Heather Mac Donald sums up the last four months — 27 Comments
Yep. What’s distressing is that there does not seem to be any revulsion against it. It’s as if people are perfectly insensitive to events.
I received MacDonald’s excellent essay last week, from Hillsdale College. Rarely, if ever, has an article so perfectly aligned with my own opinions on important issues. In completing paragraph after paragraph, I was invariably left thinking “yes, that’s exactly what I’ve been thinking and saying!”. Only, MacDonald puts it in a much more lucid and eloquent manner than I ever could.
As Griffin and I talked about on another thread, the culture now has ZERO tolerance of any risk whatsoever. The virus paranoia turns normal people into quaking milksops. That leads to the tolerance of government control of their lives. It’s Ben Franklin all over again, “those who would give up liberty for a bit of security will end up with neither.” Over 50% of the population is under mass hysteria and delusion.
Except for her inaccurate assessment of the death of Floyd (she has perhaps not read the transcript), Heather is, as always, eloquent and incisive in her defense of rational thinking founded upon facts and evidence. She is also correct that we, as a culture, are perched upon the brink of an abyss, yet it is not easy to imagine, in the current climate of ever-increasing “woke” insanity, how avoiding a catastrophic fall into that abyss might be accomplished.
j e:
I noticed that, too – her description of Floyd’s death indicates to me that she has not read the transcript. But then, I have a hunch that very very few people have.
physicsguy on July 23, 2020 at 3:20 pm said:
“the culture now has ZERO tolerance of any risk whatsoever….That leads to the tolerance of government control of their lives.”
* * *
But, of course, letting the government take control of your life is taking the biggest risk of all.
The advocates of “safety” over liberty are, of course, top-notch hypocrites, because they only safety they want to assure is their own — you, as Heather made clear, do not count.
Heather doesn’t really go into one of the instances of major government malfeasance, as it predates the recent malfeasance she concentrates on; Mollie Hemingway, who is also extremely “lucid and eloquent, ” runs with that ball.
The damage this false story caused the Trump administration can not be underestimated. It’s a story worth recounting here….The response to Trump’s claim that the leaks from anonymous intelligence officials were producing fake news was one of many indicators that U.S. political media would be in no position to think critically or skeptically about whether they were being used by a politically motivated cabal of intelligence officials. The smarter ones might have known they were being used but simply determined they would be more than happy to play an important role in the operation.
Trump was right that the leaks were real but the news was false.
…
Each time the story has been debunked, this received little to no coverage from the same corporate media that trumpeted it.
We’ve seen the breaking news reports on the Strzok memo definitively debunking the NYT hit job on the Russia dossier allegations, but Mollie creates a smoothly devastating narrative of the coup based on these recent revelations, that what we knew all along was true: the Democrats and media lied.
I’m only surprised that Strzok told the truth in his notes.
I’ve been reading MacDonald for years. She’s generally right on target.
Sorry to read her unfortunately knee-jerk remarks re Chauvin’s knee.
Also surprised to learn she lives in a 34 story apartment building. I would have guessed her to be more down to earth.
Let me chime in about MacDonald’s comments on Floyd’s death. They reflected my own at the time (one week ago) but I had not read the transcript either at that point. I am not sure when MacDonald wrote this essay, but I’m guessing it was before the transcript was released. It will be interesting to see if she offers any kind of revision in light of the transcript
Four days, six comment requests, and one follow-up story later, The Atlantic issued a series of major corrections that confirmed The Federalist’s investigation — and gutted the Purnell’s story of the police violence that made her “a police abolitionist,”
…
The article’s title and call for police abolition remain unchanged, although the story justifying her activism is no longer about (1) a police officer shooting (2) a child (3) without serious consequences, and is about now (1) a private security guard shooting (2) an adult (3) and being charged with assault. The magazine decided police bringing charges within one day, however, was not worth mentioning — and the 18-year-old victim is still simply described as just a “boy.”
Just by the way, since we’ve talked before about how the Left continuously tries to control narratives by altering language, notice how “abolitionist” is now used to mean “abolishing the police” rather than “abolishing slavery.”
It’s not an accident that so many of the statues and monuments being destroyed are about the side that WON the Civil War.
Most monuments torn down were not by protesters, but by city officials after pressure or threats from protesters.
