So it looks like I’m not the only one thinking about Johnson and acracy: Johnson’s explanation for all these things is that he suffers from the classical vice of akrasia. He knows what the right thing to do is but acts against his better judgement through lack of self-control. He is, in Aristotle’s words, like…
Read More Acracy followupSo, after a tragi-comic autumn of increasingly pitiful attempts to project normality, here we are back in lockdown. How did we get here? Here’s Stephen Bush: In both cases, the real problem is not the Chancellor but a Prime Minister whose mode of operation is to pander to which-ever voice is currently shouting the loudest:…
Read More U-Turn on Akrasia AvenueEven more virus blogging. So, the SAGE 58 meeting on the 21st September supported going back into lockdown. Among much else it said this: An effective test, trace and isolate (TTI) system is important to reduce the incidence of infections in the community. Estimates of the effectiveness of this system on R are difficult to…
Read More Kibitzing SAGEThings I’ve been reading. Here goes with the obvious. I re-read Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, and now I’m reviewing it in my own journal of the plague year. Meta, huh? From the first time round I’d kept an impression of throbbing body-horror and robust Protestantism, and there are definitely both of…
Read More BooksThis quote from the New York Times coverage of Trump’s very own superspreading event leapt out at me: White House officials conceded on Tuesday that there had been an impression created that Mr. Trump was getting tested every day, and a reliance on testing as if it were a curative measure as opposed to a…
Read More Test as cureSo remember that time I was trying to understand the contact tracing statistics? Well, the situation has since developed not necessarily to our advantage. According to the most recent release, 68% of suspect contacts are being reached. This is of course less than the official target, a disgrace, etc. However, if the celebrated paper that…
Read More Isolate, trace, and testThe Guardian would like to tell you Germans have curious native customs that include opening their windows twice a day, and that even their leader Angela Merkel gives advice about this on television. Now, one of the basic things everyone should know by now about SARS-CoV2 is that it spreads primarily through aerosol transmission in…
Read More SeriousSomething I keep talking about without ever putting in the work of writing a definitive statement is the history of the hot take as a media format. The UK media industry cluster invented three new ones at the end of the 90s, they were hugely successful, two of them depraved and corrupted everybody and the…
Read More A case study in the rise of the hot takeWe keep getting news stories about contact tracing call-handlers with nothing to do. The Guardian is especially keen on these and seems to either think they are just idle and need scolding, or else they should be laid off for reasons of economy, as there’ll be no problem bringing them back in future. Strangely, it…
Read More How bad is the contact tracing – really?Back in the first week of the virus lockdown, before “non-essential” businesses were closed, I went to my local bookshop. Business, they said, was as good as Christmas with one important difference: rather than Boring Postcards-style toilet funnies and gifts for relatives you don’t actually know, people were buying serious literature they actually intended to…
Read More Boooks