GoFundMe tells the Canadian Freedom Convoy and its donors to GoFundThemselves
Over the past weeks, the GoFundMe account supporting the Canadian Freedom Convoy has raised over $9 million from small donors. Today, at the request of the Trudeau dictatorship, that account was shut down. To add injury to insult, GoFundMe has decided to repurpose the donations, sending them to a charity that has the approval of that corporation rather than returning them to the donors. You have to submit an “application” to get your money back. Here is GoFundMe’s statement:
“Following a review of relevant facts and multiple discussions with local law enforcement and city officials, this fundraiser is now in violation of our Terms of Service (Term 8, which prohibits the promotion of violence and harassment) and has been removed from the platform.”
Violence? I’ve read a lot about this demonstration, and it’s been remarkably peaceful, not just “mostly peaceful” like the Antifa riots. Then again, since “words are violence” if they’re the wrong words coming from the wrong side, and violence isn’t violence if it comes from the right side (which would be the left), I guess the truckers are inherently violent just by having a demonstration at all.
And by scaring poor Prime Minister Trudeau, who felt he had to flee Ottawa and go into hiding due to fear. Or due to pretend fear; I really don’t know which, but I think he really is afraid of some sort of general strike starting.
I can just imagine the pressure that was put on GoFundMe to do this. Then again, they’re the same folks who did the following:
…GoFundMe deactivated the account raising money for Kyle Rittenhouse’s legal defense while leaving in place the funding effort to bail out BLM rioters. They have an active fundraising page for Gaige “Lefty” Grosskreutz, a felon who brandished a firearm at Rittenhouse. Don’t use these people. Ever. Don’t contribute to fundraisers on their site and let the organizers know why.
Ah, but consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. And the minds of the people who run GoFundMe are anything but small.
What was that definition of “fascism” in the economic sense again?:
Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it.
Historical fascism actually went further than that in terms of explicit government control of private industry. But the underpinnings – that private companies do the government’s bidding while preserving the appearance of autonomy – are now present in Canada.
And not only in Canada. The US isn’t far behind.
COVID: hope and fear
Commenter “Rufus T. Firefly” writes:
I’ll admit I had a bias. My bias was hoping that COVID-19 would not be as terminal as predicted. I followed any reasonable, valid sign that gave credence to that hope. And, most all of us eventually saw it would be nowhere near as fatal as WHO and CDC predictions. Thank goodness!!
But people like the woman you have been debating with have the opposite hope. She wants it to be deadly. She wants people to remain frightened, and masked. She latches onto any sign she can find that it is worse than it is.
What does that say about who she is? Yikes!
I have a few ideas on that – not about this particular woman being discussed, but about the phenomenon in general. There’s always the “she’s just evil and wishing people harm” spin, but let’s leave that aside and imagine other possibilities.
First we have the traditional split between the optimist and the pessimist. Rufus is hoping for the best and the other person is fearing the worst. One can entertain both thoughts simultaneously, of course, but in most people one side or the other tends to dominate. The reasons are hard to know, but perhaps it has something to do with the atmosphere of the person’s family of origin, or even some genetic tendency towards joy versus depression.
Some people even try to ward off the worst by imagining the worst. Sometimes it’s even a learned cultural/ethnic thing: “Don’t be too optimistic and you won’t be disappointed – don’t tempt fate!”
Then there’s the phenomenon of not wanting to be proven wrong. If one has cast one’s lot early on with the doom and gloom crowd – on COVID or anything else – some people will be happy to hear that it’s not as bad as all that and will eagerly accept the more hopeful news. Others will be reluctant to admit they were wrong and/or reluctant to give up a point of view for which they’ve read plenty of evidence already. This works both ways at times; in other words, the formerly optimistic can be loath to give that perspective up in the face of data that points to a more negative situation.
Another problem that sometimes occurs is that many people are bad at math and/or science and have no idea how to evaluate data. Granted, most studies do require a certain amount of math to understand, and a grounding in the scientific method as well. If a person doesn’t have a halfway decent background in those things, it’s much easier to be swayed by emotion and talk on social media, the MSM, or elsewhere.
