What’s Normal After COVID?
In October, my husband and I did something we haven’t done in nearly two years: go to a movie theatre. We are both James Bond fans and we wanted to see the latest movie in a movie theatre.
We made our way into the theatre, put on our masks (when we weren’t gobbling popcorn) and watched the movie. When we watched a Bond movie in the past, the theatre was usually packed. Not this time. There were maybe about 20 people in the room.
None of this reflected the movie. No Time to Die is a good movie but the ongoing pandemic has made us skittish to return to the theatre. In this climate, this was probably the best time to show the film. It was supposed to be released in April of 2020, but was pushed back several times until October 2021. At this point, where more and more people are vaccinated, it was time to show the movie in the theatres. The worse of the pandemic is over, but looking at that theatre, it was obvious that people still weren’t comfortable going to a movie theatre. So, is the pandemic over?
With the news of the new Omicron variant making the headlines, we are reminded again and again that while the public might be done with COVID-19, COVID isn’t done with us. It’s still early and we don’t know how virulent Omicron will be let alone how much protection the vaccines can provide from this latest variant, but the mere talk of another variant spreading around the world makes the average person stop in their tracks. Here we go again.
Of course, life is not what it was like in March and April of 2020. But life is not what it was in February 2020. I don’t know what life is like in your neck of the woods, but in Minnesota, we aren’t under lockdown. That said, things aren’t really back to normal. Malls close early. Restaurants are short-staffed. Neighborhoods once filled with people are now empty. Stores that might have been opened late into the evening now close at 7:00 PM. Churches have lost members after a year of no in person worship.
Then there are the things that are Potemkin-village normal, meaning it looks like how life was before COVID, save for one thing that reminds us things are not the same. My husband and I went to see Hamilton in Milwaukee in October. It was a packed house. However, you could not get in if you didn’t have proof of vaccination. No proof, no Hamilton.
We all remember those dangerous days in March 2020 when the virus was new and spreading. There were no vaccines, and we were trying to figure out if we needed to wear masks or not. My husband Daniel thought to himself what would happen if he died? He recounts how he didn’t want to have the hymn “How Great Thou Art” at his funeral. I worried about my mother who lived not far from me in a senior apartment complex. We had to get used to take out, and if we ate at a restaurant it had to be outside. While we are no longer where we were throughout 2020, we aren’t at normal yet. Instead, we are in some kind of liminal space. We went to our favorite Vietnamese restaurant in Uptown Minneapolis recently. It was always busy, but now it’s quiet. Life might be approaching normal, but we are not in normal yet. I’m pretty sure we aren’t even in the suburbs of normal.
I don’t know if we can get back to normal, even though a lot of people in opinion articles and podcasts want to say the pandemic is over and we can throw off our masks. The life that we had before COVID is probably gone for good. What comes next? We don’t know yet. I think the new normal is being built as we speak and we might not really be aware of the new normal until years from now.
It might look like a world where it takes a few years for moviegoing to reach pre-pandemic levels. Maybe we will have to get used to this hybrid of watching movies through streaming and in the theatre. Maybe we will wear masks for a few more years in public indoor spaces. Limited hours for stores will become normal. We might also become more hardline on being vaccinated when it comes to certain aspects of life. Unvaccinated? Maybe no lung transplant. Or going to a Broadway show. Or even having a job.
Or maybe none of that will happen. The thing is, we don’t know and we won’t know for a while. This COVID journey we are on maybe nearing the end, but we have to keep our arms and legs inside the car until the ride comes to a complete stop. Omicron reminds us that hasn’t happened yet.
Normal will happen, but that it will be a brand new normal because COVID has changed society and we will be feeling those effects for decades to come.
Writer Knute Berger wrote about America during another pandemic, the 1918 pandemic and it took quite a while for normal to happen and when it did, nothing was the same:
Well, the Spanish flu wasn’t Spanish — its origin was more plausibly in rural Kansas — and the oft-cited date gives a false sense of its duration. In fact, early signs arguably appeared in 1917 and the flu continued to flare up in places as late as 1922 before it “sputtered out.” Newspaper accounts suggest it was still rearing its head in Seattle as late as the winter of 1921. In other words, instead of a one-year or two-year misery, its arc covered four to five years, long after flu deaths had peaked. The global death estimate is at least 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million.
All of that sickness and death left human destruction in its wake:
In addition, many of the influenza’s impacts were long-term. The social impact was great. Some 700,000 deaths in the U.S., and many scores of broken families. In New York City alone it is estimated that, by the end of 1918, 31,000 children had lost one or both parents to the pandemic. Communities of color and Indigenous communities were hit particularly hard — entire villages in Alaska virtually disappeared, and some islands in the South Pacific, like Samoa, were devastated.
Berger goes on to share other examples of a changed world: unborn children faced a lifetime of developmental deficits. There was a rise in mental health issues. Some of those who caught the flu were never the same mentally.
I want things to get back to some kind of normal. I’d like to stop wearing a mask at church. I’m not interested in social distancing forever. I want to be in a movie theatre again and not feel worried. But I’m also not in a hurry for all of this to happen and I’m not going to live like it has. It’s not that I want to live in a permanent crisis, I’m learning that viruses don’t work on our time and that we can’t go “home” again even with the miracle of vaccines. We are headed towards a new normal, an undiscovered country. God only knows what we’ll find when we get there.
Dennis, thanks for writing this article. Its a subject much on all our minds these days.
Your citation below this paragraph of the “new normal” after the 1918 Influenza Pandemic backs this up. As does a lot of other history. Which means this paragraph is your money shot.
