I guess protestors and rioters are immune to COVID. Or at least, they pose no danger to Grandma. Or even if they do and grandma dies as a result, they’re not really granny-killers since their cause is just.
People who go to church, or have loved ones’ funerals with more than ten people, on the other hand: thoughtless killers!
Actually, I believe that, since most of the George Floyd demonstrators (and rioters) are young, if they themselves get COVID they are either really likely to have very mild or even asymptomatic cases. Hey, maybe they’re even doing a public service by helping coax along the herd immunity. Or maybe, just maybe, we won’t see any spike in COVID as a result of their mass get-togethers.
But if we do see a spike a couple of weeks later, rest assured. The media will not blame it on the protestors or the rioters. It will be the fault of the rest of us trying to open businesses and go about our lives.
The fallout of this is that expert opinion goes down several more notches in the eyes of most people noticing, although I’m not sure their reputation has any further down to go without digging underground. The hypocrisy is blatant, although they try to explain it away as some people’s causes are more important than other people’s causes, or religious observances, or funerals – or lives, for that matter. The social justice warrior health experts signing on to the idea that demonstrations are an exception to the no-crowds rule consider themselves to be what Sowell called “the anointed,” in his book The Vision of the Anointed:
The Vision of the Anointed (1995) is a book by economist and political columnist Thomas Sowell which brands the anointed as promoters of a worldview concocted out of fantasy impervious to any real-world considerations. Sowell asserts that these thinkers, writers, and activists continue to be revered even in the face of evidence disproving their positions.
Sowell argues that American thought is dominated by a “prevailing vision” which seals itself off from any empirical evidence that is inconsistent with that vision.
–the prevailing social vision is dangerously close to sealing itself off from any discordant feedback from reality.
–it is so necessary to believe in a particular vision that evidence of its incorrectness is ignored, suppressed, or discredited
–empirical evidence is neither sought beforehand nor consulted after a policy has been instituted. Facts may be marshalled for a position already taken, but that is very different from systematically testing opposing theories by evidence.
Sowell’s work, by the way, was one of the foundations for my political change experience. It was a process I was already going through even before I found Sowell’s writing. But once I started to read some of his stuff I felt an extraordinary sense of relief, as though coming home. Here was a thinker who was saying things that made sense to me, in a coherent whole that helped me realize what I think I’d always believed but had never found articulated elsewhere.
The public health experts had one shot, and they blew it. If deaths do result [from the riots, the public health experts] should be specifically blamed — and named — as grandma-killers. If deaths don’t result, they should be specifically blamed — and named — as business-killers. And they can’t hide behind neutral science because they abandoned neutral science for politics and preening within their own social circles.
As I said above, though, the MSM will try to blame any spike on the re-opening of businesses. But Glenn is right – and it’s not the fault of science, but of the politicization of science by scientists. It’s a practice of which the left is very fond; the Soviets were big on it.]
In a twisted way it is fitting that the most destructive week for America in living memory should be topped off by a memorial featuring the nation’s chief racial arsonist Al Sharpton…
Not the least unexpectedly, the malevolent Sharpton used the platform the mourners provided to stoke the fires of racial hatred, attacking all of white America because black America’s problems and miseries stemmed from the fact that “for 401 years white America has had its knees on our necks” – or words to that effect.
Sharpton’s four-hundred and one years ago was actually 1619, when the creation of the United States of America was still 168 years in the future, but why quibble over arithmetic when you are intent on indicting a whole race of people so you can blame them for your problems? “Four-hundred years of slavery” of course has long been a common battle cry of the racial demagogues who 50 plus years ago overwhelmed and then corrupted the civil rights movement turning it into a racial shakedown operation after the death of Martin Luther King.
That American knee that Sharpton kept referring to , of course produced the revolutionary declaration that all men are created equal and have a God-given right to liberty, which ended 3,000 years of normalizing slavery – which still exists in Africa today.
Please read the whole thing. It covers a lot of territory but isn’t very long.