By Jonah Gottschalk JULY 22, 2020
Thirty-three statues of Columbus. Nine of the Founding Fathers. Eight of Saint Junipero Serra. With the frequency of the ongoing iconoclasm, it can be hard to gain a scale of the problem.
For each story that has breached the news cycle, at least a dozen went unreported outside of local media. This detailed list records each instance monuments have been defaced, vandalized, and or torn down since nationwide protests began, updated as more occur.
…
While Confederate monuments have taken the lion’s share of media coverage, they actually form a minority of the statues targeted.
…
By far the most common route for monuments being destroyed was for protesters to damage it, then the city quickly removing it as a “public safety” hazard, not to be returned.
That last tactic is similar to the “sue and settle” scam run, most prominently, by the EPA and environmentalists acting in concert to get what the legislature wouldn’t give them.
The violence of the riots is to show us what happens when the threats are not enough by themselves.
We used to call that “mob rule” and sent the FBI and DOJ to shut it down.
Democrats even used pretend to support doing that.
Here are some of the surprising (not) ones that I’ve missed in the news, if they were ever even mentioned:
Numerous Religious Statues, Punta Gorda, FL
Several statues of Jesus, Saint Mary, and three children were torn down and defaced by night at a Catholic church. Security camera footage captured a suspect, who was found and arrested.
Statue of Ronald Reagan, Dixon, IL
Statue of the nation’s 40th President, placed on the banks of Rock River where he served as a lifeguard; he has been credited with saving upwards of 70 lives while on duty. Defaced with protester graffiti by night.
Statue of Hiawatha, LaCrosse, WI
Sixty-year-old statue of the Native American legendary leader. Requested to be removed by city government because it became a tourist attraction, and as a way to “face the symbols of our past.”
9-11 Memorial, Washingtonville, NY
Memorial to firefighters who died during the September 11 Islamist terrorist attack in New York. Defaced by unknown perpetrators, who sawed down the American flag at the site, then removed the memorial’s eagle.
Statue of Frederick Douglass, Rochester, NY
One hundred twenty-one year-old statue to the legendary abolitionist. Defaced and torn down by unknown vandals. The statue was deemed too damaged to be returned to its place.
How anyone can think that they can have a zero risk life boggles my mind. Everyone born will be subjected to risks from the moment of birth. That’s life up to the moment of death. Get used to it or go through life cringing in fear. And please don’t vote if you believe a zero risk free life is possible.
@je It’s just as likely that she has read the transcript and is uttering the required formula. It’s only anonymous, offshore, self-employed/sufficient members of the Great Unwashed who can allow themselves the luxury of not self-abasing before the Magical Soul Folk.
A good article though, although notice that she doesn’t really get much beneath the surface. We all know that something has gone very wrong with our so-called Elites. Yes, the symptoms need to be enumerated, and she has covered some of them. But the real question is *what* has gone wrong? How? When? Why? Can we hope that there is any chance that our ‘Betters’ will reboot themselves? Do we need to guillotine all of them? Even if we do, how do we avoid the New Bosses becoming just the same as the Old Bosses?
Not hard to guess my inclinations, but would prefer that wiser heads in or out of the Academy made more of an effort to nut it all out so as to avoid a run on Tumbrils. Eric Weinstein and Peter Thiel have a good discussion or two on YouTube where they try to do this for the generalized malaise which now permeates research in many of the hard sciences. it can be done, just requires courage, independent wealth, and people with nothing to lose.
Guess I’ve just answered the question. Pretty much everyone with the necessary experience, insight, and status to be heard has too much to lose if they opine publicly on the Deeper Whys rather than the Whats.
@Parker
That’s what nearly three generations of practically zero childhood mortality and no mass conscription total wars will do for you. Vietnam doesn’t count as very few of the young or old squealing opinion leaders opining today failed to get academic deferments.
Add to that atomized nuclear families, now those being mostly exploded too.. so no grandparents dying at home after long or short illnesses. People just have no idea anymore.
Our political and thought leaders are mostly where they are because they have mastered the largely arbitrary and narrow selection criteria which they wrote themselves and continuously ‘refine’=narrow to yet further fit only themselves. This doesn’t bode well when they are faced with an ‘Outside Context Problem’ — i.e. actual Real Life impinging on their fantasy world.
