COVID and the politics of “science”
I guess protestors and rioters are immune to COVID. Or at least, they pose no danger to Grandma. Or even if they do and grandma dies as a result, they’re not really granny-killers since their cause is just.
People who go to church, or have loved ones’ funerals with more than ten people, on the other hand: thoughtless killers!
Actually, I believe that, since most of the George Floyd demonstrators (and rioters) are young, if they themselves get COVID they are either really likely to have very mild or even asymptomatic cases. Hey, maybe they’re even doing a public service by helping coax along the herd immunity. Or maybe, just maybe, we won’t see any spike in COVID as a result of their mass get-togethers.
But if we do see a spike a couple of weeks later, rest assured. The media will not blame it on the protestors or the rioters. It will be the fault of the rest of us trying to open businesses and go about our lives.
The fallout of this is that expert opinion goes down several more notches in the eyes of most people noticing, although I’m not sure their reputation has any further down to go without digging underground. The hypocrisy is blatant, although they try to explain it away as some people’s causes are more important than other people’s causes, or religious observances, or funerals – or lives, for that matter. The social justice warrior health experts signing on to the idea that demonstrations are an exception to the no-crowds rule consider themselves to be what Sowell called “the anointed,” in his book The Vision of the Anointed:
The Vision of the Anointed (1995) is a book by economist and political columnist Thomas Sowell which brands the anointed as promoters of a worldview concocted out of fantasy impervious to any real-world considerations. Sowell asserts that these thinkers, writers, and activists continue to be revered even in the face of evidence disproving their positions.
Sowell argues that American thought is dominated by a “prevailing vision” which seals itself off from any empirical evidence that is inconsistent with that vision.
–the prevailing social vision is dangerously close to sealing itself off from any discordant feedback from reality.
–it is so necessary to believe in a particular vision that evidence of its incorrectness is ignored, suppressed, or discredited
–empirical evidence is neither sought beforehand nor consulted after a policy has been instituted. Facts may be marshalled for a position already taken, but that is very different from systematically testing opposing theories by evidence.
Sowell’s work, by the way, was one of the foundations for my political change experience. It was a process I was already going through even before I found Sowell’s writing. But once I started to read some of his stuff I felt an extraordinary sense of relief, as though coming home. Here was a thinker who was saying things that made sense to me, in a coherent whole that helped me realize what I think I’d always believed but had never found articulated elsewhere.
[ADDENDUM: Glenn Reynolds adds:
The public health experts had one shot, and they blew it. If deaths do result [from the riots, the public health experts] should be specifically blamed — and named — as grandma-killers. If deaths don’t result, they should be specifically blamed — and named — as business-killers. And they can’t hide behind neutral science because they abandoned neutral science for politics and preening within their own social circles.
As I said above, though, the MSM will try to blame any spike on the re-opening of businesses. But Glenn is right – and it’s not the fault of science, but of the politicization of science by scientists. It’s a practice of which the left is very fond; the Soviets were big on it.]
The Left has an “expert” fetish. They use it to screw us. We need to start fighting back.
Well I have to give the Chinese microbiologists due credit. They created the smartest virus ever seen. It won’t infect anyone in a Walmart or a Home Depot, but will bite your ass in the local hardware store. It knows the difference between wet sand and dry sand on the beach. It, as the Babylon Bee has noted, has expressed its solidarity to BLM, but will get you if you and your family gather together for a funeral for old grandpa. A truly crafty little bug.
From the very beginning Operation Fear was designed to take down orangemanbad. He allowed himself to be sucker punched. A tragic, tactical error.
parker:
I disagree. If Trump hadn’t listened at first, every single death would have been far more successfully laid at his door (they’ll try anyway, of course, but not as successfully). Instead, he can say he listened, and now it’s time to open up – which is what he’s said. He’s also allowed many of the Democratic governors to reveal their incredible awfulness. And now (hopefully!!!) he may get to preside over a recovery.
I don’t think he had much of an alternative, except in retrospect, knowing the virus didn’t turn out the way it was predicted. But decisions aren’t made in retrospect.