[NOTE: For those of you who might be unfamiliar with Horowitz, he was a big lefty radical in his youth, but now is conservative. I’ve written many posts about him, as well as about Sharpton.]
An unexpected drop in the unemployment rate set off a fresh round of debate on Friday over how fast the economy can rebound from the coronavirus pandemic and how much the government should intervene to help.
The unemployment rate fell to 13.3 percent in May from a peak of 14.7 percent in April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported — surprising economists who had widely expected the rate to jump to about 20 percent in May, given that more than 40 million people have applied for unemployment benefits in recent weeks.
The economy gained 2.2 million jobs last month, as states started relaxing stay-at-home orders and opening for business. Markets rallied on the news, with the S&P 500 gaining nearly three percent by mid-day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 3.8 percent.
President Donald Trump and his economic advisers, who have been prodding governors to relax stay-at-home orders, said the numbers show the economy will recover as quickly as they have been predicting. Trump at a Friday news conference compared the pandemic to a short-lived natural disaster and said the numbers are evidence of the “greatest comeback in American history.”
But some economists warned that the unemployment rate is still at highs not seen since the Great Depression — and that it remains hard to predict whether and how rapidly the upswing will continue. The nonpartisan CBO has estimated that unemployment won’t even near pre-pandemic levels — which was at 3.5 percent in February— by the end of next year.
Well, duuuuuh. It remains hard to predict. We need experts to tell us that? And it might not recover fully right away, to previous unemployment levels that were the lowest in umpteen
decades? Fancy that.
By no means are we out of the woods, either from naturally-occurring events or the plans of the left for more crises that might be manufactured. But I don’t think the right feels that some sort of decent recovery by November would be all that “unexpected.”
…and it will bleed into the non-academic world soon enough, and the Overton window will move to the point where the left will think it’s just a basic truth. And then half the country – the Democrat half – will agree, as well as the majority of the under-25 crowd.
Case in point: words are violence. That’s such an absurd equivalency that it contains its own obvious contradiction within it. Words are not violence. They are words. Words can incite and inspire violence if they meet a receptive mind. Expressing a difference of opinion is not violence. Words that make a person feel bad are not violence.
Remember the old children’s saying? Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. I wonder whether kids say that anymore. Did they stop saying it decades ago, because it talked about violence? Did it allow bullies to keep on bullying, because of its nefarious suggestion that the bully could keep bloviating and it didn’t matter because it didn’t inflict actual violence?
Of course AOC is in the "words are violence" and "how dare you publish things that I personally disagree with" crowd. Do you have any idea how an op-ed page works? Do you know that the NYT has published op-eds from Putin, Erdogan, and the Taliban https://t.co/BoPGjcDj8L
One of the worst things about what’s been happening now, and actually for a long time, is the acceptance of lies as truth. It’s easy to spread a simple lie that grabs people and energizes them. Truth sometimes requires deeper thought, and maybe even a little math on occasion.
This is worth listening to on the subject:
And in the same vein – the lies constantly being told on the left – please read this, this, and this. I plan a longer post some day on that last article in particular, which is about the statistics on police violence against black people.
If they can’t debate on the facts, lies will do. In fact, maybe lies are better, because you can shape them as you wish. Coordinated lies are best of all, because if practically everyone is saying it, it must be true.
And the widespread acceptance of the lies encourages more lies, because they work.
The statement from the journal can be found here. Excerpt:
…[O]ur independent peer reviewers informed us that Surgisphere would not transfer the full dataset, client contracts, and the full ISO audit report to their servers for analysis as such transfer would violate client agreements and confidentiality requirements. As such, our reviewers were not able to conduct an independent and private peer review and therefore notified us of their withdrawal from the peer-review process.We always aspire to perform our research in accordance with the highest ethical and professional guidelines. We can never forget the responsibility we have as researchers to scrupulously ensure that we rely on data sources that adhere to our high standards. Based on this development, we can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources. Due to this unfortunate development, the authors request that the paper be retracted.
They deeply apologize blahbity blah blah blah.
