They Need a Fall Guy

 The MAGA anti-vax nutjobs have been a little more vocal lately, because of that FBI report that they say proves them right about COVID being released from a Chinese lab. The MAGA crowd, who so often claim the FBI is a pack of left-wing freedom stealers, suddenly believe them now about this. (But not about anything else that they don’t want to hear.)

As with most things coming from the right, there’s a grain of truth wrapped in a whole truckload of wishful thinking and bullshit. The report assigns very little confidence in that finding, basically admitting that it’s possible, but the origins are still in question. So once again, we have this huge roar about something that makes very little difference. Or rather, as far as I’m concerned, matters not at all.

Why? Because the origin of the virus, whether it occurred in the wild or was released accidentally or on purpose from a lab, doesn’t change what we had to do to fight it. Whatever the source, the US government had to make a risk assessment, plan a strategy to battle and contain the virus and execute it. The degree to which they did or didn’t has been debated ever since, but none of that hinges on the origin of the virus. It came, we fumbled about for a while, and more than a million Americans died from it, with millions more sickened; sometimes seriously, other times not as much.

I think Republicans desperately want it to be a lab release for one simple reason: blame. They need to be able to blame The Enemy for something that had such a negative effect on the country (and the world). Being able to blame an entity that has been TFG’s favorite punching bag is the cherry on top.

When your chief characteristic is rage, it’s a hard thing to maintain over a naturally occurring process that just sprung up from flora and fauna. What are they going to do, dox Mother Nature? Threaten her job? Cut down her trees? So they need a bad guy, which is why they need COVID to have been man-made, just to have somewhere to aim their rage.

Let the academics work out how COVID got loose so that maybe more effective preventative measures might be used the next time around. But other than that, it just doesn’t matter and there’s no sense even arguing about it.

Debunkery

I saw this back in January and I kept it so I could highlight how bad arguments aren’t only a fault of the Right. Consider this graphic:

Now, I’m upset as anyone about the number of people killed by police entities in this country, but this graphic is not the weapon it should be.

Notice how it labels the data as “fatal shootings by officers and other deaths at the hands of police.”

Were there no deaths at the hands of police that were justified? Any number of these could be police responding to hostage situations, a perp who’s pointing a gun, or shooting at them.

A more effective graph would clearly count the number of killings by police of unarmed people. That’s the real issue that causes strife and unrest (and rightly so). A logical assumption would be that if the numbers were properly narrowed that way, they would have been described as such, but since they weren’t we should assume it counts all killings.

Maybe there’s a better case to be made out there, but this isn’t it.

***

I found another bad argument seeping into the sports world again, this time regarding some new baseball rules. This year, MLB has installed a more aggressive pitch clock and batter’s clock, which limits how much time batters can spend dicking around at the plate with their batting gloves, how much time pitchers can spend glaring at the catcher, and how many times he can lob the ball over to first base with a runner on.

As with any adaptation to sports rules, there are many “traditionalists” who bristle at attempts to make the game more engaging. I’ve seen several memes illustrating this point:

The logical counterpoint here is that yes, there’s a delay on that one pitch, but that’s just time invested in preventing MORE wastes of time. You lay down the law once, then the rest of the game speeds up. This is not a complicated concept but it seems to be one these meme creators aggressively ignore. It’s another one of those things that you can yell at the TV down at the bar and the rest of the drunks can nod along in agreement.

Personally, I’m all for anything that will speed the game up a bit. I’ve seen some say that when they’re at the game, they don’t care how long it takes. But I’m sure there are even more there who have actual lives. I’ve seen a ton of baseball games and most of them are night games, just because there are so few day games even scheduled. Most games start at about 7:10. A three-hour game will wrap up around 10:00 PM, with gives people time to get out of the park and back home before 11:00, to get some sleep before getting up in the morning to go to work.

They’re never going to be able to eliminate the occasional long game due to an explosion of hitting and scoring. But that’s the fun stuff to watch, isn’t it? What you DON’T want to see is an extra hour of guys stepping out of the batter’s box, loosening and refastening their gloves, then stepping back in. And then watching the pitcher step off the mound, fiddle with his hat, rub on the ball some more, then climbs back to look in for more signals. Everyone needs to stop jerking around, get in there and play. If the umps call a penalty ball or strike, so be it. Let that light the fire under everyone’s ass to keep things moving. Some of us have to get up in the morning.

RIP

It was with a heavy heart that I saw the news this morning of the passing of one of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s founding members, Gary Rossington. Skynyrd’s music was part of every party we ever threw in high school and college. Even my dad used to love dancing to Gimme Three Steps.

I was lucky to be able to meet them many years ago and in another life, back when I was a record store manager. (Remember those?) My buddy and I went to see their big 1987 reunion tour in Cleveland, their first tour since the plane crash. After the show, the MCA rep (who got me the tickets) asked us if we’d like to go hang with the band at a small party in their hotel suite. Believe me, we didn’t take long to answer. You can read the whole story, here. I didn’t get to talk to Gary, probably because I was too busy chatting up his wife, but she and the rest of the band were great to us.