#JOURNALISM: WaPo Mistakes Job Gains for ‘Grim’ Losses. To be fair, they were hoping for grim losses.
Archive for 2020
June 6, 2020
WHY IS CBS SHAMING ITS VIEWERS? White silence on social media: Why not saying anything is actually saying a lot.
“It’s incredibly hurtful,” said Broadway star Jelani Alladin. “And you’re telling me that you have no hesitation posting a selfie of yourself… or what you’re eating for dinner, and yet you’re telling me that you’re afraid to say something because you might hurt other people’s feelings? Or you don’t know what to say? Or you don’t have an audience to reach? Were you thinking those things when you posted the other photos? I don’t think you were.”
Social media silence is nuanced. There are people whose feeds have simply gone dark. There are people who, as Alladin notes, have continued posting selfies and pictures of their food as if nothing is wrong. And, as fitness influencer Trammell Logan tells CBS News, it can even be hurtful when white people post messages about #blacklivesmatter side-by-side with more frivolous content.
“In your natural state of being distraught or sadness, if something extremely personal happens to you, I can’t see how you can be in that state and post about it or be about it and then five minutes later like post a cocktail mix, or like you dancing. Our emotions don’t necessarily work like that,” Logan said.
Curiously though, at least based on their Website, CBS hasn’t stopped broadcasting its sitcoms and cop shows in a show of support.
The Tweet promoting the above article is currently getting a huge ratio, driven largely by people posting photos of food in response:
Meanwhile, the New York Times, which described the article they ran by Sen. Tom Cotton as “fascist,” runs an article with this headline: How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror.
Related: Language, Memory, & Soft Totalitarianism.
There’s a new sin. Forget gluttony. Forget sloth. The great moral error today is whiteness. To be white is to be fallen. Whiteness has become a kind of original sin, an inherited moral defect one must atone for throughout one’s life. In the wake of the brutal execution of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, this almost religious treatment of whiteness as an existential flaw has gone uber-mainstream.
Listen to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Yesterday he called on ‘white Christians’ to ‘repent of our own prejudices’. Repent, ye sinners! Or if you prefer your leaders to be secular, how about the high priestess of middle-class decency, Nigella Lawson, who instructs her fellow white people to ‘acknowledge [that] systematic racism exists’ and that we are ‘complicit in it’. That brutal killing in Minneapolis – it’s your doing, white people.
Or read Time, the most mainstream magazine in existence. ‘White people’, says one of its contributors, ‘have inherited this house of white supremacy, built by their forebears and willed to them’. Inherited. The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son. The Time writer says white racism is a spectrum, stretching from those white people who tell a black woman ‘how pretty our hair looks when we wear it straight’ to ‘the more extreme end of the spectrum… cops literally suffocating black people like George Floyd as they beg for their lives’.
To compare a compliment about a woman’s hair to the merciless killing of Floyd is deeply disturbing. It sanitises the crime committed against Floyd and debases his suffering by putting it on a par with a mere uninvited compliment. It also confirms how thoroughly whiteness has been pathologised in mainstream ideology. What was once said about black men – that it is problematic when they compliment women of another race and that their racial make-up drives them towards murderous behaviour – is now said about white men. Perhaps someone can explain how replacing one form of racial fatalism with another is progressive.
Flashback: “The White Man is the Jew of Liberal Fascism.”
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: The Left’s Eating Itself. Let them Fight.
Blue on blue violence is not my problem. The left eating itself is not my problem. In fact, the only feeling all this mayhem emits from me — and I’m not terribly proud of this — is a twinge of smug satisfaction in the form of Toldjaso.
The moment Barack Obama embraced and legitimized the left-wing terrorists in Occupy Wall Street (that have now morphed into Antifa and Black Lives Matter), I toldjaso. The moment Obama and the corporate media embraced the Trayvon Martin, Hands Up, Don’t Shoot, and Baltimore hoaxes, I toldjaso. I saw the writing on the wall and got the hell out of Los Angeles in 2011.
The left is eating itself.
Watching conservatives stress over this baffles me.
As the meme goes Let them fight.
I can understand the stress if you’re a Republican living in a Democrat-run city, but you need to get out. It’s just that simple… You need to get out. Unfortunately, things are going to get a lot worse before they get better — but they will get better, just like things got better after all the unrest of the 60s.
