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.

Is, Ought, and The Secret Third Thing

I'm on the record as saying that the is-ought problem is a significant driver of misunderstanding and animus in modern discourse.  Different people espouse both positive and normative statements in different situations for various reasons.  This means that true intention and meaning can be admittedly difficult to discern in real time, especially on social media platforms that by their nature explicitly dissuade such discernment.  Luckily, there seems to be growing awareness of this, to the point that popular pundits espouse this position to great fanfare:

And yet, I think there is something decidedly incomplete about this analysis.  Specifically, the "is" half of the equation is often treated as a given when it is anything but.  There exists near-infinite room within the description of reality itself for a completely separate set of misunderstandings, which should be an obvious truism in a world where QAnon exists and POW flags fly to this day.  One of the most reliable demonstrations of this slipperiness is the entire concept of "fact-checking," which in the Western sphere is often used to launder empire-friendly ideology and otherwise dubious interpretations of reality.  A notable implementation of this fact-checking ethos has been the "Community Notes" feature on Twitter, which allows users to add context to a given tweet when it is deemed necessary.  This feature has actually been a net positive in my eyes, likely because there is some semblance of democratic input in the proceedings.  That said, there has certainly been some manipulation and weaponization of this feature, especially now that we're approaching a much dreaded election cycle.

There are some relatively obvious problems with this dogged approach to such a strict positivism.  For one, "describing a political reality" to someone, especially an oppressed person who is more likely to be aware of that political reality, is patronizing and smarmy, often to an extreme degree.  Take the example above, where the community note essentially repeats the words the poster says in her tweet!  When it's this obvious that the person you're speaking to already knows what you're saying, what is the real purpose of your hectoring?  What's more is that simply calling something "political reality" does not make it so.  It is indeed the case that the Florida government has passed a number of regressive laws that effectively outlaw trans people.  But by limiting your version of "reality" to just that fact, you ignore that there is a good deal that the literal Most Powerful Man in the World could do to counter such a thing.  Seen this way, calling a simplistic understanding of the world "reality" functionally serves to launder conservative ideology through the smokescreen of seemingly neutral concepts such as "reasonableness" or even "facts."

Going a level deeper, an extreme commitment to the rhetoric of a particularly pessimistic realpolitik has the potential to rot one's brain.  I understand that the (admittedly terrifying) idea of a second Trump term has already rotted some brains, and that one way of dealing with this is by stifling all dissent to the seemingly only other alternative.  But while I am somewhat sympathetic to appeals to loss aversion, I think you do have to be at least a little idealistic, even in the worst of situations.  Additionally, it's fairly clear by now that the average Democratic voter is far more progressive than the party's presumptive nominee, which means that if we want any of those things to have a chance of happening, we have to be the ones who lead the way.  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.  One of your most basic rights grants you the ability to ask for a more just world.  I recommend doing that, at the very least.