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Good morning,
In his fascinating book, Nelson Mandela: Portrait of an Extraordinary Man, Richard Stengel says the great South African leader taught him that courage was not the absence of fear, but learning to overcome it.
He gives an example from Mandela’s life.
“In the 1950s, he once drove down to the Free State to see Dr. James Moroka, the courtly and old-fashioned president of the African National Congress. Dr. Moroka needed to approve a letter of protest that Mandela had drafted to send to the South African president. On the way there, in a small village in the Free State, one of the most conservative areas of South Africa, Mandela’s car grazed a white boy on a bicycle. The boy was shaken up but not hurt. The first thing Mandela did was to duck down and hide a copy of New Age, a newspaper that was a favourite of ANC members, which had been sitting on the front seat of the car. Just owning a copy of a banned publication in those days could yield a five-year prison sentence. A police sergeant arrived a few moments later, took a look at him and the injured boy, and said, ‘Kaffer, jy sal kak vandag!’ (Kaffir, you will shit today!) Mandela replied, ‘I don’t need a policeman to tell me where to shit.’ He paused when telling the story, and then said, ‘I decided to be aggressive, but I was frightened. I can pretend that I’m brave and that I can beat the whole world …’ And then his voice trailed off.
“I can pretend that I’m brave. In fact, that is what he did. And that is how he would describe courage: pretending to be brave. Fearlessness is stupidity. Courage is not letting the fear defeat you. When the policeman advanced on him, Mandela told him to be careful, that he was a lawyer and he could ruin the policeman’s career. Then, as Mandela writes in his Robben Island diary, ‘No one could have been more surprised than myself when I noticed the sergeant hesitate.’ It had worked. Later that evening, the policeman released him and he was back on his way.”
Mandela put up a front. Stengel writes, “sometimes it is only through putting up a brave front that you discover true courage. Sometimes the front is your courage.”
In this isse
- Is polarization due to echo chambers?
- A viral blizzard
- Class versus Form
Is polarization due to echo chambers?
Almost everyone agrees we live in a polarized world. Many of us believe it’s because we all live in our own echo chambers listening only to people who share our views. Living in these bubbles is pulling us away from those who live in different bubbles.
In a recent essay, Elizabeth Kolbert draws our attention to a researcher, Chris Bail, director of Polarization Lab at Duke University, who questions the standard explanation at least partly.
She writes, “Social media, [Chris Bail] allows, does encourage political extremists to become more extreme; the more outrageous the content they post, the more likes and new followers they attract, and the more status they acquire. For this group, Bail writes, ‘social media enables a kind of microcelebrity.’
“But the bulk of Facebook and Twitter users are more centrist. They aren’t particularly interested in the latest partisan wrangle. For these users, ‘posting online about politics simply carries more risk than it’s worth,’ Bail argues. By absenting themselves from online political discussions, moderates allow the extremists to dominate, and this, Bail says, promotes a ‘profound form of distortion.’ Extrapolating from the arguments they encounter, social-media users on either side conclude that those on the other are more extreme than they actually are. This phenomenon has become known as false polarization. ‘Social media has sent false polarization into hyperdrive,’ Bail observes.”
Dig deeper
A viral blizzard
We listened to a podcast yesterday with Dr Michael Osterholm, director for the Infectious Disease and Research Policy and member of US President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 Advisory Board. His prognosis didn’t sound pretty and the takeaways were clear. Don’t take Omicron lightly. This may be a long haul.
Some extracts from the conversation
On the current picture
Omicron is still appearing to be less severe in children than in adults. A New York Times article outlined some important points to consider. First, there are more children being infected with Covid than at any point in the pandemic, so we'd expect to see a higher number of children going to the hospital as well. Next, some hospitals are noting that children are being admitted to the hospitals for unrelated reasons, but then test positive for Covid once they are admitted. We still don't understand the extent to which this is an important finding in the increased number of kids being hospitalized. So to summarize the issue around severity, it remains really a murky picture yet. Clearly, I think the data support that this virus is less virulent on a person by person basis. But having said that, with the increased number of cases, even with a smaller proportion of individuals who are infected having serious illness, it still is going to likely be a very substantial number of people requiring health care services, hospitalization, ICU care and potentially dying.
On testing
It's a mess around the world. And when I talk about a mess, it's a whole number of different factors that have come together, some science-based, some policy-based, some business-based, all of them coming together. And then it's all wrapped up in a package with a big bow with a number of experts who are making comments about testing that, frankly, I believe that is beyond their pay grade to do.
On what to expect
We know we shut down in blizzards. We know that all services are compromised when we have a blizzard. And what we're trying to do is get through this one. So just think of this in the next three to four weeks. We're not asking people to deal with this kind of situation for the next four months, five months, six months. I don't think that's going to be the case. Covid will be here. We'll still have a Covid pandemic of some kind, but it won't be Omicron-like as it is now.
Dig deeper
- Smart testing in the Omicron surge (Podcast)
Class versus form
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