More Fun Wrinkles of the Is-Ought Problem

About a year ago I wrote this post clarifying some of my thoughts on the pervasiveness of the is-ought problem in modern discourse.  Specifically, I showed that part of the reason for the relevance of that framework is that neither category represents a strict binary orientation towards one's rhetorical aims, which allows one to consider the "is-ness" and "ought-ness" of any particular claim.  Most of the piece discusses how the "is" half of the equation is routinely abused to advance what are fundamentally conservative arguments, and I conclude by addressing the other half as well:

"After all, saying what ought to happen is not merely a rhetorical device; rather, it's the first step in potentially making that thing happen.  If you instead decide to alchemize your fear into a categorical imperative that effectively forbids any demands of those in power then you have implicitly, if not explicitly, accepted defeat."

By addressing this problem dialectically, I allow for one to, in good faith, apply multiple interpretations of any seemingly pragmatic argument against progressive change.  Is such an approach overly generous towards some pundits we know to be undeserving of this good faith?  Yes!  But is it also useful to consider some of their arguments through this framework, so as to better understand our own positions and arguments?  Also yes!  Why don't we do this together!

Friend of the blog Eric Levitz provides a helpful demonstration of how one can over-index the "ought-ness" of an argument.  Buried in that chain of screenshots is the metrics for Ken's post where he published the "manifesto" in question.  Ken is clearly arguing that the incredibly high demand for this information indicates a meaningful public interest for that item.  It does not necessarily claim that either a) any popular post indicates a legitimate public interest, or b) there are not other considerations for what might constitute the public interest.  Indeed, Ken's refusal to publish the fake manifesto is an implicit demonstration that he likely does not believe either of these claims.  And yet, Levitz appears to assume that Ken's specific claim that releasing the manifesto is in the public interest is actually a far more universal claim.  

Other friend of the blog Yair Rosenberg commits a very similar error to Levitz here, assuming that some level of tacit endorsement of a specific act of violence is equivalent to a categorical approval of all vigilante justice and/or all violence, period.  This paternalistic exaggeration of the "ought-ness" of the situation is easily countered by repeated demonstrations of this exact type of concern in similar situations.  Furthermore, Rosenberg appears to make a faulty assumption about the "is-ness" of political violence in our society.  Indeed, if he were to "crack open a history book" on the subject of American healthcare, he might find that the capital class purposely imposes violence on the masses in search of increased profits.  Perhaps it is this shallow understanding of reality that leads him to misunderstand the normative values of others who do not share his ignorance.

In short, the framing of the is-ought problem suggests a rigid dichotomy, but category errors within either side of the problem can support and reinforce incomplete understandings of not just others' positions, but of reality itself.

Top TV of 2024

A common refrain among the masses is that TV is not as good as it was during the "Golden Age."  A ongoing rewatch of The Sopranos has helped me to partially confirm this, albeit with an important clarification.  Yes, we are absolutely past the era where a particularly incorrigible set of auteurs created a pantheon of series that commanded the television viewing public's attention.  The craft, the uniqueness, the weight and importance, and most importantly, the television-ness of these series is not something that is likely to be replicated soon if ever again.  But I do think it's a mistake to write off television as a medium.  Even if the centrality of "Prestige TV" is long gone, the same artistic impulse and shared pursuit of television is still present, and in far more dimensions than it used to be.  You just might have to do a little more work yourself to find what is both best and best for you.  But if you do that as I have done, you might find it to be as rewarding as before, just in a different way.  Here is the result of my "work" for 2024.

#8 (tie) - Pachinko (Apple TV+), The Bear (Hulu)

My new strategy of only ranking the best of the best means I don't know quite what to do with slightly lesser seasons of great shows.  One on hand, I left the fourth season of Only Murders in the Building off the list entirely as it somehow got too episodic (it turns out that wrapping up each week's red herring within the span of thirty minutes makes the work as a whole kinda shallow).  On the other hand, Pachinko is too great to leave off the list entirely, even if the second season dragged a bit compared to the first.  While the 1989 plot lacked the intrigue of the first season and the earlier storyline flattened out some of its characters, the bones of a great program are still there.  Anytime a show manages to echo the quiet contemplation of others' perspectives of Rectify and the subtle nods to the spiritual/supernatural realm of Twin Peaks, it's probably worth sticking it out.

Same goes for The Bear, which partially collapsed under the weight of its expectations.  Excepting the brilliant premiere (the best 25-minute Nine Inch Nails music video you'll ever see) and the midseason highlight "Napkins," this season was something of a watered-down version of both the breezy nature of the first two seasons and the aura of "prestige" that Christopher Storer and friends seem enamored with.  This aspiration to be something different than the successful thing that it is hurts the show in other ways, as well.  I've remarked in previous year-end lists how The Bear echoes the thematic nature of Whiplash.  This was one of the primary reasons for the show's greatness (and still is!), but the structural problems I mentioned serve to crowd this out, sometimes explicitly.  When Carmi confronts Joel McHale's chef from hell in the finale, it's all just...spelled out, rather inartfully, in their brief conversation!  The chef is not a real, developed character like virtually everyone else in the show, but rather a cartoon villain taking the form of Carmi's insecurities and regrets.  This could (and does!) work if he merely remained a spectral force in Carmi's psyche, but his incarnation in the present world of The Bear belies how the show's creators don't seem to understand the limitations of this approach.

#7 - Sugar (Apple TV+)

Shows built around a narrative twist often don't work.  Sugar, home to the most notable twist of the year, does work.  Perhaps having the twist happen at the end of the sixth episode (of eight) and having it be something fairly obvious to anyone paying attention is a way to tell the viewer not to care that much about it.  Or, going a step further, if a twist is just a normal part of the proceedings, is it even a "twist"?  Either way, if we allow ourselves to free our minds from second-guessing the plot mechanics of the show, then perhaps we can understand just how critical they are to making Sugar what it is.  Indeed, orienting the whole show around (spoilers, kinda) Sugar's foreign understanding of humanity is one of the few postmodern approaches to storytelling that actually worked for me.  After all, we all perceive and interpret reality through our memories of movies and television, at least to some degree.  Creating a character who can only do that enables a worthwhile reflection on the push and pull of that phenomenon.

UNRANKED - The Curse (Showtime)

On one hand, The Curse is often slow and repetitive, engages in the gawking nature it seemingly exists to repudiate, and almost seems antithetical to the televisual form.  On the other hand, it features one of the performances of the year in any medium (Emma Stone), employs a wonderfully unique and fitting score, and absolutely nails the landing.  And perhaps the "weaknesses" I listed above are actually its strengths, making it above all a commentary on the nature on entertainment and art.  This push and pull made me think much more about the nature of evaluating whether or not the thing was good than about the thing itself, which I suppose is an accomplishment worthy of a unique praise.  As such, congrats to Nathan Fielder and friends for creating the first show that I simultaneously rank and do not rank in my year-end list.

#6 - Shogun (FX)

Thesis: A great drama like Shogun is great because it demands that we withhold judgment and observe another way of being, another set of values.

Antithesis: Even when we do this as authentically as possible, it's revealed that much is fundamentally the same.  Pride, honor, humility, and the like are all universal features of humanity, revealed in myriad ways across infinite contexts.

