On Biden making the “fine people” hoax about Trump in Charlottesville one of the centers of his campaign

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve long been puzzled by the perception of many people that Biden’s most salient character trait is “likeability,” but then again I’m used to having different gut feelings than other people. And, as I’ve said before, I never thought that Biden was a good guy or a smart guy, even back when I was a Democrat and expected to remain one for the rest of my life.

And Biden has not aged like a fine wine, to put it mildly.

But I’ve said all that before. That’s not what this post is about. This post concerns a very specific thing Biden is doing, which is to repeatedly harp on what might be called the “fine people” hoax about what Trump said in reaction to Charlottesville. I’ve read many things about the incident, but haven’t written much about it. Fortunately, others have. I first direct you to Ann Althouse:

… I blogged in April 2019, “If Biden does not come forward and retract [a video relying on the Charlottesville hoax] and apologize and commit himself to making amends, I consider him disqualified. He does not have the character or brain power to be President.” Now, more than a year later, Biden has done the opposite. He’s doubled down on the lie and he’s making it the centerpiece of his campaign!…

I can’t imagine what Biden could do to win my confidence. I’m not going to bother to put in a request this time, because I feel completely hopeless that he will try. He has decided to run on — his people have decided to run him on — fomenting racial division, fear, and hatred.

You probably all know the assertions made by the Trump critics, beginning with the claim that Trump called the neo-Nazi white supremacists “fine people.” He did not, of course; he specifically said he was not talking about them, but that part of the quote is often excluded by the Trump-haters. He was actually talking about people protesting the pulling down of the Confederate statues.

Then there is the MSM report that there actually weren’t people that day in Charlottesville protesting the statues being pulled down. But there had been, and other reports are that although they were there around that time police kept them away from the two main groups: white supremacists and Antifa, certainly a toxic mix. At any rate, Trump was certainly under the impression that the statue-protestors were also there, and he made it explicit that he was not praising the white supremacists in any way and in fact was condemning them.

But the duplicitous MSM has no trouble lying about what he said, nor does Biden.

Today I read a discussion by Scott Adams on Biden’s use of the Charlottesville hoax (hat tip: Scott Johnson of Powerline). Here it is, multiple expletives deleted:

“[Biden]’s basing his campaign on a debunked hoax,” he said. “What do people who believe the hoax say? ‘Oh, you right-wing crazy people are trying to tell us we didn’t hear it with our own ears. I saw it and I heard it and I can prove it. Here’s the video of what I saw and what I heard.’ And then, they’ll show the edited video — which is the hoax.”

“If they show the whole video, it shows Trump without prompting, and this is the important part, said he is not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists, ‘they should be condemned totally.’ If you leave that part out, it could be misunderstood that he was praising the people with the torches. So in order not to be misconstrued later, without prompting, Trump clarified to make sure you wouldn’t interpret it wrong, and they lopped that part off and turned it into the central part of Biden’s campaign.”

“And there’s a second lie,” he continued. “That it matters who was there. It doesn’t matter if there were any ‘fine people’ there… It doesn’t matter because Trump gave his assumption that he thought there were fine people, who fit the category of non-racist, and then he spoke to his assumption. Worst case scenario, he was mistaken about who attended.”

“The only way this hoax can exist is if you never talk to anybody who attended,” Adams said. “The people who are trying to say that the ‘fine people’ hoax really happened will only describe it from the perspective of the media reports of the time… But I talked to them, on the telephone, and they tell me the story about showing up. In one case they didn’t know who organized it at all, but they knew there was something going on about the statues. Were they marching with the racists? No, they never got close because the police stopped people from going in. And when it was over, they went home.”

“Do you know who else was incorrect about who attended? Everybody. Every person who thinks this hoax is real.”

“The f***ing ‘fine people’ hoax is the tentpole hoax that makes stupid people who believe the fake news believe that it is all true. It is the only one they think they saw with their own eyes because it got edited. And because they’re sure that one’s true, it makes all the other hoaxes seem true, and it makes everyone who supports Trump look like assholes,” he said a few minutes later. “Joe Biden, if you’re making your fellow citizens targets for violence and discrimination, and you’re doing it intentionally, you are not worthy of being a citizen of this country, much less a leader. You have not qualified at the basic level of understanding the Constitution.”

