Because this is about a half hour long, I’ve cued it up to only show a portion I think is especially interesting. But of course, you can watch the whole thing at YouTube if you’d like:
Johns Hopkins economists says lockdowns are pretty much worthless
Now they tell us.
Actually, during these COVID years I’ve read several earlier studies questioning the effectiveness of lockdowns. I don’t recall where or when, but it’s been ongoing. However, I had to seek them out; I don’t recall them being featured in the MSM, which was pushing a different line.
Now we have this from some Johns Hopkins economists. It’s very long and complex, but here are some conclusions:
Overall, we conclude that lockdowns are not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic, at least not during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results are in line with the World Health Organization Writing Group (2006), who state, “Reports from the 1918 influenza pandemic indicate that social-distancing measures did not stop or appear to dramatically reduce transmission…
In Edmonton, Canada, isolation and quarantine were instituted; public meetings were banned; schools, churches, colleges, theaters, and other public gathering places were closed; and business hours were restricted without obvious impact on the epidemic.” Our findings are also in line with Allen’s (2021) conclusion: “The most recent research has shown that lockdowns have had, at best, a marginal effect on the number of Covid 19 deaths.”…
Mandates only regulate a fraction of our potential contagious contacts and can hardly regulate nor enforce handwashing, coughing etiquette, distancing in supermarkets, etc. Countries like Denmark, Finland, and Norway that realized success in keeping COVID-19 mortality rates relatively low allowed people to go to work, use public transport, and meet privately at home during the first lockdown. In these countries, there were ample opportunities to legally meet with others.
This didn’t really need a study to discover, did it? A study can certainly validate what basically are commonsense notions of what’s reasonable and what’s not, and except for those first two “flatten the curve” weeks right at the beginning, it was obvious that the costs of lockdowns (political, economic, social, and even health-related) were going to probably be at least as bad as the benefits. But for whatever reason, lockdowns were preferred by the people in charge, perhaps because they liked being little dictators, perhaps because they believed it would help, perhaps because they wanted to hurt Trump, or perhaps some combination of such factors.
The article also says:
[Lockdowns] have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy. These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best. Such a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.
That’s a pretty strong statement, isn’t it? I wonder whether the left (which has now become the entire Democratic Party) will decide to follow the science next time, or even now. I really think it depends on who’s in charge. If it’s Republicans, and if crashing the economy while making people miserable can be blamed on those Republicans, then the left will scream “Lockdown! LOCKDOWN!!” once again. Right now there’s a push to relax things, but I believe that’s because the Democrats are in charge and at this point they feel they have been hurt politically by the continuation of the restrictions.
When Trump was president there was no downside whatsoever to scaring people out of their wits (literally), because all of the bad stuff could be blamed on Trump. Which was always absurd, because it became clear early on that countries generally had a trajectory that wasn’t all that related to government crackdowns on liberty. But I think the left’s approach worked politically anyway and damaged Trump. Now, however, it’s started to backfire on them.
[ADDENDUM: I’ve only read a portion of this article, but it seems relevant and worth reading.]
Taking time
I often decide on a topic for a post that I think I’ll be able to toss off quickly, and find that it grows and grows and grows. Once I’ve written some of it, though, I figure that I put in all that effort already and may as well stick it out to the end (sometimes the bitter end).
That happened today with the post right below this one. You’d think after all these years (about seventeen!!) I’d be better at estimating these things. But no.
Recently I did manage to winnow my 1,000+ drafts down to about 650. I got rid of the more ancient topical ones and saved what are known as evergreens. Most of the the drafts are unfinished. Some were abandoned because they became too complex and lengthy and I couldn’t do justice to them (see a theme emerging here?). In some, I lost the thread somehow and they were unsatisfying. And some I save for a rainy day.
Of course, today it’s raining…
I can’t say “it’s the springtime of my life” – but hey, why not have a musical interlude?:
Racism, that difficult word
Commenter “Ray”asks:
The Oxford English Dictionary dates the word racism to 1935, and defines it thus: “The theory that distinctive human characteristics and abilities are determined by race.” Unless you believe the blank slate theory, what’s to disagree with?
One can agree or disagree with the statement on one or both of two levels. The first is whether the definition is correct in terms of the word “racism,” and the second is whether the statement itself is true. I’m not sure which Ray meant, but no matter. I’ll tackle them both.