Is it the case that such people “want it to be deadly”? I assume there are some such people. But I think they’re very much a minority of the group that we’re talking about. People who work in the MSM, however, have reason to want it to be deadly – maybe not consciously and certainly not to anyone they know personally. But if it bleeds, it leads.. That’s been true of the news business for a long long time.
Now that the Democrats are being hurt by it, the MSM knows it’s time to let up a little. But it’s a habit that’s hard to break.
[ADDENDUM: Several people in the comments brought up the idea that some people just want to be afraid – such as, for example, people who like to watch scary movies.
I don’t think people who like to watch scary movies or ride on scary rides want to be afraid. Not actually afraid. At least, not most of them. They want the frisson of fear; a soupçon of fear rather than the real anxiety of fearing a disease hitting them or their loved ones. They are playing at fear and playing with a slight and exciting feeling of fear as a game.
People who are truly afraid of horror movies or thrill rides do not tend to watch them or ride them (more than one time, anyway) unless someone forces them in some way, by threats or bullying, or unless they work with a behaviorial psychologist to de-sensitize themselves to them.
There probably are people who like to actually be afraid in the real sense of fear, but I don’t think they are common. Most of the people who are really afraid of COVID either have a reason for it (they have lots of co-morbidities, for example, and are very old) or have more general problems with anxiety disorder.
Many of the people I know who actually are afraid don’t seem to want to be afraid at all. Some of them have those previously-mentioned factors (OCD would be another predisposing factor).
That’s a generalization, of course, but that’s what I see.
There also are people who seem to get off on telling others what to do and on scaring other people if they can. They’re not necessarily the same people who are themselves afraid.]
The tangled web: Jeff Zucker and Andrew Cuomo and Chris Cuomo and CNN and…
The degree of caring I’ve been able work up about this is tiny – and yet it’s a big story. So I’ll just link to and quote this on the Zucker affair and why he’s left CNN:
A familiar (and pathetic) theme being echoed in certain corners of the low-rated cable news network and other cable TV shows is that because Zucker and Gollust were engaging in a “consensual relationship” (both had gotten divorces in recent years) that he (and she) did nothing wrong…
Except the issue goes way beyond their “consensual relationship,” as we previously reported, a relationship that was allegedly an “open secret” for years in media circles even as the two were married to other people. Zucker admitted to his “evolving relationship” with Gollust during CNN’s investigation into the Chris Cuomo situation, and along with that admission came questions about whether favoritism was shown to Gollust. More importantly, the conflict of interest situation was very real considering for a period of several months in late 2012 and early 2013, Gollust worked as the comms director for then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
As far as media observers are concerned, it was Gollust’s connection with Andrew Cuomo and Zucker’s with Chris Cuomo as well as Andrew that is at the heart of what makes this “consensual relationship” in the workplace especially scandalous and deeply unethical.
Remember, Cuomo was forced out at CNN late last year after transcripts of his testimony during NY AG Tish James’ investigation into the allegations of sexual harassment against Andrew Cuomo revealed that Chris Cuomo was far more involved in advising his brother on how to handle the allegations than he (and CNN) had previously acknowledged.
Obviously, the disgraced former CNN “Prime Time” anchor isn’t taking his ouster laying down, which is what is making all of this even more intriguing. Wednesday, we reported that Chris Cuomo appears to be on a revenge tour, with Puck News founder Matt Belloni noting that “I’m told CNN received a litigation hold letter recently from Chris Cuomo lawyers, demanding, among other things, preservation of all communications between Zucker, comms chief Allison Gollust, and Andrew Cuomo.”
Further adding to the high drama was a New York Post report filed earlier that alleged that not only were Zucker and Gollust behind those cutesy “interview” segments between the Cuomo brothers during the pandemic and at a time when questions were being raised elsewhere about the nursing home scandal but that they also helped Gov. Cuomo with his pandemic response briefings:
CNN is a mess. I never watch it and I rarely watch any TV news. I’m not ordinarily interested in newspeople’s personalities, their foibles, and even their corruption (which I pretty much assume). I suppose I should be, because they most certainly have an influence on so many people’ perceptions of events, and that ends up affecting us all. But what interests me is the lies they tell about events, not their own personal behind-the-scenes smarminess, and the fact that they’re all interconnected with each other and with the Democrat politicians they assist.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
From a 1995 interview:
Open thread 2/4/22
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.