Nice guy, Biden.

Important candy announcements

The New Neo Posted on by

Regular readers here know I like candy corn, and a reader recently informed me that Brach’s has issued a special type of candy corn for Thanksgiving.

Yes, it’s never too early for candy corn and for Thanksgiving. But it may always be too early for this candy corn:

The Turkey Candy Corn mix features a medley of six familiar flavors to the American Thanksgiving dinner spread: Roasted turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, green beans, ginger glazed carrots, and, for dessert, sweet potato pie. Of course, the multi-hued pieces are color-coded to match their respective dish.

We have some taste-testers here. Except for the cranberry flavor, it’s thumbs down:

As the child in the video says, why, Brachs, why? Well, I suppose a candy company’s reach should exceed its grasp, or what’s a marketing department for?

Oh, and speaking of candy, I have a truly important announcement. In my local supermarket there was a bunch of – Necco wafers! Now I know that they had stopped making them a while back, and I hadn’t heard a thing about them starting up again. But indeed, they have.

Here’s the site of the company that took up the Necco torch and is holding it high. They say the chocolate is a little more intensely flavored, which I think is probably a good thing because it used to be a bit weak. I’m saying that from memory because of course, due to my migraines, I haven’t been able to eat the chocolate flavor for nearly forty years. The other ones are supposedly the same, and they did taste pretty much the same to me except for one thing – they seemed to be a teeny tiny bit thicker.

But aren’t we all.

Joe Biden says if he’s elected, he’ll put scientists in charge of the country

The New Neo Posted on by

I suppose there are people who feel reassured by this statement of Biden’s:

Former Vice President Joe Biden said in an exclusive interview with ABC “World News Tonight” Anchor David Muir on Friday that as president, he would shut the country down to stop the spread of COVID-19 if the move was recommended to him by scientists.

“I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists,” Biden told Muir Friday, alongside his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., during their first joint interview since officially becoming the Democratic Party’s presidential and vice presidential nominees.

After the experience we’ve had as a country – the economic, physical, social, and mental hardship, and the paucity of evidence that it was worth it, especially when carried on and on and on – Biden (or his advisors) still seems to think that this is a great message. I suppose it appeals to the Karens among us, but they were already voting for him. I can’t imagine that this would win him a single vote, but then a lot of improbable things have already happened in this election year.

Among other things, his statement is ludicrous on its face. “Scientists”? But which scientists? They disagree tremendously. I’ve said that his statement is ludicrous, but I’ll amend that. It’s actually not ludicrous in terms of Democratic rhetoric about “science,” which is reified and also treated as a unitary and monolithic purveyor of Truth. It’s not. And Democrats, of course, are the Party of Science. They’re not.

Biden’s statement is telling in a different way. The message is: “I’ll do whatever they tell me.” As he ages and declines, he’s become more and more dependent on others to tell him what to do, and we have no reason to imagine this won’t continue and even increase.

But the most troubling thing of all to me is that so many people seem inclined to vote for Biden, who even in his best days was a corrupt mediocrity. And his best days are over.

Public health recommendations for the next pandemic, made in 2006

The New Neo Posted on by

This article was written in 2006. One of the authors was Donald Henderson, the physician who headed up the WHO project that eradicated smallpox. He died four years ago. In addition:

From 1977 to 1990, [Henderson] was Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Later, he played a leading role in instigating national programs for public health preparedness and response following biological attacks and national disasters.

So Henderson’s credentials were impeccable.