We tried to pretend that life is a bowl of cherries. When this illusion breaks down and we’re left alone in the face of our fears and without God, well… you know the rest.
The second one here is pretty obvious, but I still don’t understand the first one.
Elk, Portland, OR
120-year-old statue of an elk dedicated to the area’s wildlife. Set afire and vandalized numerous times during protests, until so damaged the city removed it for public safety concerns.
Ten Commandments
A man pulled down a monument to the Ten Commandments with a chain and his pickup truck, then dragged it through the streets. Was arrested by local police shortly after.
There were lots of interesting and strange selections; I wonder if “someone” was keeping a list while waiting for the time to be right, or if it was just a lot of “it’s a statue it must be a bad guy” reactions during the riots.
And then there is guilt by association.
One Riot, One Ranger, Dallas, TX
Monument to the Texas Rangers in Dallas Love Field Airport. Pulled down by the city because the statue’s model joined mobs trying to keep African Americans out of white schools following Brown v. Board of Education.
I can understand that the mob took issue with the well-known (although probably apocryphal) Texas slogan, and the early Rangers probably were as bad as the criminals they were chasing, but (I can say this as a born and bred Texan), most people today are actually not aware of the sometimes sordid history of the Rangers (which, by Leftist standards, means it doesn’t exist, right?), but do accept the statue’s symbolism (or did, until too many Californians moved in) — which is that law enforcers are equal to the task being set.
The Rangers were disbanded and rechartered several times, and the current organization has practically no correspondence with the older ones, which did somethings for which they can justly be censured.
Conflation, again; but don’t remind the Democrats they are the party of the KKK.
Now, this one, I’m okay with — although the fact that somebody won a Pulitzer Prize writing about him doesn’t have much credibility anymore.
Statue of Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia, PA
After being vandalized by protesters, the statue was torn down at night by the city government.
Wikipedia:
As mayor, Rizzo was a strong opponent of desegregation of Philadelphia’s schools, and prevented the construction of public housing in majority-white neighborhoods.[7] While running for a third term, Rizzo urged supporters to “Vote White”.[8][9] During his tenure as police commissioner and mayor, the Philadelphia police department engaged in patterns of police brutality, intimidation, coercion, and disregard for constitutional rights.[10][11] The patterns of police brutality were documented in a Pulitzer-Prize winning Philadelphia Inquirer series by William K. Marimow and Jon Neuman.[12]
@AesopFan
Re the Elk.
In Heart of Darkness there is a brief mention of a frigate firing broadsides into some African Jungle.
It won’t be long before we reach the Mao’s Mango stage of this present madness.
GIYF for the Cultural Revolution Mao Mango Cult. I kid you not. Almost as silly as the notion of Jurisprudence being a Wise Latina Thing.
The lead-in to the article says it was “adapted from” MacDonald’s contribution in a Hillsdale College on-line symposium. I don’t know how much wiggle room the term “adapted from” gives one, but there you are. I don’t recall when “the transcript” hit the public awareness, but the above symposium was on June 18th…
Along with the transcript of the interview, one should read the report from the autopsy. You can find it via Google (or duckduckgo if you prefer), its a Scribd document. It makes me wonder how the prosecution is going to frame its cases.
The coronavirus gave all those governors and mayors an opportunity to get in touch with their inner commissar. Inside of every politician there’s a dictator trying to get out.
In similarly distressing news, the WSJ is suffering an a cult Awokening or uprising parallel to that seen at the NYTimes, and Heather MacDonald’s crime piece is given up as an example of alleged failure of fact-checking of the opinion side. She cherry picked her facts, they claim.
So now the Leftist reporting side wants to “face check” (ie, censor) opinion content at the WSJ.
The report as posted at Instapundit:
GLEICHSCHALTUNG: WSJ Reporters Follow NYT, Tell Publisher To Crack Down On ‘Misinformation’ In Opinion Section. “A group of more than 280 WSJ reporters, editors, and other staff sent a letter to Latour on Tuesday calling for more separation between the paper’s news and opinion sections online. The letter also asked for more freedom for reporters to critique opinion articles online and said the opinion staff should be more restrictive in what it chooses to publish, according to WSJ which reported on the letter.”
In other words, the mostly under-40 reporting staff wants veto power over the opinion page.