Frankly I don’t think we can “go back” nor should we. Going back means more people ignoring class and race disparities in our society. Going back means too many people too underpaid for their work. Going back means too many people absent from their families too often because they have to make a living.
I get that a lot of people can’t navigate the change well. And yes – we have miles to go before we sleep. History teaches us we can do this.Report
Many people across the world might be over the pandemic but the pandemic is clearly not over us because of Omnicron. That being said, the 1918 flu pandemic appears to have been quickly memory holed after that virus burnt itself out.
On the other hand, 1918 lacked the internet and it is unclear to me how many ad hoc workarounds are going to stay after COVID finally dies down or the world finally learns to accept it like it accepts the flu as endemic. Work from home from some people is the obvious one but there are other aspects. In law, a lot of depositions went over zoom during the pandemic. There are lots of lawyers who hate this and want to get back to the old world of everyone around the conference table. There are lots of lawyers who are starting firm “we are doing zoom” only depositions out a combination of laziness and theoretical advantage. It is easier to mask weak personal injury cases when opposing counsel cannot observe the allegedly injured party directly because of zoom. It also creates burden shifting. The traditional rules meant that the party noticing the deposition had to find a court reporter and location for the deposition. Now people just notice it by zoom and let opposing counsel scrounge for logistics if the deponent is not computer savvy. It pisses me off to be honest.
People have very different levels of risk tolerance that are subjective and make no sense to anyone really. I know people who are super-paranoid about COVID but completely risky in other avenues of life in ways I find questionable. I know people who are very blase about COVID but completely cautious in other avenues of life.
That being said, I am supposed to travel abroad on Saturday to a country with vaccinated travel lanes and they just announced some new steps for travels because of Omnicron.Report
Enjoyed the article. Some disconnected thoughts:
1. Someone somewhere made the joke that “Movies advertising themselves as ‘only in theaters!’ now sounds more like a threat than an enticement,” and, yeah.
2. I remember March and April 2020. And May and June and July. My university closed in March and I tried to teach online for the remaining month and a half. It didn’t go well, we had very little support and I didn’t know what I was doing. I still don’t. One thing this past year of semi-distanced classes (in person, but with distancing and an online component for those who must isolate) has taught me is *I am actually not as good a teacher as I thought* and that’s really hard, because so much of my identity came from my work. I’ve had some very hard lessons about myself during this time
3. there were weeks in summer 2020 where the only person I spoke to was my mother, on the phone. I am not sure I am going to ever be the level of cheerfulness and positivity that I was before the pandemic, and even then, I was closer to Eeyore than to Tigger on most days.
4. I don’t think we’re done. I don’t think Omicron is the last bad variant. Given how mobile we are and how non-civically-minded, I expect COVID to drag on for years after this, maybe into the 2030s. I’m beginning to consider if I could just retire early from teaching, if my reduced pension would be enough, because I can’t make it through eight more years of contact-tracing students, and plugging the damn camera and microphone into the classroom computer every morning and do the extended dance of logins to be able to broadcast class (which is much worse than being in person)
5. I recognize most of the “problems” I faced are minor compared to many people – I was able to be vaccinated early, I only lost two people I knew well to COVID and they were people I’d been somewhat out of touch with (one had been unwell for years). And yet, that doesn’t make it any easier when I’m having a really bad day of it, when I just want to stomp on my webcam and run away and live in the forest forever.
6. I think people’s mental health is going to be affected for years. Especially those in the medical fields who saw COVID patients die (I think of a friend’s sister, who is a NICU nurse, who had a couple babies in the NICU who were taken early by Caesarian as their mothers were dying of COVID). But I think even those of us who were fairly comfortable in the pandemic will be affected – I find walking into a large store makes me nervous, even if it’s not crowded, and I feel safer at the tiny neighborhood grocery than I do at the cavernous superstore, even though probably the superstore has a smaller density of people. The ONE time I ate in a restaurant since February 2020 (it was in October), I almost immediately after got a cold that was bad enough I went and got COVID tested, and so now I have an aversion to eating inside restaurants….
7. I do not foresee anything like the “roaring 20s” when this is “over” (or over enough that we’re not having thousands of deaths worldwide). Maybe in some social strata? But a lot of us are just tired and are close to the burnout point and really all we want is to sleep and maybe go shoe-shopping without a mask on and without worrying about being close to people.Report
Yeah. I want to go to Costco without a mask. I mean, I’m only one of 20% of the people in Costco with a mask on, but I want to be part of the 100% not wearing one.
And Omicron ain’t gonna be the last variant. We’re going to run out of Greek Letters.
But we’ve got more and more leaders ignoring more and more mask mandates. It’s going to be tough to get buy-in from altruistic punishers on masks when the moral leadership doesn’t also mask up in public.Report
I’ve given up on ever being able to go out in public unmasked again. I don’t feel comfortable walking into the walmart IN A MASK, and I’m not sure I ever will again.Report
I do not foresee anything like the “roaring 20s” when this is “over” (or over enough that we’re not having thousands of deaths worldwide).
Even more especially not where you live. The Roaring 20s economic boom didn’t really kick off until 1922, and even then was an almost exclusively urban phenomenon. Rural America spent the 1920s in a long recession of varying depth caused by the bottom falling out of crop prices and land values when WWI ended. I can’t think of any particular reasons that ruralia will do better this century.Report
This is a good post. I think, whenever it’s come to things that changed my life, I never thought “hey, my life is changing, what’s up with that?!?!” at the time. Rather a decade or so later I thought, “ya know, that really did change my life.”