Here are some prescient and cautionary quotes from the 2006 article, which discusses possible public health reactions to a future flu pandemic (up to and including something of the magnitude of the 1918 pandemic). But I see no reason it wouldn’t also apply to COVID:

…[T]here has been interest in a range of disease mitigation measures. Possible measures that have been proposed include: isolation of sick people in hospital or at home, use of antiviral medications, hand-washing and respiratory etiquette, large-scale or home quarantine of people believed to have been exposed, travel restrictions, prohibition of social gatherings, school closures, maintaining personal distance, and the use of masks. Thus, we must ask whether any or all of the proposed measures are epidemiologically sound, logistically feasible, and politically viable. It is also critically important to consider possible secondary social and economic impacts of various mitigation measures.

Note the balanced point of view, and the recognition that there are definitely costs to such mitigation measures that must be factored in. More:

A number of mitigation measures that are now being considered could have a serious impact on the ability of the health system to deliver adequate care and could have potentially adverse consequences for the provision of essential services. Many could result in significant disruption of the social functioning of communities and result in possibly serious economic problems. Such negative consequences might be worth chancing if there were compelling evidence or reason to believe they would seriously diminish the con-sequences or spread of a pandemic. However, few analyses have been produced that weigh the hoped-for efficacy of such measures against the potential impacts of large-scale or long-term implementation of these measures…

It has been recognized that most actions taken to counter pandemic influenza will have to be undertaken by local governments, given that the epidemic response capacity of the federal government is limited.

And yet, of course, with COVID Trump is being blamed for not having somehow figured out exactly what measures would stop the pandemic in its tracks and then implemented them by executive order.

The authors then discuss computer modeling to help with decision making, and they are somewhat skeptical about its efficacy:

No model, no matter how accurate its epidemiologic assumptions, can illuminate or predict the secondary and tertiary effects of particular disease mitigation measures. Nor,for example, can it assess the potential effects of high absentee rates resulting from home or regional quarantine on the functioning integrity of essential services, such as hospital care or provision of food and electrical service to the community. If particular measures are applied for many weeks or months, the long-term or cumulative second- and third-order effects could be devastating socially and economically. In brief, models can play a contributory role in thinking through possible mitigation measures, but the cannot be more than an ancillary aid in deciding policy.

We relied on models heavily, however, especially in the earlier reaction to the pandemic. Now we seem to be relying mostly on politics and hunches.

Here, the authors correctly foresee the possibility of closing schools and some of the attendant problems [emphasis mine]:

Some have suggested closure might be recommended for as long as a pandemic persists in a single community (perhaps 8 weeks) or for as long as a pandemic persists in the country (as long as 8 months).18Therationale for the strategy is to diminish contacts between students and so retard epidemic spread. However, if this strategy were to be successful, other sites where school-children gather would also have to be closed: daycare centers, cinemas, churches, fast-food stores, malls, and athletic arenas. Many parents would need to stay home from work to care for children, which could result in high rates of absenteeism that could stress critical services, including health care…

Political leaders need to understand the likely benefits and the potential consequences of disease mitigation measures, including the possible loss of critical civic services and the possible loss of confidence in government to manage the crisis.

The part that I highlighted is a very real consequence that we’ve been experiencing with COVID. But what the authors didn’t foresee was that this loss of confidence in government might be used as a political football by the party opposed to a president who is defined as not having responded to control the pandemic at the outset. Right now for the Democrats, loss of confidence in the federal government may be seen as a feature rather than a bug, if it hurts Trump’s chances of re-election.

The article then goes into a discussion of various strategies such as handwashing and quarantines, and adds that travel restrictions have not been found to be effective in the past. Here’s the discussion of prohibiting large gatherings:

Were consideration to be given to [banning large gatherings] on a more extensive scale and for an extended period, questions immediately arise as to how many such events would be affected. There are many social gatherings that involve close contacts among people,and this prohibition might include church services, athletic events, perhaps all meetings of more than 100 people. It might mean closing theaters, restaurants, malls,large stores, and bars. Implementing such measures would have seriously disruptive consequences for a community if extended through the 8-week period of an epidemic in a municipal area, let alone if it were to be extended through the nation’s experience with a pandemic (perhaps 8 months). In the event of a pandemic, attendance at public events or social gatherings could well decrease because people were fearful of becoming infected, and some events might be cancelled because of local concerns. But a policy calling for community wide cancellation of public events seems inadvisable.