Synthesis: Perhaps what Shogun ultimately shows us is that The Other is fundamentally unknowable  across all ages and cultures.

Super-Synthesis: Maybe it's just a good television program and everything else flows from that

#5 - Fargo (FX)

A welcome return to form for one of the true delights of late-Golden Age TV.  Basically everything about this season was note-perfect, including the well-earned optimism of the syrup-infused denouement.  But nothing was more Fargo-y than the other prominent scene from the finale, where Jennifer Jason Leigh's capitalist matriarch put Jon Hamm's sheriff character in his place.  Sheriff Tillman served as a wonderful foil throughout the season, putting a comical spin on an all-too-real American story, while still serving the interests of his powerful friends.  But ultimately, the Sheriff's antics were bad for business, so he is sent to prison, where Lorraine is able to turn the screws one last time.  Just a wonderful parable of how the spectacle of the American Id is wielded by the powerful when it's useful and put down when it is not.

#4 - Industry (HBO)

I am struggling to think of another drama whose first season was good and promising, whose second season was something of a struggle, and whose third season was downright transcendent.  Why is Industry that show?  In one sense, it's all about the mechanics of the story.  Ruthlessly stripping out some characters and focusing on one primary storyline (Pierpont's pursuit of the ESG market) helped declutter the proceedings, and allowed enough breathing room to produce the series highlight "White Mischief."  But just as much, the show finally seemed to understand its own strengths, especially when contrasted with its oxygen-sucking influence.  Industry found multiple ways to interrogate its characters' psychology without luxuriating in their excesses or relying on hokey cliches.  In doing this, it's able to avoid the moralizing pitfalls that other examinations of capitalist excess suffer from, which allows us to better contemplate the lives of the people propping up the horrible machine.

#3 - Squid Game (Netflix) 

Note: I finished this in April 2025, and it was too good not to go back and include it in this list

There was much consternation late last year, including from the show's creator himself, about the sheer foolhardiness of trying to revisit the world of my top show of 2021.  While I don't necessarily disagree with the arguments that past greatness is best left alone, I think this is one of those cases where modern capitalism has absorbed its critiques (anti-capitalist art) into its normal proceedings (more slop for the slop machine).  Fortunately, the second season of Squid Game is in no way slop.  The sense of foreboding doom, the deft storytelling, the impeccable world-building—everything that made the first season work returns in spades.  By the time we get to the finale, there's a metaphor so striking that it would be silly if it wasn't profound.  One group of contestants crosses a made-up border to attack the other group, all while a plan is being hatched to unite and attack the people who have placed them in this situation in the first place.  This is obviously an overly simple depiction of a conflict that was anything but, and yet, it is striking to see everything laid out with such moral clarity, in a way that American art avoids for infamous reasons.

#2 - My Brilliant Friend: The Story of the Lost Child (HBO) 

There's not much to say about the final installment of an all-timer that I haven't said before.  The story of Lenu's final entanglement with Nino drags at times (in part because her foolishness can no longer be attributed to the naivety of youth) until it suddenly doesn't.  Various storylines are resolved effortlessly with the appropriate level of heft and resonance for each one.  And the central tension between Lenu and Lila remains as resonant as ever, even as it is weaved into the nature of the work itself in the concluding moments.  One thing that especially struck me as I savored the final run was just how novelistic this adaptation is.  Which, well, duh.  But the specific deployment of the voiceover, the way the camera lingers on certain shots as if echoing descriptive passages, and its long and detailed memory all make this show the apotheosis of projecting a beloved work of writing onto the small screen. 

#1 - Ripley (Netflix)

In the past decade of post-Golden Age TV landscape, we've progressed from quaint complaints about treating seasons of television as movies to a funhouse mirror business model, where the demands of profit have shifted the narrative work that used to reside in low-to-mid budget movies to the small screen.  This, plus a reliance on existing IP over new ideas, has created a TV lineup of literal eight-hour movies.  To be fair, some such series are intriguing and/or legitimately good.  The Girlfriend Experience nearly topped my list years ago, and recent entries like Interview with a Vampire and Dead Ringers are worthwhile updates to classic films.  But overall, this trend towards recycling old ideas and fitting round pegs into square holes has been a net negative for the medium.

The success of Ripley, then, is instructive as to how this tendency toward mediocrity can be countered.  Don't just stretch out the story artificially—instead, literally stretch it out.  Take the ethos of a Breaking Bad set piece and apply it in painstaking detail to every detail of Ripley's slow descent into amorality.  Choose a striking visual affect, and use it not only to creating something beautiful in and of itself, but also something that stands in direct contrast to everything else that trades on the cheap luxury of Italian scenery.  Make some small but meaningful changes to the proceedings that upend things without being showy.  And center everything on a set of actors perfectly cast for their roles.  In particular, Andrew Scott's portrayal of the titular character is precisely the right kind of empty: a man who clearly acts with purpose, but a purpose whose true nature can never quite be known.

Some Brief Thoughts II

I wrote something when Biden triumphed in 2020 primary, so I owe it to myself to write something now that he has presided over a historical collapse of his political project.

1.

I started writing a post in October complaining about Harris' campaign.  I did not end up finishing it because I foolishly believed that her vibes-based, policy-light campaign was going to win regardless of its lack of substance, which would render my complaint somewhat irrelevant.  It turns out that my cynicism, while not itself unearned or incorrect, was still directionally incorrect.  It was instead Trump's fundamental lack of substance that convinced enough people (falsely of course) that he was the answer to the growing discontent of the masses.  As a penance, I have finished this post below.

The common refrain from Democratic-aligned pundits is that the economy is doing well because of Democratic policies, which means you should vote for Harris/et al to let the good times roll.  And yet, voter enthusiasm, especially that of the working class, lags behind this perception.  Why is this?

There's a lot that can be said about this, so I want to keep it relatively simple.  This means I will forgo discussion of higher-level thoughts about what "the economy" really is and if it is actually "doing well," and will instead take the Democrats' word at face value.  This is easy enough to do, as your average wonk will produce plenty of charts and graphs to this effect.  Start with this example:

This sure looks good!  The bottom earners are making more!  But real quick, which do you think is more?  Nine percent of nothing, or 5% of a lot?  The idea that we're not in the midst of a long, slow redistribution of wealth to the wealthy is directly undermined by the very data liberal pundits share to defend their candidate!  Here's another similar example:

In this case, the ~2% difference between wage growth and inflation is indeed good.  It's just that we can see the rest of the chart!  The argument that a year of this trend accomplished anything more than somewhat offsetting the previous surge in inflation is fundamentally an argument to sell you nothing but crumbs.  Put another way, it's effectively a newer, friendlier trickle-down economics that supposes that some mildly positive third-order effects of economic policy are the best the working class can hope for.

Of course not every argument the Democrats put forward is for literal crumbs.  There are some things that are a little bit better, which can be thought of as crumbs+.  One such proposal concerns home care/long-term care for seniors, which has been a long-neglected aspect of our already pretty neglectful healthcare system.  To be clear, this is a very good proposal, and its enactment would be one of the most positive political developments in years.  And yet, I can't help but notice a few things in the details:

• Innovate and Engage with the Private Sector: This initiative will draw upon best practices across Medicare plans as well as the private sector to expand the home care workforce, partner with technology companies in areas such as remote patient monitoring and telehealth services, as well as other private sector partnerships.