In other words, wait till the pandemic’s over and then check with me a decade after that.Report
As for how the Spanish flu was forgotten, it’s a weird thing in newspapers of the time how little press it gets, although I think it was also very overshadowed by the end of the worst war the world had ever seen. My understanding of the “Lost Generation” appellation is yes, it was Gertrude Stein, but she’d heard the term commonly used by French people in reference to how many young people died in the war.
Anyway, there were a few years of processing people had to do before the big cultural shifts happened.Report
Anyway, there were a few years of processing people had to do before the big cultural shifts happened.
A decade of “where are all of the 20 year olds?” became a decade of “where are all of the 30 year olds?” became a decade of “where are all of the 40 year olds?”Report
It was more like I was under the mistaken historical impression that everyone got to 1918 and said “Hey, the war’s over! Let’s party!” But a lot of people were dead and a lot of people living were really fished up at that point. There was a whole period of people trying to go back to normal who were barely functioning. And more than a few who gave drinking themselves to death in Europe a try.Report
My impression is people use the phrase “Lost Generation” without really understanding why they were lost. WW1 is so distant and the actual horror of it compared to what came before was so shocking that few people really comprehend it. Then the terrible years after the war for Europe and the world after is even more forgotten. The destruction of a world view and all that seems to make sense dwarfs anything we are going through now. People generally don’t drink themselves to death due to little things or just to be cool and fashionable.Report
I suspect that this is an early version of the NYC/Hollywood thing. We “remember” the media that made it to us from the era.
And the media that made it to us from the era was from the places that made media in that era.Report
Thinking specifically of schools — particularly early childhood/elementary schools — I think some of the “new normal” will be things that probably should have been a part of the “old normal.” Better sickness policies, better cleaning procedures, better handwashing routines… all of these are things we probably should have been doing already and which will likely remain in some form or fashion and with real benefits.
There’s been some talk that the ability to pivot to remote learning means the end of snow days. Some schools have taken a hard stance saying that snow days have their own value and won’t encroach on that, a sentiment I support. Others recognize that the logistics of quick pivots have their own challenges. Time will tell how “new normals” will emerge in areas where we identified new possibilities but with larger trade-offs.Report
I’ll make a few remarks (speaking from 25 years in the past) about remote classroom “presence” over the internet, based on my early research involvement.
It has to be casually easy to use — same order of difficulty as walking into the room and taking your seat. Setting up the first time can be (somewhat) more difficult, but after that, click the icon/link and you’re in the right place, with the video and audio working properly. Properly secured, preferably.
It may just be me, but I maintain it works best in situations where there’s a medium beyond simple audio and video to talk around. Maybe a second video window. Maybe what I did way back when, a fancier version of overhead transparencies. One of the most potentially powerful things about it being a computer on the internet is that the nature of the medium is essentially unlimited. My standard complaint goes in here: we’re still waiting for a good equivalent to a paper and pen I/O device that takes advantage of the enormously good eye-to-hand feedback loop we almost all have.
A class of 25 is absolutely the most difficult situation to deal with. There needs to be a lot of stream management going on. The instructor needs a huge amount of screen real estate. The students, much less so. If you’re a student, sitting in a classroom, paying attention, you don’t see the other students faces until it’s time to do so (eg, turn and watch Timmy while he answers the question). Ditto for the online version. There needs to be quite a lot of control of what’s on the students’ screens. There needs to be a complicated signaling protocol, so the instructor can “call on” Timmy and then everyone gets to watch him. (If I were designing it again, I would modify my version of that protocol so that Timmy doesn’t show up for a beat or so.)
Small seminars are easier. Lectures without questions are easiest.
If anyone has had really good experiences with classroom “presence” tools, I’d love to hear about them. Here or separately.Report
I taught “screen school” all year last year… 40 minutes a day to a small group of consistent 3/4/5-year-olds. I quickly learned I couldn’t just be a talking face. I quickly accelerated my nascent tech skills and came up with fun visuals to guide us through the experiences. I learned that scanning a book and screen sharing a slide show of it was infinitely better than holding a book up to the screen. Yikes! I learned how to use gifs to model movement games. And how to link slides to make them quasi interactive (e.g., “You chose the red bed… we click it and… oh my goodness, a dinosaur is in it!”). We were limited to the Zoom platform so it was still me largely throwing stuff at the kids but we did learn a lot and quickly.
But… that took weeks and months. The idea that we can immediately “flip” to remote computer instruction — especially for young kids — with minimal/no experience in that year with that teacher and that cohort feels deeply flawed to me.Report
Exactly! And given the other media, the kids probably benefit from you not as a talking face but as a talking person from at least the waist up. So they can see your body language. Certainly that was the case 25+ years ago.
Some of my point about a group like that being the most difficult is that for a seminar, or a big lecture, the other media is already done.Report
Ending awards for “good attendance” which means that kids with chronic conditions can never win, and there’s a slight incentive for the “gunners” to go to school sick so they don’t lose the award.
I don’t LOVE the idea of always doing the dang camera thing (ESPECIALLY since instead of there just being already set up cameras and mikes in the room I have to do it myself) but yeah, for people with some kind of longer term illness it probably helps. However, I’m also seeing students who are most likely NOT sick using the “I can Zoom in” as a way of not being present in person, and based on some of their exam grades, I think they’re half-listening to class and doing something else during lecture time.
I suppose it means I have to work in in-class “clicker” questions, which means I will have to learn the “clicker” utility and be sure all my students have a device that will do that. I haven’t had the energy or bandwidth for that yet, I keep hoping it will get to the point where I DON’T have 1/3-1/2 the class joining online.Report
I don’t LOVE the idea of always doing the dang camera thing (ESPECIALLY since instead of there just being already set up cameras and mikes in the room I have to do it myself)…
Half-and-half is the horror story. In this day and age, the tech to quick-scan a set of slides (or dump the images from some other software tool), to have a camera/mic set at a reasonable distance for a pure on-line lecture, fits in a standard briefcase/messenger bag. The software to control a realistic virtual classroom seems to still be sadly missing.