Inadvisable. And yet it’s been going on now for close to half a year.

About distancing:

It has been recommended that individuals maintain a distance of 3 feet or more during a pandemic so as to diminish the number of contacts with people who may be infected. The efficacy of this measure is unknown. It is typically assumed that transmission of droplet-spread diseases, such as influenza, is limited to “close contacts”—that is, being within 3–6 feet of an infected person. Keeping a space of 3 feet between individuals might be possible in some work environments, but it is difficult to imagine how bus, rail, or air travelers could stay 3 feet apart from each other throughout an epidemic. And such a recommendation would greatly complicate normal daily tasks like grocery shopping, banking, and the like.

Well, we seem to have figured out a way around that, by making people wait in lines while standing on those little circles that designate the distance deemed proper. But what science is that distance based on? As the article states, “the efficacy of this measure is unknown.” And as far as I can tell, it’s still unknown.

Masks?:

In Asia during the SARS period, many people in the affected communities wore surgical masks when in public. But studies have shown that the ordinary surgical mask does little to prevent inhalation of small dropletsbearing influenza virus. The pores in the mask become blocked by moisture from breathing, and the air stream simply diverts around the mask. There are few data avail-able to support the efficacy of N95 or surgical masks out-side a healthcare setting. N95 masks need to be fit-tested to be efficacious and are uncomfortable to wear for more than an hour or two. More important, the supplies ofsuch masks are too limited to even ensure that hospitals will have necessary reserves.

And that is more or less how it has played out – first we were told not to bother with masks, and also that there were shortages of the N95 masks for healthcare workers. Now we are told we must wear masks even if they are makeshift and made of cloth.

The article ends this way:

Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move towards catastrophe.

Cooler heads did not prevail, fear has been heightened, most of the suggestions in this article have not been followed, and we have moved towards catastrophe.

The alleged Portland head-kicker caught on video turns himself in

The New Neo Posted on by

It will be interesting to see what sort of sentence Marquise Lee Love receives, if any:

The Black Lives Matter rioter who was caught on-camera kicking a truck driver in the face in a vicious, unprovoked attack last weekend in Portland, has been arrested on multiple felony charges.

Marquise Lee Love, 25, “turned himself in Friday morning after detectives and the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office coordinated with his attorney,” Fox12 reported.

The Black Lives Matter agitator was booked into the Multnomah County Jail on charges of “second-degree assault, coercion, and riot,” according to Portland Police. His bail was set at $260,000.

I wrote “alleged” in the title of the post, but I’m being kind there, because the ironically-named Love has already pretty much confessed on social media:

“Might go to jail for murder tonight for a racist when all I did was fight him look it up on twitter put money on my books and come see me,’ Love posted on Snapchat, alongside a selfie.

[NOTE: My previous post on the subject is here.]

The MSM is very relieved to know that Joe Biden can read

The New Neo Posted on by

Good enough for government work, anyway.

See this, this, this, and this.

From that last link:

And declaring that Republicans (at least those who don’t bow to Biden) are the forces of darkness being confronted by the light is not a formula for governance, but political terror.

The theme of the DNC convention that pretended to nominate Biden and the speech in which he pretended to accept is that Democrats are a unifying force and that their political opponents are the forces of darkness. That’s not an election speech. It’s an argument for a one party state…

Biden’s speech rehashed all the tired old Obama paradigms, depicting Democrats as “generous” and Republicans as “selfish”, his base as “fair” and his opponents as “privileged”, and the system, the one that allowed him to spend nearly half a century in power, as systemically racist, while somehow the old ally of segregationists isn’t racist at all.

The true message of the DNC convention, spoken and unspoken, is that it represents a cultural class that is entitled to absolute political power, because it is morally superior to everyone else. The facade of religion and of fake former Republicans was as real as the “democratic” process leading to a rigged nomination and a fake convention of videos recorded weeks if not months ago. Behind that facade is a small class of wealthy coastal donors pulling all the strings.