My hunch is that this is a case of garbage in garbage out, perhaps purposeful on the part of someone (although not necessarily the authors). I believe that it was one of those reports too good to fact check, since it disproved the narrative of the evil Trump. But the defects in the study were blatant enough that it didn’t take much time for online sleuths to come up with valid doubts based on anomalies in the data.
Grant Napear, longtime announcer for the Sacramento Kings, learned the hard way what is unacceptable speech in today’s America:
Grant Napear resigned as the Kings’ TV play-by-play announcer and was fired from KHTK radio in Sacramento on Tuesday.
Napear was previously placed on administrative leave after he tweeted “All Lives Matter… Every single one.” His tweet was in response to former Kings center DeMarcus Cousins, who asked Napear for his take on the Black Lives Matter movement amid worldwide protests stemming from the death of George Floyd.
KHTK’s parent company, Bonneville International Corporation, said in a statement that Napear’s comments “do not reflect the views or values” of the company, and the timing of his tweet was “particularly insensitive.”
So apparently Bonneville International Corporation does not subscribe to the idea that all lives matter. Some lives matter much more than others. Note duly taken.
And the people who espouse this sort of thing consider themselves righteous. I believe – although I have no way of knowing – that Martin Luther King would be extremely saddened.
A phrase – “Black Lives Matter” – that one would think might mean something like “we need to pay attention to black people’s lives every bit as much as anyone else’s, because all lives matter” – has morphed into a sacred slogan. Calling attention to the human worth of everyone – all created equal – is now a racist insult rather than a nearly universally agreed-on statement of the basis for American liberty.
As I said, duly noted.
The situation we are in today is becoming more and more like that of , Václav Havel’s greengrocer, a story I just learned about today (hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit). The parable can be found here:
The Power of the Powerless was originally written by Havel in October 1978…
Havel biographer, John Keane, describes Havel’s definition of a post-totalitarian world: “Within the system, every individual is trapped within a dense network of the state’s governing instruments…themselves legitimated by a flexible but comprehensive ideology, a ‘secularized religion’…a labyrinth of influence, repression, fear and self-censorship which swallows up everyone within it, at the very least by rendering them silent, stultified and marked by some undesirable prejudices of the powerful…”
Havel uses the example of a greengrocer who displays in his shop the sign Workers of the world, unite!. Since failure to display the sign could be seen as disloyalty, he displays it and the sign becomes not a symbol of his enthusiasm for the regime, but a symbol of both his submission to it and humiliation by it. Havel returns repeatedly to this motif to show the contradictions between the “intentions of life” and the “intentions of systems”, i.e. between the individual and the state, in a totalitarian society.
An individual living within such a system must live a lie, to hide that which he truly believes and desires, and to do that which he must do to be left in peace and to survive.This is comparable to the classical tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
…they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system…
Individuals at each level within the bureaucracy must display their own equivalent of the grocer’s Workers of the world, unite! sign, oppressing those below them and in turn oppressed by those above. Against this public lie is contrasted a life lived in truth, a title suggested by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his essay Live Not By Lies. Havel argued that the restoration of a free society could only be achieved through a paradigm based on the individual, “human existence,” and a fundamental reconstitution of one’s “respect for self, for others and for the universe”; to refuse to give power to empty slogans and meaningless rituals, to refuse to allow the lie to oppress oneself, and to refuse to be part of the lie that oppresses others. By doing so individuals illuminate their surroundings revealing to others that they have power.
At the moment in the US, strangely enough, it’s not the central government enforcing this – although that could certainly change soon enough with a change of administration. It’s the leftist mob that frightens people into submission, and the corporate entities and academic administrators who fire people for statements such as that of Napear.
Please read the whole thing; it has come to be more and more relevant in America today. And unfortunately, it may become even more so as time goes on.