My granddaughters’ Xmas gift this year is going to be a cardboard box with a small screen that gives them a (limited) audio/video hot line to Grandpa. They were here at Thanksgiving for informal testing. Everything I saw verified the lessons about video from 25+ years ago: it has to move, then you can add frame size, color, and the rest.
I am hoping that by the time Grandpa is supposed to provide math tutoring — quoting my daughter, “Dad dragged me kicking and screaming through calculus from 200 miles away with the software he let me help demo at Take Your Daughter to Work Day” — the I/O device I want is available.Report
People don’t know what the new normal is like because big events like pandemics and massive wars always change everything. There is never a snap back to normal. A lot of people are clearly seeing COVID as an opportunity to apply what they see as correctives to human society or at least changing some things that they don’t like. All the people who want to work from home for example or people who had public facing jobs are happier that they don’t need to deal with angry customers anymore. These are minor things but there seem to be hundreds of thousands or millions of people that don’t want a return to the office or the store and restaurant. I remember early in the pandemic that a surprising number of people I knew were happy that handshakes might go away forever.
That the entire pandemic has been turned into a culture war in the United States doesn’t help that much returning to normal either. Most of the side that took COVID seriously is going to want a much slower return or even no return to normal because of the culture war against taking COVID seriously.Report
I don’t like the framing either. Normal isn’t a set thing. We can certainly talk about before and after, but lets not kid ourselves. Whatever our world looks like in 10 years will be just as “normal” as what it looked like in 2018.Report
The Republicans won big in 1918 and 1920 by promising a return to normalcy but the Roaring Twenties was unrecognizable from the world of 1910 to 1914.Report
Stuff like this just chaps my hide:
Is the rule that we have to wear a mask? If that’s the rule, then our leaders ought to do it too.
If our leaders are communicating that it’s not important to wear a mask, then the message that people will hear is that it’s not important to wear a mask.
This whole “it’s only important for other people to wear a mask” will not work.
The more that I see leadership refusing to wear a mask, the more dumb I feel for putting one on the second before I walk into a Safeway.Report
Yes, we know Democrats chap your hide.Report
Saul, maybe you could tell us what the actual rules are in SF. Seems that information might be relevant.Report
I am not really a nightclubber but indoor drinking and dining have been allowed for a while now. You need to show proof of vaccination and an ID to dine or drink in. Checking on this seems consistent. Officially I suppose you are supposed to mask up unless actively eating or drinking but this rarely happens.
At venues like movies and performances you are supposed to mask up for the entire performance unless eating or drinking. I have done so. I would guess nightclubs turn their eyes a bit but have no idea. I haven’t been out to a club since 2011.
But still JB has proven that if a Democrat does something, it must be proof of massive hypocrisy in his mind.Report
Jaybird,
Nightclubs are allowed to be open in SF. Indoor dining and drinking and dancing have been allowed for months and at 100 percent capacity or close. All you need to do is show proof of vaccination and an ID to enter.
Please explain what she did wrong here by following the proper policies and procedures.Report
According to the story:
That paragraph links to this article about the mask mandate.
The story goes on to say:
Report
I am rather pleased to see these stories and hope that the politicians in question get badly embarrassed and, even, lose their next election over the matter. It’d be a strong incentive to not go over draconian on the covid restrictions or let them linger for covid theater past the point where they’ll be of any use. It’s a Democratic politician you say? Well most urban politicians are. I hope she loses her primary to a different better Democratic Politician.Report
There are not draconian COVID restrictions in San Francisco and haven’t been for months. This is an attempt to drum up outrage over nothing burger and it just fuels JB’s anti-Democratic Party bias. He thinks he is uncovering stories of those horrible Democratic cultural elitists being big, fat hypocrites.Report
So you’re saying there isn’t a regional mandate announced in August requiring that everyone must wear a mask inside businesses, including nightclubs, unless they are actively eating or drinking?Report
I am stating that JB will use anything and everything to jump up and down and announce “Democrats are nothing but out of touch cultural elites. I don’t care if a Democrat is a public school teacher with three roommates. She is still an elite because she knows who contemporary painter X is and likes the shouts and murmurs section of the New Yorker.”
I’m stating that the main policy as practiced is providing proof of vaccination and there is no evidence that Breed did not do that.Report
I’m stating that the main policy as practiced is providing proof of vaccination and there is no evidence that Breed did not do that.
Is this a good policy? I’ve been triple vaccinated!
I’d love for this to be the policy that everybody adopts!Report
Whether Jay thinks Democrats are out of touch elites seems utterly and entirely irrelevant to my question. I don’t care if Jay thinks Democrats are out of touch elites and the country cares even less than I do.
So if the policy is simply “confirm vaccination to enter” and that’s that then the politician in question is in the clear. She can say as much and this is a nothing burger.
If the policy IS that you’re required to remain masked inside except when eating and drinking then she probably needs to fess up to violating that requirement.
If that second requirement is being recommended by a fifty year old expert who says “ehh.. who cares about clubs? This rule provides a one in a trillion decrease in the odds of Covid transmission so it’s obviously worth it.” then I’d like Mayor Breed to be listening to that recommendation and be remembering the sinking sensation she got when she got busted in violation of this rule and wonder to herself “Let’s really think about the costs and benefits of this rule. Are they in balance?”
