for social distancing guidelines, or substitute them with alternate forms of entertainment. For a lot of us with stable incomes, then, our quality of life hasn't been impacted too badly.

But the story is completely different for children, whose primary social network -- schooling -- has been shut down for months. If you're a child whose extracurricular activities rely on intimate contact, such as music, dance, martial arts classes, and sports teams, even your more sporadic socializing has been elimiinated. And, depending on how strictly the family adheres to social distancing, many children have not been able to see their same-age cousins, friends, or neighbors for months. Even when that interaction can take place, it happens in a way so limited as to prohibit all the running around, laughing, and interacting that most children do with each other.

The result is that many children are stuck in a dystopian nightmare that few adults can truly appreciate.

Even worse: there doesn't seem to be any good way out of this nightmare. Some schools, intent on opening up in the fall for a full classroom schedule, have erected bizarre plastic barriers around desks to prevent disease transmission. There are photos of children being allowed to "play outside" only so long as they stay in circles painted on the ground, socially distant from all other children.

The isolation that my own children feel is palpable. Human beings need social contact, and children in particular need all the running around, and being silly, and physically touching other children that happens during unstructured play. I fear we may be grappling with the adverse mental health consequences of socially isolated children for decades to come.

Another Small Benefit To Having A Routine

I've surely written before about the many benefits of having a consistent, daily routine. If I had to sum up all the benefits concisely, I'd put it this way: A daily routine helps to "automate" certain thought processes, which allows you to get things done without necessarily having to dedicate space for them in your thoughts.

Having to remember to take your medication, for example, is wasted mental effort if you can replace the "need to remember" with the muscle memory of taking your medicine as part of your daily breakfast. You don't have to "remember" how to make a bowl of cereal; so if taking your medicine is something you do right before you pour cereal into your bowl, then it just becomes part of the "cereal process" (no pun intended) and you don't have to think a separate set of thoughts about "I have to take my medicine."

Over time, I've "automated" my daily water consumption in a very similar way. Each morning, I make myself a cup of green tea to have with my breakfast. After I eat, as a final "breakfast step," I drink a large glass of water while I take my supplements (milk thistle, nicotinamide riboside, glucosamine, CoQ10, and a daily multivitamin). Within the hour, I prepare a cup of chamomile tea to drink while I work. At the same time every morning, I have a work meeting, and right before my work meeting, I either fill up a bottle of water to drink during the meeting, or I open a bottle of Topo Chico mineral water. By 10 or 10:30 AM, I remind myself that my midday workout is coming up, so I have another glass of water. With that, I've typically had 40-80 ounces of fluid before noon.

My post-workout routine also usually involves another 32 ounces of water, followed by two 12-ounce glasses of water at lunch. By the early afternoon, I have typically had twelve or more glasses of water. That makes sense for a guy who works out a lot and who eats plenty of electrolyte-rich foods. In fact, some days, I could stand to drink a bit more.

But the point is, all of this hydrating is built into my normal daily routine, so that I can get all the fluid I need without having to think much about it. The only time I really consciously think about hydrating is when I remember to drink a glass of water before my workout. All the rest of it is thoughtless habit.

There is a downside to this. Life isn't perfect, nor is it entirely consistent from day-to-day. So, by building something important like hydration into my daily routine, it means that if my routine is ever disrupted, even for simple reasons like a doctor's appointment or a one-off business meeting, my hydration suffers for it. Not only does that make it a greater challenge to stay hydrated during inevitable disruptions, it also makes the common irregularities of life, like a rescheduled meeting, more of an annoyance than they need to be.

Politics As Hyper-Sensitivity

It's natural, reasonable, and to some extent a showing of good faith, to assume that other people are similar to oneself. And I think that people generally tend to do so. When thinking about what constitutes a reasonable perspective, or a reasonable expectation, or when evaluating the various "shoulds" we encounter in life, I think many of us try to think about other people as being more alike than different to ourselves. I certainly do.

The good thing about this is that it minimizes the more insignificant differences between us, i.e. sources of bigotry. If race isn't related to the matter at hand, then assuming people are more like us than different allows us to easily avoid conscious or unconscious bias.

Unfortunately, sometimes our differences really are relevant. For example, if a white man like me assumes that everyone's experience with the police is more or less like mine, he'll be more likely to overlook the very real problems of police brutality, and especially racially motivated police brutality and ethnic profiling.