• Lift Up Care Workers: This initiative will provide care workers access to better wages, improve quality of care for seniors and those with disabilities, and treat our seniors with the dignity they deserve.

Making such a benefit part of Medicare is great, but if all that Medicare money is going to private sector companies with only a weak acknowledgment of the actual labor that goes into home care, then I start to get suspicious of the true aims of this endeavor.  Much like with the ACA, I view this as fundamentally a giveaway to private interests with the ancillary benefit of providing better/cheaper care to some.  Perhaps this sort of bargain really is the best we can hope for, but if you believe this I'd like to ask: which end of this bargain do you think is going to be sacrificed next time there is a recession and/or a Republican-controlled government?

In the end the case Harris is making is that Biden has given us crumbs and she hopes to give us crumbs+.  Has anything really changed from Biden's lethargic campaign?  And even if it has, will it be enough?

2.

Two red-state Democrats (at least) ran Senate campaigns that were not explicitly anti-trans, but did capitulate to right-wing framing on the issue in particularly gross ways.  One was Sherrod Brown, who had a disgusting ad that I, as a resident of Ohio, had to see one thousand times.  The other was Colin Allred, who did essentially the same thing as Brown:

Both these guys lost, running well behind Democratic performance in their state in 2018.  Transphobia is not just morally wrong, but is also an electoral loser, or at the very least an electoral dampener.  If you don't stand for something, you stand for nothing at all.

3.

Moments like these often serve as good reminders that many (if not most) Democratic electeds are really just Republicans and/or fascist enablers at heart.  Any serious movement to combat Trump and his policies must treat these people as the enemies that they are.

4.

To this end, plenty of people will argue that we missed our chance at avoiding fascism by not electing Kamala Harris.  Never let them forget that Kamala Harris accepted the endorsement of Dick Cheney, the most evil man of my lifetime.  Hard to "vote against fascism" when that's the other option.

5. 

There was a good deal of debate about the role Palestine played in the election.  I could devote thousands of words to this, but even then I don't know if I would come to a clear conclusion.  On one hand, there was some evidence that Harris changing her position on this might have mattered.  On the other hand, support for Israel is a load-bearing part of the bipartisan national security apparatus of which Kamala Harris is a key part.  And more importantly, voters implicitly understand this, rarely treating foreign policy as a particularly important reason for their voting decisions.  All this said, given that the election results point more towards Democratic lethargy rather than a fundamental shift to the right in the electorate, it's important to consider the second-order effects that facilitating a genocide may have on the people who work in Democratic campaigns. 

6.

The other point to make about Palestine in this context is that Democrat-controlled cities and states fully supported cracking down on peaceful campus protests, and then turned around and asked for voters to overlook this.  This is obviously a stark contradiction, which is made even stranger by the imperative to abandon such a politics the moment the election concluded.  The implicit (and sometimes explicit) ask by some in the pundit class to abandon the entirety of the "coalition" of voters that elected Trump is not only foolish and depoliticizing, but goes directly against the case you made to voters who care about Palestine.  The sooner Democrats understand and internalize that curiosity is generally more useful than contempt, the better.

“If you were able to overlook a genocide and cast a vote for Harris, you already understand how a conservative was able to overlook Trump’s extremism to vote for him.”

Historian Robin D.G. Kelley discusses Donald Trump's election victory and why the Democrats failed to mount a successful challenge. pic.twitter.com/DbQ5oO7BzO

— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) November 7, 2024

7.

I made this point when the Dobbs decision came down and I'll make it again: Fascism, in its most American sense, is already here and has been for some time.  Trump does not represent a meaningful break from the American continuum but rather its most vulgar and dangerous expression.  And just like all other expressions of this fascist tendency, the most concrete way in which it will express itself is through the soldiers of capital.  Any genuine anti-fascist effort must understand this.

New 2022 body cam footage shows Atlanta PD cops manufacturing felonies to arrest Cop City protesters. When local officers say there were no felonies, APD Major says, "help us out…I know it's a reach." Those charges were then used for RICO charges against bail fund leaders.

[image or embed]

— Radley Balko (@radleybalko.bsky.social) November 7, 2024 at 7:38 AM

8.

In the end, the "solution" to this, in a positive sense, is the same it's always been: Mass politics for the masses.  The elites of the Democratic Party have failed us again, so it's up to us to chart a different course—one that doesn't rely on the empty promises of Democrats or the false promises of Republicans, but on the true promise of the people, working together for our shared benefit.

Why is it Always Masks?

At the risk of becoming a broken record, I am going to post about the doomers again.  Specifically, I would like to address what appear to be their demands.  Or, should I say, their demand.  While there are some semi-reputable groups that have put together reasonable good sets of resources, the typical refrain online is far more single-minded.  To observe this, you only need to scan essentially any doomer's timeline.  Because I don't want you to have to do this, here is a sampling:

The chorus is overwhelming: Permanently wearing a mask is the primary thing you should do to combat COVID, and you're a "bad leftist" if you don't.  This refrain is so consistent and has been weaponized to such extreme ends that none other than ACT UP was pilloried just for making the obvious comparison to the rhetoric that stigmatized AIDS patients decades ago.  To be fair, I have seen people in the doomer-sphere who are more reasonable and measured in their demands.  Here is one such example:

Why do I find this to be far superior than what the mask brigade has to offer?  There are several reasons, some related directly to masking itself, and others that are more about persuasion and solidarity in general.  Let's touch on each of these briefly.

Public Health Shortcomings are Systemic in Nature

As always, yelling at people with the goal of persuading them is almost never effective to that specific end.  This feels obvious to me, but if you disagree I can come to your house and hector you about your shortcomings as something of an in-person demonstration.  The less obvious, related point is that the root cause of essentially any public health shortcoming is not individual behavior but systemic neglect.  And ironically, if you believe that mask-wearing is still a useful action in 2024 (more on this in a minute), then the decline in mask-wearing seems like an almost perfect example of this thesis!  When there were broad mask mandates, people complied at a very high level to great effect.  And when these mandates were rolled back, people changed their behavior accordingly.  We can certainly argue that some of this was a response to the general perception that acquired immunity from vaccines/infections rendered the virus less harmful at that point (sort of the converse of how nations with fewer explicit restrictions still saw dramatically different behavior in 2020).   But more generally, when public health institutions provide reasonable and appropriate guidelines on how to navigate something like the COVID pandemic, people will generally listen and comply.  When they fail to do this, individual people cannot possibly have the wherewithal to make up the difference.  This means that using your advocacy primarily to place that onus on them is inherently self-defeating, even if done in the nicest tone possible.

