The “Blood Clot” Edition
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S2: Hello and welcome to the Slate political gabfest for April 15th, 2021, a blood clot edition. I am David Plotz of City Kast here in Washington, D.C. I’m joined as ever by John Dickerson of CBS’s 60 Minutes from New York City. Hello, John Dickerson.
S3: Hello, David.
S2: And by Emily Bazelon of the New York Times Magazine and Yale University Law School from New Haven, Connecticut. Hello, Emily.
S1: Hello. Aren’t people going to look at the hideous title and think, oh, my God.
S3: Well, that’s the reaction I had.
S2: OK, we’ll give it a better title.
S1: It’s an accurate title. It is the most important thing happening right now, but it’s like a little ghoulish.
S2: I’ve done much more ghoulish titles on today’s show. Should the FDA and CDC have paused distribution of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine because of rare blood clot issues? Then the trial of Derek Chauvin intersects with the killing of another black man in the Twin Cities by a police officer. Will this horror ever end? Then President Biden unveils his ambitious plan to reform the Supreme Court, which is a commission, the whole commission,
S3: big ass commission. Thirty six people on that commission.
S1: Yeah, they commission
S2: did four times the size of the Supreme Court.
S1: Yeah, but David, did you see that one of the groups that wants to change the court hired a bus with a banner that read Retire Breyer and drove it past the Supreme Court? I thought of you when I saw that
S2: a lot of people tweet that me I don’t know why people would send that to me because he’s retired. I mean, you guys saw the news about the Google ad campaign where they aired that TV spot in the Masters, which showed a montage of people doing searches, including former Justice Breyer dressed in black robes, typing what is stare decisis into a search bar, which is so funny that he would search that. And Breyer then that quote from Breyer about how he he loves Google products and he was being paid only fairly for the ad. And the his endorsement had nothing to do, literally nothing to do with the opinion he wrote in Google’s favor and that Oracle case. Which was his final opinion that was pretty amazing. That was like the whole thing about that ad was so funny.
S1: You didn’t see that, Emily? I didn’t see it because they did it to exist, though there was a Google versus Oracle case.
S3: There is not enough construction paper in the world to handle the amount of glue created by this dead horse that you had been beating.
S2: You know, I’ve divided the.
S1: I know there are people who look forward to it and people who read it and know how to hit the fast forward button. And those people. I salute
S2: you. I was really this one was really quick today, John. It’s true.
S3: Yeah, that’s true.
S2: But, oh, you can just sit and cringe as you as you did.
S3: Apparently when you said they hired a bus, I thought you meant they hired a bus to ferry the thirty six people on the Biden commission because it requires a school bus to get them all together.
S2: All right. Well, we’re going to get to that. That’s our third topic. Let’s start with our first topic, which is that cases are rising in states like Michigan and. Elsewhere, driven by variance, by impatience, by incomplete vaccination rolls, by rapid reopenings, and the vaccination rollout itself has reached a worrying stage. We have a few states, including your home state of Pennsylvania, Emily, where there’s no longer enough demand for the vaccine supply in parts of the state, which would be great news, except that we’re way, way short of vaccinating the number of people needed for herd immunity in states like Pennsylvania. And also, alarmingly, the Johnson Johnson vaccine has now been put on pause as the FDA and CDC investigate reports of clotting in a microscopically small number of recipients of the vaccine, all of them young women, six out of seven million people who’ve received it. So, Emily, should the feds have paused the JMJ rollout?
S1: Oh, I am so worried about this. And I had such a visceral reaction of despair. You know, look like I’m not one of the experts looking at the data. Obviously, it’s important for us to be able to trust that safety review is being done in a rigorous and thorough way. But this is such a tiny number of incidents. And I don’t know. Ned Lamont, who’s the governor of my state of Connecticut, said this week, you know, I really wish they hadn’t done it this way. Like, could they have told people about the risk? Could they have thought of categories of people who could continue to receive the vaccine since the blood clots have been in women basically of childbearing age? Were there other ways to do this that don’t risk undermining public trust more broadly? Because that’s my concern, right? I mean, this is about the actual risk of blood clots and then it’s about the public health messaging. And I think there’s a real division. You know, some of the people defending the CDC’s decision were saying, well, in order to trust vaccines now and forever, people have to know that if there’s a problem, it’s reviewed. And other people are saying this is an overreaction to a tiny risk and it creates this grave danger of more vaccine hesitancy.
S2: It’s so complicated because obviously, from what we know now, the numbers of complications, blood complications are so small that piloting the vaccine, even for a day, even probably for an hour, if you pause it for an hour, would almost certainly increase the amount of death and disease. More people would get covered and die literally. I bet you could figure it out. Like if we pause vaccine distribution of this vaccine for ten minutes, more people will end up dead or sick then then from whatever complications exist from this.
S1: And we’re looking at a week to 10 days minimum.
S2: So but it’s the same time you cannot have a situation where public health officials are lying or covering things up. You have to have some kind of transparency, like I think we’ve learned from the Trump era that this that that when public health officials are are misleading, when the data is fudged, it has a deeply dangerous consequences for public trust overall. And one of the things that the long game, I think that the Biden public officials are engaged in, I hope is to restore this trust. And the way to restore the trust is weirdly is to diminish the trust in this vaccine. And in the short term, I think I mean, it’s just like.
S1: It’s I don’t know, because we’re so in the beginning and we don’t know how it’s going to go, I find it really it feels like you’re trying to game out effects based on things that haven’t happened yet.
S3: My first reaction to this was kind of what we had when during the election, when we were all teaching ourselves and everybody else that that slowing down of the counting, the vote counting process was not a sign that there was funny business, but a sign that the system was working. So if there’s a pause here, you know, the way the scientists would look at it is the system is working. There’s a problem. They’re going to look into it, not just because of the infinitesimal number of cases where you make sure that there aren’t more, but also to do what they did with AstraZeneca, which is to decide if this is something that we can just give JMJ to people who are over age 50, then that’s what we should do so that they can, you know, that they can modify what they’re doing with it so far. And then also anybody that in this small number of cases who are getting blood clots, they need to make sure they know how to treat them. Because what if there’s a knock on effect of having both the vaccine in your system and the traditional blood clotting medication? And there are some problems. So it seems on the one hand, like science is at work. What what I was thinking through also is we’re a year plus into this and we still haven’t figured out how to and we desperately need to the question of risk assessment, because in all of the decision making here, from the beginning, there’s always been a thing where basically the experts have to make a decision based on a tiny little amount of information. And in this case, the information is self reported. So it’s fuzzy. They don’t even know if these blood clots are actually coming from the vaccine. But of course, if you wait too long till you have certainty, you can have a huge disaster. And there was, in fact, a U.S. disaster in 1976 with vaccines meant to combat the swine flu, which which gives evidence to both sides of this case. On the one hand, they thought that it was leading to heart attacks. They were wrong about that. But then there were neurological nerve damage that was a result of the vaccine that was given and the swine flu never showed up. And I guess one other thing I’d throw in the mix is you can’t be silent, right? If you know that the blood clots are perhaps related, federal officials can’t just pretend it’s not happening because that would obviously reduce trust even more. So how do we talk about a situation where we’re perceiving risk? It may only be a temporary pause and have the public be able to sort of accept that as the natural and healthy course of things?