Yup. Those young, freshly credentialed Leftist reporters are embarrassed by anything that’s wrongthink, and therefore want veto power to suppress deviance from the Party Line — just like at the NYTimes.
Which remind me of my new Tshirt: “Woke? Let’s kill the young!” I just never imagined it to include the “young” over 30.
Civil War is lqqking like cute optimism to me, just now.
It’s orangemanbad all the way down to rage and madness.
One more solitary cheer for Heather Mac Donald. She’s never written a better essay, and it’s spot on. What a convention of dunces is running the government.
I also thought this article was excellent (save for her likely compulsory ignorance of what went on with Floyd). One quote was rather salient to me today:
“And yet if you briskly approach someone on one of Manhattan’s broad and now empty sidewalks, the oncoming pedestrian may lunge into the street or press up against the closest wall in abject fear if you are not wearing a mask. You may be cursed at.”
Today, I was walking straight ahead on the sidewalk in my city, fully masked like a good citizen, but didn’t make any attempt to veer out of the way of another masked gentleman walking towards me. Mind you, had we continued on our parallel paths by each other, we would never have gotten closer than three or four feet apart. When we were about ten feet from each other, the man (who I would guess was in his 50’s) suddenly shrieked, threw himself on the ground and rolled into the street (where there were cars driving by), all the while cursing at me in between screaming the word, “Murder!”
Again, both of us were seemingly healthy looking adults wearing masks who were outdoors and not in danger of being in close proximity, yet this “adult” felt the need to frankly make a fool of himself and almost get run over by a passing car. To stoop to this level, one has to be completely misinformed and/or desperate to live out their own “zombie apocalypse wasteland” fantasy.
There is red-pilled, and then there is Red Bull pilled*.
At least one company is pushing back against the #BLM juggernaut.
*from InfoWars headline, but The Daily Mail has a more complete story.
Power Line conjures up the Ghost of Communism Past to face its nemesis, George Orwell. Check out the link to Lionel Trilling’s 1949 New Yorker review of “1984” to see just how prescient they both were. The only thing they missed, as some folks have said, is that the Left took the book, not as a warning, but as a user’s manual.
Good comments, as usual at PLB, but these are particularly apropos of the need to Make Orwell Fiction Again.
donaldw • 11 hours ago
Survey [on self-censorship] seems to prove the existence of the silent majority. When conservatives feel they can’t speak openly, deep down inside they think a bad word I can’t write here. It refers to an angry state. There is one place where they can speak their mind and get revenge: the voting booth. Another good sign for November. But, not getting cocky as they say.
Patrick • 11 hours ago
And yet 100% of strong liberals claim they live perilous lives in Donald Trump’s police state in which at any minute his stormtroopers might come crashing through their doors and arrest them for supporting civil rights. I guess 58% of them momentarily forgot the horror of their every waking moment when they responded to that poll.
Jack Hogan Patrick • 11 hours ago • edited
90+% of what the Marxist media has been spewing since Nov, 2016 has been pure propaganda.
According to the Marxist media the rioters in Portland are peaceful protesters. The Federal officers Trump has sent there to protect the federal courthouse are mercilessly beating these poor peaceful protesters almost to death for no reason at all.
According to the Marxist media vandalism, breaking into buildings, destruction of property, and arson are considered peaceful protesting.
How Orwellian is all that?
Severn • 11 hours ago
I’m not sure I’d call this “self-censorship”. You can be fired for saying the wrong thing, such as stating that Trump is the President of the US. You can be physically assaulted or even murdered for saying the wrong thing, such as that ‘all lives matter’.
That’s straight-up censorship, not self-censorship.
Clark Carter • 10 hours ago • edited
If a leftist is attacked, a well-oiled political machine jumps to the defense. If a conservative is attacked, a well-oiled fundraising machine wets its pants at the idea of going up against the Left and leaves the conservative with his rear hanging in the breeze. Until that changes, nothing else will.
When my father, a Democrat living in Connecticut, got a letter saying “I know where you live” and objecting to his support of Senator Thomas Dodd, Dodd’s office sent someone over to our house and the letter writer was found and warned, I think by the FBI (I was a child). When I got the same type of letter with a more specific threat after I wrote a letter to the State newspaper in Columbia, SC I contacted Rep. Wilson’s office (he of “you lie!” fame). I was told I should expect that if I expressed my political views publicly. Now I learn that conservatives are afraid to speak out. You’ll understand I am less than shocked.