The Point of Masking

Of course, none of this is to say that public health authorities are wrong to no longer mandate and/or recommend masking.  To understand why this might be the case, it's best to think about why we started masking in the first place.  First and most obviously, in early 2020 we knew next to nothing about how this virus was spread, meaning that the precautionary principle should have (and largely did) rule the day.  Since we knew masks were critical in protecting healthcare workers and mitigating other outbreaks, we hypothesized that they might help limit the spread of COVID and thus adopted them as quickly as our supply chains would allow.  Additionally, the novelty of the virus meant that there was virtually no population immunity from disease, which required us to take all possible measures to prevent overflowing hospitals and mass death.  And that lack of immune memory had a specifically annoying side effect of often rendering individuals contagious before their symptoms kicked in (luckily, this is much less common now), which made more targeted masking guidelines (ie. masking only when symptomatic) insufficient.  All of this and more helped make universal masking a strong option to combat the spread of COVID at the start of the pandemic.  

The Emphasis on Masking

But now, with most of these conditions past us and/or greatly reduced in severity, it is less clear that the benefits of universal masking are worth the cost.  While I advocate for (and practice) masking when symptomatic, when asked, and when in a particularly vulnerable location (think hospitals), I do not think permanent, universal masking is worthwhile nor desirable.  However, this does not mean we should throw our hands up and simply accept relatively routine waves of COVID with little to no mitigation.  Rather, we should pursue the options available to us that specifically address where we are at this stage of the pandemic.  This means demanding better ventilation and filtration in public spaces, significantly improving upon our pathetic ~25% coverage rate in yearly booster campaigns, and pushing for universal sick leave that would allow people to properly isolate while sick and/or infectious.  Not only are these options more meaningful than masking at this point, they're also more conducive to building a greater sense of responsibility and solidarity around how we manage illness and disease in a post-2020 world.

Do Not Panic (Still)

I recently wrote this post on some of the problems with Covid doomers, which included specific examples of poor and misleading analysis from some of the leading voices within the movement.  As luck would have it, one of those people wrote something even more dishonest than what I shared before, to the point that I felt like briefly remarking on it.

In that piece, the author comments on a recent piece in the New York Times on increased school absences.  The high-level summary is that persistent absences among children enrolled in public schools roughly doubled from 2019 to now.  The NYT piece itself is largely an overview of a study from AEI, so it admittedly lacks the rigor and depth of the original study.  But what's odd is that Doubleday's post doesn't seem to engage with the underlying study much if at all, leaning instead on a) a single, personal anecdote, b) a drive-by reading of a few points from the NYT article, and c) a bunch of poorly-supported conjecture.

One of the main points Doubleday makes is as follows:

"It is truly astonishing and staggering that major news outlets are getting away with inventing ideological explanations for what is a clear, national and international expression of increased rates of illness. It’s particularly bizarre because this ideological explanation- that parents must for some reason value school less now- is attended by neither data nor even anecdotal evidence. Does it accord with anyone’s experience that parents are taking school “less seriously”?"

There's a couple problems with this interpretation of the NYT article.  First, inasmuch as these increased absences are an "expression of increased rates of illness," the article does indeed address this with data.  It links directly to this information from the CDC that shows persistent absence (defined there as missing 15 or more days in a year) has increased roughly 2 percentage points since 2019.  This may appear alarming at first, and it almost certainly reflects increased disease burden during this time, but a few caveats are needed.  First and most obvious, 2 percentage points is a small fraction of the 15 percentage point difference from the AEI study.  Doubleday never appears to notice this discrepancy, let alone try to explain it with anything other than her usual single-minded refrain.  Second, the year with the 2 percentage point increase (2022) not only contained the first Omicron wave (which may have infected three quarters of all children) but a temporary increase in disease burden from immunity debt.  Kids were simply sick a lot in 2022, which makes sense as it was the first year with minimal restrictions since the start of the pandemic.  Finally, I admit I have no hard data on this, but it certainly feels like the pandemic made people more willing to stay home when they're sick or contagious, even for things other than Covid.  A certain amount of increased absences, at least for this very specific reason, is probably a good thing.

I previously remarked that this sort of analysis implicitly denies the benefits of acquired immunity (you see this directly here, in her apparent misunderstanding of what "immunity debt" was and why it wouldn't apply to us anymore in 2024).  This piece goes a step further in appearing to deny the possibility of psychological effects.  When the NYT article tries to address potential psychological reasons for the increased absences, Doubleday pushes back:

"Quoting a psychologist as your first resource to analyze widespread absence also points to an institutional bias toward casting these absences as the result of poor decisions made by parents, rather than reflective of material conditions imposed on the public."

While I am obviously a big fan of materialist analysis, this misses the mark.  Claiming that psychological explanations for things are just a neoliberal misdirection not only disregards an entire field of science, it ignores a very real condition (PTSD) that appears to be a logical explanation for at least some of what ails us.  All of this quite frankly anti-intellectual rhetoric and ideology comes together in this paragraph:

"The story here is that COVID was prematurely declared over; that there is no long-term immunity; that kids are thus stuck in a carousel of constant reinfection; that that constant reinfection is harmful. It’s a much more straightforward story than “at some point during the lockdowns there was a mass psychological shift away from schools as a priority and therefore individual adults are choosing to keep individual kids home to do….something but don’t ask us what.” At the Times, the urgency of exculpating the failed pandemic reopening strategy combined with a neoliberal worldview that consistently blames individuals for social problems has birthed an absurd narrative that cannot withstand even the mildest scrutiny."

Again, I cannot stress enough that our society absolutely does blame individuals for structural problems...that is a real thing and it is bad.  But I simply do not see that happening here.  The NYT article is no stunning piece of journalism, but it appears to understand that this is not a case of lazy or irresponsible parenting:

"For a smaller number of students at the school who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, the reasons are different, and more intractable. They often have to stay home to care for younger siblings, Ms. Miller said. On days they miss the bus, their parents are busy working or do not have a car to take them to school." 

In the end I am not sure what else to say.  Treating Covid as an existential problem in 2024 ignores not only the established sciences of immunity and psychology, but also serves to downplay the problems that have existed since long before Covid (which are almost certainly contributing to the additional stresses we have seen since Covid began).  In this way such a single-track mind is not only wrong but is also counter-productive.  After all, the pre-pandemic baseline of ~15% of children being regularly absent from school appears to be the more persistent and enduring problem here.  Seems like it would be hard to meaningfully address that if all you're focused on is the past. 

A Quick Note on Conspiracies

A common refrain among liberal punditry is that believing in conspiracies is not only bad but is destroying our country.  This line of thinking is not new, but it has reached a new fever pitch with the coming of the Trump era of politics.  And while I certainly agree that the common perception of "conspiracies" as right-wing fever dreams does describe a pernicious and malign influence on our polity, it is also the established position of this blog that conspiracies are not only real but must be accounted for in any real analysis of power.

