An empathic clash

Note: The thoughts below are from a male. So please forgive me should I not be staying in my own lane. 

In the last week, the US Supreme Court overturned the precedent Roe versus Wade, and somehow the shockwaves washed up in New Zealand with political insinuations and media froth on an issue that was not meant to be an issue here. (Let's just hope that there is no inspiration for such an issue to have any currency.) But at the crux of this and all the other issues are the entrenched camps with a distracting proxy war of ideas and a distinct lack of empathy.

I say proxy because it always seems like the sides just marshal the ideas or rationalisations that they're partial to and use them to dress up their respective positions. But at the heart of it is a lot of emotion. It's easy to say "Facts don't care about your feelings" but the incidental point felt is always "My facts don't care about your feelings" and the converse that another's facts won't change my feelings. And there is history, both personal and social, that sets these things up for context for the feelings that are at the heart, as if talking about where a convulsion of cells is declared a fetal heartbeat and define the be-all-and-end-all of this. The facts can fight - and I am easily lured into the quest for an answer or a fact-based rationalisation for my own intuitions and beliefs but at the end the true edges of the conflict are usually emotional.

You have the emotions of actual people for whom it has been worked into a item of moral and tribal faith, that a conceived human organism has personhood and their deliberate termination is equivalent to murder, and who would not object to the permissible homicide. I do not consider such people arguing in bad faith though there are probably some who use it cynically as a wedge issue. It is understandable that they have a passion to stop the practice, just as there was to abolish slavery, even if the "easy-fix" of  banning this medical procedure has easily identified unintended consequences and obvious inequities that are not even on the agenda to be remedied in the States.

Then you have the actual body of people for whom a change of state law would potentially affect, namely fertile women. The "rationalisations" against them are the brutally simplistic: If you don't want to murder don't have sex unless you want a baby, as if it were only the woman responsible for an unintended conception and, worse, that abortion was the primary, and preferred, method of birth-control of women, that the chance of pregnancy was not a constant female anxiety in any heterosexual relationship and even worse, not potentially not consented sexual intercourse.

There is no perfect solution in these situations, and it is even more remote with the "I win/you lose" mentality and the demonisation of the other. In a civil society there is the requirement to draw a line somewhere and it will in its drawing disenfranchise some people. There is never much empathy in these clashes and not much pragmatism. If those in New Zealand who abhor abortion were understood the same as those that abhorred slavery on moral grounds, they appear more human. Not that the motivations of anti-abortionists are necessarily just a moral one, and there do seem well and truly other purity issues and the desire to suppress "fornication" and go back to that wholesome world we had before. 

Part of the empathy lies in the historical and cultural legacy of the past. Women, though more equal than the past, still experience latent and implicit sexism, may have moments of terror at the deviantly sexual menace of a stranger or acquaintance. Meanwhile the conservative, Christian position is that of the once-dominant culture that has been eroded and feels a perpetual sense of loss, even if they never knew how good they had it.

In the US it's always more of a circus mirror because the evangelical instinct is to not just to ban abortion but to mandate abstinence education over sinful contraception. Unlike New Zealand, they seem to legislate on puritanical instinct rather than by select committee so the individual states seem to develop biblically inspired from-conception standards, and not understand at all the range of possible pregnancies that could occur. The number of weeks of pregnancy is not from the moment of conception but from last period so if conception occurred in the third week of a woman's cycle they are already three weeks pregnant at fertilisation. Six weeks pregnant, a standard adopted by Texas, is literally only two weeks after a missed period, and even that might have had some bleeding. Miss that and you either may have a baby or an illegal abortion. 

Another example is the rending of people is the trans-rights debate. There are a range of camps from the the trans, the "woke" (basically people who accept that transpeople exist and there should be changes); the TERFs (so-called trans-exclusive radical feminists, people who feel that transpeople are a threat to biological women); the gender-conservatives (often those who try to have puberty blockers and any transition treatments illegal until someone is an adult) and maybe a swathe of people you could just say are wryly indifferent to the whole thing but could accidentally say the wrong thing to the wrong person and feel victimised for discriminating.

The proxy war of ideas is again a ridiculous mess of whether the gender dysphoria actually exists, arguments about the rate of transition regret (where someone realises they weren't transsexual after all and want to stop transitioning), testosterone levels in transgender athletes and hypothetical situations where a man should be able to walk into any female changing room saying "I identify as a woman".

The most fundamental empathy at the heart of this is someone experiencing gender dysphoria. Even in these more enlightened times, people are pretty instinctively man/woman equivalent to male/female. Once someone is openly trans, they will often be supported but between those first realisations and being confidently out must be extraordinarily difficult and emotionally straining. Also, any inclinations to show your real self in the presence of less enlightened individuals opens you up to either innocent or malicious hurt. 

TERF meanwhile seems a jarring and even unfair name to a class of mainly women who want women to be women and not want transmen to be part of their category. This might seem cruel to a persecuted category but biological women have not had any kind of gender ascendancy, and without any pragmatism, it seems they could be left to make all the accommodations just like they would for the return of abortion-bans in the US. (It reminds me of how Frederick Douglass broke with the female suffragettes after the abolition of slavery as both the once subservient and the still submissive competed for the right to vote. Douglass felt the liberated and free blacks had a more pressing need for the vote because it was a matter of survival, whereas he viewed female suffrage as inevitable but a want rather than a need. The suffragettes of the time felt differently and that they should not wait.)

The gender-conservatives might just be same abortion obsessed stuck-in-the-muds although this is about empathy, I'm not going to spend any more typing on them. The wryly indifferent, however, are deserving of some expansive empathy. They probably would be sympathetic if a transperson entered their lives but has not had reason to really think this is real issue, but also with the time to adapt to this rapid change. I saw an unusual eruption of frustration last week from one because he felt he could never say anything on the topic for fear of saying the wrong thing and losing his job. (You could ask why he would need to be saying something but that is also the wrong question to ask.)  

Empathy doesn't in itself solve any of these great dividing issues. But it is only with empathy that some pragmatism and middleground could be imagined. Though I don't particularly like him, the treatment of Luxon by the media was rather ridiculous: he voted against the legalisation of abortion on a conscience vote and was forced to say in a hundred different ways that there would be no review or change to that should National win the next election. He is free to have his beliefs and there should not be any sense of disqualification from running by holding conscience views contrary to the mainstream. What he did say was that he really felt for women in the horrible situation of needing one, and though he is hopefully past the possible need to even consider that decision, I would hope that he would not be a hypocritical and would have the view guide his personal conduct.

My only relevant reference point of someone who could have had an abortion are our friends, who due to their religious views, chose to continue a pregnancy with a fetus that was detected to have many issues including Downs Syndrome. Apparently they were offered the option of termination on more than one occasion which offended them. The young 'un is now three but reading the snapshots of their challenges with him would test anyone in their view. They are still strong in their faith and requesting and getting the prayers of a wide range of friends, and boy do they need them. You can only feel for them.

Frederick Douglass

The very human feeling of compulsion towards something that you fancy is lovely when you are not in its thrall. I remember when we had a rat (or two) in the Marsden Ave apartment and used peanut butter as a lure for our traps. It worked like a charm and the reward was the disgusting removal of a feral corpse. If aliens want to trap me they'd just have to put a jar of almond butter mixed with honey and basically all fear would go out the window and my fate would be experimentation out of the world. 

Books, when they are a compulsion, is a quaint idea. We can imagine easily the compulsion of food and drink, sex, and computer games but books can captivate. Audiobooks, too, it seems. If I could say that I dread the weeks when I don't need to commute to Hamilton it might surprise. Why? Because I have an excuse to listen to my books. Recently it has been the Asia Saga from James Clavell some of whose books go into 50 hours which no normal busy person could finish in four weeks without a strict regiment. Right now it is a biography about Frederick Douglass whose 40 hours I still need to work hard to complete.

I didn't know anything about Douglass until a few years ago when President Trump described him as "an example of someone who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more" which betrayed the Don as it made it obvious he though being someone who can speak with full confidence and bluster about someone or something that he knows nothing about Frederick Douglass. The grammarian will notice that Don was using the present perfect tense with a person who died in 1895. Don may have thought one day that he'd have to give Frederick the Medal of Freedom. But Frederick Douglass did do an amazing job. I am not half-way though and I'm already convinced of that.

He was a slave for 20 years until he escaped but emerged not only as a charismatic speaker but one with clear principles, the power of literacy much beyond those who had spent their youth in education and the wisdom for the ages. In this modern age we know the population-scale effects of deprivation and discrimination on a group while also observing those few sparkling lights of the extraordinary who stay strong and not be cut down as they distinguish themselves where most others would fall. His spectacular emergence was an antidote to that of age racism - a slave who was or became a gentleman and a scholar. Or should have been the antidote but for the dogmatism of white superiority, or that the real politick realised that emancipation of the slaves would devastate southern states regardless of moral questions. Any realistic person could say that slavery as an institution and racial notions are not of an objective rational mind. But what we can say about the blinkered prejudiced minds of the past, it is also pleasant to hear the lives of the anti-abolitionists of the times. Some people really were passionate in their support and desire to subvert slavery system, hiding slaves, supporting their escape to British colonies. While the politics of any moment in the past is hard to grasp in the competing persons and policies, that time in America, the emergence of the Republican Party and their very first elected US president, Abraham Lincoln, was part of the tumult of the times. 