S2: I mean, I think we’re in this we’re in this just extremely difficult place because there’s a couple of different things going on. One, there is a media alarmism around vaccine complications, especially at the beginning of the vaccine rollout when there were a couple of of complications, as there always are a couple of reactions,
S1: like allergic reactions.
S2: Yeah, there were front page stories even even in places like, I think The New York Times about this. And that is was just dangerous. It was a overweighting of something and that could diminish trust in the vaccines. There is an intentional effort by people like Tucker Carlson, their cronies, and I think they’re guilty of a true moral crime about hyping up questions about safety, lowering the intentionally lowering the confidence in it, which without it being based on anything real. And that is and that they’re doing that for disingenuous, politically opportunistic reasons. And it’s it’s immoral and and terrible. And then there’s this situation where we just have a loss of trust. There used to be an agreed upon public trust and certain kinds of authorities and the loss of legitimacy in those authorities, the intentional sabotage of legitimacy of those authorities by primarily by Republicans discrediting the federal government leads to death. And that’s a tragedy. And it’s not easy. None of these things is easy to restore. Like you can’t restore public trust such that people will feel confident and stuff except by just demonstrating that you’re acting responsibly. And that’s kind of the bind that the that the Biden federal officials are in right now is that the way to act responsibly is to do something that cost lives in the long term. But it’s the only way to make people feel that these institutions are actually acting for the public interest. And it’s it’s tragic.
S3: Can I add one thing on to that is I wonder, so you have the traditional diminution of trust in institutions which we’ve been been suffering through. And then I think we are in a special case, which we’ve all talked about a lot here, which is risk perception, which humans do horribly anyway, and then public. And then all the things you identified, David, are so you have risk. Perception is really tricky anyway. So you need kind of like. Batory conditions to sit, to walk everyone through and then what you just described, David, is anything but laboratory conditions right in the public health conversation. If you’ve got, like chickens flying into the room and a marching band coming through and, you know, and the water mains breaking. So but but even so, even on all of that, there is this thing that is we’re all going to have to learn in public health because we’re going have to learn it because we’re there. Another pandemic is coming is that there’s a version of what’s happened in JMJ that the public health officials at the beginning of this crisis were wrestling with, which is they saw that the net and the nascent signs of a huge pandemic and they were ringing the alarm bells and they didn’t have enough data. They had the same kind of fuzziness of data that we have right now with Jay and Jay. And they were saying, yes, data is a little fuzzy, but if you wait and you’re wrong, catastrophe. And so now it’s interesting. The public health officials are on the other side of the argument with respect to Jay, because they’re saying if you pause this too long, you’re going to lose lives, you’re going to lose more lives than you would save. But but both face the same situation, which is how to get risk averse politicians to do anything ahead of 100 percent information, which you will never have, because once you have one information, everybody’s dead. And that’s something that is, I think, distinct from the traditional distrust of institutions. Obviously, it’s harder when you distrust institutions more, but it is a kind of public thinking that we still haven’t figured out. And that’s in a special class and we’ve got to figure it out because more of these are coming.
S1: I mean, isn’t there one further layer of complication, which is that there have been many points since the pandemic began in which there’s been a really hard choice to make and advice to be given. And sometimes our American public health authorities have chosen something that in the longer run looks correct and in other cases they have not. And so, you know, I think the notion that we are supposed to blindly follow them, at least for me at this point, is totally unsatisfying. And I think I brought this up a couple of weeks ago. But watching this in the face of, I think mostly Dr. Fuji’s resistance to, you know, one dose delay, the second dose, which would increase the number of people with, you know, not complete but substantial vaccine protection and which the United Kingdom has done with a lot of success. I mean, when you look at they are like hugely decreased death rates and greater than our decrease in case rates. You think like that looks pretty good. And if we’re going to have a problem with the JMJ vaccine, could we use the other vaccines more smartly than we are right now? And especially when you think about, like the spike in cases in Michigan? I mean, I’m also sympathetic to the people who want more vaccine there. Like if we have a hotspot, why not move it there? So I just don’t feel like I live in a universe in which the track record shows that just trusting what they say is really the best. And also we have other models from other countries, other other scientists saying other things. It’s not like there’s a scientific consensus on some of these questions.
S2: Emily, you’re you’re 100 percent right about this. I guess I feel that we’re in a situation now. We’ve had Michael Menagh on the show a couple of times. Michael Mina was a fierce advocate for early, cheap testing. And it it’s clearly like would have been so much better had we had early, cheap, extensive at home testing, less accurate testing, like it would have diminished the pandemic enormously. We didn’t do it. Like the federal authorities. The commercial authorities who make these things just didn’t do it. We failed. But at some point, you also have to say, like, OK, we failed, it didn’t happen. And like, we are on a path. So there is a pretty decent vaccine rollout situation happening in the United States. We have massive manufacturing, pretty good distribution. Our rates of vaccination are much better than than most countries. It is in no sense perfect. There are clearly ways to improve it. But like the main thing to do is to get people, like, just build confidence in vaccinations and that kind of like the the sniping at it, the constant sniping and undermining of whatever is happening is itself a problem like the the pointing to we should always like, oh, why aren’t we doing this? Why aren’t we doing this? It’s like it’s like you can’t like it’s it’s it’s like being steered a car, being steered by seven different people. And it’s like you kind of kind of got to make a bet and sort of say we’re doing that. This is how we’re doing it. We’ve got a system, we have a distribution set up where people know what the what the protocols are. Let’s just do that.
S1: I mean, the people who have been criticizing don’t have any power, right? They’re not in the car driving. They’re like the well, I mean, they do a lot of them are scientists, but they’re not making policy. No, but but are you seeing
S2: changes sort of changes the public’s perception of whether this is working or not, which diminishes public trust?
S1: I mean, so are you saying basically, like even if you have doubts about this move with the. Vaccine that you just should I mean, there’s a question like, should you just be quiet about it? Because all the questioning and second guessing is itself undermining public trust and like just better for everyone to just, like, go right or wrong.