As such, I think it is useful to briefly consider what we're really arguing about when we argue about the very idea of conspiracies.  Certainly, it must be true that very few if any liberals think that conspiracies literally do not exist.  Otherwise it's unlikely that they would ever mention things that fit the literal definition of conspiracy, whether it be things that are sorta real or things that are completely made up:

As we can assume that blanket dismissals of "conspiracies" are not literally that, we can instead attempt to understand the real topic of discussion.  Silly as they are, the tweets above actually illuminate the political function that conspiracy theories serve.  Whether it be a leftist critiquing the forces of capital, a right-winger decrying the scourge of "wokeism," or a Democratic Party loyalist speculating that a whistleblower killed himself for funsies, the intended affect is the same.  In each case, the theorist identifies a group or an entity as both powerful and dastardly, and uses the lens of conspiracism to paint them as the enemy.  As such, the true object of these theories is not so much the conspiracy itself but rather who holds power and to what end.  In turn, conspiracies theories inherently posit that those who are powerful wield that power specifically to diminish those who should have power.  This means that conspiracy theories are "bad" in that they mask what is fundamentally a normative statement about political beliefs behind a web of intrigue.  But they're also "good" because the underlying assertion that a group or entity holds power is a testable, falsifiable statement.  So even thought we (hopefully) have the epistemic humility to know that we'll never know the real truth behind many things, conspiracy theories serve a useful political function of not only identifying one's enemy, but also giving a specific reason for such a designation, within an admittedly crude structure of an analysis of power.

Do Not Panic

I don't often experience pride in the profound sense.  One exception to this is how I, a former moderate hypochondriac, navigated the pandemic.  This is not to say that I did not experience anxiety or even occasional panic, but rather that I was able to deal with it and emerge on the other side with a more sustainable approach to managing both my health and my mind.  And while I will never look back at my specific experience of the pandemic as something I would ever want to re-live, I can at least find some solace in knowing that it helped usher in a certain amount of personal growth and maturity.

Unfortunately, it is very apparent that this was not the case for everyone.  To be clear, I am speaking specifically about the doomers, a subset of people who post constantly about ongoing threats from COVID that are exaggerated at best and wholly invented at worst.  I want to also be clear that I am not suggesting that these people are mentally deficient or morally suspect, but simply that their words and actions appear to inspire unneeded panic and angst in others.  As such, that impulse must be pushed back on. 

Of course people have been panicking ever since we first learned of the novel virus in late 2019.  This panic was, to a certain degree, pretty obviously justified.  The prospect of drastically altered lives dotted by sickness and death indeed came to pass, and was every bit as horrible as one might have reasonably expected.  And now we have a new endemic virus that will add to our infectious disease burden for years to come at best and forever at worst.  But the specific panic I am talking about here seems to have arisen in the past couple years, after the worst parts of the pandemic concluded.  My first awareness of this came from this article, which I decried here.  I remarked again on this through this thread and elsewhere, but I never really collected all of my thoughts into once place.  This was partly because I did not want to risk becoming a "crank" over what is ultimately a meta-discourse that is mostly contained to a few corners of Twitter (though there are exceptions).  But it was mostly because I feel like I said all I needed to say right here:

"Actually existing Covid is bad enough...millions dead, billions infected, a new endemic virus to manage in perpetuity, a largely indifferent ruling class facing zero repercussions for their crimes, and a society still feeling every single after-effect possible.  Indeed, it's the sort of event that should inspire a mass movement to address the shortcomings of our political economy and ensure that we're in a place to actually confront the next such challenge, whenever it happens.  But the fear-mongering doesn't just not help with this, it actively works against this.  It creates a reality so perilous, so fraught with certain doom, that fighting for change becomes inherently impossible.  It's effectively a call to inaction.  I still believe that we can use the shared suffering of the past three years as a rallying cry to demand something better, but we're never going to do that if we can't engage with reality as it actually exists.  And that means never, ever resorting to fear-mongering."

That said, it doesn't seem like the worst impulses of the doomer crowd are going away anytime soon.  Just the other day this exact contingent of people casted aspersions over this eminently reasonable article where the author appears to care deeply for and go out of her way to accommodate the needs of her partner.  If even the most milquetoast sentiments presented with nuance and compassion have become cause for suspicion, then we probably need to spend a little extra time understanding the specific social corrosion that has led us here.

Suspicion of Others

A good place to start is with this post about the death of a former polio patient from the misleadingly named newsletter "Do Not Panic."  There's a lot I could address here, but I'll limit myself to a notable contradiction that I feel is illuminating.  Early on he proclaims that "All it would have taken to keep Paul alive was a mask. That’s it."  This seemingly frames the cause of Paul's death as a family member or caretaker who carelessly passed along a deadly disease.  Which is a strange assumption to make in the absence of direct evidence, but we'll come back to that.  What makes this even stranger is that he later walks this back saying "This is not to blame his death on any one individual. We don’t know the details of his interactions or the precautions that were taken."  If we assume he is genuine in this subsequent statement, then it renders the previous statement as nothing more than a naked appeal to suspicion to anyone who may have come into contact with the deceased.

What's more is that this appeal to suspicion barely makes any sense, even taken at face value.  While it's good to mask, especially in specific scenarios where risk of contagion is high, the certainty of his statement ("all it would have taken") belies the fact that masks are a relatively crude tool with variable efficacy against a highly contagious virus.  Ignoring that it's entirely possible the person who transmitted the virus in this instance may have been masked, it's also clear that a person looking to understand the root cause of this specific death should be concerned with several other problems before even considering who was or was not wearing a mask.  Why is vaccine uptake so low?  Was a care worker forced to work while contagious?  Why was money appropriated for ventilation upgrades that would mitigate the overall spread of disease spent on cops?  What unites these questions and others is that they do not scapegoat or focus on individual decisions, but rather seek to address the clear systemic reasons that the majority of people are subject to a power structure that shows little to no concern about their health and well being.  Put another way, if we have a genuine interest in minimizing the death and illness that come with respiratory disease, what purpose does hectoring anyone, let alone a hypothetical person, serve?

Epistemic Neglect

Another frequent source of fear-mongering is Julia Doubleday's The Gauntlet.  A recent post of hers is illustrative of another problem with the doomer set: a default assumption that all problems since March 2020 are a result of COVID.  In this case, it's right there in the title: "COVID is overwhelming hospital systems."  A glance at basically any numbers show that this is not really the case, especially now in March 2024, so what is the cause for this disconnect?  Well if you scroll down her article you will see the culprit: a big long list of tentatively connected articles and studies about overwhelmed hospital systems.  Which is indeed bad and, taken as a whole, intimidating and scary.  I don't even think it's unreasonable to see such a thing and hypothesize that the cause is COVID.  But of course the next logical step is to actually read the articles, where you will see things like this:

"After a dramatic decrease in April 2020, emergency department visits in Canada returned to baseline volumes by the summer of 2022. Despite this return to baseline, the capacity of emergency departments to provide care has been outstripped. Hospital staffing shortages and resulting bed closures have meant admitted patients are subjected to much longer emergency department stays."

And this:

"Emergency departments have a crucial role in the healthcare system, serving as a safety net for uninsured individuals and providing care regardless of their ability to pay. However, the study revealed that California’s population grew by 4.2 percent, while the number of EDs decreased from 339 to 326. Additionally, the number of hospital beds declined by 2.5 percent, further exacerbating the strain on emergency services."

And this:

"The province made progress reducing ER wait times around that time. Between 2014 and 2017, waits in Winnipeg fell to 1.5 hours. More capacity was added to the system and a new electronic bed-mapping system was introduced. That, among other steps, freed up more space on medical wards for ER patients waiting for a bed. It allowed ER physicians and nurses to see more patients quicker because they didn’t have to tend to as many people warehoused on gurneys in their department.

