January 6 rolls around again

Every time I go online, I see that another attempt has been made to elect the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives … but no candidate has obtained enough votes.

Wikipedia says:

It is the 128th U.S. speaker election since the office was created in 1789. … Of the fourteen prior speaker elections that took more than one ballot, thirteen occurred before the American Civil War. The 68th Congress in 1923 [one hundred years ago] was the last time it took more than one ballot to elect a speaker, and the 36th Congress in 1859 was the last time it took more than nine ballots to elect a speaker. The record number is 133 ballots during the 34th Congress in 1855.

As of this writing, there’ve been thirteen inconclusive ballots. Rep. McCarthy inches closer to victory, but he hasn’t won yet. He needs to bring four of his party’s holdouts over to his side.

I am noting this because the newswriters deem it significant, though I myself am not sure that it is, except for this obvious point, that the Republicans aren’t a big, happy family.

My most vocal Republican-leaning friend, a longtime Trump supporter, has switched his allegiance to DeSantis for the next presidential contest. I wish I lived in Florida, he says. He lives in South Carolina (a hotbed of liberalism, apparently). He’s sworn never to vote for Sen. Graham again. That Graham supported the omnibus bill was the last straw.

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Poor Samuel was weeping in his room just now because Spotify was playing this song in my room.

Some music affects him very strongly.

Straight-up Communist

As always, to magnify an image, click on it.

What I’m sharing is a screenshot of one of my friends’ Facebook posts. According to my friend, not only are many of the recent quarantining measures “in direct opposition to our constitution,” they’re “straight up Communist.”

By embracing these measures, U.S. citizens “have changed their views on ‘freedom’.”

Instead, they should be holding leaders “accountable.”

Well, I want to know:

Which measures are the unconstitutional ones?

What about them is unconstitutional?

What about them is “straight-up Communist?”

What kind of holding accountable is being urged? Are leaders to be voted out? Are they to be impeached? Are their laws to be disobeyed?

My friend doesn’t say.

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This is hardly the most inflammatory post I’ve seen about the quarantining measures.

Yesterday, another friend, a sweet woman from my church, shared a photo of a Nazi putting a noose around a teenaged resistance fighter.

Socialism! was her accusation.

We need to pay attention to history!

But the history is that courts in the USA have given the federal government and, especially, the state governments extensive leeway to quarantine.

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Reading the two posts between their lines, I think that what’s being advocated is civil disobedience. (It’s a member of the resistance who’s being portrayed as a hero.)

This is a grave position for my friends to take, and not only because civil disobedience, by its nature, tends to weaken the rule of law. It’s especially grave in this context because disobeying the law is likely to result in many more deaths.

Interestingly, my first friend grants this point, saying, “Our opinions about whether or not the current measures are necessary are ultimately irrelevant.”

This position implies that certain freedoms (of commerce? of movement?) are more important than the preservation of many lives.

I wonder if my friend has thought this through.

He has six children. If he considered the measures necessary for preserving lives, would he grant his children the freedom to flout them?

I doubt it.

If his children were adults, would he want them to have the freedom to act so as to disregard the preservation of lives?

If he says he would, he’s more radical than the people who oppose seatbelt laws. The brunt of the harm that results from the choice not to wear a seatbelt is borne by the person who makes that choice. This is much less likely to be true of the person who chooses not to take precautions against COVID-19.

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As it happens, my friend doesn’t believe that the measures are necessary for preserving lives. He doesn’t believe that COVID-19 is especially dangerous. In other posts, he says that COVID-19 probably is much more widespread than the official story claims. He even believes that his whole family had COVID-19 in December, in South Carolina. (I think this is ludicrous.)

But if his disbelief in the measures’ necessity is what’s influencing him to reject the measures, then either (a) he’s confused – that is, he misspeaks when he says that whether the measures are necessary is irrelevant – or (b) he’s arguing in bad faith: he says that the question is irrelevant though he knows that it’s relevant to him.

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Relatedly, I wonder: when my friend says that the measures are “straight-up Communist,” is he confused, or is he arguing (or asserting) in bad faith, using an inflammatory label just for its rhetorical effect?

And if he’s confused, is his shoddy understanding of Communism indicative of willful neglect? Does it suggest that his general argumentative tendencies are characterized by bad faith?