Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
These are posts on culture from the blog Base and Superstructure. Mostly the focus is on American culture. But there might be a few posts on broader, international issues.
Not long ago, I watched a LinkedIn video that defined a ‘thought leader’ as “a person who helps people make difficult choices by being a decision leader.” As a philosopher, I wasn’t too impressed with this display. And as a definition of ‘thought leader,’ that’s about as unhelpful as it gets.
But I think it shows us a few things about business jargon and the nature of the ‘business intellectual.’ What does it show us?
By now I’m sure many of us know that the choices we make are far more complex than popular debate suggests. Almost everyone agrees on the need for consent, on at least some notion of ‘consent.’ But whether and how we consent – and what kind of consent we need – remains less clear.
I might approach these issues in a million ways. But here’s one way. I recently re-read a blog post on Feministing. The post covered a 2014 study in Psychology of Women Quarterly on gender and choices about body hair. It turns out that a woman’s decision to remove (or not remove) body hair is a pretty complicated one. In particular, the social pressures involved cloud the matter of whether and how women consent and make choices.
I wrote my last update on the COVID-19 data near the height of the delta variant phase of the pandemic in late August. At the time, case numbers were still rising. Since then, they continued rising until September 2. And then they started an extended decline. Let’s revisit the topic of COVID-19 and see where we’re headed.
Readers looking for my full history of posts on the topic can find links here: March 2020, August 2020, January 2021, August 2021.
We see lots and lots of coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Much of it’s clickbait. Some of it can inform us, sometimes in great depth. We can find, for example, many in-depth accounts of what hospitalization or ‘long COVID‘ is like. But very little of it – almost none – gives us much in the way of practical, useful information for risk assessment.
In particular, the news coverage doesn’t give us a good sense of the proportional danger to specific groups of people. This goes even more so for the delta variant, where the vast majority of the coverage presents misleading information. In that last sentence, I linked to the CDC’s overview, which is much more informative than the news coverage. With delta, the news veers between COVID denialism and gross exaggeration of the risk to specific groups, children prominent among them.
So, I’m going to take a crack at risk assessment here. I’ll present CDC data and draw tentative inferences about risk by age and vaccination status. Let’s see if I can provide some of the missing risk assessment info.
I’ve been thinking recently about how politics changed in the era of COVID-19. In doing so, my mind drifted right away to two emerging movements. I’m talking about right-wing death cults and leftish doom cults. But we’ll get there in a bit.
Before that, I want to issue a call for compassion. The last year+ fucked people up in lots of ways. 600,000 Americans died (so far). Millions lost family or friends. Millions got COVID themselves, and they spent weeks – even months – recovering from it. Let’s say it hasn’t been a great time for mental health.
Back, then, to the topic at hand.
© 2025 Base and Superstructure
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
