Siding with Humans, 12 April 2025
When government uses “anxiety” as an excuse to not deal with a problem, the term for this is Political Abuse of Psychiatry.
Some in the government used shaming “fear” of sickness and death to try to keep people engaged with the economy despite the threats of covid, and now the Trump administration is using “climate anxiety” to justify stopping research on climate, in order to attempt to hide the public health effects that would come from environmental damage. Again and again it’s been clear that there’s an agenda against public health that is the same opposition to climate mitigation, it’s been obvious since they use the same tactics and the funding comes from the same fossil fuel sources.
NY Project Hope Coping with COVID - 5. Look at uncertainty from a different perspective… It’s been said that uncertainty can be an “emotional amplifier,” meaning that uncertainty amplifies the emotions of whatever you’re thinking about. For example, it can be unpleasant to be uncertain about whether you’re going catch COVID-19, but it’s pleasant to be uncertain about how the new food you’re trying will taste. Looking at uncertainty in the lense of unexpected joy can take away some of the fear. Leaning into uncertainty as you do when you’re going to a new place, reading a new book, eating new food, learning a new language, and traveling abroad can help you to be more open to uncertainty, and more creative. We don’t know how these experiences will turn out, but we are still willing to engage in them.
It’s normal for people to want to avoid getting sick for all sorts of reasons. It’s absolutely normal to want to postpone injury and death. Yet elite panic seems to lead people in power to focus on “calming down” the public about dangers, and normalizing harms and bad outcomes because of some kind of loyalty to a status quo that preserves their own position.
🗞️ In the news
Second child dies from measles-related causes as Texas outbreak continues to spread - Updated on: April 7, 2025 / 6:50 PM CDT / CBS/AP A second school-aged child has died in Texas from a measles-related illness, a hospital spokesperson confirmed Sunday. The child's death comes as an outbreak of measles originating in West Texas continues to spread. … (...) … An unvaccinated school-age child died of measles in February in Lubbock — the first measles death in the U.S. in a decade. In early March, an adult in New Mexico who was unvaccinated and did not seek medical care became the second measles-related death. More than two months in, the West Texas outbreak is believed to have spread to New Mexico, Oklahoma and Kansas, sickening nearly 570 people. The World Health Organization also reported cases related to Texas in Mexico.
CIDRAP - Studies: 1 in 7 US working-age adults report long COVID, with heaviest burden on the poor Mary Van Beusekom, MS April 9, 2025 "In the United States, concerns have been increasingly raised over the future public health and economic burden of long COVID including disability and declines in labor force participation," he wrote. "However, only a handful of U.S. studies have explored sociodemographic or socioeconomic characteristics that put people at risk of long COVID or have investigated its economic and mental health sequelae."
Important Context The FDA Goes Fringe: What You Need to Know About the Agency’s New Hire Tracy Beth Høeg has been a far-right favorite for her COVID contrarianism. Walker Bragman Apr 05, 2025 Høeg’s induction into the new regime is unsurprising. She fits in well with the current crop of contrarian public health leadership and is a longtime ally of Makary’s. The pair published a paper together and have co-authored opinion pieces. Like her new boss, Høeg has promoted “natural immunity.” She also branded individuals supportive of COVID mitigation measures “Covidian,” a term favored by Trump’s new National Institutes of Health director, economist Jay Bhattacharya. Along with Makary and Bhattacharya, Høeg has allied herself with anti-vaxxers like Kennedy, whom she calls a “friend,” and Alex Berenson. She’s also made many dubious remarks about vaccines—particularly COVID jabs, casting doubt on both their safety and the need to use them. During a post-election podcast appearance, Høeg said she hoped to see the incoming administration craft a “revised framework for testing, approving and regulating new vaccines,” and end “unnecessary” inoculations.
The opposition to proxy voting is the same old opposition to remote anything.
There's a bill in Congress to allow proxy voting for representatives with new babies. Republican Mike Johsnon has gone so far as to just shut down everything for the week just to stop this bill, because there are Republicans who support it.
There is no issue with proxy voting being "corrupted" because all these votes are public, not by secret ballot. So there's no functional or practical reason to not allow remote voting. It could always be verified that it was done on the level.