Keefe Goldfisher • 10 hours ago • edited
Our family are Oregonians, at least 3 of us–in the countryside, and we certainly do self-censor. A dinner out and stroll through Portland’s dineries in summer must not be accompanied by political chatter too free that someone might overhear. Increasingly, our very small town, due to the wonderful Internet, features self-appointed town criers for Leftist positions on locally-hosted sites and through private social media that everyone is tagged to, like Facebook; so no escape in small towns either.
I actually live in fear of the day when they come hard for PowerlineBlog, a very safe perch to add commentary… so far, and only the 2nd online site where I might opine. Kamala Harris says that after Joe Biden wins they will find all the Trump supporters. Farms will not be exempt, I expect.
Beats Goldstein’s two minutes of hate all to hell.
Kenneth Felton • 10 hours ago
…
Our choice in November is crystal clear. If you want an Orwellian dystopia, vote Biden. If you want a chance at freedom, vote Trump. And if you can’t tell the difference, you ain’t American.
Shallow Mind • 10 hours ago
I wonder how much of the liberal/moderate group’s fear is of leftists vs fear of conservatives?
Clark Carter Shallow Mind • 8 hours ago
I’d think all of it.
The notion that low mortality of Covid19 means that it is mere
bad flu is wrong.
Unfortunately, this new communicable disease is neither one and done nor simply another flu.
T J:
Half of the patients in the study had severe COVID, meaning probably that they had come near death. The summary you posted doesn’t say how many had been on respirators, but since the echocardiograms were done in April, clearly these were people who had been treated early in the pandemic and probably had been on respirators, which can also cause damage. The patients were mostly old and mostly male, a group that has quite a bit of heart issues to begin with, and I don’t see that there was any baseline of “before” to compare them to, or even a matched set from a similar demographic that had not had COVID. So, what does it mean? In addition, only one in seven of the abnormalities found was considered severe. The subjects numbered 1216 and were from 69 countries. Therefore, the average number from each country was 17. How were these people selected for scans? They certainly were a selected group, and there’s no reason to suspect they were randomly selected; the study used the people who had had the test for some reason. Were they the ones having cardiac symptoms? Seems that way, if you look at the study. Had they ever had echocardiogams before, and were they normal prior to having COVID (no information on that, apparently). What’s more, if a person has flu or pneumonia that is bad enough to be hospitalized, they sometimes have cardiac issues (see this as well as this), so this is not just COVID that can cause cardiac problems.
I have only skimmed parts of the full study – it’s long – but it seems pretty clear to me that it has little relevance to the question of how common cardiac problems are post-COVID in the general population, how long they persist, how serious they are, and how severe cases of COVID compare to severe cases of flu or pneumonia in that respect.
I will add that over a quarter of the subjects had “suspected” COVID rather than confirmed COVID.
Neo – thanks for the analysis of the Covid study – if only we could have had YOU advising the President!
You cannot believe the public health bureaucrats. They are corrupt and dishonest. My favorite example of this is the EPA study on second hand smoke. The EPA claimed that exposure to second hand smoke caused 3000 cases of lung cancer a year. However, when you look at the study you find that the EPA didn’t measure any actual exposure to second hand smoke. People were asked about their exposure and a numerical value was assigned to their answer. This is simply an attempt to change qualitative data into quantitative data and it is fraudulent.
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Yep. What’s distressing is that there does not seem to be any revulsion against it. It’s as if people are perfectly insensitive to events.
I received MacDonald’s excellent essay last week, from Hillsdale College. Rarely, if ever, has an article so perfectly aligned with my own opinions on important issues. In completing paragraph after paragraph, I was invariably left thinking “yes, that’s exactly what I’ve been thinking and saying!”. Only, MacDonald puts it in a much more lucid and eloquent manner than I ever could.
As Griffin and I talked about on another thread, the culture now has ZERO tolerance of any risk whatsoever. The virus paranoia turns normal people into quaking milksops. That leads to the tolerance of government control of their lives. It’s Ben Franklin all over again, “those who would give up liberty for a bit of security will end up with neither.” Over 50% of the population is under mass hysteria and delusion.
