Reality - especially epidemiology - has a distinct leftist bias, which almost makes you feel sorry for right-wing ideologues like @mayoroflasvegas Carolyn Goodman, who says that every business in town will get to make up its own rules after she unilaterally lifts quarantine.

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She told CNN, "I am not a private owner. That's the competition in this country. The free enterprise and to be able to make sure that what you offer the public meets the needs of the public."

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/22/politics/las-vegas-mayor-social-distancing-cnntv/index.html

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You can see where she's coming from. Her entire worldview is shaped by the Thatcherite dogma that "there is no such thing as society." The Reaganite cant that "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

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This only makes sense if you don't believe that humans have shared destiny - that your neighbor's problems are not your problems. Even in the best of times, this is obviously untrue (your neighbor's decision to play loud music at 2AM or to store plutonium in his backyard).

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Humans OBVIOUSLY have a shared destiny, including/especially a shared microbial destiny. There's a great Lenny Bruce sketch about this, positing that the basis of society is agreement about where we crap and where we eat.

https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2017/08/25/lenny-bruce-berkeley-concert-1965-full-transcript/

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Mayor Goodman's position comes down to this: "We're all in the same swimming pool. This end is the no-pissing-in-the-pool end. That end is the pissing-in-the-pool end. This will all be fine."

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The small business that reopens with inadequate measures will not harm only itself and its customer. It will harm everyone who comes into contact with those people.

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There's lots more wrong with Goodman's idea: like the fact that, workers rely on governments for protection from employers. There's a buyer's market for labor, so employers can treat workers as disposable, murdering them through inadequate protection and then replacing them.

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Or the fact that neither business owners nor customers are qualified to assess the sufficiency of a given plan to re-open. That's like saying, "OK, everyone who wants to fly in an airplane should just inspect it themselves and decide whether it's safe."

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The complex technical questions of the modern world cannot be navigated through individual research: you can't individually assess the safety of planes, or building codes, or food prep. You can't know if a slot-machine is fair or gimmicked.

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We need impartial expert agencies that conduct truth-seeking exercises to determine the best practices, and then conduct inspections and enforcement on our behalf. Not the "personal responsibility" of becoming an expert in every technical subject we live and die by.

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These agencies need to show their work, recuse themselves over conflicts of interest, and hear and act on new information as it becomes available.

They need to use a universally legible PROCESS that comes to technically legible CONCLUSIONS.

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That is, they need to govern, as part of a legitimate, responsive state.

The problem of electing people who believe in dismantling government is that they dismantle government.

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That works great, but fails badly - I neither want to have to determine whether a barber is safe to visit, nor trust the barber to make that determination. I want a public health expert to make it, and I want that person to be overseen by a democratic institution.

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What's more, if YOU are willing to trust the barber (or yourself) and you get it wrong, you could infect ME. This is not a matter of personal choice and personal responsibility. It is a matter of stubbornly irreducible shared destiny.

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I get that this is inconvenient for people who believe that shared destiny is a Communist plot. But, as our friends on the right are fond of reminding us, "reality doesn't care about your feelings."

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Image:
Las Vegas Guy, modified
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CC BY-SA
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