S2: It’s a I don’t know,
S3: it’s a it’s a great question, I think, to two things. One, I think there’s a danger in jumbling all the mistakes together. So the mistake Mina was calling out was bureaucratic, slow footedness, which is just the clog in the system. You could argue with the FDA and CDC on JMJ, the bureaucracy, bureaucracies moving too fast. So I think that’s a distinct category. I think there are three categories you’ve named. One is bureaucratic, slow footedness. One is bad decisions, poorly made. And the third category is decisions made with the best information at the time. But because you’re always making decisions in the fog of war, some percentage of those decisions are going to turn out not to be right, not because you didn’t do everything that was possible, but because by their very nature, all the decisions that are being made, the with respect to covid-19 are being made with so little information. But you have to make them when you have to make them. And knowing which of the three we’re in helps us figure out in the future how to do them better. I think to your question, Emily, it would be great if people who were critical of the pause said, we understand what you’re trying to balance here. We understand you can’t just be silent about this. But we also recognize that in a public health context, you have to make a balance in favor of more lives, save and therefore you shouldn’t have paused or whatever, but that when they criticize that they do so within a framework of the notion that there is not certainty
S1: and that kind of anguish.
S3: Precisely. Precisely because that’s we need to build that up. And you can be critical while still maintaining the floor of good faith because you all recognize that everybody’s making decisions here on limited information. And that’s always the way it’s going to be.
S2: Right. I think those are two that is a critical point that you guys just made there, which is certainty like like what you want is acknowledgment of uncertainty and and recognition of good faith when it is merited, which it seems merited in these cases. And that would go a long way. I also think there’s a third part, which is treat the public like adults, which is. Yes, God, yes. Like assume that when you tell them about risk, they can make decisions even though it’s hard. But the people are people are you know, I bet you could go to thousands of people and tell them about what happened with the JMJ and they’re going to mostly make rational decisions about it.
S3: Can I make one more case for being good faith recognition of the uncertainties of things? The reason you also want to do that is so that when you have unsafe lies told by people in authority who know one hundred percent the opposite of what they are saying in public. And in this case, I’m talking about the previous president, that those kinds of lies which which are wreckage to public the public good and public safety, stay glowing in their neon form and aren’t muddled by by people who say, oh, well, it’s all a confusing thing and who could know better. That’s true of some category of things. But then there are affirmative lies which are in fact, dangerous, and they deserve a special category. Right.
S2: Gabfest listeners, we have a live show coming up in less than two weeks, Wednesday, April 28th, at eight o’clock Eastern. We are going to talk about the first hundred days of the Biden Harris administration. We’re going to be live on Facebook and YouTube. If you go to Slate Dotcom live, you can get information and links to sign up for this live show. It’s going to be really fun. We haven’t done a live a virtual live show in a while. Of course, we’re looking forward to getting back, doing real live shows, but it’s going to be a while before we can do that. And for now, doing a show on Wednesday evening with you will be delightful and you’ll be a chance for you to comment and chat and submit questions. And we’re going to have a great discussion about what’s happened in the first hundred days. And this live show is presented by Lord Jones, who the makers of the world’s finest CBD products. You have heard me talk about Lord Jones products before. You’ll actually get to see them and their beautiful packaging when you tune in to this live event and our listeners, you’ll get twenty five percent off your first order at Lord Jones dotcom gabfest. So please go to sleep dotcom live to get more information about the April twenty eight live show and links to sign up for it. There’s a really stunning moment for me this week, actually, truthfully, there are two of them which get at the breadth of violence committed against black men in this country by the police. Karen Nazario is the army second lieutenant who was pepper sprayed by cops in Virginia. It turns out he had a family connection to Eric Garner. He called Eric Garner, his uncle. And Eric Garner, of course, was the man who was killed by police in New York. And at the same time, Courtney Ross, who was George Floyds girlfriend, knew and in fact had been the dean at the school attended by Dante. Right. The man killed by police in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. It’s just a sense of like, oh, my God, it’s like this violence is so pervasive. It is so frequent that that people upon whom it is visited that there’s there’s so much of it. It’s it was. Stunning to me, so, Emily. We have a lot of stuff going on around this issue. We have the killing of DONTAE, right? We have the Nazarro case and then we have the SHERVIN trial, the trial of Derek Shervin, the police officer on trial for murder and the death of George Floyd. I don’t know. I don’t even have a question, just say something about I
S1: mean, one thing at this very moment that I’ve been thinking about is obviously it’s important for Shoven to be able to put on a strong defense as you can. That’s how our adversarial system works. We are watching, though, what is, at least for me, this quite painful effort to effectively blame George Floyd for his own death by talking a lot about his drug use. And in the case of Dante. Right. There’s a lot of discussion about how like, well, there was a warrant out for his arrest and that warrant was for aggravated robbery. And so that somehow justifies the shooting. And like, these are just right.
S2: Or and the Nazario case, oh, he drove for a mile to a gas station. So, of course, the police are going to be suspicious of him and that therefore he deserves to be pepper sprayed or implicitly
S3: and we should just object. I know we’re interrupting the hell out of you, Emily, but the Nazario drove to the filling station to be under the lights because he was worried about being pulled over by police on a dark road, which is not which is something that lots of police run into. So in other words, it’s compounded by what we’re talking about. Sorry, Carol.
S1: I mean, I just am stuck in every instance by this problem of people are not, like, gleaming and pure. None of us are. There’s always something that someone can find in a story that makes you look like you’re culpable in some way. And obviously there are degrees of that, too. But what the police do needs to be judged by that particular moment and action and what they are doing, as well as like whatever they’re responding to. And one of the ways, especially in the case of Dante, right. Like why are the cops pulling someone over? Because they have air freshener dangling from their back window to begin with, like given what we know about road stops and how fraught they become, how much police are hyper vigilant in those moments as well as people, especially, I think often black men who fear these encounters for good reason, like part of what we need to do is not create the conditions in which things spin out of control. And then I think, you know, we should talk about this like horror of a police officer intending to grab their taser, their stun gun and instead pulling out a real pistol. And, you know, that is a fact of American policing. That is about how we use firearms. And it just was obviously sad. Such a tragic outcome here.
S3: Well, you know, Emily, your point there is so important about certain kinds of traffic stops, certain kinds of police interactions that, you know, that has been the defund the police movement has gotten so mangled and and and so kind of abused in the political system. But essentially the argument is essentially move. And you saw it this week in the questioning of Kristen Clarke, who’s would be head of civil rights at DOJ, the Biden administration, if there was better thinking about these interactions so that they didn’t take place in the fraud environment that they do, then you don’t have mistaken assuming let’s for a moment that it was a mistake, which from the audio, it sounded like it was a mistake. You don’t even get into that situation. You don’t even have these kinds of interactions because you think about policing differently, which is to me, the most important thing distinct from the label that’s being used by those who in bad faith want to make it sound like people who want to modify the way policing works want to just defund the police completely.