So here is to compulsions of learning of lives. I will blog about the Asia Saga once I can listen to the final 50 hour novel and complete the full view. 

The Project of Rehumanisation

Names are funny little beasts. I remember a time in my youth when I assumed names actually imbue the person with a characteristic. If I met someone with the same name as any of my childhood peers, I would expect someone similar. Kanes are bad boys. Davids are honest and shy. Tims are a bit rough. Natalies are tomboyish, and so on. It is not a surprise that this phase didn't last and I even got to meet some Daniels who were rather undeniably unDaniel. Such are those strange assumptions and realisations of growing up, even thinking that something as shallow as names or words could be definitive of the person, rather than a living vital person be defining, and filling the name. But there are examples galore where people, either with words or narratives, define the others. 

If I could draw a very amateurish theory, I'd say there is an uneasy relationship in our minds between language and real things in our minds, language is such a convenient shortcut to dealing with things, but are inarticulate when applied to people. When we observe something about a person or thing that goes against a label, there is a dissonance and we feel a greater faithfulness to the label rather than what we see with our own eyes. The language or narrative we put on people, though adaptive in these complicated times, seems to butcher the rich four dimensional reality of someone. 

One of the crudest skills of the bully is to take someone's name and bend it into something worse. Trump was masterful in having the media repeat his nicknames for his rivals and enemies, and have his followers and mouthpieces repeat them: Crooked Hillary; Low Energy Jeb; Crazy Nancy. He did it with mini-narratives that are accessed through labels such as Hillary's e-mails or Hunter Biden's laptop. In New Zealand we have had a spate of this with the variety of names our Prime Minister is referred by her detractors ("Jabcinda"). And the function of name-calling is that others will have a caricatured image that others can see despite what they might see or know. It also sets up for confirmation biases, or give reason for partisans to create narratives around them to reinforce them.

Racial stereotyping or gendered thinking is a more garden variety of this. This is nothing new - we shouldn't judge a book by its cover and experiencing a broad range of any category of people will usually show diversity. The quote that was profound on me ages ago that I'm glad to have been able to track down: "There is more genetic variation within self-identified racial groups than between them." (Professor Audrey Smedley) Living abroad helps when you know that there are quiet "Americans", arrogant outspoken "British" without any sign of a tight upper lip; you'll find numerically challenged "Chinese", and some not so inscrutable "Japanese". It's not just for race and gender but for any what that replaces our idea of knowing the who.

People also have the strange ability to equate a person with a single act from the opus of their lives, or take an utterance to be their a saying representative of their soul and being. To be clear, there could be plenty of heinous acts which in their very doing do tell you something significant about who a person is (although nothing even remotely close to their totality). However, there are plenty of poor choices, as well as occasions of poor execution made by people that may somehow singularly transform how they may be seen... even when we do not have the context for what was said or done, or even worse, we rely on someone else to tell us what was said or done, and despite their lifetime of saying and doing all sorts. If I were to insert a thematic segue to my previous post, people who have been "cancelled" may feel this the most. As individuals we can feel for a while that one mistake or something poorly said is our everything, that we could creep into a hole and die, at least for a while, and it doesn't help when the world seems to agree, at least for a while. 

To me, these things are all kinds of dehumanisation, where someone holds a caricature in their mind of others, even despite evidence to the contrary, which robs them of their dignity and uniqueness. Holding such a shallow representation is adaptive to the observer because it is consistent and does not require too much extra mental processing and adaptation to differences in people. Stereotypes after all are a kind of a heuristic and means we can make practical decisions quickly. But inside every Tamati, Dietrich and Hashimoto is a beating heart, who has beat through a childhood, maybe with a mother that loves them, and making mistakes, longing and learning. They have a body with marks from scraps and sickness, of predisposition, of summertime outside. That is a full person and to recognise the space to know someone. And that would be what I would say is to rehumanise someone in our minds.

Besides the banal not judging a book by its cover, there are other rehumanising practices, such as "be kind - you will never know the battle others are fighting". Another one is the awareness that we often attribute our own failings to circumstance, and the failings of others to their character, and that we should always look to see others failings in the context of circumstances. Or meditating on the basic physicality of others and ourselves.

Probably the interesting part of my job has been to be more and more aware of the cultural norms around introductions. I'm typically all business when it comes to my intros but have tried to broaden them out because in Pacific and Māori cultures, introductions are important - they should be more personal and they should be paid attention to. With students of that background, unless I want to be dehumanised to a short, bald white guy, I should show some feelings, values, habits, hobbies and origin rather than just my role and responsibilities. I remember shortly after returning having a tikanga training and having the facilitator first ask us to introduce ourselves without any prompting, to which we gave various depths of responses, after each of the intros she would ask a deeper question, or to note something in common, which she later said was a function of the habit of introductions. People do have a desire to know with whom they are working with and commonality builds trust, and it shouldn't be replaced just with a handshake. There are situations where we do not naturally have introductions but where small-talk allows some way to fill in the backstory of someone to get over the labels and assumptions that we might have. And there is a delight in speaking with a real person.

Those are easier because a new person is a new page. It is harder to rehumanise people you have known for some time and for whom their are bygones, mutually spent time but not with mutual discovery. Some of my colleagues fall into this category. They are caricatures to an extent: I know their working persona, their good and bad deeds either first or second hand; they tend to know me the same way. It could be easier to lump the Indian females into a common person, the males into another. The Sāmoan women who speak English as a second language, and for whom English has a certain tone and articulateness, which makes them sound ignorant or lowly educated, even if they have a doctorate, and that does all of them harm, even if they do not have a doctorate.

Our ways of interacting with people can often be culture-bound, and that to adopt another cultural mindset can help overcome the power of shallow impressions. One word from te reo Māori that is useful to know is tapu, which is often translated as "sacred" or "restricted". Everything and everybody has a degree of tapu, and it has to be reduced by becoming familiar (whakanoa) if you are going to be in contact or conducting interactions with another. Another word from te reo that has had quite some currency in teaching these days is "mana-enhancing" (whakamana), describing to a mode of education that ensures the dignity of people in the education process, that we are building people rather than sorting them out into elite, the also-rans and the failures. Whakamana though is to recognise the dignity and integrity, the inherent and accumulated mana of someone else. When you see all others as tapu and having mana as part of the framework to your world, they are humanised or rehumanised and you will have the humility to let them be themselves.

No matter how you do it, I think there is value in indulging in a project of rehumanisation of others in your life, especially with the people who are often in your life, but also for those that are very familiar and may have be incidentally dehumanised by a label or an event and have been incidentally harmed. I could talk about how we can rehumanise ourselves who we harm with labels and narratives but that can wait till another time.  

 

A Not-So-Short History of Cancellation

The topic of the so-called cancel culture trend is apparently at a crescendo in various pockets of the US media especially with the sickening tendency to align it with political partisanship, and bad faith arguments rather than any substantial discussion of what is at its heart. However, the term has no lack of currency in New Zealand. You can read tweets from Pākehā men afraid to be cancelled because they can't say te reo Māori names correctly. Meanwhile there has been a kerfuffle in Māori twitter whether tangata whenua can use the N word. Without a heavy reading of all that others have opined, I would like to say my own not-so-hot take of this rather lazy catch-all term of "cancellation".

I recall back to the staff Christmas party of 2020 when I was talking to a Chinese colleague about the song that was playing from the organiser's playlist, a Michael Jackson song, which for the life of me I cannot remember which. A member of the organising committee listened in and once I turned to them they had mentioned that it was a huge discussion about MJ and whether to include him. It was only at that prompting that I did remember that people do talk about whether to "cancel" a person's body of work and legacy, which in its most extreme conceptions we collectively stop playing his songs, remove his songs from sale, remove his winning of awards, deny his cultural significance and stop doing the moonwalk for the likely true allegations that he molested children. (Actually more extreme is the Stalineque removal of someone from all photos as well, I guess.) Or on the other hand can we just acknowledge the allegations but separate the man from his art? Back in 2009 at the time of his passing, I was about to head of overseas, and did not note my thoughts at the time but I think my view was more for the latter - let his name be associated for what he did both good or bad, as a human, but let his art live on as one of the positive things he did. Back then there was no "cancel culture" just "political correctness" idiomatically running amok. 