But it's the same old story about remote work and forcing Return To Office.
If they start to allow new parents to remote vote with new babies…
Of course this will become the disability accessibility issue that it really is. They likely don't want to create precedents because the far right is eugenicist and resents anyone disabled from participating in society, let alone the halls of power.
Constituents will start to question why their representatives have to live in DC and hobnob with each other more than their own neighbors back home that they represent. They will say they need to collaborate with the magic of in-person - as if telephones haven't existed and party calls for decades already. But we know what that means. It means that they're more interested in getting a long weekend from their job than actually doing their job - representing us.
People who want to serve in Congress will start questioning all sorts of barriers. Anand Giridharadas recently recounted a story on a livestream about how some years ago he had talked to someone about a possible run for some office, and the person who talked to him basically told him to forget about spending any time with his toddlers for the duration of holding office. Why is it made so hard for people to actually be a part of the ruling bodies do you think? It absolutely disincentivizes people running who actually want to spend time with their families, who actually want to live in the district they represent, who actually want to hang with their neighbors in their district, and it incentivizes people who would maybe prefer to hobnob with fancy lobbyists and donors from the upper class. The donor class certainly likes having them all in one place for easy access by the lobbying groups they set up in DC.
And think of the fossil fuel use. If you think it's important to stop unnecessary travel, like commutes where telework makes more sense, and reducing business airline travel, these people in Congress fly way more than the average person. But if they didn't actually have to be there in person, why couldn't they live normal lives working remotely most of the time?
I don't know why this sounds tough to conceptualize to some people but this is what it's really about when it comes right down to it. We need changes in the way we do things.
My letter to my congressperson:
I support proxy voting in Congress and so should you.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
The authoritarian eugenics plans of tech moguls and the religious far right.
The far right may seem to be, and in many ways is, made up of a lot of different factions, but some of them have similar goals of living in their own segregated network states based on eugenics. And in fact, the tech elites have a form of "techno rapture" beliefs that are eerily like Christian ideas of The Rapture. And the Trump administration is planning on giving away federal lands for modern day coal patch company towns where democracy doesn't exist, and company tycoons play king dictator, and they're trying to sell this to people on the left as the "abundance" ideology solution to housing shortages which amounts to privatization and deregulation and just disregarding environmental impacts and rejecting public health.
Wall Street Journal - Federal Land Can Be Home Sweet Home Our departments will work together to solve the housing crisis. By Scott Turner and Doug Burgum March 16, 2025 3:48 pm ET Historically, building on federal land is a nightmare of red tape—lengthy environmental reviews, complex transfer protocols and disjointed agency priorities. This partnership will cut through the bureaucracy. Interior will reduce the red tape behind land transfers or leases to public housing authorities, nonprofits and local governments.
The American Prospect - The Abundance Agenda: Neoliberalism’s Rebrand The new centrist push to regain control of the Democratic Party, with corporate money by Dylan Gyauch-Lewis November 26, 2024 What exactly abundance adherents believe varies, of course, but there are a number of broad precepts: building more housing, producing more energy, and fostering more technological innovation. None of these are objectionable goals; the differences with progressives arise, largely, in how to get there. Abundance starts from a “growth above all” mindset. The agenda’s advocates hate residential zoning laws—which, contrary to what they frequently imply, is something they have in common with us and most progressives—but also detest the National Environmental Policy Act, support fracking, oppose tenant protections, and are often deferential to the policy preferences of Big Tech.