And, obligatorily, let’s note that this is a conversation among and between liberals. The conservatives aren’t in this conversation. They’re in the corner with their innards liquified and leaking out their anuses from horse dewormer muttering something about taxation being theft.Report
Everything North said here.
If we need these rules — rules that are a pain in the butt to follow — then the leaders who enact or support or enforce them should be good models for following them.
If we don’t need these rules, we shouldn’t have them.
If only some people need these rules… then we don’t need these rules.Report
Or you know, the photographers could have waited for her to be between sips for a gotcha moment. The inability of liberals to take their own side in an argument is breathtaking.Report
The video in question is here:
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I am pleased at that inability. If one wants mindless rally round dear leader attitudes then I’m pleased one can only find it mostly on the right.Report
There is a difference between not having mindless dear leader attitudes and just doing a knee jerk contrarian stance against your time just to prove that you do not have a mindless dear leader attitude.
I don’t take it as a matter of good faith that JB’s presentation of the story is accurate.
From the same article, “I was in a private area with my drinks with the people I was with, enjoying myself at a venue and I had a great time and I followed the appropriate protocols. And yes, I was dancing and yes, I was drinking and having fun. And at the end of the day, I am doing everything I can to follow the existing protocols,” Breed said. “And I think sadly, sometimes these videos are taking out of perspective,” she added.
I wasn’t at the club. Why should I take it on faith that she was misbehaving all the time and violating the protocols over an opportunistic photographer waiting for a moment when a drink was down but the mask was not up.
Also in terms of revelations, this is extremely weak tea.
JB on the other hand has proven himself to have lots of psychological hangups about Democrats.Report
I don’t take it as a matter of good faith that JB’s presentation of the story is accurate.
It’s not *MY* presentation of the story! That’s the SF Chronicle!Report
Oh, I get it, it’s a smokescreen to hide his fascism!Report
Mayor Bass appears to be signaling inadvertently with her behavior that the protocols she’s overseeing are overly restrictive without accompanying health benefits. So then maybe the protocols should be relaxed so that being masked any time you aren’t drinking or eating is no longer required? I know this isn’t about Jay’s opinion of liberals so it’s somewhat orthogonal to your main point but that strikes me as the more salient question.Report
If you haven’t seen this thread, you might be surprised by it:
The interesting part of the thread isn’t the storefronts (of which there are many, many pictures) but this:
I’ve no doubt that a different Democrat will get elected next time. A “moderate”.Report
This has nothing to do with COVID. This looked like planned crime, potentially organized on social media.Report
Saul, you misunderstand. I was responding to North’s statement: “It’s a Democratic politician you say? Well most urban politicians are. I hope she loses her primary to a different better Democratic Politician.”
The tweets I quoted are from someone calling for different better politicians.
And, as I said, “I’ve no doubt that a different Democrat will get elected next time. A “moderate”.”Report
I’ve heard a lot of hair raising stuff about local politics in Cali.Report
What have you head and from who?Report
Oh from everywhere on the internet. Crowing conservatives, exasperated liberals, “you gotta understand” NIMBIES and the idealistic poorer people they use as their beards.
As for what? All kinds of stuff. Most of which boils down to “we need a lot more housing but we don’t wanna build it.” On the up side Minneapolis and Saint Paul did recently import an idiotic idea from Cali. They’re talking about taking a run at rent control. Le sigh. Three steps forward and two steps back.Report
Hearing things on the internet is the equivalent of stating “mistakes were made.” It acknowledges things might have been not up to snuff but is too unspecific.
NIMBYism is a universal and bi-partisan problem. Unfortunately YIMBYism seems to be not quite popular. The links between good policy and popularity in Democracy are often tenuous and quite sucky. Still, YIMBYism is not the vote-killer it used to be. Scott Weiner and London Breed are YIMBYs. There has been some progress albeit not as much as needed but I don’t think you are one to expect fast progress.
There are probably points to make about homelessness in San Francisco but conservatives still end up being unable to help themselves from wanting to think it proves dime-store Calvinism is correct and homelessness is a “personal choice” that needs to be beaten out of people rather than a complex policy problem with lots of different parts.
The SF School Board is facing recall elections and received plenty of snark in the liberal press over some of their decisions. Chessa Boudin is also subject to a recall but one I personally find more questionable. I intend to vote against it but for the recall of the three school board members.
Is SF more liberal than many places in the United States? Absolutely. Is it filled with hypocrites and and smug elitists who look down on normal hard-working Americans? No.
Crime is complicated. It is easy to jump up and down when someone gets released without cash bail and then commits another crime. It is hard to balance that with someone who was wrongfully arrested/accused and then loses their job because they spend weeks or months in jail as their case proceeds to trial. Jaybird’s posting of the pictures from downtown SF might as well been an out of context screed from the Federalist or a Garrison cartoon. This is a very small block of luxury stores. It appears that there was an organized heist with dozens of people and cars to hit all at once and overwhelm any resistance but police did arrive and make arrests. This crime did not occur because of the election of a progressive DA who understands crime needs a more complicated and nuanced response than “lock them up and throw away the key.”
Yet, school shootings can never hurt Republicans but one instance of maybe less than perfect adherence to a policy (and it is debatable whether she violated policy) is damnation for all Democrats it seems.Report
“NIMBYism is a universal and bi-partisan problem.”
It is, sure, and yet… yet it’s a bigger problem for us liberals. Is that because liberals tend to be running the show in places that are economically successful enough to have people clamoring to live there? Could be. If that is the case then it’s even more incumbent on liberals to develop means of dealing with NIMBY’s because we NEED that skill more.