Since then though #MeToo (Crypticity's abound: A touchy subject) and the arrival of things labelled as "cancellation" have begun a thing. I generally believe it is widely misused term because what is cancellation in what it would be in the extreme case of MJ, is not what is happening for most people. It is just criticism for unfavoured views. For an exploration of where the term emerged from and how it manifests itself now, On The Media podcast did a great investigation: 

The general opinion aligns with mine. I would go further that if we retrospectively apply the cancel culture concept into the past, it is easy to think of lots of examples of the overwhelming cancellation of people, ideas and culture. Those that feel now experiencing social consequences for mocking Nanaia Mahuta's moko kauae do not think about the long term consequences experienced by those with moko of various forms until very recently. You can imagine a conservative of twenty years ago saying that if someone wanted a job they should have never had a moko tattooed, because who would employ them? If people experience social approbrium (AKA cancellation) after criticising homosexuality for religious reasons, they might realise that there was no freedom to express one's homosexuality in public until recent decades, and even when it wasn't illegal, it still faces social consequences in some contexts. And if those who voted to keep conversion therapy experience criticism and feel like they are experiencing cancellation now, they can read about how Alan Turing, the genius who cracked the German Enigma code in WW2 and was key to the development of computers, was cancelled for his homosexuality and then crippled by conversion therapy before taking his life.

The New Zealand based voices that there is a cancel culture in New Zealand academia are interesting to look at: Academics Divided On Their Own Freedoms | Newsroom. The low number of respondents  who felt free to discuss issues relating to te Tiriti and gender issues is a concern, the former perhaps a result of the furore caused by two prominent professors saying that mātauranga Māori was not science (Crypticity's abound: Whaowhia te kete mātauranga - Fill your baskets of knowledge). The latter issue of gender and sex issues has become quite politicised, especially around the rights around transition treatments, transpeople in sport and equitable access to facilities and its presentation in public education. It makes sense that anything where there is high political tension that there is less freedom to speak. Only the fool-hardy or the hard-headed charge out of the trenches in a culture war, let alone peek over the parapet from an ivory tower. 

On both te Tiriti and gender issues, there is a reluctance on the part of "the cancelled" to consider changing views that, I would dare to presume, are unchanged from the early formation of their ideas on those topics. And there is a lack of willingness to engage with how to think about this beyond their own assumptions. And those who are aggrieved when authorative figures again state the dogma around te Tiriti or gender issues tend to respond in a way that does not offer paths to any form of learning or redemption, but rather doubling down and digging heels in, which serves no-one.

Some of their concerns you could reconcile easily with the Americanism: You can have freedom of speech, but not freedom of consequence, something I talked about and still agree with after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France after cartoonists drew the Prophet Mohammed (Crypticity's abound: Get outta the house!). You can have a view and voice it but private individuals, the groups you are a member to or the authorities that oversee your professional or public life may provide some form of consequence against you. But these tend to be nothing compared to the unrecognised cancelled of the past. People might criticise you for supporting Russia's right to militarily engage with Ukraine but what happens is nothing compared to what pacifists were exposed to in the past. The anecdotal cases of people losing jobs for tweets or Facebook posts for their views on race, gender, etc. are nothing compared to the legions of people who have lost opportunities for jobs for having a race or gender. 

Back to the MJ episode, which is a truer question of to cancel or not to cancel, I'm not sure my mind is changed, but watching the Netflix documentary on Jimmy Savile is surely the greatest food for thought, because by the end you'd like the BBC to destroy every video ever made with him in it. Frankly put, past Jimmy Savile content can barely be watched without recalling what he was doing at the time off camera. His whole body of work and especially his philanthropy seemed not just a way for him to perform some form of moral licensing to harm others, but was also a method to indulge in more molestation. While the editing of select moments from a lot of footage makes it look like he was doing it in broad daylight, you wonder whether it was that apparent to a producer, let alone a member of the public it all was. Since his death came too soon, and the authorities and media acted too late, I would say that his name living in infamy and some restitution for those affected is in order. He was a manipulator so while I wouldn't say the Monarchy, his professional collaborators nor other high profile friends should bear much scorn for their association, the police and BBC should have had more consequences for their part in delaying and protecting. 

Anyway. There has been over two months here without a blog, which in my whole blogging life is a chasm. The last blog was in early February which unsurprisingly came just before my formal appointment as a Head of School, while my previous position of Director of Studies was still being recruited for. Over two months on the position is yet to be filled, I have had to caretake that previous position while also adapt and craft the new one, which has been very challenging as both positions were only getting more heavy and complicated. That explains my lack of blogging to an extent, and a lack of push to get my Achilles right and have me back running. 

Manning up to the mandates

It's been 12 days since an organised protest movement of diverse origins descended in front of the New Zealand government buildings. It's been an interestingly unprecedented time.

Previously I have discussed about the mandates and my view that in a pandemic the social contract for mutual protection justifies it to encourage and, in particular fields, compel those whose risks and benefits of vaccination are modest in order to do something that for the whole of society is a good thing. There are plenty of similar cases: taxation, rules around alcohol and tobacco, road safety and dare it be more analogous, compulsory childhood vaccinations. Vaccinations though are quite an invasive kind of obligation to put on someone. A bit like fluoridation of the water, or the fortification of staple foods with supplements, it takes away a large degree of choice about what you put in your body.

I feel that the New Zealand case easily justifies it with our "Delta wave" crushed without the mortality and morbidity inflicted on other countries; in fact, it is hard to find any country which got through a genuine wave with only a mere extra five deaths per million population added to the pandemic toll. Our effective booster campaign might also curb Omicron, time will tell. 

In terms of the risks from the widespread vaccination, there has not been a rise in excess mortality in NZ in either 2020 or 2021, nor an unexpected rise during the peak of the vaccination campaign, literally no "signals" from the data. At this time there are only two confirmed deaths linked directly to vaccinations; while there is undoubtedly a number of those who have had bad reactions, an unblunted Delta wave would have easily caused more harm.

A poll instigated by Family First has shown that New Zealanders may have less fondness toward the mandates now than they had last year when they were introduced. But there was an interesting finding amongst it: "1 in 3 vaccinated Kiwis said that the vaccine mandate or pass requirements were a large factor in their decision to get vaccinated." For the vaccine or mandate averse, this is a negative - a sign that people were compelled, but for me it is the opposite: If we had a third fewer people vaccinated, we would have a rate similar to what has happened in many European countries, Israel and the US. 

It has been often pointed out that under Omicron, the mandates themselves offer only marginally more protection to the vulnerable as life without the mandates. Omicron appears to more easily evade the immunity gained from vaccines (as well as previous infection) and triple vaccinated people can catch and pass it on to an unfortunately high degree. Thus there are people asking whether the mandates are the right tool. In New Zealand, especially until this wave has subsided, I would say it is still a reasonable tool. Freshly vaccinated people have broader, less evaded immunity and any encouragement to have this happen is still relevant. 

The vaccinated are also less likely to end up in hospital. Like it or not, the unvaccinated who are the most at risk have been excluded from a lot of places. (An outdoor protest is ironically a pretty safe place to be, much better than a workplace.) With the desire to avoid overwhelming the hospitals, it seems prudent to have measures that slow down the rate of growth of the Omicron outbreak. 

The response of the anti-mandate people has been unsympathetically seen as pākehā people who have never been discriminated against reacting with their white privilege. There might be a trace of that in some but you have to admit that if you had made a decision to not get vaccinated, the implications if you are in a healthcare or education, or in the emergency services, it is a hugely disruptive imposition to one's working life. (To be clear, the decision to close the border effectively did the same thing to many jobs.) For the people in other fields who are not vaccinated, or who do not get fully vaccinated for reasons of a bad reaction that somehow doesn't meet the rigid criteria for an exemption, life is a real headache. It is a pause on any life at cafes and restaurants, even outdoor events may impose vaccine pass requirements, and your job could still be affected. (On Thursday, a staff member failed to check a vaccine pass for a tradesman and got into trouble for allowing an unvaccinated contractor on campus. Not the first time a contractor, a comparatively free form of employment has evaded checking that I know about, but clearly they are trying to continue their lives despite private businesses who may require them imposing the restrictions themselves.) But this is not intended to be permanent and once they do not serve a purpose the mandates will end, thus spake the Prime Minister.

It is hard to see an end to the protests. It is easy to advocate "clearing them away" but this is heavy-handed and at worst setting light to a powder keg. These people have nowhere else to be right now: no job; there is clearly funding, food and resources either from the sympathetic public or by externally interested parties. I would look to a way to negotiate with several parties who have a clear and large membership of people behind them for the intermediate goal of removing vehicles and even a small win for vaccine-adverse. 

Even though I support mandates, an increased vaccination rate has already been met, and if I were negotiating I would be open to loosening some of the rules in spite of the rising number of Omicron cases. But the lack of cohesive leadership in the protest movement, or even a negotiable list of demands, apart from complete governmental abdication of a fairly understandable position, is really an issue. Unless the protests are for a purely political purpose, there might be no way out except for attrition, and I would have recommended some initial "attritional" steps. Currently, with food and basic services being provided the protestors have no reason to leave. The first step would be to ticket cars, and then state that ticketed vehicles would be towed. That way there would be some "skin in the game" for protestors to decide whether to stay or not, and a reason to accept conditions.