Except for her inaccurate assessment of the death of Floyd (she has perhaps not read the transcript), Heather is, as always, eloquent and incisive in her defense of rational thinking founded upon facts and evidence. She is also correct that we, as a culture, are perched upon the brink of an abyss, yet it is not easy to imagine, in the current climate of ever-increasing “woke” insanity, how avoiding a catastrophic fall into that abyss might be accomplished.
j e:
I noticed that, too – her description of Floyd’s death indicates to me that she has not read the transcript. But then, I have a hunch that very very few people have.
physicsguy on July 23, 2020 at 3:20 pm said:
“the culture now has ZERO tolerance of any risk whatsoever….That leads to the tolerance of government control of their lives.”
* * *
But, of course, letting the government take control of your life is taking the biggest risk of all.
The advocates of “safety” over liberty are, of course, top-notch hypocrites, because they only safety they want to assure is their own — you, as Heather made clear, do not count.
This post seems to fit that topic.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/20/hilarious-viral-video-calls-out-hypocrisy-in-woke-movement/
Heather doesn’t really go into one of the instances of major government malfeasance, as it predates the recent malfeasance she concentrates on; Mollie Hemingway, who is also extremely “lucid and eloquent, ” runs with that ball.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/23/new-fbi-notes-re-debunk-major-nyt-story-highlight-media-collusion-to-produce-russia-hoax/
We’ve seen the breaking news reports on the Strzok memo definitively debunking the NYT hit job on the Russia dossier allegations, but Mollie creates a smoothly devastating narrative of the coup based on these recent revelations, that what we knew all along was true: the Democrats and media lied.
I’m only surprised that Strzok told the truth in his notes.
I’ve been reading MacDonald for years. She’s generally right on target.
Sorry to read her unfortunately knee-jerk remarks re Chauvin’s knee.
Also surprised to learn she lives in a 34 story apartment building. I would have guessed her to be more down to earth.
Let me chime in about MacDonald’s comments on Floyd’s death. They reflected my own at the time (one week ago) but I had not read the transcript either at that point. I am not sure when MacDonald wrote this essay, but I’m guessing it was before the transcript was released. It will be interesting to see if she offers any kind of revision in light of the transcript
The narrative over-rides the facts, every time.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/21/the-atlantic-finally-admits-its-police-abolition-piece-is-based-on-a-false-narrative/
Just by the way, since we’ve talked before about how the Left continuously tries to control narratives by altering language, notice how “abolitionist” is now used to mean “abolishing the police” rather than “abolishing slavery.”
It’s not an accident that so many of the statues and monuments being destroyed are about the side that WON the Civil War.
That last tactic is similar to the “sue and settle” scam run, most prominently, by the EPA and environmentalists acting in concert to get what the legislature wouldn’t give them.
The violence of the riots is to show us what happens when the threats are not enough by themselves.
We used to call that “mob rule” and sent the FBI and DOJ to shut it down.
Democrats even used pretend to support doing that.
Here are some of the surprising (not) ones that I’ve missed in the news, if they were ever even mentioned:
How anyone can think that they can have a zero risk life boggles my mind. Everyone born will be subjected to risks from the moment of birth. That’s life up to the moment of death. Get used to it or go through life cringing in fear. And please don’t vote if you believe a zero risk free life is possible.
@je It’s just as likely that she has read the transcript and is uttering the required formula. It’s only anonymous, offshore, self-employed/sufficient members of the Great Unwashed who can allow themselves the luxury of not self-abasing before the Magical Soul Folk.
A good article though, although notice that she doesn’t really get much beneath the surface. We all know that something has gone very wrong with our so-called Elites. Yes, the symptoms need to be enumerated, and she has covered some of them. But the real question is *what* has gone wrong? How? When? Why? Can we hope that there is any chance that our ‘Betters’ will reboot themselves? Do we need to guillotine all of them? Even if we do, how do we avoid the New Bosses becoming just the same as the Old Bosses?
Not hard to guess my inclinations, but would prefer that wiser heads in or out of the Academy made more of an effort to nut it all out so as to avoid a run on Tumbrils. Eric Weinstein and Peter Thiel have a good discussion or two on YouTube where they try to do this for the generalized malaise which now permeates research in many of the hard sciences. it can be done, just requires courage, independent wealth, and people with nothing to lose.