And a whole heck of a lot of the homelessness, crime etc. problems that liberal areas are struggling with seems downstream of the housing stock question.Report
I think this says a lot of hair raising stuff about politics in nearly all-white towns in semi-rural Michigan. We should shut it down until we can figure out what is going on.
https://twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/1465783921195438084?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1465783921195438084%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com%2F2021%2F11%2Fguns-guns-gunsReport
Dumb, why?
Does the virus care what Mayor Breed does?
Does your mask become ineffective if she takes hers off?
If Mom drives to the store without a seat belt, should I feel dumb for wearing one?Report
If Mom drives to the store without a seat belt, should the police give her a ticket?
If the police do not give her a ticket because, hey, it’s her car… then what do we think about the Click It or Ticket law?Report
We can feel many things, but an adult shouldn’t feel dumb for taking sensible precautions.
The virus and the laws of gravity don’t care what Mom does or doesn’t.Report
The more boosters I have and the more leadership refuses to comply, the more that I wonder if I haven’t misjudged the “sensible” part of “sensible precautions”.
You could die while taking a walk around the block, after all.Report
Let me give an example from the CDC.
The CDC announced that fewer than 10% of Covid transmissions happened outdoors.
This is true, of course, but it’s true because, according to the New York Times, “There is not a single documented Covid infection anywhere in the world from casual outdoor interactions, such as walking past someone on a street or eating at a nearby table.”
No, not a single one.
So is wearing a mask outside a “sensible precaution” or does it veer off into “unsensible”?
I have reached the conclusion that masks outdoors (when running, perhaps) are an unsensible precaution, even when I happen to be running a trail where I know I will be passed by others.
If leadership also communicates that masking has moved from a “sensible precaution” to an “unsensible” one, I do not see why I should not agree with them.
And doubly so when there are more criticisms against me who is only considering masking less than against those who are not masking despite their own mandates.Report
So, Mom not wearing a seat belt causes you to question whether you’ve misjudged the laws of gravity?Report
No, I understand what Newton was arguing with the whole F =MA thing.
What I’m having an issue with is the whole fuzziness between “sensible” and “unsensible” when it comes to masking.Report
“…but an adult shouldn’t feel dumb for taking sensible precautions.”
We are still very much identifying what qualifies as a “sensible precaution.” So if the people who are in charge or deciding what precautions are so sensible as to be mandated don’t see the need to follow those mandates, it calls into question both the sensibility of the act and how much precaution it actually offers.
If I tell my kids not to touch the stove because it is hot and then place my hand on the stove, they might think, “Well, that dumb dumb is going to be in a world of hurt. I won’t act like him.” But they might also think, “Hm… doesn’t seem hot. I should be fine to touch it, too.”
You might think the latter would be a dumb way to proceed, but for someone who is still learning how stoves work, it is a pretty reasonable response. And we are still very much still learning how Covid works… not just the virus but how society and Covid will/should/are interacting.
I’m not one to champion Jaybird and rarely share his political perspective but when someone is right, they’re right. And he’s 100% right that lawmakers not following their own laws vis a vis Covid is a pretty big problem.Report
It seems weird that people who are so literate and well informed and able to summon up highly technical studies at a moments notice, should suddenly pivot to “gosh, Mayor Breed isn’t wearing a mask and now I just don’t know what to do!”
Especially since Jaybird was the guy presenting a sketchy study and vehemently insisting that masks don’t really work and can sometimes be counterproductive.
Is this mask hesitancy really about Mayor Breed? Really?Report
Especially since Jaybird was the guy presenting a sketchy study and vehemently insisting that masks don’t really work and can sometimes be counterproductive.
You misunderstand.
My argument was that N95 masks worked and the study showed that double-layer t-shirt masks were meh and single-layer were worse than nothing.
If you’d like to see what the CDC has to say, you can do so here.
You may be shocked to find that there are masks that they recommend *AGAINST* using.Report
Did you arrive at these conclusions using your own reasoning, or did other peoples behavior affect your judgment?
I mean, if Chip always wears a mask, does that cause you to doubt that study?Report
Did I arrive at the conclusion that some masks were bad because the CDC said that they were bad?
Yes. I, myself, wear N95 masks when I go out.
And now I am seeing that those in power who have been appropriately vaccinated are masking up less and less.
Indeed, defenses of them doing so include, and let me copy and paste this:
the main policy as practiced is providing proof of vaccination
I’m asking “is this a good policy?”
And “if so, can I follow it too?”Report
“Can I follow it too?”
Why would you ask such a question if you’ve already formed an opinion based on reason?
You certainly didn’t start masking because of their role modeling, why would you cease because of it?Report
I began masking well before I got vaccinated way back when we didn’t know anything about the virus.
As it is now, as more and more of our vaccinated leadership has decided that vaccination is sufficient protection (indeed, the main policy as practiced is providing proof of vaccination), I am recalculating with this new information.
Do you think that this new information is bad information?
Like, do you think that London Breed should be ashamed for what she did?
Or do you think that what she did was no big deal?
I’d like to know what the policy ought to be, that I might meet it.Report
“a sketchy study”
If you would like to come to your own conclusions about how sketchy the study is, you can read it for yourself here.
Nature.
I don’t understand why Chip is calling it “sketchy”.Report
I can’t speak for Jaybird but I think it’s pretty clear that masking outside of a handful of places with sensitive populations (hospitals, nursing homes, etc.) is theater. Even in those places it only works if it is vigorously enforced which it never is in casual environments. Like the virus doesn’t sign a ceasefire when you sip your beer but resume hostilities when you walk to the bathroom.
