Who's closer to right?
If neither side in a debate is correct, who's closer to right?
One of the precious few benefits of the country having been so completely knackered for the past couple of years is the growing number of us who’ve newly discovered just how inadequate our binary social and political systems happen to be.
Nowhere was this more prominently on display than in the 2020 presidential election, where we were limited to two awful choices: Trump or Biden. Many suspected that they were going to hate themselves no matter how they voted in 2020. They were absolutely and tragically correct.
Right now, everything comes down to basically one of two choices: right or left. Once you accept the fact that very few of the folks on either side represent anything close to your desires, you are left to decide which is the least awful choice. Or, looking at it from a glass half full perspective, who’s closer to right.
One of the worst outcomes of the two camps arrangement is that people who meet most definitions of crazy end up looking relatively sane simply because they’re in a time zone that’s at least adjacent to the truth. Even if it’s only a temporary accident of geography and unlikely to be repeated soon, someone’s got to be.
Let’s examine two examples of this paradigm. One involving Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the president, and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky. The other involving University of Idaho President Scott Green and the Idaho Freedom Foundation.
Dr. Fauci has, unfortunately, become a controversial and polarizing figure. I’ve defended Fauci in the past and still consider him to be a good scientist — albeit one with a possibly disqualifying conflict of interest. But he’s indisputably put himself in awkward positions that you’d hope that a scientist in his 80s, with decades of experience in public health policy, would be capable of avoiding.
To be fair, many of Fauci’s problems are not of his invention. I’ve long maintained that a public health official was the wrong choice to be point in our response to the pandemic. Fauci is out of his depth in this role.
Along this line, there’s a story of Pete Townsend who, during the height of his success with The Who, went to a doctor to ask what could be done about his deteriorating hearing.
“Stop playing music,” he was told.
Now as a technical matter that was sage counsel. But it was lousy advice. Ask a doctor what to do about a disease and they’ll point to a cure. Just watch out for the ancillary effects — medical and otherwise.