This is all obvious enough. What's less obvious is that sometimes the political statements and arguments we see and hear are addressing people who bear little resemblance to ourselves, even though they may agree with our preferred policies.

One example of this might be the issue of corn subsidies. Both economic libertarians and environmental activists oppose corn subsidies, but for very different reasons. Libertarians oppose distorting market incentives with economic rents, while environmentalists oppose rewarding farmers for devastating the environment. On the issue of wind power subsidies, by contrast, economic libertarians still oppose the subsidies, but environmentalists often believe subsidizing wind power is an important step toward reducing society's carbon footprint.

What if you're browsing online opinions or memes, and you see something like this:

People oppose subsidizing wind power because they don't care about reducing our carbon footpring! I hate people who can't understand the science of climate change!

One thing you might think, if you're an economic libertarian like me, is, "My opposition to wind power subsidies has nothing to do with opposing climate science or reluctance to reduce atmospheric carbon. My opposition is entirely due to the economic damage caused by government subsidies." If I were to respond with those thoughts, however, I'd be pitting economic policy against climate policy in theory, something that I don't think would serve my position well.

The problem here is that people who argue against "climate-deniers" are not arguing against those of us who oppose subsidies on economic grounds. By participating in an argument against "climate-deniers," we're unwittingly carrying their water. What we should do instead is not assume that we're being spoken to. There are "climate-deniers" out there who oppose wind power subsidies on those grounds. If someone wants to argue against such people, that's none of my business, because I'm not one of them. If someone wants to argue against what economics says about subsidies, well then, that's my fight. But the climate-denial thing is not my fight.

At least for me, it takes an extra step to remember that someone might be arguing against a real argument that some less-informed person made, but that that less-informed person might actually be real and really made those arguments.

(Note: I do not claim here that people who disbelieve in anthropogenic global warming are uninformed. I'm only using this as an example of people who make arguments that I don't make, whether or not they are true.)

This holds true for any issue. I often hear political arguments against conservatism, against libertarianism, or in favor of socialized medicine or any number of things I oppose. It's tempting to assume that anyone who shares my beliefs does so for the same reasons or with similarly well-reasoned arguments. But the reality is that most people are engaged in arguments that I would never personally choose to have. But, hyper-sensitive as I may have been in the past, I have grown accustomed to thinking that people are making bad-faith arguments about my beliefs. After all, I'm against wind-power subsidies, and I believe that anthropogenic global warming is real.

So from now on, I'm going to try to remember to only fight fights that are relevant to me. I can make arguments against subsidies. I can make arguments in favor of reasonable economic policies. I can make ethical arguments informed by psychology. I can argue against the illusions we hold and the defense mechanisms we employ. I can make these arguments because they are personal to me, and because I know something about them, and because they are involve my actually held beliefs.

But if someone wants to argue against something I never said, from now on, I'll just assume that they're talking about someone else, a real person who really does hold those beliefs, and try not to mix my beliefs up with some people who probably don't share my own thoughts. I'll be less hyper-sensitive and stick mainly to my own positions.

The Fountain Of Youth

It's hard to write a post like this without either bragging or sneering, but I assure you, I am doing neither.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the grocery store. I opted to use the self checkout kiosks, but because I was buying wine, a store clerk had to come check my ID. When she saw my date of birth, she said, "Oh my god!" I asked her what was the problem, and she said, nothing, only that she was surprised that I was as old as I was. "I would have believed '89." In truth, she had thought that was more than ten years younger than I really am. In other words, she thought I was in my twenties.

Yesterday, we spent the afternoon in a local park. The park has a short trail down to what passes for a "waterfall" in flat Texas prairie country. It's a nice, short hike, and somewhat steep in parts. My GPS watch had it that the whole thing was 0.88 miles round trip. I checked it when we arrived at the waterfall itself, and it read 0.36. As you can see, this is not much of a "hike," but much more of a short walk down the hill and back up.

To be sure, it was hot outside, and the path is steep in some places, requiring us to choose our steps carefully in order to make it back up. But a 0.4 mile walk up the hill can only be so gruelling. I'd call it pretty much nothing.

So, I was surprised when I noticed that a solid majority of the other people in the park that day came up the hill panting and gasping for air, plopping themselves down in the nearest shady spot to catch some oxygen. I mean, they were really out of it. By all appearances, they looked as though they had just finished an 8-mile tempo run or something.