[NOTE: Perhaps you have noticed, as I have, a host of emails from various companies you’ve dealt with (even tangentially) in the past, claiming their solidarity with the demonstrations and their renewed commitment to fight the rampant racism that infects our whole society. I cannot recall this sort of mass political mailing happening before. Perhaps it did on 9/11, but I don’t think email was quite as ubiquitous back then and I certainly don’t remember it happening. At any rate, it seems to me that most companies are very much feeling the need to put that greengrocer’s sign in their own windows.]
Most of the looters and rioters arrested by the NYPD over the past several days are immediately released as a direct result of New York’s new bail-reform law, New York City police chief Terrence Monahan told the New York Post on Tuesday.
While the city police made over 650 arrests on Monday night alone, Monahan said that “just about all of them” will be released without bail.
After the looting and arson, Cuomo did what he does best – blame others:
“The police in New York City were not effective at doing their job last night. Period,” Cuomo told reporters. He also floated the idea of “displacing” de Blasio, but immediately retracted the suggestion, saying it would create a “chaotic situation in the midst of an already chaotic situation, that doesn’t make sense.”
Chief Monahan told the Post that he was “extremely outraged” by Cuomo’s remarks.
“I’m watching my men and women out there dealing with stuff that no cop should ever have to deal with, bricks, bottles, rocks, hit in the face with bottles and continuing to go forward to make an arrest,” Monahan said. “For a governor to be sitting in his office saying that we’re not doing a good job — I’m outraged.”
I cannot even imagine what it is like to be a police officer today in New York or in any Democrat-dominated area. The police in general are being demonized, and the officials in charge do not have their backs and often tie their hands while those same officials posture and preen and virtue-signal and blame others.
Once hydroxychloroquine was touted by Trump as a possible tool against COVID, the drug’s days were numbered. Is it any wonder that a major study came out against it, and now there’s growing evidence that the study may have been fudged or at least very sloppy? Continue reading →
I have a better idea. Why not call them “undocumented shoppers”?
And isn’t that AP style guidance racist, anyway, assuming that black people are the ones looting?
But of course the changes in language are not limited to this moment, or to looters and looting. Get up-to-date on the newest Newspeak.
About a year ago this comment was made on the blog:
One fundamental principle – identified and exploited by both Goebbels’ Propagandaministerium and the KGB in Soviet Russia – is that endless repetition of a slogan infallibly modifies most people’s perception and reaction.
Pavlov – think about that – has been one of the few (the only one?) scientists whose research was constantly supported and financed in the USSR, even if he openly refused to accept the Marxist ideology.
…[E]verybody who comes from the left…knows that dissent means expulsion; so, any leftist develops a special ear capable of recognizing a new dogma: in articles and speeches given by the cool people in the cool places, a term begins to be used as if it were an indisputable evidence and those who “incredibly” refuse to accept it are gradually described as controversial, then conservative and eventually Fascist.
We constantly see this in action. “Moving the Overton Window” is another name for the goal of the process of language “reform,” which is to change public perceptions of what is acceptable and what is radical, and to make the once-radical now acceptable. There are many ways the left accomplishes this, but a major one is through language. The left recognized early on that changes in language are not superficial, and it became a big tool for them.
In the French Revolution, language was used for this purpose when people were instructed to call each other “citizen”, and in the USSR a similar phenomenon occurred:
Upon abolishing the titles of nobility in France, and the terms monsieur and madame (literally, “my lord” and “my lady”), the revolutionaries employed the term citoyen for men and citoyenne for women (both meaning “citizen”) to refer to each other…
When the socialist movement gained momentum in the mid-18th century, socialists elsewhere began to look for a similar egalitarian alternative to terms like “Mister”, “Miss”, or “Missus”. In German, the word Kamerad had long been used as an affectionate form of address among people linked by some strong common interest…In English, the first known use of the word “comrade” with this meaning was in 1884 in the socialist magazine Justice.
In the late 19th century Russian Marxists and other leftist revolutionaries adopted as a translation of the word “Kamerad” the Russian word tovarishch, whose original meaning was “business companion”…
That’s just about forms of address, but the thing about these words is that they are used constantly in everyday life and are habitual. To change them is to change a great deal.