Unfortunately, the gains made during those years were wiped out when the former Progressive Conservative government consolidated hospital operations in 2017 and cut funding for acute-care facilities. The median wait time returned to two hours by early 2018. It fell during the COVID-19 pandemic as patients were reluctant to visit ERs. But it shot up again to two hours by the spring of 2021. It jumped to three hours the following year." 

To be clear, most of the articles in Doubleday's list simply describe the problems and do not attempt to even posit a root cause (something something about the decaying institution of journalism).  This shortcoming makes it easy to point to the sheer scope of them and say something like "maybe everyone is dying of long COVID" without any direct evidence.  While you certainly can do that, this sort of practice reminds me almost exactly of another COVID-related panic: the "died suddenly" trope where rabid anti-vaxxers attribute every random death to the COVID vaccine:

All this is not to say that people who seem to express genuine concerns others are as low and dastardly as anti-vaxxers.  But if you subscribe to some sort of leftist ideology, I do think it is incumbent to base your pleas on robust knowledge and sound epistemology.  Associating collectivist ideals with specious inferences and a questionable understanding of reality will do no one any favors. 

From Denial to Acceptance

To build on the last point, I think the problem with simplistic views and "investigations" in the doomer space is not limited to these isolated examples.  Rather, I think the cart is leading the horse in a sort of existential manner.  In the case of COVID, something spectacular, universal, and deadly happened, and our governments failed us in ways that are not difficult to grasp.  Anyone with any revolutionary consciousness whatsoever should understand the opportunity, and perhaps should have even had some light optimism that things would change during the George Floyd protests.  Since this did not come to pass, I can understand the impulse to hammer away at the one thing that provided a sort of perverse hope in recent memory.  But while I would not abandon the push for better vaccine uptake, improved ventilation, or simply preparing for the next pandemic, I think there needs to be a reckoning that the moment for a COVID-specific mass movement has passed.

To be clear, this is not some sort of cynical defeatism (well, at least, it's mostly not).  Rather, it's an acknowledgment of the simple fact that pandemics end.  Specifically, they end because our immune systems work.  Virtually everyone has immune memory from vaccine(s), infection(s), or both, and it's that memory makes us far less likely to experience damaging effects from the virus going forward.  While I would not frame the enormous cost we were made to pay to get to this point as a "victory," we have arrived at this culmination nonetheless.  Living as though it is still 2020 serves no one, and is most certainly not a prescription to rally people to your cause.  Instead I think it is incumbent on those fighting for the disabled, the vulnerable, and the memories of the deceased to allow themselves at least some respite and relief from this psychic burden.  It's the only way we're going to be able to continue the larger fight.

How To Blow Up Solidarity

I read Andreas Malm's brief treatise on climate violence last year.  It was pretty good.  As was the film loosely based off of it.  The title and the subject matter of his book is obviously provocative so it's understandable and even expected that there would be some reaction.  But of course, some of that reaction is so facile and/or disingenuous that it would be comical were the stakes not so high.  One such take came from the masters of well actually, Vox.  It's a long article so there's a lot to criticize, but I wanted to limit my commentary to one particular part; where the author takes issue with analogizing the climate struggle to other struggles:

"Yet a commitment to nonviolence is scarcely the only thing that distinguishes the climate movement from all of the auspicious precedents that Malm cites. In many respects, climate radicals simply face a much more difficult challenge than did the celebrated social movements that they wish to emulate.

The struggles against Jim Crow, apartheid, and British colonialism consisted of mass movements to secure basic rights. The injustice and indignities of apartheid structured Black South Africans’ daily lives, constraining their economic opportunities and denying their political freedoms. And the same can be said of Jim Crow’s implications for Black Americans.

By contrast, the typical Westerner does not find their basic aspirations frustrated by climate change on anything like a daily basis. Extreme weather events periodically call the problem to mind, but even then it is not always clear that rising global temperatures are responsible for a specific flood or fire.

Further, the anti-apartheid and civil rights movements could plausibly promise to redress their animating grievances, and without the advent of any new technology or cooperation of any foreign power. No technical challenge stood in the way of universal voting rights. Formal political equality could be established with the stroke of pen and enforced by existing institutions of federal law enforcement.

The climate movement, on the other hand, cannot credibly promise to eliminate the problems that it seeks to politicize. The world is going to get warmer, no matter how much we reduce emissions from this point forward. In any given rich country, climate activists can’t honestly say that their agenda will improve climatic conditions, only that it might limit the extent to which those conditions get worse, assuming that other nations enact similar policies. Malm’s radical vision of decarbonization pairs this meager, uncertain prize with clear and immediate economic costs: Any near-term ban on fossil fuels would dramatically increase energy prices, and undermine the functioning of electricity grids."

There are some straightforward issues with the logic here.  Specifically, the contrast he highlights between the specific policy goals of civil rights movements and the large, sweeping vision of a green utopia is almost entirely of his own creation.  By purposefully framing the contrast as such, he ignores that the struggle for civil rights absolutely had more ambitious goals than what was realized, while the fight for climate justice has had modest but real successes.  His appeal to "immediate economic costs" is rhetorically irrelevant, as essentially all positive change requires somebody to do/make something, and most people don't work for free.  And perhaps most glaringly is how this passage elides that Malm never really treats these struggles as perfect or even semi-perfect analogues in the first place.  The actual point of these comparisons, which Malm states explicitly in the text, is to determine "whether it is possible to locate even one minimally relevant analogue to the climate struggle that has not contained some violence."  Malm is not trying to sketch a blueprint, but instead make a single, critical point.

But the most dismal logic used in this piece is something similar to what I've remarked on before; namely, a dishonest and/or misguided appeal to complexity.  In the case of Palestine, the argument is used to encourage full disengagement; everything is so complicated and every problem is so ingrained that you shouldn't worry about it.  The subtle difference here is that the appeal is used to discourage hope.  For example, the author claims that climate change does not disrupt daily lives and thus is too big or abstract to inspire action.  This ignores that there is plenty of existing organization against fossil fuels; indeed, these are the very movements Malm is critiquing in his book!  But this also elides that there are very clear and obvious disruptions that could and should inspire action and, perhaps more cynically, that Americans don't exactly need for something to be real to storm the capitol anyway.  Once I discerned this fundamental lack of imagination in this piece, I became unable to interpret this passage (or really any part of the article) any other way.  If your analysis of a political tract focused on inciting positive change implicitly forecloses reason for optimism, perhaps the issue is with your own mindset and not the relatively straightforward logic of the work you are critiquing.  To invert the famous quote, if you are unable to envision the end of the problems, then perhaps all that's left is to accept the most terrible outcome.

The Duster Extended Universe

Duster is a band that inspires obsession.  Part of this is the nature of the music: calm, knowing, purposeful—basically all the aspects of something that would normally inspire religious fervor if the thing itself wasn't sadboy music.  But the other part of this is that there are just so many layers to their discographical onion.  Duster may have only released four proper albums (so far), but that only scratches the surface of what's out there to discover.  To this end, let me be your guide.  As your guide, I invite you to experience everything for yourself, but I will provide some light editorialization to help point in certain directions.