I wasn’t around back then, but I was around in the 50s and I was among people who had been adults in the 1930s, and what they meant by the word was usually something like this: “the idea that distinctive human characteristics and abilities are determined by race, are almost certainly unchangeable, and that therefore certain races are inferior and should be treated as such.” Although the definition included racist thinking, it was racist action that was considered even more important to the definition.
The definition of the word has changed. When did that happen? I’m not exactly sure, but certainly by the 80s and 90s it was starting, and in the 21st Century it has come into full flower. The new definition went through stages. I’d characterize the starting point as “attributing bad qualities to any race (or any person because of his or her race), or speaking that way, or acting in a way that discriminates against anyone because of race.” It was inclusive and applied to all races.
Then it became something like this: “attributing bad qualities to black people, Hispanic people, Asian people, or any other minority, because of race.” Actions were even worse than thought, but thought was just about as bad, and “actions” were more broadly defined than before. They included the use of ertain words and expressions that hadn’t previously been seen as racist (see for example the “water buffalo” incident, circa 1993).
It was also at that point that CRT began to spread in the guise of its original law school manifestation, Critical Legal Theory. The history of CLT – and of how it came to morph into CRT – is too lengthy and complex for this post, but you can find various discussions online. The point we have now reached is that it has become mainstream and has spilled over even into elementary education and the workplace, and this has been building for quite some time.
That current CRT-based definition of racism is in fact a profoundly racist one. In other words, it defines the racist by the race of the person, with white people inherently racist and “people of color” by definition non-racist. This is considered true because of systemic societal reasons, a poorly-defined (and thus very difficult to refute in any rational way) word. All differences in achievement between races, whether personal or average differences, that put the designated minority-victim groups at a disadvantage, are ascribed to the influence of racism rather than having any reality in characteristics of people in those groups. For some, racism is an immutable characteristic of white people, and others seem to think it’s society that is set up this way and if society were utterly changed and improved according to their dictates then racism might someday cease in the distant future.
This is why arguments such as “what about the NBA, where most of the players are black? Isn’t that racist?” don’t work. Racism only works in once direction, according to this definition.
Now we come to the second question that started this post: is it true that “distinctive human characteristics and abilities are determined by race”? My answer is “no,” and my reason has to do with the definition of the word “determined.”
There is no question that human groups, even groups within groups such as ethnicities or place of national origin within groups, differ on average on a host of characteristics. The overlap is huge, but the average differences are there and there are differences in the tails as well. Thomas Sowell has done an enormous amount of work documenting this and explaining its meaning, and I refer you to his book Race and Culture or any number of his videos and article on the subject. But suffice to say that races definitely exhibit different physical traits (again, on average) and a host of other different traits, and such differences are also found within races by country or place of origin.
“Race” is defined by a spectrum of certain physical traits – for example, skin color. But race is not solely determined by any one trait; it’s a grouping of traits. For example, you can find very light-skinned people defined as black, and very dark-skinned people (from some Indian ethnic groups, for example) are not considered to be of the same race as black people from Africa. It’s a constellation of average physical traits that makes up a race, and those races were generally defined quite a few years ago, although there’s been a certain level of change since.
The bottom line is that the racial designations don’t determine the average differences one finds in the “human characteristics and abilities” among the races. Such differences exist among all groups, including differences within each group such as the average differences between white people of different national origins. People differ for a host of reasons we have yet to fully tease out, and one would never expect those differences to completely even out among groups to produce a total homogeneity. But the differences are not determined by racial classifications; they are exhibited by the different groups (including racial groups), and they are averages.
The differences are also especially pronounced at the tails, as one might expect. That’s why you get all those black NBA stars, and all those Jewish Nobel winners. Is it “racist” of me to say so? I think it’s merely acknowledging what is observed. That doesn’t mean that one doesn’t have a genius such as Thomas Sowell among black people. And if you think there are no Jewish basketball players – well, there sure aren’t a lot, but there are some (see also this).
The definition of racism has therefore expanded way beyond its original meaning, because old-school racists are just not all that common today compared to yesteryear, although they certainly exist. Because accusing people – and groups – of racism has become so very politically (and sometimes individually) useful, it had to be redefined in a broader way, and it had to become divorced from discriminatory actions since such actions became more and more uncommon if they continued to be defined in the old way.
The question that seems to obsess many people is whether these average differences among groups are mostly cultural or mostly genetic. That’s a question that people argue about vociferously, and I’m not going to take it up here. I’ve read tons of material on the subject, including The Bell Curve and much of Sowell, and I believe the differences have a small and poorly-understood genetic component and a huge and poorly-understood cultural one.