Maybe these made sense in 2020
but we have the solution and it is the vaccines. The rest is quickly and quite apparently becoming nonsense.Report
So, we should use our own reason and sense of risk to make our decisions, regardless of what the mayor of San Francisco does or doesn’t?Report
Yes. We should all get the shot. Then the mayor can declare victory and drop the mandate.Report
Which would also, likely, have the side effect of making it feel more like Covid is whupped which could have a few beneficial knock on effects.Report
One certainly hopes!Report
Great!
So long as there are no examples of politicians downplaying the efficacy of vaccine mandates, we will have this whipped in no time!Report
I believe those politicians have blood on their hands.Report
I have no strong bones on whether mask mandates make sense or not. But Jaybird is taking it as an matter of faith that this series proves Breed was being a hypocrite out of touch elite when it takes a lot of heavy lifting to get there.Report
If the main policy as practiced is providing proof of vaccination then that should be the main policy as established!
If leadership establishes one policy of masking for the little people but runs with the policy of providing proof of vaccination for themselves, then establish the policy of provision of proof of vax!Report
The host of the most viewed cable show telling us that vaccines don’t work while himself being vaccinated, well heck that’s just no biggie.
But a mayor appearing without a mask?
Outrage!
The world just doesn’t make sense any more!
In conclusion the Democrats should do some soul searching.Report
If you want an accurate summation of my opinion, it follows (cut/pasted):
Report
Even my liberal friends & family got a wry chuckle out of this video.Report
@KenB that was pretty funny. They have good writers there at Reason’s video unit.Report
Remy is a genius.Report
I think my comment was a pretty accurate summation.Report
I’m more inclined to say that you feel that your comment was a pretty accurate summation.Report
Your comment was accurate, Chip but irrelevant. As I noted to Saul previously, conservatives aren’t in this conversation. They’re flopping around in a pool of feces off in the corner. This is an intra-liberal discussion. Whatabouting the conservative figures is irrelevant to the question of liberal politicians flouting the rules they’re putting into place locally.
You say liberal policy and politicians are better than conservatives by a mile. I agree with you. But the cost of being better than conservatives is you have to BE BETTER. Yeah conservatives are literally encouraging their constituents to do stuff that makes it more likely they’ll die and also take down their local hospital systems. That’s awful. That’s horrendous. That doesn’t make individual liberal politicians not adhering to the social isolation guidelines they institute good or even less bad. Liberal politicians avoiding their own rules is bad. Not as bad as conservative shenanigans’ but still bad. Either the rules are excessive and should be relaxed or the politicians did bad and should eat a bug at a minimum or resign at worst. This isn’t complicated.Report
Despite what you think, Jaybird has proven to have a bias towards conservative sources and tweets. We are in severe if it quacks like a duck territory.Report
…is the San Franscisco Chronicle a conservative source?Report
If this is liberalism, bring me some conservatism. If this is conservatism, bring me some liberalism.
This isn’t liberal or conservative, this is just dumb.
“I saw a person without a mask and now I question maskng” is sophomoric, like literally something an oppositional adolescent would say.
Who here is actually dong that?
Who is bold enough to make such a stupid comment in their own name?
No one, which is why this is couched in “Oh, well its not ME, but OTHER people who will see this and question masks!”
I guess its really about ethics in political gamesmanship or something.
This is utter BS on steroids. There is no pool of people who are going to question masks because of the mayor, but there are plenty of people who question masks because of the Republicans.Report
Chip, at this point do you see masking as primarily something for self-protection (“wearing a mask is unpleasant but it will keep me safe”), or as primarily something to protect others (“wearing a mask is unpleasant but it means I’m less likely to spread the virus if I have it”)?
If it’s mainly for self-protection then it’s hard to see the justification for mask mandates, especially ones that don’t specify KN95 or similar effectiveness.
If it’s mainly a personal sacrifice to protect those around you, then can you really not see why having a leader say “you all have to do this for the community, but I personally won’t hold myself to the same rule” is damaging to that effort?Report
Don’t know about Chip, but my own inclination is that the science says, “If everyone wears masks in crowded places, especially indoor crowded places, transmission is substantially reduced.” It may work in one direction only, eg, it protects others from me if I’m carrying the virus. It may work in both directions. That part is unclear. So’s the related droplets-vs-aerosols debate.Report
I’ll happily say that it’s almost impossible to overestimate the stupidity of the masses. If the mayor was flouting the rules she established then that assuredly damages the efficacy of the rule in question, the reputation of the mayor and respect for the mayors ideology and party. You’re a former conservative yourself and older even than I am. You’ve seen hypocrisy devour social conservativism from a dominant social default down to a whining rump in the course of a couple of decades. How could you possibly imaging it’ll work differently for a liberal?
And why not make the affirmative case that public officials shouldn’t have to worry about adhering to the rules they set, ostensibly for everyone? Are rules really only for the little people? You seem to be skating pretty close to saying so.Report
“The masses are stupid and need to be led like sheep so Democrats need to be perfect” is what I meant by “If this is liberalism bring me some conservatism.”Report
Wait…so is this an acknowledgement that the mayor of San Francisco effed up?
That might be sufficient for me too.
“The rules are good, worth following, don’t need to be changed, and, by not following her own rules, she effed up.”Report
If you want to make the case that the Mayor flouting her own regulations doesn’t hurt her reputation and her ideology then please make it instead of simply implying it.
You’re welcome to clutch your pearls at the observation that great masses of people are stupid in aggregate, it doesn’t change that they are and that observing so is like commenting that the sky is blue or the sun rises in the east.Report
Is there any evidence that this is moving votes?
I mean, even by your own logic, what makes you think this is changing SF electoral dynamics?