S2: I mean, there’s so many terrible things. I mean, one of the things I think about Emily as you were talking is like with Dante Wright or with George Floyd, like. Police are not in the business of justice. Their job is not just a business, is their job as law enforcement, and it is to take care of the people in their charge so that justice can be done later. The idea that that Danti. Right. Has a warrant out and therefore it’s somehow justice for for the police to maltreat him is so odd. Like the job of the police is to take great care of the people that they are arresting to get to provide them the medical care they need to provide them whatever they need so that they can then be tried. If they need to be tried, charged, they need to be charged. But it’s not the police’s job to carry out justice. That’s the system that we all support. And and I think there’s a there’s like this kind of conflation like that that police are being allowed to sort of do the jobs of prosecutor. So it’s justified. And it’s it’s not really the job of the police to do that.
S1: And I think also that if you are someone who wants to emphasize like, well, these people did this thing that contributed to the tragedy that followed, you’re you’re separating yourself. You’re imagining that you would be spared because you didn’t have drugs in your system or you didn’t have a warrant out for your arrest. And I just like I am so deeply unconvinced by that. I think like. Yes, absolutely. You know, black men are at greater risk in these situations, but they can also happen to anyone. There is an arbitrary, random just scariness to this. And so if you like, imagine that by emphasizing the wrongdoing of the person who gets harmed by the police like that is going to save you or people you love. Like it’s just not true.
S2: Emily, if you were driving at night on a dark road and the police pulled you like Flash do, what would you do? Would you pull over or would you try to get to somewhere lit before you did it? I mean, I find this this question really alarming, especially you have the case and I don’t have the details in front of me. I just saw it flash across a news story of a somebody who was shot and killed by an off duty police officer out of uniform because they didn’t obey the off duty police officer out of uniforms, orders to do something and they were shot and killed. An off duty police officer is going to face no consequences. But it’s like, why should you obey the order of someone who’s not in uniform, who’s off duty, who pulls you over and tells you to do something like that’s you shouldn’t like this terrifying situation.
S1: Yeah, there were some interesting law professor posts about this whole, like, loop of how do you know that something’s illegal order in the second that it’s being given? When do you know you’re supposed to comply? I mean, I think this question of like, whether you should drive to somewhere with better lighting. I mean, I am scared of the police. So my feelings about the police always is just total deference, like absolute, you know, supine behavior in any circumstance. Like I say, sir, more times in a sentence when I’m talking to the cops than in any like it otherwise basically doesn’t come out of my mouth once in a while to like a Dauman. That’s it. But I just have this and that’s like what I teach my children. And I was in the car with my husband last year and he got into some argument with the police and I was just like, are you kidding? Like, that is not what we are doing. We are doing what they said. I’m not saying that I don’t understand why other people respond differently. I just feel like they have the gun. And that’s all I need to know in the actual moment. But I do think that driving to somewhere where there are witnesses or where there’s lighting could be like a perfectly rational response, especially if you are a person of color and a man and worried about that interaction in a different way than I am.
S2: I wish there were like acceptable social or the police would accept a signal, which is the U.S. I am going to drive to a place where there are witnesses and which doesn’t lead the
S1: way to flash that light from the car.
S3: Well, but your point, Lieutenant, Lieutenant Nazario, the footage in that is extraordinary. I mean, he’s in his fatigues. He’s got his hands out the window in a fully lit place, and yet they’re treating him like this. I mean, they’ve got their guns drawn. Yeah, they’ve got their guns drawn. One thing that strikes me, though, is that. This was all captured on police cameras, the role that cameras have played in putting us in this conversation we’re having, it’s accelerated the realizations here of what happens in these in these kinds of instances, which is a pretty strong bulwark against what has happened in the past, which is and you see it in the in the Shoven trial, which is the kind of narratives being made out of whole cloth, out of the air. One of the expert witnesses on Chauvin’s behalf suggested that Floyd might have been affected by the carbon monoxide, even though it turns out the cop car was a hybrid vehicle and he didn’t even know if it was on. In other words, absent video, either in cop cameras or bystanders. You can you can see in real time how the narratives get created in the courtroom and all you need. Right, Emily, is just one person on the jury to have a reasonable doubt. And and it’s over.
S2: Yeah, well, so so do you guys think that the showband trial verdict is going to be an important marker? I mean, I think if Shervin is not convicted, like it’s going to be a really bad situation for this this issue in this country. And if he you know, if he is convicted, I have no idea. I mean, like, I’m not I’m not following the trials. I’m not a juror. I don’t know I don’t know whether the evidence warrants his conviction.
S1: The evidence warrants his conviction.
S2: I don’t know that. I mean, I’m not on the we’re not we’re not talking my opinion.
S3: May I ask two questions? One is, given your non juror opinion, do you do you think it’s. Do you think objectively the evidence warrants his conviction, A, which seems like you do be subjectively, do you think it would be crazy for any one person on the jury to have reasonable doubt? And then totally distinct question to both of you. Tell me what the smart thing is to think about the effect of George Floyds death now that you’re on the effect it’s had in the larger culture and then the effect it’s had with respect to the treatment of young black men by police? And are those two things distinct?
S2: They’re like those like us
S1: always show for all those
S2: questions. Each of those is like a 45 minute documentary.
S3: Well, I’m sorry,
S2: I’m doing a podcast.
S3: Fermented soil in my brain.
S1: I mean, my feeling about the the trial to answer the legal question, is that the prosecutors were smart to give the jury choices about third degree versus second degree felony murder versus manslaughter, and that if the jurors reject all of those avenues, that that is going to, to me, be shocking. You know, I actually think that there is a way in which George Floyds death, because the video is so horrifying, has been a kind of wake up call for, you know, lots of people, especially white people, for whom this did not seem like necessarily, you know, such a pressing issue in America. I feel like there is more understanding of why the calls for racial justice have have deepened and expanded in the last year or so. You know, there is that, I suppose, benefit, though obviously we don’t want people to have to die so that other people can be more aware.