I also approach each person not as a member of an ethnic or racial group but as an individual capable of good or bad and usually a combination of both. I realize that’s an old-fashioned notion. But I think it’s the right one.
Open thread 2/3/22
Drat: the NY Times has purchased Wordle
Until a few days ago I’d never heard of Wordle. That shows you how far out of the loop I am, because it’s been popular online for a few months now.
A friend mentioned it to me a few days ago, and I tried it and liked it. One of its advantages is that you can only play one time a day, so that acts as a built-in check against obsessive time-wasting with the game.
But no sooner had I started than the Times seems intent to ruin things [emphasis added]:
The game was purchased by The New York Times Company in January 2022 for an undisclosed seven-figure sum, with plans to initially keep it free for all players.
How long will that initial period last? I have no intention of paying to subscribe to the Times in order to play Wordle.
However, I realized the very first time I played that this was just an internet and solitary version of an old old favorite of mine called Jotto. I played it as a child, and it is just about exactly the same except of course no computers were involved, and it was interactive with at least two people playing against each other.
And I think that difference is emblematic of the social and entertainment changes we’ve undergone since the 1950s, when Jotto first started and when I first began to play it. I probably stopped playing it in the early 60s, but I seem to recall that when my son was young we used to make up our own Jotto sheets and play it together as a family.
I had forgotten about Jotto until Wordle came along. But it was a fun game. If you played it for years, as I did, it will also help you with Wordle.
Speaking of which, here’s a method that supposedly would help you play Wordle even without accessing the Times.
Blacks cannot be racist, and whites cannot not be racist
I think that’s how the narrative goes, right?
I seem to remember hearing as much way way back, many decades ago. Therefore I’m with Christopher Rufo when he tweets that “Whoopi Goldberg said on television what critical race theorists have been saying in print for years.”
Of course. Not everyone was paying attention to this twaddle, but it’s been out there attempting to warp minds for decades. There’s this summary of the train of thought, for example:
. Over the past twenty years or so, in American scholarship on racism, with ever growing intensity, it has become fashionable and even mainstream to assert that Jews are white, that is, that they belong to the dominant majority. This means, that as a collective, due to embedded racialized structures in society, they benefit from their dominant position and are complicit in oppression…
Critical Whiteness Studies have been promoted as an activist scholarship; according to its self-definition, its task is questioning, and de-essentializing whiteness. It seeks to question whiteness being the default color, as “neutral”, contrasted to people of color. The intention, according to Ruth Frankenberg, is to “displace the ‘unmarked marker’ status of whiteness, a continued inability to ‘color’ the seemingly transparent white positionings.” Even in previous critical analyses of racism, she claims, “whiteness remains unexamined—unqualified, essential, homogenous, seemingly self-fashioned, and apparently unmarked by history and practice” (Frankenberg 1997, p. 1).
It wasn’t enough to talk about black people’s oppression. White people – all of them, every single one – had to be demonized. And it couldn’t matter that some individual white people had even joined in the historic struggle against discrimination of blacks. They were oppressors too.
The root of much of this is the Marxist idea that people are marked solely by their membership in certain groups, that the individual actions don’t really matter to that designation because it’s all about groups, and that there is always an oppressor group (or groups) and always a victim group (or groups), and that the former are bad and the latter good no matter what they actually do, either as individuals or together. Nowadays instead of class those groups are racial for the most part, with all “whites” on one side and all “people of color” on another. There are hierarchies within each broad category, of course, and there are also some sexual categories (women in general, and gay or trans versus straight) as well. But race reigns supreme.
If the American people don’t buy this, too bad. It’s what Democrats wish to put into practice, both in thought and deed. Pick a SCOTUS justice for her fit into one – preferably two or more – of the preferred categories. Are too many “people of color” being arrested and put in prison? Change the laws so more are released. Are too many black children doing poorly in school? Blame evil “meritocracy.”
And on and on and on.
Back when I first heard about the first faint glimmerings of this sort of thing it wasn’t so very widespread. Now it’s the default position of most of the talking heads and all of the gazillions of people who have read (and taken to heart) those “anti-racism” books or taken courses in learning how white people should say continual mea culpas.