Sowell’s corpus is one of the few non-fiction oeuvre of which one can reasonably ask a fan, “OK. Now which book are you going to re-read next?” And expect a lively response.
Which is a wonderful thing to say about an author no longer writing new works.
Me? After listening to a few of his stimulating author interviews during lockdown – “Intellectuals and Socialism.”
PS Does Thomas know that he still re-feeds people’s minds? Whatever. I’ve just given myself a reason enough to compose fan mail to the Hoover Institution!
PPS I recall Sowell saying that Harvard was too clubby. Chicago taught him to argue and to test his ideas. But he didn’t undergo his political change until a few years later, while teaching and testing his intellectual notions, and finding them lacking. Is anyone else so meticulous and rigorous today?
Thomas Sowell was required reading when I was an economics major. His solid reasoning was a large part of my conversion from union Democrat to Constitutional conservative. Now, of course, colleges protect students from exposure to his ideas.
My contempt-o-meter for our “elites” has been stuck at eleven for years. One former friend and fellow so-called economist even checked with Walter William’s office to confirm he was black. She couldn’t believe he could be a “person of color” who expressed all those retrograde theories. She considers herself a beacon of tolerance and me a hypocritical racist.
Civil disobedience is the least of what we owe these fledgling oppressors. This Sunday I’ll be in, or in front of, a church. Holding a sign protesting lockdown discrimination against non-protesters. To hell with them all, and the media donkeys they rode in on.
Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell are two men I am in awe of, mostly because they are both 35 times smarter than I am.
My capacity to tolerate all this COVID stuff reached well past flood level yesterday, watching all of the protests and veneration of a poor dead black man who spent a lot of time in trouble with the law and the way the media is working so hard to blame Trump and conservatives I finally realized this morning has me in a mild depression and I suppose I have been there for a bit.
I also turn 3/4 of a century this week, told my wife when we first did the lock down in March that it would surely be over by June and we could have nice little backyard gathering of friends and family like we did 15 years ago when I turn 60 and had over 50 folks show up including kids and grandkids coming in from out of state, not so this time around. My out of state kids are not getting on planes for awhile and they are fed up with the protest and riots, I raised them to accept everyone and that color did not matter, just be friends and one of my sons best friends who comes down to shoot with us from time to time is a black man who lives in New Mexico. My daughter live up in Detroit and her best friend is a black woman who has a son the same age as my grandson and that woman told my daughter that a lot of Detroit black people think Trump is the first president who actually wanted to help the black people get jobs and prosper, until the virus came along and then the rioting that lovely black woman in her late 40’s, who I met last October, told my daughter that she has lived in the Detroit area all of her life and had never seen the optimism in the black community and maybe that is why the local people turned out and did not let the outsiders burn Detroit again.
I could go on and on but I would just be going in a circle in my brain, I have black friends on Facebook along with Asian and Hispanic and the ethnic identity I always felt should never be a factor in any manner since I like them for being the individuals they are and I had think for a minute about checking off and ethnic box to identify them.
At the same time I like Texas, I like our Alamo and our Texas Rangers and I want folks who come from all over the world like my friends from France and German who become US citizens and decide to live in Texas, I want them to become Texans and learn to love our traditions and history, warts and all and some of them have done that.
I really appreciate Neo’s postings about the current situations, multiple ones and they align with mine most all of the time but for my own sanity I have decided to take a step back from my old man computer viewing for the rest of the month since fixing this stuff is beyond my pay grade and coping with it has become too difficult so I will see you all a few days before the 4th of July. In the meantime I have appreciated so many of the fine people who read Neo and comment and bring so much knowledge to various situations.
That will be all for now. Thank You’all,
“ empirical evidence is neither sought beforehand nor consulted after a policy has been instituted. Facts may be marshalled for a position already taken, but that is very different from systematically testing opposing theories by evidence.”
Well, well, the opposite of this is known as the “scientific method”, which has brought us all the wealth we have today. Everything from modern medicine, immensely productive agriculture, electricity, cars, planes, and airplanes, computers… l could go on for hours. The lefties prefer “scientific socialism”, aka Marxism, which has resulted in the deaths of over 100 million people in the twentieth century. Breaking eggs without actually producing an omelette is their idea of an experiment, it’s sufficient to make a mess.