S2: I mean, to me, the big transformation besides the fact that the BLM movement was a movement that galvanized more people at the biggest protest movement in American history and. That in itself is important, is there’s a framing of this issue which which I don’t think most Americans were aware of and I think they now are aware of, that’s really important, which is that the police that a lot of the jobs the police do shouldn’t be done by the police. Yes, that is that doesn’t shift what the police do overnight, but it will gradually shift so that I think there’s now this understanding that there’s all kinds of things that happen that are under the police bailiwick now which are going to be gradually hived off and treated as their own special expertise that require different act than a than a big guy with a gun. And that’s going to be a huge shift that will happen over time and is great. And it’s and I think honestly, like many millions of people I know, I suspect that’s true because I’m one of them just never even had that thought until this
S1: year and don’t involve them in situations that it’s not absolutely necessary. I’m just going to go back to my perennial cry of caution about calling them
S3: one of the things that was popped into my mind, which isn’t central to this question, but it does seem a result is that and I don’t know whether this was revealed by the protests in the wake of Floyd’s death or whether it was, in fact changed. But I mean, Donald Trump’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests, some people, Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, others talked about implicit racism and Black Lives Matter. And Donald Trump instead hit a familiar button, which was basically to scare suburbanites. And I’m not intuiting that it’s what he said out loud. And so he mashed that button, which had been successful in previous times, and it was not in fact, it was the opposite of successful. So the question is whether that was the case before the Black Lives Matter movement or whether something was revealed and a change occurred as a result of Floyd’s death and the protests in the wake of it. And I don’t know what the answer is that whether it’s revealed or changed, but I think that’s a societal change that took place distinct from the question of the relationship between police and the community.
S2: Slate plus members, thank you. You support the gabfest, you support the journalism that Slate does. Our topic for Slate plus this week is we’re going to talk about whether it is moral and good and bright to bring a child into this terrible world this time, given climate change, given global conflict, human pandemic, given the horrible things that our children might live to see, should people have children? You may be surprised to know that Emily Bazelon does not have a new job. She is not. One of the thirty six legal scholars appointed to the Biden commission, said the Supreme Court. So, Emily, were you asked to join the commission?
S1: No, but one of the co-chairs is Christina Rodriguez, who is a beloved law school classmate and colleague of mine, if I can be said to have colleagues at Yale Law School. So I’m very happy that she’s front and center.
S2: I am sorry for her because she has joined a body that seems designed maximally to fail. Thirty six members, which is a ridiculous number of members on a commission, has no power to do anything except just no power to issue binding recommendations. It can write a report, which I guess is what law professors really love to do anyway.
S1: It does not even really supposed to make recommendations at all. As it’s been explained to me, it’s like analyzing different options.
S2: It’s like a jawin flock of of law professor types meeting for 180 days, it sounds like over Zoome. It literally sounds like it is my nightmare. Emily, I am sure these are all fantastically brilliant scholars and thinkers and lawyers and what a tremendous waste of time. But what are they going to consider? What are they going to do?
S1: Yeah, well, right. They are going to consider the various options, everything from expanding the number of justices on the court, which obviously has become a rallying cry for some liberal advocacy groups, which are really worried about the fact that conservatives are firmly in control of the court and then they can consider lots of other options. And so can we talk about the other ideas? Because they’re both more like maybe realistic and also probably in the medium to long term, I would argue a better fix. And I am not going to cite to a piece that Ryan, Dawla and Sam Moyen wrote in The Atlantic, which I really appreciated because I thought it did such a good job of laying out that if you want to talk about expanding the justices or court packing, you’re talking about who is on the court. And you’re, you know, in the short term, like the Democrats could add a few justices and take control. And until there is unified control of Congress and the presidency from the Republicans, they’ll be in the ascendance. But like you end up in a kind of like, what’s the Dr. Seuss book that hasn’t been canceled? The budget battle like the
S3: Beatles, but the. About beadell book, the butter Bible is just the butter, but it’s not Beatle, it’s not because the Beatle there and you’d get another another alliteration.
S1: Yeah, I mean, it’s basically like an arms race in the longer term now. I mean, I’m not saying that you couldn’t justify adding a justice or two as a kind of payback for the combination of the Republicans in the Senate not considering Garland’s nomination because it was the end of Obama’s presidency and yet rushing through Amy CONI Barrett because it was the end of President Trump’s presidency. But in the longer run, I’m a little skeptical that, you know, ratcheting up the number of justices is a great idea. But what Ryan and Sam are talking about is changing what the court does, how much power it has in American life. And if you are skeptical of judicial supremacy, of the idea that our least Democratic branch is weighing in about every important issue in American life, this is a lot to attract it both for conservatives and liberals, because there have been periods, particularly the 1960s and early 70s, in which the court was a real friend to liberal causes. And I think it still is sort of running on the fumes of that Warren Court era among liberals. But it has also been like a seriously reactionary force at other key moments in American history, like the end of reconstruction and the Lochner era and almost wrecking the New Deal. So if you worry about that, you might want a court that doesn’t have all the power it has now. And so, for example, you could have a court where you have to have six justices sign on to overturn a statute that would change the power relationship among the branches of government. Right. Because you’re saying, OK, we’re going to accord more deference to the democratically elected branches that pass this law and give less power to this very small number of people wear who wear black robes. There are other possibilities in that domain, like stripping the court of jurisdiction of certain kinds of cases that I think deserve more of an airing and greater public understanding than they have now. And so maybe the commission can help with that.
S2: How can those decisions with those have to be statutorily done that have to be constitutional? Could the court itself, could the Supreme Court itself declare, like we we say, that only six to three decisions overturn statutes? Where does that change come from? I guess is my question.
S1: The change would come from Congress and the court would probably be inclined to try to strike it down. But there have been other moments of jurisdiction stripping and various points in American history. It’s not like it’s on. And the Constitution itself has jurisdictional limits on what the federal jurisdiction stripping. I think, like in the eighteen sixties, that was part of the fighting going on when they were changing the number of justices that were also jurisdiction stripping proposals. And I think at least one of them passed. Some historian can fill this out or correct me. But in any case, this idea that Congress can set limits on what the courts can see and hear like that comes from the Constitution itself. When it passed, they talked about how you had to have a certain amount of money at stake in a case, and there had to be some reason that a federal as opposed to state court was going to hear it. So like that idea, I mean, I guess the Supreme Court could strike it down. But I mean, it seems to me like it has a really firm basis in the American system.
S3: Can I move from cart to horse? Because I think please, this is all cart talk. But I think that the precondition for any of these changes happening and also I think for people understanding what’s going on is to and maybe everybody knows this, but, you know, there’s a way in which this debate feels like, well, Democrats sour grapes, they didn’t win the presidency and they didn’t get to name the people on the court and tough luck for them. Why are they trying to change this venerable American institution just because they lost in a fair game? So I’m relying on all these figures from Ron Brownstein. But if you look at so and then this is also a question you, Emily, which is is the central thing for these thirty six members to answer the question of whether the Supreme Court, which was designed in some ways to be not designed, in some ways it was designed to be slower than the passions of the moment has gotten so detached from the current moment that it’s broken. So Democrats have won have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. But the Republicans have controlled the White House, which names the members of the Supreme Court for 12 of the past twenty eight years. So that’s one of the ways in which the popular will of the people is disconnected from the person who’s naming the Supreme Court justices. Then you have Republicans who controlled the Senate for twenty two of the 40 years. And this is according to Brown piece, which quotes Lee Drutman of the New America think tank, which is that only in one two year period, during the span of time that Republicans have controlled the Senate has been the case that the GOP has represented a. Majority of the American public, so most of the other time, the GOP, which is ratifying the Supreme Court picks of the presidents who have not been elected by the popular vote, does not represent a majority of the American public. They represent a geographical distribution of the Senate. And so the question then is, is that combination of representation in both the Senate and the presidency broken with respect to the way these justices should be picked and so undemocratic that it represents a like something that the founders would not have wanted? Is that the central question you have to figure out first before you can create the conditions for then a solution to that problem?