As has been pointed out many times before (after all, it is Groundhog Day), this has now leaped from academia to mainstream. And yet, somehow, so far Americans don’t think much of it when it’s put into practice:
Per ABC News: “Just over three-quarters of Americans (76 percent) want Biden to consider ‘all possible nominees.’ Just 23% want him to automatically follow through on his history-making commitment that the White House seems keen on seeing through.”…
The poll also found that no demographic – not even racial minorities or Democrats – want Biden to consider only black women for the vacancy.
I think that last sentence in the quote is especially important. Why is this being rejected? Perhaps it’s because most people still retain common sense. Or perhaps we can sum it up with that old thought: it’s profoundly un-American to make decisions on such a basis.
Here we go again: it’s Groundhog Day!
[NOTE: What could be more appropriate on Groundhog Day than a repeat of an old essay about the movie? The film is a huge personal favorite of mine: very funny, mysterious, and touching. This essay has been slightly edited, of course, because in the spirit of the movie we try to get it better each time.]
In discussions of the film “Groundhog Day” on this blog, I’ve noticed a couple of people questioning why the Bill Murray character would find Andie McDowell’s Rita deserving of all those years of his devotion and energy. For example, “…[W]hat, exactly, made the lovely but, let’s face it, vapid Rita worthy of Phil’s centuries of effort?”
My answer is that he discovered love. Yes, Rita was beautiful, and a good human being with many excellent qualities. But of course she was imperfect, and over the years (centuries? millennia?) Phil no doubt had learned just about all of her flaws. Still, it didn’t matter to him because it wasn’t about Rita, exactly—it was about the fact that, somewhere along the long path of his transformation to wisdom, he finally understood that every person in town, including the ones he couldn’t tolerate at the beginning, was worthy of his attention—and of something one might call “love,” in its broadest sense.
And somewhere along the way to that knowledge, Phil’s efforts in “Groundhog Day” stopped being about getting into Rita’s pants or even getting her to love him, although that certainly took up a larger percentage of his time (and the movie’s length) than some of his other pursuits. But he probably spent at least as much time learning to play the piano (a form of love, too), or to carve ice sculptures, or to become skilled at some of the more mindless and meaningless tricks he mastered, or learning details about the life of almost everyone in town.
Was the old derelict, whose life Phil tried to save over and over and over, “worth it” either? Such questions no longer mattered to him, because the gesture and the effort were worth it, and every life was worth something to him.
Rita, of course, had always been physically attractive to Phil. But as the film (and time) wore on—and on—she became the object not just of eros, but of agape as well. By the end of the movie, I think that Phil had come to appreciate the idea of the theme and variations versus the symphony, which I wrote about here:
And, although walking repeatedly in the same place is very different from traveling around the world and walking in a new place every day, is it really so very much less varied? It depends on the eye and mind of the beholder; the expansive imagination can find variety in small differences, and the stunted one can find boredom in vast changes.
And I submit that love is like that, too. Some people spend a lifetime with one love, one spouse; plumbing the depths of that single human being and what it means to be in an intimate relationship with him/her. Others go from relationship to relationship, never alighting with one person for very long, craving the variety.
It would seem on the face of it that the second type of person has the more exciting time in love. But it ain’t necessarily so. Either of these experiences can be boring or fascinating, depending on what we bring to it: the first experience is a universe in depth, and the second a universe in breadth. But both can contain multitudes.
Towards the end of the film (SPOILER ALERT), Phil makes it clear that he has given up the pursuit of Rita entirely, and immersed himself in his love for her instead. Is this what finally frees him?
[NOTE: Here’s another essay on the film that’s worth reading.]
Open thread 2/2/22
“Mostly peaceful” versus “non-violent dangers.”
Orwell would take note of the Canadian left’s reaction to the trucker convoy:
You’ve heard of mostly peaceful violence and fiery but mostly peaceful protests.
Well, that’s how the leftwing propaganda fiction corporations describe violent thuggish gang-warfare assemblages they approve of.
But how do they describe completely, 100% orderly, violence-free protests they disapprove of?
In other words, some people have been stirred to fearfulness by left-wing propaganda about the trucker convoy, even though that demonstration hasn’t just been mostly peaceful – it’s been totally peaceful so far.
[NOTE: See also this for a discussion of the US DOJ’s differential treatment of the BLM/Antifa protestors of 2020 versus the January 6th protestors.]