I will note that this list of songs does not list every single release (or "release") related to Duster.  Some are redundant, some are live recordings of minimal note, some recordings are sliiightly different versions of tracks that appear elsewhere, and then there's the pandemic thing which is going in the memory hole along with every other pandemic-specific thing.  Furthermore, many of these "releases" overlap to a significant degree.  I have addressed this by numbering/bolding the most relevant release and then noting why it is excluded from this "canonical" count elsewhere.  And finally, if you're a Duster fan that has stumbled upon this and happen to notice that something is missing, let me know (but be cool about it).

DUSTER LPs

STRATOSPHERE (1998) - Starting with the magnum opus because that's where I started on some random Saturday night in January 2020 (great timing I know).  Already wrote about this here, and although that piece is more about the pandemic, I think that is an appropriate frame for this album lol

1. Moon Age
2. Heading for the Door
3. Gold Dust
4. Topical Solution
5. Docking the Pod
6. The Landing
7. Echo, Bravo
8. Constellations
9. The Queen of Hearts
10. Two Way Radio
11. Inside Out
12. Stratosphere
13. Reed to Hillsborough
14. Shadows of Planes
15. Earth Moon Transit
16. The Twins/Romantica
17. Sideria

CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENT (2000) - Uneven when compared to its predecessor, but there's still a few all-time classics here.  The Seattle airport parking structures have never sounded so beautiful

18. Get the Dutch
19. Operations
20. Diamond
21. Me and the Birds
22. Travelogue
23. The Phantom Facing Me
24. Cooking
25. Unrecovery
26. The Breakup Suite
27. Everything You See (Is Your Own)
28. Now It's Coming Back
29. Auto-Mobile

DUSTER (CAT ALBUM) (2019) - The most bombastic of their proper releases with the fullest sound.  The trade-off is that it sacrifices a bit of charm when compared with the lo-fi classics.  But hey, charm is overrated

30. Copernicus Crater
31. I'm Lost
32. Chocolate and Mint
33. Summer War
34. Lomo
35. Damaged
36. Letting Go
37. Go Back
38. Hoya Paranoia
39. Ghoulish
40. Ghost World
41. The Thirteen

TOGETHER (2022) - The least essential of their formal releases, even though ending on a song called "Sad Boys" is the most Duster thing possible

42. New Directions
43. Retrograde
44. N
45. Time Glitch
46. Teeth
47. Escalator
48. Familiar Fields
49. Moonroam
50. Sleepyhead
51. Making Room
52. Drifter
53. Feel No Joy
54. Sad Boys

DUSTER EPs

TRANSMISSION, FLUX (1997) - The first proper Duster release.  Appropriately, it is the purest distillation of their sound, inasmuch as they have a single "sound" 

55. Orbitron
56. Fuzz and Timbre
57. My Friends Are Cosmonauts
58. Closer to the Speed of Sound
59. Stars Will Fall

APEX, TRANCE-LIKE (1998) - OK maybe this is the purest distillation of their sound.  I dunno, music criticism is made up

60. Light Years
61. Four Hours

1975 (1999) - Their most underrated release.  Touches on every strength and finishes in a little over 20 minutes...what's not to love?

62. Irato
63. Memphis Sophisticate
64. The Motion Picture
65. And Things (Are Mostly Ghosts)
66. August Relativity
67. Want No Light to Shine

DUSTER OTHER

CAPSULE LOSING CONTACT (2019) - The big compendium that, along with the new album, helped spur the Duster renaissance.  This has everything released before their breakup in 2001 plus a few other stray goodies, including the sublime title track

Moon Age 
Heading for the Door 
Gold Dust 
Topical Solution 
Docking the Pod 
The Landing 
Echo, Bravo 
Constellations 
The Queen of Hearts 
Two Way Radio 
Inside Out 
Stratosphere 
Reed to Hillsborough 
Shadows of Planes 
Earth Moon Transit 
The Twins / Romantica 
Sideria 
Get the Dutch 
Operations 
Diamond 
Me and the Birds 
Travelogue 
The Phantom Facing Me 
Cooking 
Unrecovery 
The Breakup Suite 
Everything You See (Is Your Own) 
Now It’s Coming Back 
Auto-Mobile 
Orbitron 
Fuzz and Timbre 
My Friends Are Cosmonauts 
Closer to the Speed of Sound 
Stars Will Fall 
Four Hours 
Light Years 
68. Capsule Losing Contact 
69. East Reed 
70. And Things Are Mostly Ghosts (Version Over Dose Mix) 
Irato 
Memphis Sophisticate 
The Motion Picture 
And Things (Are Mostly Ghosts) 
August Relativity 
Want No Light to Shine 
71. Haunt My Sleep 
72. Peyote 
73. Something That I Need 
74. What You're Doing to Me 
75. Faint 
76. The Hours 

REMOTE ECHOES (2023) - If you like the random tracks from Capsule, boy have I got some good news for you.  There is a ton of random Duster music floating around the internet, a smattering of which got a proper release just last year.  I say smattering because this is not necessarily the best of these random tracks but because it is a good representative sample.  Half-finished intrigues, slightly lesser tunes, and a re-mix (pre-mix?) of one of their best songs...it's all here baybee

77. Before The Veil
78. Cigarettes And Coffee
79. The Weed Supreme
Untitled 59 ("Haunt My Sleep" on Capsule Losing Contact)
80. I Know I Won't
81. Moon In Aries
82. Glue
83. Testphase
84. Lost Time
85. Strange
86. The Mood
87. Country Heather
88. Untitled 84
89. Darby

ON THE AIR (1997) - A live "album" posted to YouTube that is ubiquitous enough among the "community" that I consider it canon.  Equal parts sublime and achingly raw 

90. Heading For the Door (live)

91. I Am the King (live)

92. My Friends Are Cosmonauts (live)

93. Untitled (live)

94. Inside Out (live)

95. Gold Dust (live)

96. Reed to Hillsborough (live)

97. Stars Will Fall (live)

LOW EARTH ORBIT (???) - The first of many unreleased albums on YouTube.  You will begin to note how some of this overlaps with subsequent releases, which I have noted when appropriate.  This very confusion in compiling my own complete collection is in part what inspired me to write this post

Untitled (84) (same title on Remote Echoes)

Untitled (80) ("Take Off Your Face" on CA)

Untitled (58) ("Wander Off" on CA)

98. Lines (this is only on the tracks I downloaded from here)

The One ("Something That I Need" on Capsule Losing Contact)

99. What Goes on in Your Mind

101. Untitled (81)

101. Delicate Things

Everything is all in Place ("Everything Is All In One Place" on CA)

102. California

TESTPHASE, TAPE ONE (1997?) - Another unreleased YouTube album with the same mixture of unique tracks and things released elsewhere.  This contains the entirety of the informal/limited release Christmas Dust, so I've just rolled that up here

My Friends Are Cosmonauts (same title on Transmission, Flux)
Track 2 ("The Mood" on Remote Echoes)
Track 3 ("Moon in Aries" on Remote Echoes)
Track 4 ("Cigarettes and Coffee" on Remote Echoes)
Track 5 ("Country Heather" on Remote Echoes)
103. Track 6 (probably titled "Bon Voyage")
104. Track 7
105. Track 8
106. Track 9
107. Track 10
108. Track 11
109. Skulls (Misfits cover)