Later in the day, I went for a run. It was very hot outside, so I was running shirtless, with my hair pulled back under a bandana, and a pair of sunglasses on. As I crossed the street at one busy intersection, someone from a passing car called out a question to me: "Hey! How old are you?" I didn't have the impression that they thought I was extremely old. I didn't have a chance to answer, because I was running fast and in the opposite direction of the passing car, but I smiled to myself as I thought about what that person would think if they knew I was 40 years old.

A few years back, I was doing box jumps at the gym. A twenty-something fellow gym-goer came up to me between sets and told me, "I hope I can do stuff like that when I'm your age!"

"It's use it or lose it," I told him. "The only reason I can do this is because I won't stop."

Like I said at the outset of this post, I'm not saying this to brag about myself or to criticize other people. I take all of these situations -- and the many more I could list -- not as evidence of my great fittness, but rather evidence of how far people will let themselves go.

Ten years ago, I used to be amazed by the fact that most people my age had no idea what their own bodies were capable of; that most of them had no idea what their own bodies were supposed to look like, because they had never taken the time to get in really good shape. The human body performs differently, and of course looks differently, when it's fit. Overweight people, people with "dad bods," skeletal waifs, and the like have really never experienced things like agility, being sure on their feet, being able to lift heavy things with confidence and carry them across the room or something. And they don't know what their own bodies would look like if they did.

But nowadays, I don't really think about that anymore. Nowadays, I am struck by how much faster most people are aging than I am. I watch as friends and acquaintences slowly put on more and more weight, unable to tame their cravings or counteract them with physical activity. I watch as even young people give up on sports and fitness, except the few who go to the gym, mostly to look sexy, attract a mate, get married, and then ultimately do what they had planned on doing all along: let themselves go. I hear people talk about their aches and pains, their inability or unwillingness to walk any short distance, their struggle with having to climb a few flights of stairs.

It's the practical problems they all have that make the biggest impression on me. The atrophy of their bodies has made even the simplest aspects of life difficult. Small wonder so many of them drive their cars even when they're only going to the park a block away. Small wonder they all seem to be aging so much faster than me.

I spend a lot of time in the sun, and I have a chronic disease that is aging my body at an accelerated rate. It should be I who looks older than others. But I don't, and my best guess is because I have always adhered to the adage of "use it or lose it."

The fountain of youth is real. It is simply the act of sticking with a good diet and a high level of physical activity throughout your life. Don't stop. Don't let yourself go. Don't put on 15, 20, 50, 100... pounds and then turn around one day and realize that you look 40 or older when you're really 30 or younger. Keep yourself healthy, well into old age. Use it or lose it.

A Belated Thank-You

Yesterday, while running, I thought back to an old experience I had as a teenager.

Like many teenage boys, I suffered from Osgoode-Schlatter syndrome, which is basically a severe case of "growing pains." It's worse than it sounds. The overactive growth plates in my knees were producing so much bone tissue that they swelled up painfully, and I was unable to run for almost a year. My legs were constantly in pain. To this day, I still have lumps of bone on my knees as a result of my condition.

In Autumn of the worst year of my Osgoode-Schlatter syndrome, I had big plans to run on the high school cross-country team - or at least with the team - despite my being only in the eighth grade. The pain dashed my hopes, but my sister was still on the team, and so I still found myself attending all the cross-country meets and watching my friends run and have fun on the team. For a young man whose only connection to joy was running, it was difficult to watch.

One day, at a cross-country meet, it became a bit too much for me, so went back to my parents' car, sat down in the passenger's seat, and cried. I just wanted to be alone and cry. To my chagrin, the head cross-country coach - an incredibly gentle and kind-hearted man - saw me crying in the car and came to console me. He put a hand on my arm and did his best. I don't remember saying anything. I think I was trying so hard to hold back my tears and make it look like I wasn't crying, that I couldn't do much but make monosyllabic grunts to everything he said. He stayed with me a long time, then caringly said good bye with a few more words of encouragement and went back to the team.

This got me to thinking about another coach at my high school. He was a football coach, and I didn't play football, so I only knew him as my history teacher. He was a very witty guy, and always seemed happy. I enjoyed his history class a lot, and I figured he must like me okay, mainly because I laughed at all his jokes. But one day, at a parent-teacher conference, he very seriously and very meaningfully told my mother that if she ever wanted me out of the house, she should send me to his.