S1: I mean, I think those those facts are really important context for the extreme concern about what the court could do next among liberals. Right. It’s the sense that if the court lurches to the right, it’s going to be standing in the way of, you know, potentially powerful progressive era of government in a way that is out of step with the American electorate. And we’ve seen this happen before. I mean, this is the Lochner era in the early 20th century. And then following on the you know, the early decisions by the Supreme Court that almost wrecked the New Deal. It was a very conservative set of justices effectively appointed by previous presidents who are having this kind of like death grip to be dramatic on what people were doing to try to protect workers. That’s like the Lochner era. There’s all this, you know, labor protective legislation passing and then there’s like FDR in the New Deal and trying to save the country from the depression. And and again, like, you know, pro worker efforts that the court is is obstructing. So that’s exactly the concern. And I think, you know, I I’ve written about this regularly. I feel like it’s really hard to take this issue to make it feel super urgent and mainstream at a moment when the court isn’t doing something obviously dire. So. Right. There’s always a dynamic like if the conservative majority of six does not wield its power in dramatic, you know, society like altering fashion, then the the heat behind, you know, these efforts to reform the court is going to dissipate. And it’s just a little hard to tell right now. You know, in a sense, I would argue that this is sort of a backwards argument. But in some ways, President Trump did the court, the conservatives, a favor because his challenges to the election were so ridiculous and over-the-top and insane that almost all the justices said, look, forget it, we’re not doing this. There was a really, you know, unified rejection by the American, by the whole American judiciary of those challenges that makes the court and the judiciary look very reasonable and moderate and like reality based. But that doesn’t have a whole lot to do with these other hugely important issues, like whether states can have strong gun control laws. You know, what happens to the future of reproductive rights, religious freedom, like all these other issues that are the usual hot button issues for the courts.
S2: I want to turn back to another subject which has nothing to do with this, which is I’m just obsessed with the fact that they’ve named 36 people to the commission, which is a terrible number. If you’ve ever been on a committee, you know that you cannot get anything done if there’s more.
S1: This would be like 12,
S2: seven people on that. Oh, man, thank you. But I’m just weird. I actually imposing this is the question. Maybe listeners, you can what would. Thirty six people. What kind of entity would work with thirty six people. I think a high school football team. That’s about the right number for school football team sandbagging operation.
S3: If you were trying to stack sandbags against for
S2: one for what size what’s not for the whole river. A fire.
S3: Well a
S1: fire. Why are you in a world in
S2: which there is
S1: like six people, like four times nine? That’s good.
S2: Fire is quite
S3: excellent. Also, where do 80 percent of the members of the thirty six member body, what to colleges did they attend?
S2: Guess how you see Santa Barbara Steria.
S3: And I just want to say I am representing the 20 percent on the committee. You, Harvard and Yale people
S1: pox on both of them. Yes.
S2: Let’s go to cocktail chatter. When you are having a cocktail party in the future, which has thirty six people, which might be a good number for a cocktail
S1: party, I don’t know. Not quite yet. No, not
S2: yet. I’m not saying no. I’m not saying now. I’m saying in the future. I’m saying what would be a good thirty six people is a good number of people for a cocktail party potentially. I’m just thinking about that now.
S3: How far in the future do you think we will be when we can in fact have thirty six.
S2: People at Christmas party, holiday party.
S3: OK. All right.
S2: Do you think sooner or later
S1: outside the summer? No.
S2: Yeah, OK. Indoors.
S1: Indoors, yeah. I don’t know.
S2: What do you what’s your guess? I just put a marker down. December, December 8th.
S3: Should February. Will holiday parties. Everyone has to wear a robe, though, Emily.
S1: I really like the idea of holiday parties being possible with lots of people next winter and I think over the summer outside, as long as there’s lots of air circulation, seems OK.
S2: Let’s imagine our cocktails at that situation. John, what would you be chattering about at that holiday party?
S3: Watch the Netflix series. Call my agent. Oh, definitely. Have you watched it? Yes.
S1: So great.
S3: Yeah. I mean. Just do it. I’m not going to say anything more because I think I’ll ruin it. It’s very funny and it’s just the right amount of lightness, but it has some very subtle and supersmart little storylines in it. It was just what we needed. Also, like I also quite liked actually the irregulars, which is Sherlock Holmes fan fiction. It’s quite short, but I also quite like that Emily chatter.
S1: This is a sad chapter, but I am feeling very worried about a death penalty case in Tennessee. The defendant’s name is Purvis Payne, and he was convicted in the 1980s of this horrible double murder like horrible of a mother and her two year old. So his story from the very beginning is that he heard cries for help because his girlfriend lived next door. He walked into this apartment. There was a knife still in the body of this woman. And so he tried to pull it out, got blood on his hands, got blood on his clothes, tried to call the police with the phone. And so his fingerprints are on the phone. So, yes, there is physical evidence that implicates him, but his story has always been that he was not the actual murderer. It is such a terrible crime. It seems like a crime of passion. And there’s no evidence that he was intimate with this woman or would have had a reason to do this anyway. Lo these many years later, the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office Empirical I have written about and talked about before for many years, resisted additional DNA testing
S2: this FUJIMURA
S1: by the time they did it, the evidence was degraded and so it was sort of inconclusive. The remaining issue in this case is that Purvis Payne has tested low in terms of his IQ. He is someone who may very well have an intellectual disability. And the Supreme Court ruled executions of people with intellectual disabilities unconstitutional several years ago. But this judgment was already final. And so Purvis Payne has never been able to bring his intellectual disability claim before any court to get it heard. And that just seems unconscionable. So the Tennessee legislature is actually considering a bill right now that would address this particular issue. And my understanding is that Tennessee has never had a claim come forward like this one. And it really seems like something they should fix. One big question is that the legislature is almost done its session. And so are they going to make a priority of passing this bill and giving this man a chance to make this, you know, critical legal argument? And there is also a petition for clemency in front of Governor Lee in Tennessee. So, anyway, this is a just really upsetting death penalty case that is looming. And I guess the last thing I’ll say is that executions were on pause in Tennessee because of covid until April 9th. But now an execution date could really be set at any time.