The Democrats are represented by a 77-year-old political hack who spent his career trading favors and traded up through a rigged nominating process, and the former squeeze of the dirtiest man in San Francisco politics who got into the Senate through a one-party election, and by the men and women pulling the strings in a process that has nothing to do with democracy.

The challenge of Marxism: Part II

The New Neo Posted on by

[Part I can be found here. A Part III is also planned.]

Yoram Hazony, author of this Quillette essay on “The Challenge of Marxism,” has a great deal to say about liberalism. He writes [emphasis mine]:

Enlightenment liberalism is a rationalist system built on the premise that human beings are, by nature, free and equal. It is further asserted that this truth is “self-evident,” meaning that all of us can recognize it through the exercise of reason alone, without reference to the particular national or religious traditions of our time and place.

I found this puzzling. Why is Hazony using words from the Declaration of Independence to describe something that is quite different from what the Founders meant? What they wrote has given birth to classical liberalism (these days, much more akin to conservatism) rather than to what has been known as “liberalism” since the 60s, and what I believe Hazony means by “Enlightenment liberalism.” I found this part of his essay very murky, because it seems to me he’s mixing apples and oranges.

The relevant words of the Declaration of Independence go like this [emphasis mine]:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

I think it’s pretty clear what’s being said there. A Creator is the source of rights, and equality is not actual equality in the real world – as in, everyone gets a medal, everyone has the same amount of money, everyone is equally happy – but the opportunity to be treated the same by the law and to strive to be happy in the world.

Here are the things I’m talking about, things Hazony doesn’t mention but which seem quite relevant to his essay [emphasis mine]:

That “all Men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with Certain unalienable Rights” was self-evident to Americans at the time of the writing of the Declaration. They were a deeply religious people who were very familiar with the idea of universal human equality from the teachings of Christianity and from English republicanism. They were familiar with the idea of inalienable rights from the political writings of John Locke’s Second Treatise and other English sources…

Jefferson said that his purpose in writing the Declaration was to express a shared understanding of “the American mind.”…

There are two ways that all “men”—all persons—might be “created equal.” One is that they are all by birth or naturally political equals. This means that no one is legitimately the ruler of others by birth and no one is by birth the subject of a ruler. The other is that human equality goes deeper than just political equality. In this sense, all people are considered of equal value and worth, or equal in the eyes of God. All are created moral equals.

In fact Jefferson intended both of these senses of natural equality…Both senses of natural human equality were common beliefs of colonial Americans in 1776.

So, we have two basic types of equality in classical liberalism and the Declaration. The first counters the idea of monarchy and/or royalty, and the second has to do with morals and God. In the political realm, what that meant was that humans would be equal under the law (once slavery was gotten rid of, which was a problem inherited from the colonial economic structure and one that very unfortunately the Founders were not able to solve). We are speaking, of course, of equality of opportunity rather than an illusory and impossible equality of outcome, one of the most basic distinctions between classical liberalism and modern-day liberalism. They both contain the word “liberalism,” but there’s a world of difference between them.

The latter is really just another name for leftism; you might call it “leftism lite.” It does indeed sow the seeds of even greater and more extreme leftism, but only because it is a milder and less obvious form of it. If liberalism or “Enlightenment liberalism” had stuck to classical liberalism – many of the tenets of which were still part of the belief system of most Democrats and liberals when I was a child, although that is absolutely no longer true – I don’t see that it would have inevitably led to the leftist takeover we see today. The problem is that, during the 1960s, “liberalism” shed those beliefs and became leftist.

Was that inevitable? I don’t know, but I think it happened because Americans got lazy and failed to value or even understand what they already had and why it was so important, and stopped teaching the distinction to children, as well as de-emphasizing the “Creator” part. I don’t know all the details of the change from a legal system and a society that defended equality of opportunity to one that promoted equality of outcome, but I do know one turning point that occurred in 1965 in the context of civil rights, in a speech by LBJ at Howard University’s commencement [emphasis mine]:

The voting rights bill will be the latest, and among the most important, in a long series of victories. But this victory–as Winston Churchill said of another triumph for freedom–“is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”…

But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.