Guess I’ve just answered the question. Pretty much everyone with the necessary experience, insight, and status to be heard has too much to lose if they opine publicly on the Deeper Whys rather than the Whats.
@Parker
That’s what nearly three generations of practically zero childhood mortality and no mass conscription total wars will do for you. Vietnam doesn’t count as very few of the young or old squealing opinion leaders opining today failed to get academic deferments.
Add to that atomized nuclear families, now those being mostly exploded too.. so no grandparents dying at home after long or short illnesses. People just have no idea anymore.
Our political and thought leaders are mostly where they are because they have mastered the largely arbitrary and narrow selection criteria which they wrote themselves and continuously ‘refine’=narrow to yet further fit only themselves. This doesn’t bode well when they are faced with an ‘Outside Context Problem’ — i.e. actual Real Life impinging on their fantasy world.
We tried to pretend that life is a bowl of cherries. When this illusion breaks down and we’re left alone in the face of our fears and without God, well… you know the rest.
The second one here is pretty obvious, but I still don’t understand the first one.
There were lots of interesting and strange selections; I wonder if “someone” was keeping a list while waiting for the time to be right, or if it was just a lot of “it’s a statue it must be a bad guy” reactions during the riots.
And then there is guilt by association.
I can understand that the mob took issue with the well-known (although probably apocryphal) Texas slogan, and the early Rangers probably were as bad as the criminals they were chasing, but (I can say this as a born and bred Texan), most people today are actually not aware of the sometimes sordid history of the Rangers (which, by Leftist standards, means it doesn’t exist, right?), but do accept the statue’s symbolism (or did, until too many Californians moved in) — which is that law enforcers are equal to the task being set.
The Rangers were disbanded and rechartered several times, and the current organization has practically no correspondence with the older ones, which did somethings for which they can justly be censured.
Conflation, again; but don’t remind the Democrats they are the party of the KKK.
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/05/09/one-riot-one-ranger-the-texas-rangers-of-the-old-west-is-the-oldest-state-law-enforcement-agency-in-north-america/
Now, this one, I’m okay with — although the fact that somebody won a Pulitzer Prize writing about him doesn’t have much credibility anymore.
Wikipedia:
@AesopFan
Re the Elk.
In Heart of Darkness there is a brief mention of a frigate firing broadsides into some African Jungle.
It won’t be long before we reach the Mao’s Mango stage of this present madness.
GIYF for the Cultural Revolution Mao Mango Cult. I kid you not. Almost as silly as the notion of Jurisprudence being a Wise Latina Thing.
The lead-in to the article says it was “adapted from” MacDonald’s contribution in a Hillsdale College on-line symposium. I don’t know how much wiggle room the term “adapted from” gives one, but there you are. I don’t recall when “the transcript” hit the public awareness, but the above symposium was on June 18th…
Along with the transcript of the interview, one should read the report from the autopsy. You can find it via Google (or duckduckgo if you prefer), its a Scribd document. It makes me wonder how the prosecution is going to frame its cases.
The coronavirus gave all those governors and mayors an opportunity to get in touch with their inner commissar. Inside of every politician there’s a dictator trying to get out.
In similarly distressing news, the WSJ is suffering an a cult Awokening or uprising parallel to that seen at the NYTimes, and Heather MacDonald’s crime piece is given up as an example of alleged failure of fact-checking of the opinion side. She cherry picked her facts, they claim.
So now the Leftist reporting side wants to “face check” (ie, censor) opinion content at the WSJ.
The report as posted at Instapundit:
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/389039/#respond
Yup. Those young, freshly credentialed Leftist reporters are embarrassed by anything that’s wrongthink, and therefore want veto power to suppress deviance from the Party Line — just like at the NYTimes.
Which remind me of my new Tshirt: “Woke? Let’s kill the young!” I just never imagined it to include the “young” over 30.
Civil War is lqqking like cute optimism to me, just now.
It’s orangemanbad all the way down to rage and madness.
One more solitary cheer for Heather Mac Donald. She’s never written a better essay, and it’s spot on. What a convention of dunces is running the government.
I also thought this article was excellent (save for her likely compulsory ignorance of what went on with Floyd). One quote was rather salient to me today:
“And yet if you briskly approach someone on one of Manhattan’s broad and now empty sidewalks, the oncoming pedestrian may lunge into the street or press up against the closest wall in abject fear if you are not wearing a mask. You may be cursed at.”
