by They said it was a case of when, not if, and New Zealand now has community transmission of Covid for the first time in over 100 days. Auckland is back under a fairly strict lockdown. If the last five months are any indication, they’ll stamp out this latest outbreak pretty sharpish. Heaven forbid Auckland ends up like Melbourne, or Romania for that matter. Heck, if we took the same attitude to Covid that NZ has, we’d be bolted down right now. Hermetically sealed. On Tuesday night one of my students decided to turn up sick to his lesson. We shook hands when he arrived, then he immediately said he wasn’t feeling well and could we cancel? My first feeling was one of sympathy for him being ill – he’s a nice guy – but then, shit, what if he’s got the virus? Why didn’t he just stay at home?
Joe Biden has picked his running mate, Kamala Harris. The sensible pick, I’d say. I’m not sure how I should pronounce her first name. I’ve heard Americans say it’s comma + la, but I don’t pronounce comma anything like how Americans do. My best option I think is to say the beginning of the name like how I say calm, so I end up with /ˈkɑːmələ/. It’s an interesting name, with those three consecutive consonants alphabetically (albeit out of order) alternating with three identical vowels. It reminds me a bit of the common Hungarian surname Kelemen – four consonants in alphabetical order, with the same vowel three times in between. Relatedly, someone once created the word kelemenopy from KLMNOP, the six letters in the middle of the alphabet, defining it as a period in the middle of something when not a lot happens. There’s also the New Zealand band Elemeno P.
Fivethirtyeight came out with their election forecast yesterday. They made Biden a 71% favourite. Only 71%, after the practically flawless way Biden has campaigned so far and Trump’s utter eff-up on coronavirus and just about everything else. They’re saying that Trump’s chances are the same as the probability that a random date on the calendar is in the weekend, or the chance that a random point on the earth’s surface is on land. Or that Biden is marginally less likely to win than my dad was to see out the next year after his cancer diagnosis. In other words, because we live in such uncertain times and there still nearly three months until election day, this thing is far from over. And the odds don’t even take possible cheating into account.
But, in the US you can see a path. A long and treacherous one, but a path nonetheless. There’s the sense that the Democrats are building something that people can get behind. It’s possible that they take the senate, that Harris or some other Democrat wins in 2024, that the country enters a long period of positive leadership, of inclusion, of reduced partisanship. It’s possible. Even if Trump wins, which would be a huge setback, the path wouldn’t necessarily disappear. This is different to the UK, where I can’t see the path at all. It might be there, but it isn’t on any map. I see hatred, bile, polarisation caused mainly by the botched Brexit process, and people getting angry at all the wrong things. Reading an article in the Express yesterday and the comments that went with it, I thought, holy hell, even if 20% of British people think like you, the country is in an omnifuck of staggering proportions.