Some language changes are natural and emerge spontaneously from the people themselves, but some are imposed from above either through suggestion, repetition, coercion, and/or threat of punishment. Think, for example, about Canadian professor Jordan Peterson’s battle over the use of pronouns for transgendered people—he has indicated he would certainly consider using a person’s preferred pronouns, but not under coercion or threat of punishment, either by government or by SJWs. As Peterson said in this video: the left is “trying to gain linguistic supremacy in the area of public discourse.”
To gain this linguistic and ultimately ideological supremacy, the left is constantly attempting to alter speech in ways both small and large. The small ways are sometimes even more effective, because they can evade whatever radar the right may possess, and the right often adopts these linguistic changes without even realizing what’s occurring.
Orwell devoted a great portion of his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four to this very issue of politically purposeful language change, which he viewed as central to leftist thought. In fact, I believe that his coinage and discussion of Newspeak was the beating heart of his book and a huge, memorable, and especially meaningful reason why it became so widely read and influential.
Lara Logan is not one of the enablers. Please watch:
Perhaps Antifa’s most clever move is its name, which is explained as meaning “anti-fascist.” Orwell would be very very proud. A group or groups claimed to be Antifa’s antecedents may have started during the actual Fascist era in Germany and Italy, but the modern version surfs off the name to create an impression that is quite different from the truth.
“Fascist” had already become an all-purpose word to refer to whatever people don’t like, anyway. So these days the left and the MSM use it to refer to the right in the US. It’s absurd for many reasons, one of which is that the US right stands for small government rather than large. But the left and the MSM and the anti-Trumpers and the Democrats (have I left anyone out?) count on ignorance of history in its listeners, and so “fascist” and “nazis” it is.
Once Trump and the right have been falsely labeled as such – as well as “white supremacists” – the stage is set for lauding and/or excusing the excesses of Antifa as forgivable because, after all, they are just fighting fascism and white supremacy. Who wouldn’t want to do that?
And so we get a bunch of puff pieces such as, just to take one that came up when I Googled, this from the BBC:
Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, says the modern American Antifa movement began in the 1980s with a group called Anti-Racist Action. Its members confronted neo-Nazi skinheads at punk gigs in the American Midwest and elsewhere. By the early 2000s the Antifa movement was mostly dormant – until the rise of Donald Trump and the alt-right…
What are they opposed to?
Neo-Nazis, Neo-fascism, white supremacists and racism, and these days the movement that encapsulates some of those ideas: the alt-right.
We spoke to secret Antifa groups in Oregon. They said they come from a variety of political backgrounds but they were united in their opposition to fascism, and they have an anti-government streak. They said they see creeping authoritarianism in the current American administration that they are looking to build “a movement that really insulates us from the policies of Donald Trump”.
So they’re just a bunch of good people fighting Trump and his merry band of white supremacists. It goes unmentioned how small that latter group is, and how Trump and the rest have condemned it, because the MSM doesn’t want to give that impression.
The piece goes on:
Their willingness to use violence marks out Antifa from many other left-wing activists, although the Antifa members we spoke to said they denounce the use of weapons and violent direct action. They said if violence does occur, it’s as a form of self-defence. They also make historical arguments to justify their position. For instance, they ask, what if opponents of the German Nazi Party had been more forceful in their opposition in the 1930s, could World War Two and the Holocaust have been averted?
Antifa have been directly and sometimes physically confronting the far right on the streets…
That’s about as negative as it gets.
In all that propaganda from Antifa there is one very telling phrase of truth: “they have an anti-government streak.” Boy, do they ever. In fact, they are anarchists, a word that is descriptive of the group but only comes up once in that entire article, in this context: “Like other protest movements dating back to Cold War era West German anarchists, Antifa supporters will often dress all in black…” The casual reader could be forgiven for assuming that only in Germany during the Cold War were the current Antifa’s predecessors anarchists (if the reader even knows what the word means). But anarchists are exactly what the group is today.