I don't know why my mother told me about that. I also don't really know why he said that, what he could have seen in me that would give him any indication that that was something that ought to be said. At the time, I found the whole situation confusing. But now, with 25 years of hindsight serving me, I'm overcome by that man's kindness.

The truth is that I was slipping further and further into depression when I was in high school, a depression that would stretch across the next decade of my life. When you're suffering from something like that, and especially when you're a teenager suffering from something like that, it's common to scapegoat your problems. Thus, at the time, I ascribed all of my "depression" (I didn't call it that back then) to the rather oppressive religious-conservative community and their relative inability to relate to a somewhat eccentric, differentiated person like me.

As I had it, "people hated me." A look back with better hindsight, though, proves otherwise. Here are two important members of the community who could see how much I was suffering, and who did reach out to make my life better. The truth is, my community could have been there for me, if I had only allowed them to be.

Of course, that would have required a more complete understanding of my situation. I was emotionally stunted and ill-equipped to have normal social relationships of any kind with any person whatsoever. I was a broken human being. I needed years of personal growth to achieve whatever semblance of normalcy and mental health I've managed to achieve. (I am certainly no longer depressed, and haven't been for a long, long time.) It's too much to ask of my teenage self to recognize what was being done for me, on a completely kind-hearted and unsolicited basis. I didn't have the emotional tools required to recognize it.

But I recognize it now. Furthermore, I recognize that these two examples I've provided aren't the only examples. Many people would have helped me, if I could have been helped. It's not their fault that I couldn't be helped at the time. All the same, 25 years later, I appreciate what they did for me. It stuck with me. I'm thankful for it. And I'm very sorry I couldn't see it then and avail myself of the support that was being offered.

I'm sorry that I wasn't the person then that I am now. But to those who ever extended a hand and tried to help a young man who needed it, but couldn't see it, I offer you a belated and very heart-felt thank you. Thank you.

Life In A Global Pandemic, Part 9

In Omnipotent Government, Ludwig von Mises describes how the foundation for a Nazi takeover of Germany was laid in part by large groups of unemployed men hanging around in militias. They say idle hands are the devil's playground, and that is probably true.

As of this writing, there are close to 40 million newly unemployed - or should I say disemployed? - people in the United States, thanks to "lockdown" or "quarantine" policies that we now know were far too draconian than they needed to be, given the severity of COVID-19. What have all those idle hands been up to lately?

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No one knows what was going through Derek Chauvin's head when he knelt on top of George Floyd in broad daylight, with cameras rolling, as the latter man begged for mercy and finally died. Chauvin and the four other officers involved in the killing were fired. As protests erupted in Minneapolis over the systemic mistreatment of blacks in the US criminal justice system, charges of third-degree murder were ultimately brought against Chauvin; although it's fair to wonder if the killing really was third-degree murder, and not second-degree murder as most reasonable people have concluded.

What an odd name, Derek Chauvin. Chauvin, get it? Like chauvinism.

And so protests erupted. Soon video emerged of white men, dressed all in black, wearing gas masks, and carrying umbrellas in the sunshine, systematically breaking windows with hammers and lighting things on fire before quietly walking away. On the videos, the peaceful black protesters try to stop them, but they can't. It is suggested by the various publishers of these videos that these disguised white men are the ones who turned the protests into riots.

Who were these men? The mayor of Minneapolis suggested that they were white supremacists from out-of-state. They might also have been members of "Antifa," which is not really an "organization," per se, despite news that the White House wishes to label them as a terrorist organization. Antifa is an ideology more than an organization. Those aligned with Antifa often show up at left-leaning protests and cause trouble. They ostensibly wish to fight anything they view to be "fascism," but their ideological agenda is a Marxist-Leninist one. So were those who started the riots in Minneapolis "members" of Antifa? Who knows?

*        *        *

Within hours of the riots, the sympathetic left on social media took to their news feeds, their tweets, their status updates, and their stories to urge "people" not to condemn the riots, but to instead seek to understand why black victims of systemic racism in the United States would wish to riot in the first place.

I find this reaction to be odd.

It's odd because no amount of police brutality justifies a violent mob attacking innocent bystanders and looting private businesses. An argument could be made that Black America has a legitimate moral cause to destroy government buildings, court houses, police precincts, and the like. But stealing TVs? Such actions can only be morally justified on Marxist-Leninist grounds, i.e. according to the ideology of Antifa and its ilk. Private property is, according to this belief system, yet another tool of oppression, and it is fair and right, and perhaps even erogatory, to destroy it.

