Surprise! Weirdo shut-in will miss the pandemic

The latest column from our (non-)roving correspondent on all things intersecting law, race, and candy:

I’ve said, here and elsewhere, that one of the principal benefits of the pandemic is how I’ve been able to exclude racism and whiteness generally from my day-to-day life. 

 There's no denying that the pandemic has severely curtailed nearly everyone's interactions with other humans, but can you really say the pandemic has reduced racism in your life if your "job" and generally sedentary lifestyle never require you to leave the home anyway?

White people haven’t improved; I’ve just been able to limit my exposure to them. I’ve turned my house into Wakanda: a technically advanced, globally isolated home base from which I can pick and choose when and how often to interact with white people.

 Like a lot of kids transfixed by the film Black Panther, Elie enjoys pretending to be the ruler of a fictional kingdom. But it's not clear how "white people" pre-pandemic were keeping him from arranging his action figures on the rim of the tub during bath time. Oh, the adventures he's had during lockdown!

Still, we can all agree the pandemic hasn't all been positive. But Elie doesn't mention the fact that black and Latino people have been dying of Covid at twice the rate of white people. Why should Elie talk about that when the pandemic has exacted even greater inequities? Like the time he was sitting in a car outside the CVS while his wife ventured inside to buy Easter candy and he saw an elderly white woman ask a black teenager if the store was administering Covid vaccinations -- but his rhetorical skills had deteriorated such that he couldn't think of anything devastating to say to put the elderly woman in her place.

Pre-Covid, I’d have been ready with some witticism which both answered the lady’s question and made clear that I disapproved of her haranguing a young person. But I’ve been living in my white-free castle for a year.

Indeed. When your "white-free castle" is rarely "White Castle-free," it tends to make you slow on the draw.

 And then I was left with the other side effect of racism that people don’t always see: the shame. Did I fail to show solidarity with this young Black stranger?

 So, his failure to "show solidarity" with his fellow black person is white people's fault. Which would have to mean that Elie needs white people to be racist so that he can always, as he claims, "be ready with some witticism" to remind them that they are racist.

 Such is the toll the lockdown has taken on our cognitive abilities. Time for it to end.

The Atlantic is now your one-stop shop for all your favorite hot takes!

Being in total lockdown seems to have given our brightest minds time to wander farther off the reservation than ever before, and The Atlantic wants to hear from them. Recently, the Internet gave the once-venerable source of lengthy pieces about the manliness of sailing the collective gas face when it published a "think" piece essentially saying, Maybe what we need is more fascism?

I guess to appease people fond of the other extreme of tenured idiocy, come now law prawfs Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods to argue that AKSHUALLY totalitarian government surveillance and censorship are GOOD.

In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.

 The authors' premise is that because privately owned corporations do this to some extent anyway, we might as as well give the government -- which, the authors forget to mention, has the power to seize property and imprison and execute people -- all the keys because of the three R's: Russians, Ring, and 'Rona.

Goldsmith and Keane provide a bit of the old false equivalence:

These and similar developments are the private functional equivalent of China’s social-credit ratings, which critics in the West so fervently decry. The U.S. government, too, makes important decisions based on privately collected pools of data. The Department of Homeland Security now requires visa applicants to submit their social-media accounts for review. And courts regularly rely on algorithms to determine a defendant’s flight risk, recidivism risk, and more.

And also a bit of the old assuming facts not in evidence:

The First and Fourth Amendments as currently interpreted, and the American aversion to excessive government-private-sector collaboration, have stood as barriers to greater government involvement. Americans’ understanding of these laws, and the cultural norms they spawned, will be tested as the social costs of a relatively open internet multiply. [Emphasis added.]

I'll leave it to the good people of the Commenteriat to marinate on this. Meantime, I've got to finish up my own Atlantic submission: a think piece explaining how, actually, primogeniture ensures the divine right of kings stays within only the purest bloodlines.