Today, I was walking straight ahead on the sidewalk in my city, fully masked like a good citizen, but didn’t make any attempt to veer out of the way of another masked gentleman walking towards me. Mind you, had we continued on our parallel paths by each other, we would never have gotten closer than three or four feet apart. When we were about ten feet from each other, the man (who I would guess was in his 50’s) suddenly shrieked, threw himself on the ground and rolled into the street (where there were cars driving by), all the while cursing at me in between screaming the word, “Murder!”
Again, both of us were seemingly healthy looking adults wearing masks who were outdoors and not in danger of being in close proximity, yet this “adult” felt the need to frankly make a fool of himself and almost get run over by a passing car. To stoop to this level, one has to be completely misinformed and/or desperate to live out their own “zombie apocalypse wasteland” fantasy.
There is red-pilled, and then there is Red Bull pilled*.
At least one company is pushing back against the #BLM juggernaut.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8527767/Red-Bull-fires-executives-pushed-diversity-inclusion.html
*from InfoWars headline, but The Daily Mail has a more complete story.
Power Line conjures up the Ghost of Communism Past to face its nemesis, George Orwell. Check out the link to Lionel Trilling’s 1949 New Yorker review of “1984” to see just how prescient they both were. The only thing they missed, as some folks have said, is that the Left took the book, not as a warning, but as a user’s manual.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/07/our-orwellian-nightmare-come-true.php
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1949/06/18/orwell-on-the-future
Good comments, as usual at PLB, but these are particularly apropos of the need to Make Orwell Fiction Again.
The notion that low mortality of Covid19 means that it is mere
bad flu is wrong.
Morbidity is far, far higher than any flu the living have had.
A new international study finds half of hospital CV19 patients have heart damage from this social disease.
https://www.newsweek.com/scans-reveal-heart-damage-over-half-covid-19-patients-study-1517293
Other studies has shown one third of patients have kidney damage. Or brain damage, liver damage, testicular damage.
Very possibly life-long. We don’t know. And even the asymptomatic can be afflicted by lung damage.
Dr Chris Martensen (pathology) runs through the evidence for morbidity among Covid19 survivors at minute 15, here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfDpuouYUFc
Unfortunately, this new communicable disease is neither one and done nor simply another flu.
T J:
Half of the patients in the study had severe COVID, meaning probably that they had come near death. The summary you posted doesn’t say how many had been on respirators, but since the echocardiograms were done in April, clearly these were people who had been treated early in the pandemic and probably had been on respirators, which can also cause damage. The patients were mostly old and mostly male, a group that has quite a bit of heart issues to begin with, and I don’t see that there was any baseline of “before” to compare them to, or even a matched set from a similar demographic that had not had COVID. So, what does it mean? In addition, only one in seven of the abnormalities found was considered severe. The subjects numbered 1216 and were from 69 countries. Therefore, the average number from each country was 17. How were these people selected for scans? They certainly were a selected group, and there’s no reason to suspect they were randomly selected; the study used the people who had had the test for some reason. Were they the ones having cardiac symptoms? Seems that way, if you look at the study. Had they ever had echocardiogams before, and were they normal prior to having COVID (no information on that, apparently). What’s more, if a person has flu or pneumonia that is bad enough to be hospitalized, they sometimes have cardiac issues (see this as well as this), so this is not just COVID that can cause cardiac problems.
I have only skimmed parts of the full study – it’s long – but it seems pretty clear to me that it has little relevance to the question of how common cardiac problems are post-COVID in the general population, how long they persist, how serious they are, and how severe cases of COVID compare to severe cases of flu or pneumonia in that respect.
I will add that over a quarter of the subjects had “suspected” COVID rather than confirmed COVID.
Neo – thanks for the analysis of the Covid study – if only we could have had YOU advising the President!
You cannot believe the public health bureaucrats. They are corrupt and dishonest. My favorite example of this is the EPA study on second hand smoke. The EPA claimed that exposure to second hand smoke caused 3000 cases of lung cancer a year. However, when you look at the study you find that the EPA didn’t measure any actual exposure to second hand smoke. People were asked about their exposure and a numerical value was assigned to their answer. This is simply an attempt to change qualitative data into quantitative data and it is fraudulent.