Sounds like this is the Tan Suit, Frisco Edition.Report
In sapphire blue San Francisco? No clue. I don’t live there. I’d hope it’d mean a more sensible Democratic Mayor gets a leg up but who knows.Report
This is why I have such scorn for Pundit Brain.
We have a dozen or more Savvy Pundit comments shrieking and howling about how Mayor Breed and the Democrats are blowing it, just blowing it, absolutely destroying their reputations and then, after a bit of reflection….
Well, maybe none of that is actually happening.
But trust me on this next Savvy take on electoral politics and who is Doing It Wrong!Report
I’d settle for liberals starting to realize that proving Murc’s law is not in their best interestReport
“We need more people to stand up for Team Good like Chris Cuomo had the integrity to do!”
“Instead of standing up for #MeToo?”
“BOTH SIDES DO IT!”Report
My guess is she’s just an idiot. That’s what I think about my local leadership, where the mask mandate keeps coming on and off despite the fact that, if the news is to be believed, we have over 90% of the eligible population vaccinated.Report
I don’t think she is an idiot and there is plenty of popular support for masking in SF and California being kept in place. Whether this is correct as a matter of COVID infection spread risk reduction, I will leave to the experts.
San Francisco and California are not as super-liberal as right-wing nuts make them out to bee but they are not exactly purple states either. Elder got crushed in the recall partially (or largely) because an overwhelming majority of voters thought the GOP response to COVID was nuts.
As far as I can tell, SF residents largely support the mask mandate remaining than support repealing it. It is questionable whether Breed violated the mask mandate as it stands now at all. Why is this a big concern for dudes from Colorado, Minnesota, and Maryland? How does it effect you at all?
Also, Trump hack judges are striking down vaccine mandates left and right with very strained logic: https://twitter.com/hannnahmmarie/status/1465831113172164613?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1465831113172164613%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com%2F2021%2F11%2Ftrump-judge-stops-vaccine-mandate-with-powerline-blog-postReport
Maybe she didn’t. I am admittedly not an expert in the nuances of SF’s rules.
But it isn’t like the mask mandates are some uniquely California thing. I assume most of us commenting here are subject to one.Report
you assume incorrectly. Very Incorrectly. The only place I am subject to a mask mandate anymore is in federal buildings or on federal property. and its been that way here for months. Our schools were the last entities to drop their mandates, and all of them now have.Report
I meant the people Saul specifically mentioned since I gather all of us are in metropolitan or at least large suburban areas where they persist or it is foreseeable they could return. I understand that is not everywhere.Report
I would be interested in knowing if whether “most” of us are, myself. Because, hey, *I* am (work) and I walked maskedly past signs at the Safeway and King Soopers asking everybody to wear a mask into a gaggle of people where I am one of the 20% masked people walking around.Report
If her voters are in favor of the mask policy then going out and flouting her own mask policy in a night club is, if not idiot behavior, at least idiot adjacent.Report
Except there is no evidence that she was flouting her own mask policy except one photograph. You have not answered my question about why I should take it as a matter as a good faith that this was a genuine flouting hypocrisy as opposed to gotcha moments from highly biased sources with axes to grind.
Your desire to appear above the fray makes you a real cheerleader for GOP swipes sometimes.
As I said above, I don’t think Jaybird operates in good faith. I don’t think he is cute or clever or loveable. His sources for everything allegedly bad or hypocritical about Democrats and Democratic Party come from highly partisan right-wingers like Manhattan Institute fellows. When called out for citing the fascist friendlt Claremont Institute he apologizes with the non-apology apology well known to unrepentant middle-school miscreants and very online 8chaners.
I see no reason to give any weight or deference to his viewpoint. Nor do I see any reason to see this as anything but middle aged white guys getting excited because they get to tut tut at San Francisco for alleged hypocrisy like a bunch of class clowns.
For someone so allegedly fond of “federalism for real this time”, Jaybird sure hates it when people to his left get to have federalism too.Report
It’s not just a photograph, there is video available.
For someone so allegedly fond of “federalism for real this time”, Jaybird sure hates it when people to his left get to have federalism too.
Saul, I’d merely be down with Numbers 15:15-16. I don’t mind California having a different set of rules than Colorado. I don’t mind San Francisco having a different set of rules than California.
I mind the mayor having a different set of rules than her constituents.
You’re arguing that the policy as practiced is just show your vax card. I think that that’d be a good policy to have and she would obviously *NOT* be in violation of it by dancing on the dance floor as seen above (assuming she showed her card).
But that’s not the mandate.Report
(And I’m not fond of it as much as I think that we could iterate it a lot longer before we achieve a failure state than whatever the hell it is we’re doing now.)Report
If you want to assert that Jaybird and, apparently, the San Francisco Chronicle are wrong then, spare us your indignant screeds Saul and cite the proof. Has the Mayor made the claim that she was fully in compliance with her own rule? Where’re the articles? Where’s the link to the regulation showing the masking isn’t required when not drinking or eating? Surely the Mayor can find at least one liberal friendly media outlet in San fishing Francisco to present her side of the story? Is she claiming complete innocence here?Report
It’s about trust and faith in the systems.
“We need a mask mandate!”
“Why?”
“Because of the science.”
“Um, okay.”
…
“Wait, you’re not wearing a mask? Does that mean you’re not to be trusted? Or the science you touted is not to be trusted?”
None of this changes any realities about the virus and masks or whatever. But such behavior has very real effects. And saying, “Well, people should be smart enough to do their own research and not listen to politicians…” Well… you know what kinda folks tend to say that? Not the kinda folks I imagine you want to be associated with.Report