If I could doubly highlight that last word “result,” I would, because that is the crux of the matter.

The idea was well-intentioned. And it’s something we seek. But encoding equality of outcome – LBJ’s equality of result – in law was fatally flawed because it required a type of equality that the great Thomas Sowell has called cosmic justice, an equality that cannot be achieved on earth and that always must involve an inherently leftist re-organization of society that can only substitute one injustice for another and in the end fails to achieve its ends anyway.

That’s enough for today, but there’s plenty more. In Part III I plan to discuss the two major Enlightenment thinkers Locke vs. Rousseau, and how the work of one leads to classical liberalism and the other leads to 60s-type “liberalism” and leftism of all sorts, including Marxism.

Reading Orwell as a child

The New Neo Posted on by

I was about eleven or twelve or perhaps thirteen years old when I first read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It made an indelible impression on me, probably greater than it would have if I’d waited till at least college age. I’m not sure where I picked it up, or why. Had I heard about it somewhere?

I also read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World at around the same time. I didn’t understand it except on a very basic level. Nor did Huxley’s book frighten me; it merely puzzled me and parts of it amused me:

Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children…

But what was this “Our Ford” business? “Alcohol in his blood surrogate”? The references were too sophisticated for me, although years later I appreciated the book and found it fascinating.

But Orwell? Orwell I understood from the start. It cast a terrifying spell, so much so that it colored my days for a while. There were images that gripped me with fear – Room 101, of course, but so much more. Even the ulcer on Winston Smith’s leg, and the grayness of the entire world. The language of Newspeak and its purpose were instantly intelligible, too. And the ending – terrible, terrible.

Perhaps horror is more accessible to a child than satire. And probably the horror was even more comprehensible – on a certain level anyway – because I was a Cold War child. At any rate, it was one of the more influential books I’ve ever read, and I consider it a masterpiece. I read it again as an adult, and understood it on a deeper level intellectually and historically. But I think that when I was a child, my visceral understanding was stronger.

Why am I writing about this now? The other day I was talking to a friend – a well-educated and intelligent friend – and I was illustrating some point by a reference to Orwell’s book. “You know, like the scene in Nineteen Eighty-Four where Winston…” and I saw her look at me blankly. That caused me to ask whether she’d ever read it, and the answer was “I don’t remember, but I don’t think I ever did.”

This friend happens to be a Democrat, although not a leftist. I’ve been talking to her a bit lately about politics, trying to explain my view of how far to the left Democrats have gone. The moment she said that demonstrated to me something I’d already known but hadn’t thought that much about lately, which is that we all draw on our life experiences when we make political decisions. That’s elementary, of course, but what struck me when she said that was that we may assume a certain basic commonality of experience – just from being about the same age and living in the same place, having about the same amount of education, being of similar ethnic background, and being friends – when our experiences are really quite different after all.

For me, Orwell looms large. For her, he barely exists.

[NOTE: I’m aware that reading Orwell at any age does not determine political orientation. For example, a lot of leftists think that Trump is trying to implement some sort of tyrannical regime as in Orwell’s book. Or at least, they say that to gullible listeners.]

Fear of COVID

The New Neo Posted on by

Polls indicate that Americans are very poorly informed about COVID facts. That doesn’t surprise me, and I don’t think it should surprise anyone. A lot of people have trouble with complex scientific information, especially if there’s math involved. It doesn’t help, either, when the popular sources of information – the writers and pundits of the MSM, and/or social media – either don’t understand the information itself, or purposely present it in a skewed and/or confusing manner in order to stir up fear:

“These results are nothing short of stunning,” concluded the firm. “Six months into this pandemic, Americans still dramatically misunderstand the risk of dying from COVID-19.”