KQED Forum - Is ‘The Nerd Reich’ Taking Over the Government? By Mina Kim 2025 Apr 2 at 10 am A group of Silicon Valley billionaires is causing chaos in the federal government by shuttering agencies, firing workers en masse and flouting legal and political norms. According to journalist Gil Duran, the chaos is carefully orchestrated, as figures like Elon Musk, David Sacks and Peter Thiel follow a playbook conceived by far right thinkers on how to take down institutions and seize power. We talk to Duran about what these tech elites – a group he calls “The Nerd Reich” – are reading, thinking and saying. Guests: Gil Duran, journalist, produces a newsletter covering the tech industry, "The Nerd Reich"
BBC Intrigue - The Immortals: 9. Nerd Rapture 2 October 2023 The immortalist movement in Silicon Valley shares a lot with evangelical religions, says Dr Emile P Torres, a philosopher and former Nick Bostrom acolyte. In both, he explains, there’s a heaven in which the faithful will experience unsurpassed bliss and delight, and an apocalypse, which will separate out the people who can go there. After a decade at the epicentre of the transhumanist research community, Emile became concerned with the number of apocalyptic stories of techno-utopia that were being shared online. Was this philosophical movement becoming radicalised? When Emile raises the question, the consequences are swift and severe. Excommunicated, harassed and threatened.
Political Research Associates Trad Values Meets Tech The U.S. Right’s Pronatalist Coalition Gaby Del Valle March 27, 2025 These oft-disagreeing factions came together in Austin, Texas, in December 2023 for the inaugural Natal Conference. The conference was the brainchild of Kevin Dolan, a former data scientist who was ousted from his job after being outed for his involvement with Deseret Nationalism, a far-right faction within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that promotes an ultra-conservative brand of Mormonism.[2] Dolan billed the conference as a way of unifying disparate movements under a single goal. “The best thing I can do to move the needle on this issue personally is just unite the clans: throw up a rally point, let people come together,” Dolan said in a podcast episode posted shortly after the conference.[3] So far, the plan appears to be working: Elon Musk reposted Dolan’s speech from the 2023 conference on X, and another conference is slated for this March.[4] In many ways, the 2023 Natal Conference was a prelude for the coalition that helped elect Trump: a motley crew of old-guard Republicans, the MAGA hat-clad New Right, and members of the tech elite.
The Canadian roots of Elon Musk's conspiracist grandpa - Raised in Saskatchewan, Joshua Haldeman was a tech-utopian, politician and apartheid fan By Geoff Leo Mar. 20, 2025 “An ‘Invisible Government,’ working to carry out the objectives of the International Conspiracy, is operating in every country,” he wrote in his book The International Conspiracy in Health, which was published in the mid-1960s. In it, he also said the conspiracy was pushing for the fluoridation of water supplies, mandatory milk pasteurization and mass vaccination programs. Haldeman dedicated his life to fighting it. “Only by following the example and guidance of Jesus Christ will man be able to successfully combat the evil forces of the International Conspiracy and achieve the greatness for himself and his country.” Haldeman thought government was being badly mismanaged and at one point in his career, he embraced the solution proposed by a movement called Technocracy: that government should be run by scientists and engineers, not politicians. Over his lifetime, Haldeman would lead two Canadian political parties (one of which he founded), campaign against Canadian prime ministers William Lyon Mackenzie King and John Diefenbaker, write a book defending South Africa’s system of apartheid and spend years flying and driving across the African wilderness with his family — hunting for the Lost City of the Kalahari.
Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other forms of government?
Politics is always involved in healthcare, and always should be. Doctors and scientists are humans and should not pretend to be above the rest of us or operating outside of the reality of our communities.
Remember if you say you want politics out of healthcare or science - you're basically pushing for "the private market" to control it all. Politics controls government, and government is in charge of healthcare. If you don't want that, you're saying you want the richest people deciding what healthcare the poorest person can get or not get. Representative government, however flawed, is far preferable to "the invisible hand of the market" (which is a fantasy idea that's a decoy to take your attention away from the power brokers attached to that so-called hand). There's no power vacuum that won't be filled by somebody. If scientists and doctors cede the political, they will be controlled solely by private equity. And we see how that's turned out with veterinarians. We don’t even have an animal hospital in my city anymore.
Everything is political. Famines are political, and so are pandemics. Chloe Humbert Mar 18, 2024
Because government is about governance, and ultimately controls what happens or doesn’t in every area of society.
And for anyone thinking that you don’t want politicians making specific technical decisions about your healthcare… then specify that. Be specific. Don’t fail to communicate.
Quote:
“In developing regulations the EPA was directed to weigh only one concern: public health. The costs to industry were explicitly deemed irrelevant.”
— Jane Mayer, Dark Money, 2016