A class war has erupted in the US and many Western nations – but it’s not the one the left was traditionally expecting
I think it’s hilarious that the socialists are furious about the workers of the world uniting.@SohrabAhmari
— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) January 31, 2022
Then again, maybe the left did expect this. Maybe they changed their earlier expectations a while back. They certainly act as though they did. They gave up on the “little people” – the common man or woman, the middle class and even to some extent the lower middle class working people who care about their communities, many of whom are members of minority groups that traditionally vote for Democrats.
Maybe the Democrats figured no matter how far to the left they themselves moved, and no matter how much their policies trashed the lives of those people and those neighborhoods, minorities would still vote for them because they had fully bought the myth of the racist Republicans who would – as Joe Biden so memorably said back in 2012 – “put y’all back in chains.”
Maybe the Democrats were willing to lose the white working class because they felt they had a majority coalition of the rich white virtue-signaling liberals, the readers of the MSM (through which Democrats controlled that all-important “narrative” through which they felt they could create people’s reality), and large ethnic groups such as black people (poor or rich or in-between) and Hispanics. A combination of those groups would carry them through without the working class white people they despised anyway.
And so – among other things – the left angered the working class people who had to go to work in masks to keep the country functioning, while the leftist elites could work from home or flout their own rules. They ordered people to get vaccinated when some people were afraid or distrustful of vaccinations and the health agencies such as the CDC that had previously lied to them (and to all of us).
This isn’t just true in the US. It’s certainly true in Canada – as the truck convoy indicates. And it might be spreading (see this and this).
The left thought general strikes and demonstrations were things that they owned. How dare the right do this. How dare they!
[NOTE: See also this by Glenn Reynolds from 2019.]
Whoopi Goldberg, the Nazis, and those white Jews
Let me start by asking whether anyone has accused Whoopi Goldberg of cultural appropriation regarding her stage name? Not only was her birth name Caryn Johnson, but her Jewish last name – and of course her silly first name – were adopted as jokes.
Let me add that I happen to think Goldberg was incredibly good in the movie “Ghost,” not just very funny but also very touching towards the end. And her early comedy routines, which I saw during the 80s in this one-woman show, were good. I don’t know what I’d think of the video now, but I certainly liked it then.
But these days Whoopi is primarily one of the members of “The View,” a talk show I don’t watch but which has an enormous and influential following. Every excerpt I’ve seen from it is either inane or actively offensive or both, and Whoopi is by no means the worst offender there. But recently she made headlines with some comments about the Holocaust that got her into a bit of trouble that I predict will blow over.
I don’t want this post to get unwieldy by focusing on Goldberg herself, so I’m not going to go into everything she said and what was wrong with it. You can take a look at Andrea Widburg’s discussion here for that.
The gist of Goldberg’s remarks was that the Holocaust wasn’t about race, it was about “man’s inhumanity to man,” and Jews are white so this was “white people doing it to white people.” In addition, she doesn’t seem to think there was anything unique about the Holocaust: “Let’s talk about it for what it is. It’s how people treat each other. It’s a problem. It doesn’t matter if you are black or white because black, white, Jews, Italians, everybody eats each other.”
So according to Whoopi the Nazis, with their elaborate hierarchy of racial categories that involved the Germans at the pinnacle (as a race – in fact, the master race) were doing kind of like what Jews do to Italians and Italians do to Jews every day. Leaving aside how reductionist and profoundly ignorant that is, doesn’t the perspective of the Nazis themselves matter? Because that perspective was about as explicitly racist as they come:
In his speeches and writings, Hitler spread his beliefs in racial “purity” and in the superiority of the “Germanic race”—what he called an Aryan “master race.” He pronounced that his race must remain pure in order to one day take over the world. For Hitler, the ideal “Aryan” was blond, blue-eyed, and tall.
When Hitler and the Nazis came to power, these beliefs became the government ideology and were spread in publicly displayed posters, on the radio, in movies, in classrooms, and in newspapers. The Nazis began to put their ideology into practice with the support of German scientists who believed that the human race could be improved by limiting the reproduction of people considered “inferior.”
Later it was expanded into not just persecuting Jews, but killing them and wiping the entire group off the face of the earth based on their ethnic identity.
But the Jews were merely the lowest in the Nazis’ hierarchy, which made them the Nazis’ highest priority. The plans of the Nazis, once they conquered Europe, were to eliminate other groups in a stepped program according to national origins. Black people were not their concern for the simple reason that, at that time, Europe had very few black people (but gypsies were certainly among the Nazis’ targets). Whether you call these groups ethnic groups (most have distinct DNA profiles, by the way) or races does not matter. The point is that it mattered very very much to the Nazis, in fact it was of paramount importance.