Of course, no one participating in a riot has spent any significant amount of time seeking epistemic moral justification for their actions. All they're really doing is seizing the opportunity. When "everyone else" is looting and destroying, you may as well get yours, too. Whoever started the riots knew this to be true of mobs, in fact they were counting on it. You only try to start a riot when you believe that the mob will follow-on with whatever destruction you've chosen to initiate. That's the whole point of inciting a mob.

It is for this reason that people should not seek to understand the rioters. Violent mobs don't have a cause. Violent mobs don't have a modus operandi. Violent mobs are breakdowns of social order, in which any terrible thing can happen. Looting and vandalism are comparatively modest outcomes here. The real dangers of a violent mob are murder and rape. Anyone who has any experience with a dangerous, teeming hoard knows this to be true.

Peaceful protests and violent mobs are in two entirely different categories. No, we should not seek to understand a mob. We should run for our lives, and then morally condemn them in the strongest ways available to us.

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I'm a 40-year-old American man. Sadly, this is not my first race riot. I am old enough to quite vividly remember the LA riots that broke out in the wake of the verdict in the Rodney King beating. Then, members of the Los Angeles Police Department were acquitted of using excessive force on Mr. King, despite the beating having been captured on video. If you're young and you've never seen the video, or if it's been a while since you've seen it, I recommend you remind yourself what was on that video. Watch it again, and keep in mind that the courts found the police not guilty of using excessive force.

When you're done watching that video, watch Rodney King's public statement to the media on the riots. Rodney King himself, a well-spoke if not particularly eloquent man who was quite nearly beaten to death by the Los Angeles Police Department, observed the ensuing LA race riots and spoke out against rioting, famously imploring people: "Can we all get along?" Watch the video. You can see the horror, the confusion, and the sadness on his face.

Then, imagine being beaten nearly to death, imagine successfully bringing a trial against the monsters who almost took your life, imagine losing that trial, and then imagine watching all of your supposed "supporters" burn your home to the ground, taking many African-American-owned small businesses with it.

Finally, imagine seeing all that and sympathizing with the mob. That is what today's woke social media leftists want you to do.

*        *        *

Of course, it's impossible to sympathize with a mob. The mob will turn on you. You do not control a mob. All you can do is follow the mob wherever it goes, and if the mob chooses to drag you down, the mob will do so, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.

On social media, a woman suggested that my decision to speak out against violent riots "speaks volumes" about my supposed racism. On the contrary, however, I think it speaks volumes about the far left in today's society that they endorse the mob. Their memories are too short to remember the LA riots, and certainly too short to remember the race riots of the early 1960s. It has been utterly fascinating to contrast the ideological responses to racial violence then and now.

Perhaps if George Floyd had lived, he would have served as a cooling voice during today's riots, as Rodney King did almost 30 years ago. I don't know, of course. I know nothing about George Floyd other than that he was an innocent man murdered in broad daylight in front of a camera, and that American society has grown so accustomed to seeing such videos that we no longer consider them to be shocking.

*        *        *

There were protests, which sadly turned violent, and there are think-pieces and social media updates. Everyone is navel-gazing about this, and while they do, they urge high-minded thoughts about the state of race relations in America today. Whites are urging each other to check their privilege and to learn about the black experience in America.

All such commentary is self-indulgent silliness.

While it's always a good idea to engage in self-improvement and to become a less bigoted person, white racism did not kill George Floyd. Police brutality killed George Floyd, systemic police brutality, fed with dollars from the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. A narcissistic, emboldened police force with near-immunity in the courts and one of the most politically powerful labor unions in the country killed George Floyd. A corrupt and unassailable criminal justice system that has financial incentives to murder and/or imprison blacks and latinos killed George Floyd.

You're not going to solve that problem by reading about Martin Luther King. You're not going to solve that problem by allowing more black voices a chance to be heard. You're only going to solve that problem by dismantling the police state.

It's natural for human beings, when confronted with an unsolvable problem, to assume instead that they are confronted with an easier problem, and to solve the easier problem instead.

Thus, and somewhat incredibly, we see that there is at least one problem in America that is a more unsolvable problem than racism: The police.