I have read several of Sowell’s books; if anything he make you think.
Of course, thinking is something the left wishes that people never engage in.
Neo, I suggest “Life At the Bottom, ” by Theodore Dalrymple; his look at the white English underclass.
The author served as a prision psychatrist, which gave him a front row seat to how certain classes of people have totally absorbed and taken advantage of the policies implemented by liberal progressives (in the sense of absolving themselves from any blame as to their own outcomes). He restricted his study to white, non-immigrants only, to eliminate the “race’ variable.
Needless to say, the white British underclass suffers the same social pathologies evident within black inner cities here in the USA.
While I am recommending books, “The True Believer – The Nature of Mass Movements, ” by Eric Hoffer (the “longshoreman philosopher”) is a classic. A good study on what motivates folks to join radical movements.
OldTexan:
Believe me, I understand. Lately, I’ve thought of stepping back for a while, too, although I don’t plan to. But please come back after the Fourth!
I noticed long ago that the leftists considered themselves to be intellectually and morally superior people. If you disagreed with them, you weren’t just mistaken, you were stupid and evil. At first I joked that they had overdosed on self esteem. Later I concluded that they had a bad case of the hubris. Now I just think they are narcissists.
I was working on a comment to the effect that public authorities are dangerously eroding their credibility with all their activist fudging of science and knowledge. Then Richard Fernandez hit it out of the park with his post today:
________________________________________
Megan McArdle fears that public health officials’ endorsement of mass demonstrations to support Black Lives Matter has destroyed their credibility to order lockdowns in the future.
…
The damage may affect more than officialdom’s power to call for a lockdown in the event of a second Coronavirus wave. Not only has the academia/media lost much of its credibility on social distancing/lockdown questions, it has collaterally diminished its authority on sound the tocsin on Climate Emergency, the Rohingya genocide and all the many other ‘alerts’ it has been issuing. The true will be doubted alongside the false.
The idea that the media inflated or exaggerated the pandemic fears to justify a lockdown for social engineering purposes may seem monstrous to those whose modest jobs and small businesses were lost, but like a spouse walking in on flagrante delicto what else are they to think? “Honey I can explain why we locked down the jobs and churches and visits to nursing homes but not Antifa. It’s not what it looks like!”
https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2020/06/05/the-collapse-of-social-distancing-and-establishment-authority-n502213
Covid served its purpose. the revolution is on… Grey lady has fallen…
Art. I had to chew on that pithy, hard thought. The way your last line cogently reframed the preceding two.
At first I thought you were referring to the NYTimes, now “run” by its child-“reporters”. Then “Grey Lady” I knew meant the Statue of Liberty.
Finally, came the pop culture reference on the dark action film series starring Gerard Butler (and by the way, the last instalment, which I saw last fall, was worth watching, against most critics prejudice).
It’s gone on to be a staple of cable movie channel television. I think “The White House Has Fallen” is the first.
Lastly, comes a sense sad loss.
That’s a lot to convey in three short lines. You are the definition of and have delivered us a line worth quoting in sociable company to pique and with substantive effect. Potentially. (Especially to other men who are prone to know and enjoy this genre.)
Thanks, Art!
I’m listening to Tom Sowell saying, If you could, what would you counsel President Obama to do? “Resign.” (I believe this Uncommon Knowledge or Hoover Institution interview took place in early 2012, concerning his book “Dismantling America.”)
There is yet a fifth or sixth thought summoned by “Grey Lady has fallen…” And that’s how a gift to the US from France because of slaves liberated because of the Civil War became coopted to serve another subversive goal.
Given the real violence and faux strife of today, your acuity falls upon that unHoly fact.
Combined with how in the past decade a mere poetic quote from the statue has been endlessly invoked to frame the progressive’s quest for open borders.
Thus, another way in which the Lady Liberty has been uprooted and smashed and uprooted from the majesty of her singular setting, and celebration of America, “And crowned her good” line from “America, The Beautiful.”
That’s not a bad day’s work, Art. I’ve enjoyed explicating it.
That’s some mighty powerful, pregnant, pith. Thank you, Art.