Read about the Nazis’ Generalplan Ost to learn what the Nazis had in mind for their fellow white people in eastern Europe:
Generalplan Ost was a secret Nazi German plan for the colonization of Central and Eastern Europe. Implementing it would have necessitated genocide and ethnic cleansing on a vast scale to be undertaken in the European territories occupied by Germany during World War II. It would have included the extermination of most Slavic people in Europe. The plan, prepared in the years 1939–1942, was part of Adolf Hitler’s and the Nazi movement’s Lebensraum policy and a fulfilment of the Drang nach Osten (English: Drive towards the East) ideology of German expansion to the east, both of them part of the larger plan to establish the New Order…
The Generalplan Ost proposal offered various percentages of the conquered or colonized people who were targeted for removal and physical destruction; the net effect of which would be to ensure that the conquered territories would become German. In ten years’ time, the plan effectively called for the extermination, expulsion, Germanization or enslavement of most or all East and West Slavs living behind the front lines of East-Central Europe…After the war, under the “Big Plan”, more people in Eastern Europe were to be affected. In their place up to 10 million Germans would be settled in an extended “living space” (Lebensraum). Because the number of Germans appeared to be insufficient to populate the vast territories of Central and Eastern Europe, the peoples judged to lie racially between the Germans and the Russians (Mittelschicht), namely, Latvians and even Czechs, were also supposed to be resettled there….
According to Nazi intentions, attempts at Germanization were to be undertaken only in the case of those foreign nationals in Central and Eastern Europe who could be considered a desirable element for the future Reich from the point of view of its racial theories. The Plan stipulated that there were to be different methods of treating particular nations and even particular groups within them. Attempts were even made to establish the basic criteria to be used in determining whether a given group lent itself to Germanization. These criteria were to be applied more liberally in the case of nations whose racial material (rassische Substanz) and level of cultural development made them more suitable than others for Germanization. The Plan considered that there were a large number of such elements among the Baltic states. Erhard Wetzel felt that thought should be given to a possible Germanization of the whole of the Estonian nation and a sizable proportion of the Latvians. On the other hand, the Lithuanians seemed less desirable since “they contained too great an admixture of Slav blood.” Himmler’s view was that “almost the whole of the Lithuanian nation would have to be deported to the East”. Himmler is described to even have had a positive attitude towards germanizing the populations of Alsace-Lorraine, border areas of Slovenia (Upper Carniola and Southern Styria) and Bohemia-Moravia, but not Lithuania, claiming its population to be of “inferior race”.
The Nazis were absolutely obsessed with race, and they divided white people up into many different races.
But it was the Jews who were marked for utter elimination, and this was so important to the Nazis that – unlike with Generalplan Ost – it couldn’t wait till the war was over. It had to done at the same time, and resources were diverted to that endeavor. What’s more, it came rather close to succeeding in making Europe Judenfrei.
So in that sense the Jews were not planned to be utterly unique in terms of being destroyed, just the first and the most urgently and thoroughly destroyed.
But ultimately what Whoopi Goldberg was talking about involves today, as well, and it has to do with “whiteness.” I wrote a post on the subject in October of 2020 entitled, “The new whiteness of the Jews.” In it, I said:
Jews can be all things to all Jew-haters: outsider “people of color” when necessary, insider privileged whites when necessary. But the common denominator in these categorizations is that the hate against them does not die. It just takes on different guises. And of course, Farrakhan has always been a spreader of the poison.
I also quoted this:
On October 17th, the New York Times published an op-ed celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Million Man March that neglected to mention the anti-Semitic history of its organizer, Louis Farrakhan. In response, former Times editorial board member Bari Weiss tweeted that the institution had adopted “a worldview in which Jew hate does not count.” The author of the Times op-ed, Howard University professor Natalie Hopkinson, replied that “ppl who have become white”—that is, Jews like Weiss—“should not be lecturing Black ppl about oppression.”
“People who have become white, says Howard University professor Hopkinon. This toxic drivel is part of what is taught to young people today, and just because it’s drivel doesn’t mean it’s not toxic.
[NOTE: Here’s a post I wrote in 2005 on whether the Holocaust was unique.]
[ADDENDUM: I now see that someone else has mentioned cultural appropriation by Whoopi.]