As good faith I would immediately relax rules around the unvaccinated eating and enjoying outdoor venues. This would mean legal protection to say eateries could not enforce vaccine pass requirements for outdoor areas. Any outdoor recreational event also cannot apply vaccine requirements. 

Though the quoted survey suggested that the public would support daily testing of the unvaccinated to retain employment, it is somewhat of a red herring. There isn't the supply to allow this except if it was funded by the unvaccinated people or companies themselves for their unvaccinated staff members. If I were a company whose function was impacted by the mandates, I would have sought to have dispensation to support the testing of key unvaccinated staff, but the wholesale testing of all unvaccinated would be difficult and could not be publicly funded. Even with a factory on our shores, the requirement for hundreds of thousands of rapid tests and PCR tests daily on top of what is already required to service public health needs is not feasible. But with the compliance requirements on the companies and the requirement to have everyone mask, I don't see a downside to some industries, especially with key staff to have this allowance.

Now that we are mostly vaccinated, and the militant antivaxx medical practitioners have been sidelined, it would be a positive step to allow GPs the power to make prudent exemption decisions freeing up those who cannot get double vaccinated due to adverse reactions on their first vaccination to take a greater part in society.  

These would be my requirements if I were negotiating, and it would be done with the additional pressure that those with vehicles would soon have their vehicles fined and prone to being pulled over at a later date for unpaid fines. And with the additional issue that eventually, the vehicles would be towed.

It is a pity that anti-mandate sentiment often coincides with anti-mask animus. If staff in the mandated fields committed to wear a provided N95 or similar facial protection, I would, if in power, suggest this as an appropriate loosening, that with the provision, either publicly or privately, of a high quality mask, unvaccinated staff should be able to keep working. However, it would rely on the integrity of those who, even in the protest situation, are not demonstrating the expected consciousness of their potential infectiousness. Even as a triple vaccinated person, I'm masking and it disturbs me that people in these roles do not have the awareness of others required for the position. I believe those in hospitality, such as baristas and the like, with clear supervision would wear a high quality mask. The industry is need of work so I could see companies willing to cough up and extra $2 a day to make sure they have good staff. 

When members of the protest have a better situation to leave for, they have a reason to be elsewhere, and I would hope that the above weaken the resolve of the majority to waste time when income could be gained, a step towards a reintegration with common society could be imagined, which would happen once the Omicron wave has ebbed. 

Part of my job over the last couple of weeks has been to handle outbreaks, creating a process for notification so that staff can have certainty of what to do, sending classes home into self-isolation, creating a path back to leave self-isolation and back to the classroom etc. At the same time, our organisation has been doing the same with staff as we did have our own outbreak. For all the discussion of how "useless" masks are, two of three positive cases were probably the least diligent with masking. I was a casual contact with a staff case and now two student cases, but I use an KN95 mask, which while not impervious does give me far more assurance. Even with the mask, I still got tested after the first student case (unbeknownst to be it also followed the casual contact with a positive staff member - I only found out a few days later).

I was asked how I was coping with all this, and to be clear, I'm fine with handling pandemics now. The arrangements are pretty easy. I believe I was pretty clear since March 2020. The details may have changed but the best practice of effective communication and clear processes are still the same. One of my previous posts was called Stalemate because my role was changing in a direction I liked but in a manner I thought senseless. I baulked. Despite my objections, my role has senselessly gone in the direction that I liked but without a single change in the mode. Now, on top of handling the Omicron outbreak, I'm doing two jobs and even once my old job is resolved, I'm still marginalised in a way I don't like. When it was decided that things would proceed as was planned without consideration to my situation, I said simply, to do so would risk a lot and if the group was prepared to take the risk, then it needs to realise the risk. It cannot eat the cake and have it as well. But there was no change - it committed me to a situation that I may not want to stay. There was either a rigidity of thought that things couldn't be another way, or just a desire to marginalise me. Either way, it is an inhumane approach. 

Whether it is from mandate or otherwise, it is not a great feeling to have your mana and rights seemingly infringed from without. The wisdom is to take it for a moment to buy you the time to act. The protests may result in a change of government in 2023. My change in role may break me away from my employment of 6 years. Only time will tell.

Homo Omicronicus

In my trade, the well known term "literacy", i.e. the ability to effectively read and write a range of text, is paired with a less well known and used term, "numeracy". The word literacy is often coupled with other terms to mean that their level of comprehension and expression, for example, scientific literacy and digital literacy (both which are also frequent visitors to my discussions at work). 

Numeracy is similar to literacy but instead of texts we have numbers. Both have a minimum standard to them: an illiterate person cannot read or write, even if they may have familiarity with the alphabet, while a functionally innumerate person would not be able to do much more than count or recognise numbers. But both have matters of degree. Most literate people can read e-mails, novels and blurbs, but they may have more difficulty with scientific literature. Averagely numerate people would have no trouble with handling money and percentages but not understand exponential growth, standard deviation and statistical significance, etc. 

The pandemic has had plenty of numbers and as they enter the mainstream conversations and articles it is interesting to see how they are interpreted. Numbers can be counter-intuitive and also statistics famously can be used to create the wrong impressions, especially when mistakenly compared. One common misunderstanding is something like relative and absolute risk, two percentages that could differ significantly. Relative risk reduction through vaccination would be a comparison with a non-vaccinated person, i.e., if 100 unvaccinated people caught Covid-19 and ten were sick enough to go to the hospital, whereas 100 vaccinated people caught Covid-19 and only one was sick enough to go to hospital, the vaccination was 90% effective against hospitalisation. This is true even if the chance of any given unvaccinated person getting sick and going to hospital may be low. (A recent conversation I had touched on this kind of thing for running and cancer which I had casually raised in another conversation. There is some research findings here. As a regular runner, I apparently have a 42% relative risk reduction of oesophageal cancer compared with a non-runner... but I have never known anyone with such a cancer.)

One of the numbers that is often asked is how many of the hospitalised cases were vaccinated. In the early days of Delta in NZ, it was a very strong selling point for the vaccine because it was like night and day, the vast majority of the hospitalisations were not vaccinated. But numbers can be deceptive, too, and the statistics from highly vaccinated countries have misled many. Vaccination after all reduces risk but does not eliminate it, so in a 100% vaccinated population, 100% of cases, 100% of hospitalisations and 100% of deaths will be in the vaccinated. There should be no room for shock at these outcomes, especially as in New Zealand any death of a positive case is recorded as a Covid death. 

With the Delta variant, there was a blurring of the numbers at high levels of vaccination, like New Zealand, Australia and Canada as the vaccinated and the increasingly boosted majority presented more positive cases than the unvaccinated, even if their rate of becoming a case, hospitalised or dying would be significantly lower. In fact, even if the worst number, the death rate, were the same for vaccinated and unvaccinated, it would still be showing the huge benefit of vaccination as the vaccinated include the vast majority of the elderly and immunocompromised, while the unvaccinated would have a larger number of people who are younger or healthier. 

The Delta strain in New Zealand, which was rather scary going in, has been muted for the most part by our vaccination policy. What had been a sharp, deadly wave for almost all countries has been an inconvenient but not terribly lethal interruption to normal life. With the "orange light" on, we are doing things more or less as usual with a tending down of transmission. But now we move on from the maths above of Delta and onto that for Omicron.

It is thankfully a "milder" variant but the sheer numbers potentially make it a short, sharp viral bullrush charge rather than the trench war of Delta, and New Zealand has had the best seats in the house to see how Omicron does its thing in other countries and adjust our approach in the absence of a hot war on our own turf. But the numbers are just bonkers. The case numbers are astronomically, making any meaningful association with previous records obsolete. Even in its earlier peaks, the global number of new daily cases only just broke 800,000. Now, still with many countries in the early days of their outbreaks, the average is almost two million a day. But the case number, apart from being ludicrously high is meaningless because:

• not all cases are being tested because of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic infection (as was the case from the beginning)
• the testing system is overloaded in any Omicron dominant locality
• home-testing through Rapid Antigen Tests are being used and results are not often reported

The positivity rates for the officially recorded PCR tests are high, which usually means it is just too prevalent in the community, and that is really the only conclusion to take from it. The key takeaway is that it is a rampant variant that is easy to catch and easy to pass with neither previous infection nor vaccination standing up as much protection as they had with Delta. 

Under Delta in a highly vaccinated country, it was taken that the metrics to follow were the number of hospitalisations and deaths, rather than cases. Vaccination does not prevent all infections and do not prevent transmission from those infected people. There had been a "decoupling" of cases and hospitalisation: before vaccination, case rises were always followed by hospitalisation rises and then deaths. With vaccination it weakened the delayed association. 