It amuses me, in a bleak way, that the site reporting on this news gets it wrong, as well. Here’s the quote I’m talking about. The problem is in the third sentence – it’s actually not the risk of death that’s being reported as 80% in older people, that’s the percentage of the COVID deaths that involve older people:

On average, Americans believe that people aged 55 and older account for just over half of total COVID-19 deaths; the actual figure is 92%.
Americans believe that people aged 44 and younger account for about 30% of total deaths; the actual figure is 2.7%.
Americans overestimate the risk of death from COVID-19 for people aged 24 and younger by a factor of 50; and they think the risk for people aged 65 and older is half of what it actually is (40% vs 80%).

And this comes as no surprise as well:

What’s perhaps most striking from the survey is the connection between age of the respondents and their misconception about the virus. The younger you are, the more likely it is that you don’t understand.

“The discrepancy with the actual mortality data is staggering: for people aged 18–24, the share of those worried about serious health consequences is 400 times higher than the share of total COVID deaths; for those age 25–34 it is 90 times higher,” says the report…

People who get their information predominantly from social media have the most erroneous and distorted perception of risk.
Those who identify as Democrats tend to mistakenly overstate the risk of death from COVID-19 for younger people much more than Republicans.

In addition, here’s an interesting study from China on the risks of catching COVID from close contact. It seems to me it’s less than originally thought:

3410 close contacts of 391 index cases were traced between 13 January and 6 March 2020…

Among 3410 close contacts, 127 (3.7% [95% CI, 3.1% to 4.4%]) were secondarily infected. Of these 127 persons, 8 (6.3% [CI, 2.1% to 10.5%]) were asymptomatic. Of the 119 symptomatic cases, 20 (16.8%) were defined as mild, 87 (73.1%) as moderate, and 12 (10.1%) as severe or critical. Compared with the household setting (10.3%), the secondary attack rate was lower for exposures in healthcare settings (1.0%; odds ratio [OR], 0.09 [CI, 0.04 to 0.20]) and on public transportation (0.1%; OR, 0.01 [CI, 0.00 to 0.08]). The secondary attack rate increased with the severity of index cases, from 0.3% (CI, 0.0 to 1.0%) for asymptomatic to 3.3% (CI, 1.8% to 4.8%) for mild, 5.6% (CI, 4.4% to 6.8%) for moderate, and 6.2% (CI, 3.2% to 9.1%) for severe or critical cases. Index cases with expectoration were associated with higher risk for secondary infection (13.6% vs. 3.0% for index cases without expectoration; OR, 4.81 [CI, 3.35 to 6.93]).

The challenge of Marxism: Part I

The New Neo Posted on by

Quite a few people have recommended that I read the essay “The Challenge of Marxism” by Yoram Hazony, appearing in Quillette. It’s fascinating and it’s long.

I have mixed feelings about it, or at least parts of it. I agree with much of it, and I reach similarly pessimistic conclusions to Hazony about where we’re at right now and how influential and powerful Marxists (and/or far leftists, who are very much related) have become, especially within certain vital institutions such as education and the press. I agree with him that Marxism (and the far left) is on the ascendance, and has been for some time. Here’s Hazony on the purposely-confusing nomenclature:

Anti-Marxist liberals have labored under numerous disadvantages in the recent struggles to maintain control of liberal organizations. One is that they are often not confident they can use the term “Marxist” in good faith to describe those seeking to overthrow them. This is because their tormentors do not follow the precedent of the Communist Party, the Nazis, and various other political movements that branded themselves using a particular party name and issued an explicit manifesto to define it. Instead, they disorient their opponents by referring to their beliefs with a shifting vocabulary of terms, including “the Left,” “Progressivism,” “Social Justice,” “Anti-Racism,” “Anti-Fascism,” “Black Lives Matter,” “Critical Race Theory,” “Identity Politics,” “Political Correctness,” “Wokeness,” and more.

Marxists in this country were often underground long before these recent years, however. They were exceptionally active and yet many were clandestine in the 1930s, for example. Post WWII, the House (Un-American Activities Committee) and the Senate (Joe McCarthy) were hotly engaged in trying to root out secret Marxists and Communists in positions of power and influence in the US, and whatever you may think of the anti-Communists’ methods and their veracity, the truth is that a not-insignificant number of infiltrated and secret Marxists/Communists existed in government and in other walks of American life, even back then.