EXPERIMENTAL DUST (???) - Yet another one of these.  This is my favorite overall collection of such tracks, but YMMV

Untitled (61) ("What You're Doing to Me" on Capsule Losing Contact)
110. Untitled
Untitled ("The Weed Supreme" on Remote Echoes)
Untitled (62) ("Before the Veil" on Remote Echoes)
Untitled (59) ("Haunt My Sleep" on Capsule Losing Contact)
111. Cut
112. Diamond (Demo) (I think this is better than the track on Contemporary Movement so I declare it canonical)
Testphase (same title on Remote Echoes)
113. Cooking No More
114. Instrumental
Untitled (60) ("Traces" on CA)
115. Instruments 1
116. I Am The King

ON THE DODGE (1996?) - Another one!  A bit more jagged than the others (if that is even possible), but with a few bangers nonetheless.  Note that the last four tracks are improperly labeled with song titles from Calm because of the artwork

Payote (same title on Capsule Losing Contact)
117. Headstone Next Door
118. Lullaby
119. Distance
Glue (same title on Remote Echoes)
Darby (same title on Remote Echoes)
120. Lucky
121. The Tribal Life
122. Dead Horse
123. Quiet Frontier
124. Crossed the Tracks
Arlington Sunset ("Lost Time" on Remote Echoes)
Wild and Free ("I Know I Won't" on Remote Echoes)
Sign Crushes Motorist ("Strange" on Remote Echoes)
125. The Vacancy (presumably not the title)

RANDOM SONGS (various) - A few singles, a few loose tracks, what have you

126. Untitled (73) (???) - The only track off of a fake unreleased album that appears to be a "Duster" track.  That's canonical enough for me

127. Interstellar Tunnel (2019) - Released around the time of their s/t, but not included on the s/t.  Might be a joke?  Regardless, it is a song

128. What Are You Waiting For (2019) - Another unreleased single from the time of the s/t release

129. Hell's Breaking Loose (2019) - A final unreleased song from the s/t.  This one actually slaps

VALIUM AGGELEIN

THE BLACK MOON (2020) - A re-release of the Duster crew's experiment with Kosmiche that combines the original album Hier Kommt Der Schwartze Mond with a bunch of other tracks.  Wrote this up here when it was re-released

130. Here Comes The Black Moon 
131. Liftoff In Stereo 
132. Trial By Fire 
133. The Clouds Will Drop Ladders 
134. Triumph Of The Metal People 
135. Frequency Converter 
136. Birth To Death In Slow Motion 
137. Dream Scientist 
138. Bird Wings 
139. Nudists 
The Landing (same title on Stratosphere)
140. Under The Mountain 
141. Sonar 
142. Mercury 
143. The Valium Machine 
144. Spies 
145. V 
146. Inside The Static Cult 
147. Then, In 2060 A.D. 
148. Alum Rock 
149. Interruptor 
150. Slower 
151. Excerpt From Mount Hamilton 
152. 96 
153. Spark Collector 

EIAFUAWN

BIRDS IN THE GROUND (2006) - Clay Parton's solo work during Duster's lengthy hiatus is great in its own right.  A little more whimsical than Duster, but fundamentally in the same vein, and with the same economy of songwriting

154. Bunny
155. No More Like That
156. Birds
157. The Voice Of Music
158. Bees
159. The Coffin Was So Light I Thought It Might Float Away
160. Good God Y'all
161. Secret Gypsy Language
162. On A Peoplemover
163. Two Thousand Twelve
164. The Drunk Pilot And The Romantic Passenger
165. Modulator Hustle

EVERYTHING IS STILL ALL FUCKED UP (???) - A collection of all other unreleased EIAFUAWN stuff, which is pretty much just as good as the official release

166. (One at a) Time

167. The Battle of Lissa

168. Bugtime

169. Christine's Tune (Flying Burrito Brothers)

170. Humans

171. Secret Love

172. Audiotrack 02

173. Audiotrack 03

174. The Drunk Pilot and the Romantic Passenger (demo)

175. Faint

176. EISAFU

177. Magnet Man

178. My Friends Are Cosmonauts (different enough from the regular version IMO)

179. Newbird

180. Sunlight

181. Tempest

182. Untitled 1

183. Untitled 2

184. Untitled 3

185. Untitled 4

186. Untitled 5

CANAAN AMBER

CA (2023) - A five-track EP with a bunch of bonus tracks that represents Canaan Amber's equivalent of EIAFUAWN.  The EP portion (the first five tracks) is fairly uninspired but the bonus tracks contains some of the very best of the old "Duster" bootlegs

187. Create The Scene

188. Days Rewinding (Instrumental)

189. Gold Hills

190. Runaway

191. No Way

192. Turn On

193. Everything Is All In One Place

194. Wander Off

195. Ghost Girl

196. Take Off Your Face

197. Traces

198. Create The Scene (Instrumental)

CALM

CALM 12" (1995) - Just a real nice blast of guitar tone from the immediate predecessor to Duster.  Hey look the song titles are just the entirety of the lyrics

199. We've Made A Contact But Worship Silent I Make A Whisper I Am A Sinner
200. Slide The Needle In Under Blue Skin I Took A Picture So I Still Can Burn You
201. The Spirits Fall Upon The Wheel To Turn The Spokes With Angel Grace When I Am Gone With Broken Wings The Spirits Fall To Take My Place
202. Demons Reloading Such A Beautiful Disease Trigger Pull This Trigger
203. Silk Wrapped Hands In A Masquerade Even When Things Are Picture Blue I Keep It Under My Pillow Now Just In Case Theres Nothing Left To Do Outrun Myself
204. Be Still / We Will Live Like Thunder

CALM 7" (1996) - More scattered a la the Duster bootlegs.  Still kinda fun

205. Arlington Sunset
206. Wild and Free
207. Sign Crushes Motorist
208. The Vacancy

MOONRAKER (1996) - More substantial than the 7" but less bombastic than the 12"

209. Moonraker
210. Scientists & Saboteurs

ROLLING THUNDER DEMO (???) - Basically foreshadows all three of the subsequent Calm releases, which is all you can ask of a demo really

211. Untitled 1
212. Untitled 2
213. Untitled 3
214. Rolling Thunder

MOHINDER

O NATION, YOU BLEED FROM MANY WOUNDS, 1896 (1993) - Yeah, so now we're to the point where we're a little too far afield from Duster plus it's clear these are 18-year-olds learning how to play music, and while there are examples of that that work for me, this is not that.  Still, it's a little fun to hear a faint hint of what would come later

215. To Satisfy
216. Run
217. Give
218. Inhuman Nature
219. Numb
220. Of Sound Mind
221. 101

NITWITS (1994)

222. Number One

223. Imbalance

224. Itch

THE MISSION (1994)

225. The Mission

226. The Alien

227. Division

228. Acceptance

229. The Static Cult

230. Beautify

231. One Warrior

232. Expiration

HELVETIA

Jason Albertini's band.  It's pretty good...and extremely prolific.  If you want to go through and catalogue all of that be my guest.