Omicron has truly muddied the water with hospitalisations as well with a lot of people saying that vaccination was ineffective against the variant. Even in the early days in South Africa it was noted that the high case numbers were often incidental positive cases in the hospital. That is to say, there were patients who were coming to hospital for non-respiratory reasons, asymptomatic, but who turned out to be positive with the virus at the time of admission. If "hospitalised" for their other condition, they would be counted as hospitalised Covid positive cases (as they fit the categorisation, just like deaths of positive cases count, too). To be clear, even if you are in for a non-respiratory illness, an active viral infection is probably unhelpful and definitely something to keep away from those who were vulnerable within the hospital, and would be checked into a Covid ward. There were often the questions of hospitalisation "from" or "with" Omicron. Prepositions do matter to make sense of it but that kind of data is very hard to track for many practical reasons that you can imagine. While there would be admissions for clear-cut Covid, non-respiratory admissions with Covid could turn serious. It is hard to think about how this kind of data could be given easily without recreating a system that was fine pre-Omicron.

My sole contribution to the thinking for making sense of the numbers would be this. I'll take an example sent to me saying that in British Columbia in Canada, 44% of the Covid hospitalisations had been vaccinated. This is a lot of vaccinated people in hospital, but with a bit of thought we know that as a country in the league of Australia and New Zealand, it is actually a positive statistic. But under Omicron it is potentially even better than it looks. The key idea to note, which has been true in South Africa and the United Kingdom is that the virus is so prevalent that a huge number of hospitalised cases are "incidental", that is, they were hospitalised for another reason yet turned up a positive test. This really does mess with that once critical measure of hospitalisations. There are a couple of lenses to look at this number to get a better idea. For the first, I proffer two assumptions:

• those hospitalised for non-Covid reasons who are positive with the virus are there in proportion to the vaccination rate
• Omicron being the main reason for the majority of their hospitalisations as their Delta wave had passed

And for ease, let's assign some variables:

A = Hospitalised Covid-positive patients who are admitted for Covid who were vaccinated 

B = Hospitalised Covid-positive patients who are admitted for Covid who were unvaccinated  

C = Hospitalised Covid-positive patients who are admitted for other reasons who had been vaccinated.

D = Hospitalised Covid-positive patients who are admitted for other reasons who had not been vaccinated.

 The 44% would have a numerator of A+C, and the demoninator would be A+B+C+D, when what we want to know is A/(A+B), the hospitalisation rate for vaccinated people. But with 79% of the total population double vaccinated, it is easy to know that C would outnumber D with the conservative assumption that asymptomatic infection is just as probable (it probably isn't). This addition of a number to both the numerator and denominator reduces an extreme number towards the middle. For example, if A = 5, B = 20, C = 20, D = 5, the apparent percentage of vaccinated hospitalised patients would be 25/50 (50%) when the actual percentage of vaccinated hospitalised would be 5/20, i.e. 25%.

The 44% statistic might well discourage the vaccination effort or, worse, be weaponised by those want to draw more attention to the inefficacy of vaccines. If it were known that the percentage of vaccinated people hospitalised for Covid reasons were between 20%-30%, and that they are from not just a majority of the population, but the segment that included the elderly and immune-compromised for whom the vaccine would have the least effect and, conversely, the unvaccinated minority was still producing the vast majority of hospitalised Omicron cases, it is rather positive news!

The other lens to look at it from is that just as cases are not an accurate measure, ICU/HDU admission is the new critical number. For New Zealand's reference, probably the most useful numbers to look at are here: Daily Cases Admitted to Hospital - COVID Live for Australia. The numbers will shortly exceed anything from Australia's previous waves, although this particular wave takes the proverbial cake as its with all states now contributing (aside from Western Australia which is still more or less Covid-zero). 

The awkward thing about the currency of numbers and statistics that are that without some base numeracy they are misunderstood and applied. The dilemma for any of the public health communicators is to not deny such numbers or interpret them skipping the analysis, but to "show their working" in a simple way, preferably with graphics. Otherwise, people feel dissonance between what is being claimed (vaccines are preventing hospitalisations) and the seemingly concrete numbers (44% of hospitalisations are in the vaccinated!).

Stalemate

There are those interesting moments when again you briefly stand up in the river of time and realise how far the world has moved, in a good way, from how it was technologically. There is the incremental addition of apps, devices and Big Data applications that come to mind but there is nothing better than looking at one aspect of life and comparing how it was and how it has become.

Most will know that I had chess as a hobby through my teenage years. I read books, played tournaments and followed the comings-and-goings of the elite level chess. I only abandoned it when I went to university as other passions like language learning and philosophy soaked up time. I think I only went in one tournament in my twenties and apart from some social games with friends it was just a very, very idle interest. Put simply, between the ages of 20 and 40, I played more games of Chinese chess than standard international chess.

To set the scene of when I did play in my "prime" (about 1997), the internet had just arrived in New Zealand, but there were almost no mobile phones, not even iPods, let alone smartphones. There were rudimentary computer chess computers on the market but they were not strong. (In that year though the world chess champion of the time, Garry Kasparov, lost to Deep Blue.) To say there was internet is to say there were webpages, YouTube was eight years away. For chess, with the use of special chess notation, you could read what happened in various tournament games. There might have been rudimentary chessboard interfaces back then to click through moves but maybe not. 

As a learner, you had to find people to play which for me at the time involved going one evening a week to Glen Eden to Waitematā chess club and the occasional tournament. Most of the famous games were in books and mainly in notation except for the occasional chess grid illustration of a crucial position, so to study you would play through and try to understand what the grandmasters were doing. During my "active period", let's say the five years of high school. there were three World Chess Championship matches, but I only followed one because there wasn't easy access to the games. Back then, learning did take some dedication, support and resources. 

Now, you don't even need a chessboard to play. Many players play more online chess than over-the-board (OTB) chess, which meant that the Covid pandemic may have led to more chess being played. I have barely ever played online but I enjoy now just following what's going on and, my gosh, it's never been easier. The most recent world chess championships was all live and I could wake up in the morning and watch the middlegame (the middle phase of the game) Chromecast to the television. While watching live, they have a commentary team looking at all probable variations with one of the best chess computers rate the position so, like a scoreline, you could see the theoretical state of the match as well as hypothetical positions after suggested moves. When one of the players does a mistake, the rating could shoot from being in favour of one player to being in favour of the other.

It was a match of two halves. Magnus Carlsen of Norway, the four-time defending champion and highest rated player of all time, was against Ian Nepomniatchi of Russia (AKA Nepo), a player who had the rather unique status of having a positive score against Magnus in classical chess, mostly due to the fact that he was stronger in their younger years. At first there were five tough draws before the historic game six, the longest game in championship history, a 136 move win to Carlsen. Even for a "slow" game like chess, there was remarkably quick collapse in Nepo thereafter, who lost all focus with it three of the next five games with some stunningly bad moves, usually made after not much time thinking and always followed by a long retreat away from the board leaving the champion sitting there waiting for his return. 

That was all "classical chess" - the test match cricket equivalent of chess. But at the start of my holiday, I got to see the semifinal and final of the online speed chess championships as well, and this is incredibly watchable. You can watch the two players face-on (as they are shot through the webcam) and hear the commentary at short game formats; they pack up to 32 games head-to-head in a few hours! 

After watching, you have the usual pangs about what I could have been with such a rich digital environment of chess. (But of course all of my opponents would too have their playing environments thus enriched.)

I've now completed day four of this summer break. Despite the chess watching, it's  a kind of a let-down, feeling as if it's been a little frittered away, but I guess this is expected at the start of a holiday when your mind and body are a just mending their frazzled edges from the preceding months.

States of mind

There are many things that one takes for granted in life, often unconsciously. And sometimes in a twist of fate, or "a learning moment" we discover the assumptions we had relied on, often as a rude surprise. It could be mundane, too, like that the laundry doesn't do itself. Or dramatic, when you discover that you are not invincible and levelled by sickness. Such things are on a personal, individual level but, of course, groups of people can have this, too. And it is often in extraordinary times, such as the Covid period before us, that some of our collective assumptions are brought into a stark light. 

In my twenties, I thought a lot about the social contract, which is, in a word, the written or unwritten agreement people have to live in a society. At the time, I had some resentment about rules and expectations that I felt I hadn't consented to - I took myself as an individualist and a libertarian and felt that we should be able to have some liberty to choose for ourselves. However, logically I agreed that there had to be some bottom-line mutual understandings. An obvious example would be that taxes and council rates make sense: roads don't build themselves; there needs to be services and support to those who have lifequakes, etc. so I could support the idea of unemployment benefits and public health services. Maturing and having a greater view of the challenges of staying together as a society made me buy more into the importance of a social contract, and if anything I would have wanted the agreement to be more explicit, subject to education and clarification. 

There is always a tension between individual liberty and social or community well-being. Traffic safety is a fruitful source of examples: Seatbelts and speed limits are both compelled upon individuals by the authorities and by-laws. A great driver with 20/20 vision, insured, driving in perfect conditions with a recently warranted and serviced vehicle might want dispensation to drive faster or, more likely, presume it and speed; and may also anger when they are "caught out". Speed limits are calibrated based on the community, not individuals. An individual would have more enjoyment and time for the things they love by speeding safely, but it is not allowed. 