What are anarchists? Well, since they’re anarchists, they have a lot of different beliefs, and there are anarchists of the left and of the right but the divisions are hard to fathom because the entire thing is hard to fathom. But roughly, Antifa are anarchists of the left (see this). What unites anarchists in general is a desire to destroy central governments, but that’s only the beginning. As such, Antifa in the US is very interested in stirring up trouble and doing anything they think will weaken the Trump administration, but their goals are much larger than that.
See this, for example; Antifa has had a large presence in the liberal/left Northwest for several years:
Antifa has never had to hide in Seattle, Portland or the rest of the West Coast. When the news media is forced to mention them at all, they obligingly call them “anti-fascists”, which, this week, useful idiots have been touting on Twitter as proof that being against Antifa means one is for fascism, to which I have replied, “why are you against ‘Making America Great Again?”
In notoriously anti-Second Amendment Seattle, Antifa open-carried. They commandeered a couple of blocks, as their “security arm”, the John Brown Gun Glub, prevented citizen journalist, and expert on Antifa and its funders, Andy Ngo, from filming the goings on. The Seattle media was incurious…
Portland, Oregon, has at times been owned by Antifa. They controlled the comings and goings of cars an people, which the Mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, allowed. A decision upon which he doubled-down.
At various times on my radio program, I read from Facebook pages of Antifa groups about their paramilitary trainings to be held in Seattle parks: how to make IEDs; how to hide spears in the handles of protest signs; the use of marbles to trip (and probably fatally injure) police horses and their riders. The rest of the Seattle media was not drawn to the stories.
On July 13, 2019 at 4:30 AM, I thought Antifa had erred by outing themselves as dangerous Marxists bent on attacking our Country. One of their soldiers, from the related “security” arm, the John Brown Gun Club, attempted to murder federal agents at an ICE Detention facility in Tacoma, South of Seattle in Washington State. An ICE Spokesman noted, had the terror attack been successful at blowing up the building, 1,400 people would have been murdered.
One would imagine this would alarm the media and the government–not so. In Seattle, and much of the West Coast, this attack is still viewed as a righteous act of self-defense against an agency politicians vilify.
See also this:
This is dangerous.
Socialist Seattle Councilmember Tammy Morales defending the weekend violence, telling her comrades on the Council:
"I don't want to hear is for our constituents to be told to be civil, not to be reactionary, to be told looting doesn't solve anything." pic.twitter.com/NVUBfYVrwS
— (((Jason Rantz))) on KTTH Radio (@jasonrantz) June 2, 2020
The people of Antifa could be shut down fairly easily if they weren’t idealized, covered up, and romanticized, by other people playing a stupid, ignorant, dangerous, dreamy game – or who are in league with them. And such people are legion in blue strongholds these days.
More:
As NBC News in New York noted, the attacks being carried out on American cities are sophisticated; they have logistics, supply chain, intelligence operations and medical supply and aid groups. They learned their techniques on our streets, tested them on our citizens and now, they are employing them against the United States of America, along with drug addiction, sex trafficking, illegal immigration and pornography: another gift to the Country from the one-party West Coast. How can you protect you and your communities?
These groups are not going to stop, they will have to be stopped. Make sure office holders and politicians you support will work to end Antifa and the militant arm of Black Lives Matter as terrorist groups.
A Project Veritas video released Tuesday showed a man identified as a campaign organizer for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Bernard Sanders saying “cities burn” if President Trump wins reelection and predicting violence against police at the 2020 Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee.
Asked what would happen if Mr. Trump is reelected, the man described as Sanders campaign field organizer Kyle Jurek said, “F–ing cities burn,” adding, “I mean, we don’t have a lot of time left, we have to save
f–ing human civilization.”…
[H]e also expressed support for ideological reeducation Trump voters; compared such Americans to Nazis; praised Soviet-style gulags; and predicted police would be “beaten” in riots at the party convention.
They found an opportunity prior to the convention, in the Floyd death at the hands of police in Minneapolis. But they were already prepared with the playbook, the supplies, and the organization.