So this secrecy is not new.

What is new, I think, is that an entire major party is now controlled by such Marxists and far leftists. Some are pretending to be more moderate than they actually are, but some are pretty much “out” as being far left, such as Bernie Sanders and AOC, just to name two. They call themselves by a term that Hazony doesn’t list, “Democratic Socialists,” which is another screen term. I also believe that Barack Obama was one of the somewhat-hidden Marxists to come to power – and I say “somewhat-hidden” because even during his 2008 campaign there were plenty of hints of his far leftism, for those who cared to look.

Back to Hazony’s essay. Here’s why he uses the term “Marxist”:

But for present purposes…I will use the term “Marxist” in a broad sense to refer to any political or intellectual movement that is built upon Marx’s general framework as I’ve just described it [oppressor and oppressed groups, false consciousness, revolutionary reconstitution of society, and total disappearance of class antagonisms]. This includes the “Progressive” or “Anti-Racism” movement now advancing toward the conquest of liberalism in America and Britain. This movement uses racialist categories such as whites and people of color to describe the oppressors and the oppressed in our day. But it relies entirely on Marx’s general framework for its critique of liberalism and for its plan of action against the liberal political order. It is simply an updated Marxism.

Again, I somewhat agree and somewhat disagree. My disagreement centers on the fact that I believe that many modern-day far leftist activists are actually ignorant of some of these four stages and do not necessarily believe in them all, but are nevertheless 100% with the methods and program. Perhaps I’m being nitpicky, because in practical terms it hardly makes a difference. Calling them all “Marxists” has the advantage of showing the seriousness of the threat they present, but it also gives them the opportunity to deny the characterization as far-fetched and wildly conspiratorial.

Their leaders, however, are for the most part almost certainly quite aware of Marxism and its tenets (two of BLM’s founders call themselves “trained Marxists,” for example, and I believe that they are exactly that). It’s hardly just the leaders, either. But I think that nevertheless considerable numbers of the rank and file are not completely aware – although as I said, it may be a distinction without a difference.

I also think that quite a few Marxists/leftists today are not idealists and do not believe in the fourth premise Hazony lists: “total disappearance of class antagonism.” I believe that, instead, they plan to establish a new hierarchy of power and to replace the old oppressors and become the new oppressors as a kind of payback and in achievement of a power and control they feel they’ve earned and plan to maintain. Utopia will never come, but they’ll be in control, and that’s good enough.

I also agree with Hazony that Marxism and far leftsm have the sort of appeal the author describes:

This is the principal reason that Marxist ideas are so attractive. In every society, there will always be plenty of people who have reason to feel they’ve been oppressed or exploited. Some of these claims will be worthy of remedy and some less so. But virtually all of them are susceptible to a Marxist interpretation, which shows how they result from systematic oppression by the dominant classes, and justifies responding with outrage and violence.

And I agree on Marxism’s flaws, big time. It’s the third one Hazony lists that’s especially troubling:

This brings us to the third failing of the Marxist framework. This is the notorious absence of a clear view as to what the underclass, having overthrown its oppressors and seized the state, is supposed to do with its newfound power. Marx is emphatic that once they have control of the state, the oppressed classes will be able to end oppression. But these claims appear to be unfounded. After all, we’ve said that the strength of the Marxist framework lies in its willingness to recognize that power relations do exist among classes and groups in every society, and that these can be oppressive and exploitative in every society. And if this is an empirical fact—as indeed it seems to be—then how will the Marxists who have overthrown liberalism be able use the state to obtain the total abolition of class antagonisms? At this point, Marx’s empiricist posture evaporates, and his framework becomes completely utopian.

Completely utopian – or revealed as completely cynical, as I’ve already noted.

When I began this essay I thought I’d be able to tackle it in one post. But no way; not even close. I’ve got much much more to say, and I’ve only just begun. So I plan to take up the rest in Part II, and there may even be a Part III. Please stay tuned.

[ADDENDUM: Part II can be found here.]