S2: Maria opening.
S1: Mhm. Exactly.
S2: That’s amazing that you can’t that that the Supreme Court has outlawed this, but you cannot actually
S1: bring the claim because like your judgment was final.
S2: Yeah, great. My chatter was said to me by many people, saw it across many channels. Soras far of our best listener was the first person to tip me to it, which is the United States. Gird Yourself is entering a bouba crisis that because there’s a whole bunch of shipping containers piled up at West Coast ports, the shipping containers that contain the tapioca balls that help make bubble tea are delayed and bush houses, barbershops, boba tea houses around the country are about to experience a massive shortage, a shortage that could last for two months. Some of you may know I am a absolute bouba addict. I have bubble tea every day and I don’t really know what’s going to happen. If there was a period at the beginning, a pandemic where I didn’t have bubble tea because pandemic, you know, shut everything down, there was no bubble on offer. And so there’s probably a month. I didn’t have bubble tea at the beginning of pandemic until I ordered my own bouba and. I I don’t want to live in a world without bubble tea,
S3: and can you stock can you stock bubble.
S2: I have some, I have them, I’ve got them, but I don’t.
S1: Are you good at making it yourself? It seems like something you would rather have other people make. Well, the
S2: bubble the bubble is actually making the bubbles at home. It’s actually better. The tea that I make is much worse. But the bubble, you help her.
S3: Can you help a brother out if we get into the pinch there? My son is man for mobility and goes to one to, you know, the other end essentially of the island to go with his family.
S2: What’s his favorite one?
S3: Uh, I don’t
S1: know if it’s inconvenient and far away.
S3: Yeah. I mean, because, you know, you’re always as a parent taking
S2: the big guys. The bubble guys is generally the one that people are
S3: very you know, you’re always taking readings of what your children are truly interested in and what they will exert effort because towards and this is a real this gets this gets real activity.
S2: And you tell them to tell them to call me and we’ll
S3: I will figure out a way.
S1: Why is that to you? Make words that seem surprised?
S2: Well, because the tea that I they love is a really creamy, milky tea. And I just don’t know. I don’t like tea. And so I don’t make tea that much and I don’t know how to make a creamy, milky tea.
S1: Gotcha.
S3: Wait, we have an answer because sugar in Koreatown.
S2: Oh yeah. That’s that must be one of the that’s a kind of post dates my bouba initiation at these very brown sugary ones. I mean, people like them. They’re very sweet. They’re even sweeter than regular bubble tea, but good. He’s got his the metabolism to carry that off. Listeners, you have continued to send us great chatter’s. You tweet them to us at at Slate as please tweet them to us at. It’s like for some articles on work of culture or movie song, historical episode. There’s wonderful, strange, horrifying, magnificent, tragic and most of all worthy of discussion at your cocktail party. And we will call you about it and hopefully you can do it on the air. And today’s listener chatter comes from Gabe Jacobs, who’s talking about a 99 percent invisible episode about the Freedom House Ambulance Service, an episode I listen to. I can’t wait to hear what Gabe has to say about it.
S4: Episode four or five Freedom House Ambulance Service tells the story of young black men from Pittsburgh in 1966 who, along with Phil, Helen and Dr. Peter Saffar, recognize the problems of having the police who had very little medical training act as the first responders to medical emergencies, especially in black neighborhoods. These men went on to become the first EMTs, saving over two hundred people’s lives in the first year of Freedom House ambulance services existence alone. I personally can’t imagine living in a world without EMTs. And I think this story is a great example of how distributing funds to train services, particularly around health and mental health, is better for public health and safety than throwing additional money at the police force in hopes that they can serve the public in ways they were never trained to do.
S1: Well, those people certainly will appreciate. They figured something out that we were just talking about ten minutes
S2: ago, a fantastic example of of defending the police and shifting their responsibilities. That’s our show for today. It’s produced by Jocelyn Frank. A researcher is Bridget Dunlap. And we say a sad, sad and also happy goodbye to Faith Smith. Faith has been responsible for our live events here at the gab fest for years. She’s going off to a great new opportunity and we’re going to miss her terribly because faith could get anything done and do it with good cheer and competence and intelligence. And it’s just like a better colleague. You cannot imagine we will miss you so much
S1: and miss you. Now go forth and prosper for sure.
S3: Thank you, Face.
S2: Gabriel Roth is editorial director of Slate Audio. June Thomas as managing producer. Alicia Montgomery is executive producer of Slate podcasts. You should follow us on Twitter at at Slate Gabfest and tweet your chatter to us there for Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson and David Plotz. Thank you for listening. We will talk to you next week. Hello, Slate, plus, how are you? You know, the world is really terrible and Tom Wyman in The New York Times reminded us of that this week. Tom Wyman is a philosopher who wrote a piece for The Times, which was headlined. Why, despite everything, you should have kids, if you want them in a time of covid-19 climate change and catastrophe, having a baby is an act of radical hope. And if you read this piece, it’s actually it really does not make you want to have a baby, really makes you really worried about having a baby, because it’s it’s just about all the horror that we could be leaving to our children. All three of us have children, multiple children, and the seven seven children among the three of us. We’ve clearly made a choice, but you can imagine, you know, a young adult trying to make a decision about whether to procreate and it would be a hard decision. And and you certainly, like people make choices all the time not to have children for any number of reasons. But if you want to have a child, should you hesitate because the world that they face is, you know, could be catastrophic, that there will be catastrophic climate change. It could be like just absolutely terrible. Even if you are an American living in a prosperous country, the world as the world is not good.
S1: And we should note that there is a baby bust going on because of the pandemic or at least correlated with the pandemic where there are hundreds of thousands of fewer babies than expected being born to Americans. Right. Right. So, three, injecting a sense of urgency to our
S2: three hundred fewer. I wonder why that is. Why do you think that is? Why do you think that baby bust happened? Is it people had less sex, people deliberately or hooking up less people were what I mean
S1: I mean, in other times of baby buzz, it’s correlated with economics, right, where people see declining job opportunities and they worry about whether they can afford to have kids. Yeah.
S3: Which which suggests at least it may not be the completely motivating reason, but it suggests some restraint, which then makes you think if people could be restrained with respect to that, why couldn’t they? Still there impulses with respect to not wearing masks, but perhaps that’s a conversation, a very different time.
S1: Well, it is the leaped off into a whole different
S2: maybe all the people who are not wearing masks or having riada sex and are, in fact, having lots of children.