When I try to imagine myself in the position of someone who couldn’t see a dying parent because of COVID only to then turn on the TV and not only see these protests with no concern of spreading the disease but see medical experts defending them, I have to stop myself.
I have to stop myself because I think there’s a honest chance if I had been in that situation, I would have wound up doing terminal violence to someone over it. There are people who are going to be angry over this for the rest of their lives. And that anger is only going to fester and darken because it will never be socially acceptable to express it, until that Man on the White Horse rides up and gives that anger voice through fire, the noose, and the smell of gunsmoke.
Mike
Grey lady only fell off the flophouse mattress onto the floor – not a long fall.
My comment was in re “Grey Lady aka NYT” – but I enjoyed TJ’s view explaining the double-edged bon mot.
Well done, Dodger.
So, Floyd was SARS-CoV-2+, a probable spreader. I wonder if they will be consistent and classify his death caused by Covid-19.
parker:
Trump re-gained his footing with “Liberate Minnesota! Liberate Michigan! Liberate Virginia!” He put down a marker there.
Today’s turn-around on the unemployment situation will pressure our enemies into making mistakes.
OldTexan —
Happy birthday! May you make it to 4/4 of a century!
I feel you, though. I always host 20+ people on my patio for July 4th, and it’s looking like I’m going to have to cancel because King County, WA, is likely only going to be at the “gatherings of 5 people outside your family” stage and probably nobody will come.
It’s probably for the best, since my incandescent anger at most of them for being socially-controlling idiots whose moral standing is entirely lying down won’t have cooled to embers yet.
Old Texan,
Hau’oli la hanau!
When I try to imagine myself in the position of someone who couldn’t see a dying parent because of COVID only to then turn on the TV and not only see these protests with no concern of spreading the disease but see medical experts defending them, I have to stop myself.
Higher education is a great collecting pool of poseurs and frauds.
“Higher education is a great collecting pool of poseurs and frauds.”
And we all are now undergrads. Now everyone gets to see what is has been like to live on a college campus for the last 5-10 years. The leftists running amok, shaming and bullying everyone who disagrees with them. Continually pushing and prodding the “administrations” to follow their “vision”, and the weak kneed administrations (now the governments, local, state, and federal) caving in and making nice to the mob. Ordinary conservative minions are in fear of speaking (conservative undergrads students). My only hope is that unlike colleges where the mob enjoys a 97/1 ratio in the ring leaders (the faculty) that such is not the case outside the colleges where I see more like a 50/50 ratio, but will it be enough???
OldTexan,
Have a great Birthday!
I look forward to your return and sharing of your wisdom.
Old Texan:
Happy birthday! Don’t be gone long, we won’t mess with Texas while you are away. 😉
Don’t mess with anybody in Texas.
Protesters in McAllen – wasn’t there a movie about this kind of thing a while ago?
https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1268990711157972993
What a protest in ranch country looks like.
https://twitter.com/TexsonRancher/status/1268950503754473472
Maybe not from Texas, but the sentiment is the same.
https://twitter.com/coleman_peanut/status/1268847366024630274
Because, of course they do.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/06/06/denial-of-truth-allows-easier-trespass/
“It’s not about the virus, it’s all about control.”
https://theconservativetreehouse.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/trump-suit-5.jpg
Some good news – not every government institution is totally corrupt.
Yet.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/06/05/shutdown-challenge-victory-michigan-supreme-court-rules-7-0-in-favor-of-barber-who-refuses-to-close-shop/
The old must go, they do not change, and they remember too many inconvenient things…
Aerop Fan:
The protest in McAllen, after the dude fired up his chain the snowflake was wailing “somebody call 911.” I thought COPs were the problem. LOL.
You can’t keep a good book censored — if you intend to stay in business.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/alex-no-1
First we elect a President who owned a stake in WWE wrestling, then we get another dream match between billionaires: Bezos (heel) and Musk (face).
Do we live in a great country or what!!
https://www.wwe.com/superstars/donald-trump
Yes, it’s all political.
Extortion usually is.
https://hotair.com/archives/allahpundit/2020/06/05/fauci-protests-perfect-set-spread-coronavirus/