It comes to mind as we are making our way to the end of a social dilemma around vaccination. The vaccination of an individual provides a degree of protection to one's own health, albeit with a small risk. For those in middle age or older, for whom Covid-19 infections causes far more problems, it is a no-brainer: benefits in protection grow exponentially over the risks of vaccination. But for younger people and people who consider themselves free of "co-morbidities", who are healthy and active, the risks and the benefits are similarly small and there is no urgency to take the risk.

But vaccination is a national campaign because there is a multiplier effect when there are more and more people with immunity for others' safety (AKA herd immunity). On top of that, there are other societal benefits such as protecting healthcare system capacity and reducing the disruptions caused by clusters of cases and the follow on effects on productivity. Similar to tax or the speed limit, there is a huge benefit in having everyone complying, including those with little risk. 

Naturally, there cannot be forced vaccination upon anyone despite the strong social good in having the vast majority including the disinclined and not-at-risk vaccinated. And that is the dilemma: we are relying on individual choices to achieve what is a collective good. Around the time of the Vaxathon many of the vaccinated and unvaccinated resented that people were being bribed into getting the jab. But that is the cost to hasten and encourage those individual choices to happen to get closer to the goal of 90% double vaccinated.

And now the mandates and the implications of the traffic light system are coming in to stimulate further vaccination. Mandates are not forcing people in the physical sense but are very blunt tools and often thought as compulsion. It should not have come to it, really, but here we are having passed the US, Israel and about to pass the UK in our vaccination push. Yet still we will almost certainly be short of Singapore's effort and may, if we don't have some restrictions, be met with a similar "opening wave" to what they had. 

The protests against the mandates, while probably stirred up by disinformation, should have been a moment to contemplate how we understand our mutual social responsibility, that there is a balance between social and individual rights and responsibilities because, after all, many of those people may also agree that a society needs to have concessions for a civil society as part of the social contract. But they also might have a different understanding of statehood, and even those who support mandates should reflect on their base assumptions, one of which is that anyone who believes in mandates is a "statist" and that not everyone is. The opposite of a statist would be an anarchist, but there are many shades of the two in between. There are topical groupings like ethno-nationalists, libertarians and communists who are all statists with consistent logical beliefs but who would not be the best bedfellows. Tribal groupings, nomadic groups and anarchists are not statists, but worldwide they are in the vast minority.

In past blogs I have spoken of JC, who I came to know in a professional capacity and who incidentally is an antivaxxer and along self-identified anarchist. He posts and re-posts screeds about many things, much more in this pandemic but generally a lot. One of his more delightful series is on the topic of anarchy. It has two columns "When the government does it" and "When anybody else does it" (it's written from a USA perspective so has a few that don't pertain to New Zealand):

The point of course is that, but for a statist belief, the government literally is performing daily insults, injuries and crimes upon those who are not statists. That is not to say that avowed statists would say they agree with everything that is listed on the left, and would say that governments or authorities should be restrained by written constitutions and systems of laws to prevent the corruption of the intent of the actions on the left becoming of the same nature as the equivalency on the right. And in the assessment of our states, we should always look to see how the intentions of the right are in fact preserved and not insults, injuries and crimes. Historically speaking we know that they are truly not sustained.

Older now as I am, I am an avowed statist. When you are growing up you can imagine your own autonomy and liberty being all you need, or that all you need is you and your group, and dropped in the jungle that is true. But it isn't a surprise that people no matter where in the world they developed, as the number went up city-states, then states arose. States, and the concessions to individual liberty that comes with being in them, fulfil the need to organise humanity. But I think that times like the mandates do help us challenge either our assumption that they are a left-side function and for those who think it's a right-side offence to challenge their beliefs, too.

Numbers fun

There is a curiosity in contemplating the subtle differences that lead to vastly different outcomes. I remember trying to grow seedlings from seed in egg cartons. Sometimes they grew; sometimes they didn't. When you are young, if they didn't you might blame your skill or your luck. It might have been just the matter of not deep enough, or that the water just happened not to get to the seed, or an hour too long on the window sill, or a day passing without the care that it might have deserved. Of course, it could have also been a dud or sterile seed. Either way, some grew. Some didn't. To someone who thinks on paper, with cause-and-effect logic, there should be no fail; but to a child, sometimes something working is a matter of people and luck, it working for you and not for me.

Anyhow, sometimes the countries approach to Covid felt a bit like that. Take Singapore - on 1 May 2021 they still had only 30 official deaths, while already clocking over 60,000 positive cases. Any of the "Covid is just the flu" people should have been saying "What about Singapore?" instead of Sweden, but for the fact that the narrative was all wrong - they were doing with collective responsibility and restrictions, though not onerous. The maths doesn't work really either unless they had a secret protocol. New Zealand with a rather untaxed medical system at present has got to 30 with 7,000 positive cases and we are about the same population. Presuming 60,000 cases and that all the deaths were recorded, it truly doesn't sound like a dangerous pathogen. One might even suppose that someone was cooking the books, which did fit right either with Singapore's image. 

But their zero Covid glory days have gone out the window like ours: in just over 6 months, they have gone from 60,000 to 210,000 cases, and from 30 deaths to almost 460 deaths. Even that screaming increase is actually relatively mild globally speaking, but does put paid to the idea they were necessarily hiding anything. They might have just had an approach that suited them. 

Singapore was on NZ levels of deaths/million until very recently when it shot from 6 to 78, but there has been another country that has never really had respite from Covid, effectively on their sixth wave, not to mention being one of the first hit while unsuspecting: they are South Korea. Singapore's 78 deaths/million population is very good; South Korea's is 57. How can Singapore have one significant wave and be worse hit than South Korea? 

Two recent deaths, including one a five minute walk from my home, have changed things somewhat lift this Delta toll to four. But even our situation seems weird: We have gone from 2880 to almost 7000 cases in three months and which, vaccinated or not, we should have been at least doubling our toll.  

But that's were we go back to our childish minds. Despite the gripes about vaccination roll-out, it currently seems fortuitously well-timed: my speculation would be that with most of our population, particularly the vulnerable elderly freshly vaccinated it is sticking to the young. Singapore has the curse of high population density, too, whereas we have open windows, warming weather and less required contact. That would be speculation. There is so much to idiosyncrasy and happenstance. 

New magic, old magic

I was listening to a podcast on "consciousness", as in the way that we all believe ourselves conscious, and how in different levels of complex animals that we would also assume that there is a degree of consciousness. But at some point of lower level organism you'd think that there would be a point where there is no light of consciousness, like a worm, perhaps which has senses but is automatic in its responses. We lack the ability to put ourselves in the mind of another organism so never really know, say, cat consciousness but for what we observe and intuit from the contemptuous or smug cat faces and expressions we see. To me it begs the question a little because while we may be able to put ourselves in another human's shoes, we can't really know their mind.  

In the brainspace of impossible hypotheticals, we have the thought experiment of contemplating what it's like to be in someone else's head. Why they react or cannot tame their feelings, while they are like the like the anthropomorphic scorpion on the anthropomorphic frog stinging away to their own demise or detriment.

But I digress, what I wanted to talk about was magical thinking. It is probably possible to think that you roughly know how another person thinks, or why another person think it without the fully experiencing their minds. Flicking our minds into the medieval minds we assume that the they were immersed in the magic potential latent in the world, of gods, spirits, miracles, blessings and curses. In magic there is a certainty, a black-and-whiteness: the wicked are cursed; sins stain; there is a divine order; and the pious will win in the end. Such thinking is a salve to the uncertainty and grey that plague the objective world. 

If I were to speculate, I would say as the Enlightenment drained this old magic from the world a new magic took its place, and for the exact same reason: without the old magic giving us certainty and confidence, we would have been left without that special something to make the uncertainties of life bearable. 

The magical mantra of the moment is, of course, "vaccine". Where in the Grimms tales there were witches and wizards with their spells, nowadays we have things like vaccines, which regardless of how they are explained to people, are always trapped by the common conception of  a magic protective charm that makes you able to walk through a viral storm unharmed. Because of the pervasiveness of the disease and also the fractiousness of the community vaccination effort, their weaknesses and side effects, waning immunity and "breakthrough infections" have become headline news. But the vaccines do not give you a force field aura: they're just a drug that stimulates the body in particular ways, how your body reacts is not guaranteed. 

The last phase of the trials for Pfizer's vaccine had the headlines showing over 90% effectiveness against symptomatic infection, an astonishing headline which remains largely true. But that huge news still has the inverse fact latent: For every 10 people unvaccinated who would develop symptomatic infection, there would still be one vaccinated for every similar ten vaccinated people who would get symptomatic infection, and probably one or more with asymptomatic infection. This is to say, a vaccine in a league of its own was still expected to have recipients who could become symptomatic and infectious. Even after waning, and for new variants, it is probably though as effective as many of the other vaccines that are given to us, if it were taken by the most of the community.

Which is where we come to the thorny topic of mandates, which I would presume most administrators and officials probably wouldn't want to use. The magical view of vaccines sometimes gets in the way of mandates, but only because of magical thinking. This video by JP Sears, for which he argues against restrictions on the unvaccinated is latent with the magic. The strawman is that vaccines are 100% effective so what do the vaccinated have to worry about the unvaccinated, if the vulnerable are all vaxxed, and why compel or exclude those who choose not to? 