S1: Let’s go back to our question about whether to have a baby, so I will just say that selfishly and personally, having children is like the most rewarding, enriching, immersive experience I’ve ever had. I cannot imagine my life without it. I am not pushing it on anyone who doesn’t want to do it. But the idea that you wouldn’t do it for a kind of abstract worry reason, while I think that’s perfectly rational, I would let it go because you only have your one life. And if you want to have children, it’s such a there’s just not I don’t think there’s another experience that’s like it. And so I would not give it up because of some fear of what could happen in the future, even though that is a real concern.
S2: But I mean, you feel that fear about what can happen in the future is abstract. Isn’t that you know, isn’t that part of science? And our ability to be rational creatures is to know that the future there are certain aspects of the future that we’re pretty sure are going to happen and they’re alarming to imagine a loved one having to live through.
S3: Is the abstract sort of
S1: about timeline, right? Sorry, John.
S3: No, no, no. What’s I guess it’s is it abstract or is it concrete? Because because implicit in the idea that you want to have kids is that is that humanity will fail.
S1: I mean, the thing is, like humanity has been doing better, not worse for the most part. Lo these like four hundred years. Right. I mean, not in every place. Not in every instance. I don’t mean to be overstating it, but like for the most part life has improved materially and so. Well it’s possible that will reverse. And I mean I do think climate change is a huge threat and another pandemic is a huge threat. And like so is a meteor striking the earth and work there?
S2: That’s it. That’s like. But, Emily, the way you just tossed in a meteor strike there, I thought I think it’s exactly wrong, like
S1: Emily, but I thought that was like a real thing that we should be worrying about much more than we do. I didn’t mean it in a while.
S2: It felt so cavalierly. It felt to me like, oh, you’re like cavalierly a meteor. The other two know climate change is real.
S1: I think future people who worry about the future get really like we should actually do something about meteors is my sense from my son who thinks about all this much more than me. But what I was going to say is that for me, this has to do with timeline like it seems to me entirely likely that in like two hundred to a thousand years some terrible calamity is going to befall humankind. But I don’t feel that connected to my descendants. Two hundred years on, like maybe it’s the poverty of my own imagination, but I can’t think very much past, like, my own great grandchildren or even my grandchildren. So I don’t worry about it that much. And maybe that’s wrong.
S3: It’s also quite possible that your great grandchildren may be the ones to save humanity from the whatever it may be, the media or the climate change. But perhaps they could put up the big shield to block against the meteor. And therefore, yeah, but I think mostly the being the necessity of hope and the necessity of the hope that you’re constantly in touch with when you are a parent, either explicitly as you think about things or just through everything you do is necessary for all of us, it seems to me, who have well, I mean, I guess if you choose not to have kids, you find your hope in other places. But that’s the most that seems the most powerful case to me.
S2: Right. A world without children is a world without hope. That is absolutely true. That’s absolutely true. But then there’s the question about. Like imagining the life that the those children and their children could lead and feeling. That, on balance, would it be, of course, if you when you have a child, you wish that child to have the happiest life and you do anything for that child to have a happy and healthy life. But if you don’t have the child, you know, you don’t have to worry about, but they’re going to have a happy and healthy life. You don’t have to spend time filled with anxiety and stress about whether the world they’re going to face. I mean, maybe I’ve just read too many climate change books. I’ve just read The Mystery for the Future, which is an optimistic climate change book. And it’s still really grim, like it’s still really grim and terrible to imagine. What could you
S1: have? This is like a present fear for your own children or for your grandchildren, like how
S2: I have it as a very present fear for my own children. I feel that by the time my own children are our age and by that point I’ll be dead or dead or non compos mentis, I expect. But by the time my children are our age, I think the world will be in a very, very dangerous, dark place and that there’s all kinds of, you know, climatic changes which will lead to political instability, which will make the prosperity that we’ve all counted on much less reliable than than we think it is. That’s my fear. You’re going to be. But I hope you’re I’m wrong because, like, I’ve got the children already.
S3: If you’re if you’re not going to be here, David, should we get a sub? Yeah. You know,
S2: we are a media strike. Do we still have to do a show?
S3: Yes. Here’s the thing about hope in the way we’ve been talking about it, in the way we live our lives. Chesterton said that that hope is the power being cheerful in circumstances we know to be desperate so that it feels like it’s the kind of hope we’re talking about here. It’s not that we’re all like it’s all going to turn out fine. Every week we come together and try and figure out things for the purposes of figuring out what we think and hopefully for helping people put together some building blocks to figure out what they think or run away from what we think, which is another way of them figuring out what they think, all of which is hopeful, which is that through learning about more stuff, we can be better. So it seems to me that everything we do is based on the premise that of this hope. And so we’re kind of there’s a lot of sunk cost here. This is what we are. This is how we live our lives. This is who we are. So for those of us who are imprisoned in this, you know, other people have other ways of doing things. But for those of us who are in in this this kind of hope that you can power through adverse circumstances seems to me to be kind of hardwired into us.
S1: OK, well, I don’t know, I think that I am sort of denials about future problems to some degree, like it really is just, oh, it just can otherwise you can land in such a nihilist place. So I just don’t think about it very much. And I also think I’m just like selfish on some level because my children are like the experience of my life. I would never, ever give up. And so anyway, I just think
S3: it’s so
S1: funny when you
S2: talk about your children as it is existing to serve you. Like you’re not.
S1: Well, I don’t think the way
S3: she’s being, but she’s just being incredibly vulnerable and transparent. But the proof that that that Emily is not exactly right is that she’s she and Paul have raised these two young men who care a whole whole lot about the world. Thank you. And so that’s been transferred. Whatever you may think your selfish desires are, so and so on. You’ve modeled something because you can’t just tell kids this because they don’t listen. You’ve modeled something that’s created people who are, like going to be swinging at the media are when it comes or whether it’s a real media meeting or a metaphor on
S2: the other, has a really tall and probably consume a lot of resources.
S3: You’ve given up. Your answer is contained in your children.
S2: I’m sorry about what a lovely way.
S1: I think it’s true for all for you guys, too. I mean, there is just a way in which, like, you know, you do the best you can and like, yeah, I guess I have been talking about them, my kids somehow as reflecting me, although of course, I don’t really think of it, that they see it that way at all, nor should they like they are creating their own independent lives, as are your kids. And in the end, like none of us would give that up for anything. Right.
S3: More help around the house, I’d give I’d give it up for more help around the house.
S1: So, David, I don’t know you just because I think you’re more willing to think about the potential grim realities of climate change that just seem I mean, I feel like you’re being more of a realist than me, perhaps, and it just seems more miserable.
S2: Yeah, no, that’s that’s true. I should stop. I’m generally very happy person, so I’ll stop that. OK, Slate plus Kibbie.