Many of the vulnerable people who have done the right thing and got vaccinated also are the ones who the vaccine may have less protective power. In a relatively unvaccinated community, they might still die at a high rate (though lower than without the vaccine). All it might take is for them to have poorer sleep and a period of lower immunity. Vaccines are both for individual protection as well as community protection, yet most of the antivaxx calculations emphasise the individual risks and benefits, which is understandable, and dismiss or ignore that it is a public good to have wide protection for all of society, and depending on the needs of the society it might encourage it in different ways. 

There is a similar magic in natural immunity, which does bestow immunity to future infection and thus could be seen similarly to a vaccination, with the proviso that one is ultimately not permanently harmed by their infection (and hopefully nor others by their onward transmission of the virus). Again the magical thinking comes into it, the aura of protection and the need for nothing more. 

But the magical thinking about the vaccine and natural immunity, and similar thinking about "young", "healthy" and "vulnerable" are nice to simplify the world. It doesn't take much for the world to shatter that with young people hospitalised by the virus, reinfection and breakthrough infections. None of these phenomena should be remarkable except if one misapprehends how things happen with magical thinking. The fact of breakthrough infections were literally printed on the box when the phase three trials were run. Reinfection is no surprise - some viruses you only get once but others, especially respiratory viruses, like to visit again and again. Some people are "unluckier" with it, sometimes due to innate factors, sometimes circumstantial factors, sometimes with behavioral factors. Sometimes any one kind of factor (for example, an innate risk towards ACE2 receptor targeting viruses) might overcome all circumstantial factors (low inoculum of virus, generally healthy) and behavioral factors (wearing a mask, generally socially distancing). There is plenty of grey to cause a decent number of exceptional cases when something is happening across vast swaths of the population.

The failure of reason

t has been often said that the very intelligent are not immune to bad ideas, often because they underestimate the powers of their own biases and often cannot step back. The US Senate and Congress are full, both sides, with bad faith actors. They are tribal and toe party lines without without much reason, or if so, it's with forced reason. There are a few who forcefully show reason, often forcefully in opposite directions, and Rand Paul, the Republican Senator for Kentucky, is one of those.

For those that don't know, he is the son of another senator, Ron Paul, who as a maverick independent ran for President on several occasions, but as an outsider to the Republican establishment failed, a bit like a libertarian Bernie Sanders but not getting quite so close. The son thinks closer to Republican orthodoxy and ran, like his dad, for the Republican nomination in 2016, which was when Trump smudged out the opposition to be the contender and eventual president.

Anyway, he is one that can put a thought or more together and here I give you a smart man with wrong ideas. (1) Rand Paul Attacks Dr. Fauci (Again) Over Vaccines, Covid Mandates - YouTube

I like smart people who disagree with me because it is an interesting mental challenge which forces you to ask yourself how entrenched are your own biases are, or whether it is reason or truth that makes their words have power. He is a convincing speaker.

But I would still argue, despite his conviction, that his reason is more a product of his biases. Let's look:

The opening has him saying that the US vaccination situation is not perilously placed because "over 90% of people over 65% are vaccinated". To be clear, the United States has pretty much hit its ceiling for willing recipients and resorting to mandates and they're not that far along. For perspective as of today, 65% of the whole US population has at least partially vaccinated (compared with 72% for NZ) with 56% fully vaccinated (compared with 52% in NZ), but New Zealand is still steaming along! We'll probably pass them for double within the next week. 

But does he not have a point: Covid-19 is particularly harsh on those 65 and older, and it has long been a suggested strategy that we somehow shield the old and let the young go about their lives, and vaccination should be that shield. And this fits a very libertarian view of the world that has a lot of merit, that people should make the choices that suit them: Young people want to play. Old people should hunker down. And with a much vaunted highly effective vaccine the libertarians, even the circumspect ones, would want to return to their principles.

Except you can't and the representative for Kentucky should know that almost 25% of their death toll for the duration of the pandemic has been in the last two and half months, when the majority of the vaccinations in his low vaccination state have already had plenty of opportunities to vaccinate. 

The difference of course is in the herd immunity concept, and that is where the libertarian bias is exposed. Vaccination, even before Covid, was not just for individual protection but to have a community protection, because even if the elderly are vaccinated, they will still be vulnerable, albeit much less so. The probability of them meeting this virus when their immune system is low is a function of their environmental level of protection, the people around them. And while kids have the lowest risk, they are the grandchildren who spend time with their elders. And this is the aside because age is only one aspect of risk. 

Paul thus overstates the personal responsibility that in economic terms would be reasonably rational and applies it to pandemic public health. But community responsibility has little part in his consideration - it has a whiff of socialism and collectivism and the greater good. These would not be part of this speech.

The part about multiclonal antibodies has more than a trace of bad faith. The treatment costs about $2000 compared to over $20 for a Covid jab, and was in limited supply, bankrolled by the Federal Government which pre-ordered it, and best used in the early stages of the condition when the virus, rather than the body's response to it, can be curbed. Public health is caught in this dilemma that any treatment detracts from the push for vaccination, but Paul is also one for autonomy and choice of healthcare and resents people not having the choice. The central government control is something that chaffs a libertarian; in New Zealand we have a similar situation with regard to Pharmac which allows medicines to be purchased by the state and subsidised for use in public health services. 

His discussion about masks could be more relevant. There is no doubt that there are masks of differing effectiveness, and in the situation he specifies you would hope that the elderly positive case was in hospital for care, in the usual isolation practiced; and if not, that all the precautions and guidance for care made. But any mask, especially for the infected is better than no mask. And almost any mask in a poorly ventilated room over a long enough time will fail. In the end, it's a matter of probabilities. When we go walking, we generally wear cloth masks, but more as a consideration for others. But if I go to the supermarket, I'll wear a surgical mask. Now that the pandemic in Auckland is getting a bit worse, I think we'll upgrade to N95 if they are available. Really the argument is really just picking a fight with his nemesis "Dr Fauci".

His final argument seems a strawman. Or a couple of strawmen. The idea of targeting the vaccine in the US is not an issue unless he is suggesting what he would never suggest: the mandatory vaccination of the elderly. But that never would be more reasonable to him than the mandatory vaccination of children as part of a childhood vaccination. He is not suggesting forcing the unvaccinated elderly to get the jab. His argument about doing antibody tests prior to getting vaccination seems reasonable except for the fact that it again puts up more drag and resistance to the vaccination campaign, and thus the community protection. And how many pre-existing antibodies are enough? As was found early in the pandemic, asymptomatic infection is reasonably common, which might cause a very mild immune response but perhaps detectable antibodies. 

To be clear, I think if someone can prove their previous infection and antibodies to it, which is probably something becoming more commonly done and more feasible to do, I'd say let them have an immunity passport but it should also be understood as having an expiry. 

The final conclusion is where the bias, which is his pre-existing lens for which all of public health is understood comes out: individual responsibility; personal choice is king; dissension should be encouraged. In most contexts I agree, except for a time when we should be pulling together like now.

A final note: I'm not sure how I feel yet about the YouTube, Twitter and Facebook censorship of "misinformation". I think like all things it is something that is easier said than done, and almost any rule for it is likely to have unintended consequences, or require a byzantine system that will certainly seem unfair to some. Right now the by-catch of reasonable discussion is getting hit to the extent of exacerbating the sense of an authoritarian plot.

Anyway, I enjoy listening to Rand Paul even if he cannot get down from his a priori views.

Certitude, part 2

In my previous posts I have thought aloud about two phenomena: the over-emphasis of single or few data points; and then in the latter post talking about how certain data points (to me) have a certain invalidating power over the explanations often given by the data points gave birth to conspiracy theories. 

At the heart of it is, and this is the amateur non-well-read thinker understanding, are two engines to the variance in our understandings of how things are, and the departure from a common truth. These engines are attribution and the desire for narrative. 

Attribution is the explanation or cause you assign to something, for example, I might attribute my car crash to others cars parked too close together blocking my view of oncoming traffic on a difficult corner, rather than my approach to difficult corners that might inevitably lead to a crash. The problem with attribution is that it is prone to our cognitive biases. When we already have a generalisation about a category of things, we notice when things prove it and ignore those that don't fit the generalisation, even if the contrary examples are more plentiful (i.e. confirmation bias).

The desire for a narrative is that a stories that these explanations weave together to make the world understandable. The crash might be part of my narrative of being unlucky in everything; or a world-against-me, "people should learn to park" narrative. 

Conspiracy theories are the latent super-narratives linking all sorts of smaller narratives together. For example, in our current pandemic there is:

• Bill Gates wants to depopulate the world and inject microchips in people.  
• The virus was man-made and funded by the US government in the lab in China. Dr Fauci knows everything but can't reveal his complicity. The Chinese deliberately released the virus.
• The virus is not as bad as people mention and only kills those "on death's door", or have co-morbidities and would die anyway. Normal people have sufficient natural immunity to resist it.
• Big Pharma are suppressing simple cures to this virus and has bought out government and public health officials. The medical professionals are all in on in and profiting from it, claiming money for each "covid" death.
• The vaccine is ineffective and more dangerous than they want you to know but they are committed to it and using it to create a system to restrict freedom of speech and movement from their enemies.
• ...

Some people believe in none, one, some or all of these narratives, and when a new event or data point comes along it could be fit into any one of these, even if it contradicts another that may be simultaneously held. When a fully vaccinated person dies with or of Covid, which is fully expected to happen, especially in the older age group, it fits the narrative of vaccination being ineffective. When a recently vaccinated person dies, as they may when 9-10 people die each day in a given year and most of the population is getting two jabs this year. 

(Coincidentally NZ's excess deaths for 2021 might be the best evidence for whether vaccinating the whole country with Pfizer has a disproportionate death rate than the disease, which I would already say is unlikely. In many countries, doubters could say that vaccination deaths are covered up in the Covid numbers, or that excess deaths in 2021 not reported officially as Covid deaths are vaccination-related. 2021, while not over yet, in NZ would be expected to have an almost insignificant number of actual Covid deaths and there would be room to analyse whether a year where between 50%-90% of the population being fully vaccinated without widespread community transmission to confound the figures.)

There can be a lot of contradictions between the narratives we believe. Often we have a narrative of ourselves and one for the world and the data points are attributed in different ways if something happens to oneself versus if it is seen in others. An example given would be something like "I was speeding because I had something urgent to do and it won't hurt anyone" while others "are speeding because they are young/female/Polynesian/on drugs/have toxic masculinity and they'll crash and kill someone". The contradiction between the narrative for own choices and life and the narrative you understand for the world and for others do not necessarily have to correspond. There are funny examples of American politicians trying to refute accusations of sexism by saying that they couldn't possibly be sexist when they have a daughter, wife and mother. There are those that say they have no racist or homophobic inclinations by saying "some of my best friends are (fill in the gap)". Again, that's a matter of attribution. Not many people have a narrative that they themselves are a bad person, so when critical things are said, there is an immediate attribution for the criticism: the speaker doesn't like me; the speaker does has questionable judgement, etc. Of course, there are people who take criticism well - and their narrative might be as a humble learner in life, or a "growth mindset" individual. 

Some people are motivated enough to go in front of a building in London where Bill Gates was having a meeting and chant: "Arrest Bill Gates". It is rather extraordinary the dehumanising power of narrative when it comes to someone who does fit the mould of a philanthropist. He has views on climate change and poverty and had devoted a lot of time and money to try and make the world a better place. He does believe the global population is high and, for humanity's sake, should be restrained in some way as he said in a famous 2010 TED talk. There is a much quoted line about 4 minutes in: "First, we've got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent," which those with a conspiratorial narrative read as a reduction of the current population. The quote usually does not include what he said immediately after: "But there, we see an increase of about 1.3." (1.3, indicating it would be x1.3 its current size, 30% growth overall.) The point being that he would propose growth not to be to 9 billion but perhaps 8.3 billion, not as the selective quoting suggests of reducing the current population by 10 or 15 percent by vaccines. Raising vaccinations as a way to arrest population growth, though not spelled out, is because there is a correlation between infant mortality and having more children per person. Reducing the infant deaths increases the investment results in fewer children, greater investment in the smaller number and smaller families.  

The irony is that the funny not-so-secret plot to depopulate the world by vaccinations would work if you want a virulent virus run rampant, rather than fund the production of vaccines to blunt it, which Gates did, or if even the vaccines are meant to be some secret death sterilising "death chemicals" to depopulate, you'd charitably fund them to get to more than 2% of Africa and a still low rate in India and other countries. You wouldn't want India to be vaccinating with its own vaccine using very different technology. Or China to be using its own technology and not the Bill Gates sterilising death chemical. And you wouldn't want the wealthy elite to be the main recipients of vaccines, with targeted disinformation discouraging minorities and the poor from getting vaccinated. 

There is so much dissonance in this yet so much certitude in the narrative that force-fits the data point pieces as data points with questionable attribution. We are generally blind to our own cognitive biases, but narratives are easier to elicit. Ask anyone: "Why are successful/unsuccessful?" "Why are you healthy/unhealthy?" for one's own narratives. Generally, people will resolve this to their own attributes and habits and not the circumstances and environmental variables. Also ask them: "Why is the country going well/going to hell?" "Why is there so much conflict in the world/the world becoming more peaceful?" and you'll maybe get a narrative about the corruption of the elite; capitalism; the stimulation of technology; globalism; etc. but the world and the country are infinitely complicated systems. In many narratives there is some explanatory power over the cases and the data points, but nothing can really wrap things up in an explanation.

Power to the people

The current limbo phase of the Delta lockdown has had a lot of twists and turns, which for an Auckland population that is still largely housebound, the frustration is showing. One constellation of concerns is around "gangs": Pre-lockdown there was the controversy of a gang receiving government funding for drug rehabilitation services; more recently there have been cases within gangs, a gang funeral; rumours of large parties under lockdown; a stowaway gangster in the back of a freight lorry going over the Auckland boundary; Brian Tāmaki leading a lockdown protest in the Domain with bikers; and then the news that Destiny Church received lockdown support funding. It isn't a surprise that the repressed conservative parts of the population have a new fire in the belly, and the outrage machines are swinging back into action. The most recent pressure has been that Labour has not been forceful with the gangs.

Now perhaps I should give two caveats to what I'll say next: (1) I don't know anything about gangs; (2) I can assume that most of those who comment on gangs don't know anything about gangs. My thoughts are musings and you can feel free to ignore, but if you do, please also ignore the musings of most that go around musing.

Firstly, I'd like to make a plaintive call against the abuse of language that goes into the commentary on the topic. Gangs are usually said and even mentally apprehended as a monolith. This kind of sloppy language use I think leads to very black and white thinking which is unhelpful. There are many different gangs, many their own histories, organisational structures, degrees of criminal involvement and so forth. This is not to say that one needs to know these things to talk about gangs - just that it is important to view them as a diverse group.

Gangs in New Zealand, and probably, all around the world are products of exclusion and opposition, but also safety and being part of a group. Gang formation, I would hazard a guess, is a fairly natural social response that has been seen in a wide variety of cultural and demographic groups, from Japan, to South America, to Europe to Polynesia. I would further guess that there will always be gangs when there have been exclusionary forces, whether it be the historic or structural racism, policies that put more of them in jail, immigration policies against people from the Pacific islands, constant reinforcement of negative stereotyping in the media, or profiling by the police, as well as general deprivation, excluding some from a fair economic part of the pie. 

The choice that the authorities have is to either to continue to increase the exclusion, call for toughness to smash the gangs; or to find ways to increase the rapprochement between the two sides, reduce the exclusionary factors and stance of authorities, while still ensuring law and order. 

The former approach is basically either an "eternal war" approach. The exclusionary force can only lead to a greater resistance. Only a technological authoritarian society (think Mainland China) could stomp out these organisations, but it would still lead to a mass of disenfranchised, antisocial individuals. It would be a losing game for a society unless it is accompanied by a huge effort to re-incorporate them in with dignity (jobs and resources).

The latter approach is often the politically unpalatable one: rapprochement involves understanding and cooperation with those who are often public enemies. Even for the "enemy"-side of the equation this is a difficult political move internally. They have to collaborate with the authorities. That is not to say that the current government is far along this path, but it would seem to be the approach. 

The latter is also a tightrope and you can see similar kinds of attempting to pull together in history: Sinn Fein and the British Government (which can be considered successful), and the PLA and the Israeli government (which was not). In any case, there is an importance in recognising and respecting the other. Often political forces preclude it.

The humorous expectation that gangs, whatever patch they be, would follow lock-step with the democratically elected elite to deal with Covid-19 was not ever going to be a thing, despite the hope that we could be a team of five million. Firstly, without Covid support for the gangs directly (which I assume has not happened and would have been political suicide), the gangs would have no money to support themselves so forget about drugs not being sold, if not because they are hugely profitable, then because they would not be able to fund their organisation. Though not gang-related, the criticism of Brian Tāmaki's Destiny Church of taking government support in the weeks before having an anti-lockdown protest are also a bit facile for the same reason. 

One of the interesting underlying assumptions underneath a lot of the conservative reasoning is also the belief in a Leviathan state force and power to oversee the implementation of policy. Even though I do not like the man, Brian Tāmaki, and the presumably the gang-leaders, they are all people with unofficial constituencies. Judith Collins thoughts that she would have prevented Brian from having his day in the sun is interesting. I am interested what that would have looked like when he insisted on going, or if the Bishop were arrested in front of his mass. Destiny is pretty disciplined with its flock, but they were not the only ones at the protest.

Even in non-democratic societies, past and present, ruling groups have worked directly and indirectly with formal and informal power holders in society. For a society to thrive and be (more or less) unified is its ability to balance its different factions' views and needs.