Eventually, even Democrats will sue for peace by voting for a Rudy Giuliani, because all this baloney about social justice is just the Democrat Party reverting to the soft-on-crime party that imploded in 1972.
Relax.
Sit back.
You get what you vote for and Democrats voted for this.
Sorry, but it’s a waste of time to care about people more than they care about themselves.
I’m certainly not happy about what’s happening. It just it what it is. So…
Let them fight.
Read the whole thing, but note that it was a long and painful quarter-century between New York’s fall from grace starting in the Lindsey years of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, until Giuliani’s election in 1994. To mix and match Tom Wolfe and H.L. Mencken, in the coming months and years, the voters in New York and other riot-torn cities will be getting their “great relearning” good and hard.
CHRISTOPHER FLANNERY: The 1619 Riots: Our elites seek a new nation conceived in violence.
June 5, 2020
MEGAN MCARDLE: Thanks to the protests, social distancing is over.
In a few weeks, one of two things will have happened. Either covid-19 cases will abruptly reverse their decline in some of America’s largest cities, and we will know that they were seeded by the days of rage we are living through . . . or they won’t. Either way, social distancing is over.
In the happy scenario, the protests will have performed an enormous public service, even beyond agitating for justice. They are basically running a natural experiment that scientists could never have ethically undertaken: Do massive outside gatherings — including singing, chanting, screaming and coughing — spread covid-19, or not? Along with evidence from the Memorial Day weekend parties at Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks, they may well demonstrate, once and for all, that the risk of spreading covid-19 outdoors is negligible. At which point, throw open the bar patios and backyard barbecues! Bring on the beach-blanket bingo! Move church pews into the parking lot and sing away!
Unfortunately, it’s also grimly plausible that in a few weeks we’ll see new outbreaks that will soon surge out of control, taking many American lives. Because we’ll never be able to lock down our cities again; once you’ve let the cat out of the bag, kitty won’t allow himself to be stuffed back in. . . .
First, as was pointed out when red states were protesting, you may have every right to risk your own death, but with infectious disease, protesters also risk killing other people, who might not have volunteered to die for your cause. Which brings us to the second caveat: In a diverse and highly pluralistic society, authorities don’t get to declare some causes worthy and others worthless. . . .
It may seem obvious to you that ending police brutality rises to a level of importance that, say, church services don’t. But the impossibility of rank-ordering competing ideas about what is “most important” is the reason liberal democracy had to be invented. If you were a religious believer, you might rank church higher; if you were about to lose your house unless your business reopened, you might put nail salons high up on the list.
As individuals, we can make those distinctions. But our authorities may not except on broadly neutral terms. Some public officials seem to imagine that if they can distinguish between selling food and offering Communion, they must also have the authority to make even finer distinctions: allowing people to exercise their First Amendment right to protest police brutality, while circumscribing their First Amendment right to worship in public. Legally, I doubt it, but I’m quite positive that courts won’t let governments distinguish between assembling to protest police brutality and assembling to protest public health policy.
One can, of course, argue that there’s a moral difference. But moral distinctions have no force outside the community that makes them. However satisfying it feels to call one sort of protest “suicidal,” “reckless” and “mind-bogglingly selfish,” while describing the other as a noble and necessary fight against injustice, this will not restrain the disdained. Indeed, the perceived hypocrisy will deafen them to anything said after that.
Yep. The public health experts had one shot, and they blew it. If deaths do result, they 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
Which is a sub-case of why so many of our institutions, from the New York Times to NYC government to higher education and even sports, are failing: The people running them care more about mugging for their peers than about the welfare of the institutions they are entrusted. That’s a species of corruption, and a highly destructive one.
OPEN THREAD: Use all your well-learned politesse.
I WAS WARNED A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO THAT CHINA WAS GOING TO TRY TO CREATE ITS OWN ELON MUSK: Chinese private launch firms advance with methane engines, launch preparations and new funding.
WELL, THAT’S NOT THE NARRATIVE: Black Likely Voter Approval of Trump at 41%. Hey, maybe that’s why the Democrats are so anxious to push protests and a racial-polarization campaign.
Related: Democrats Scramble to Win Over More Black Men: Some black voters are attracted to what they describe as President Trump’s tell-it-like-it-is demeanor, surveys found. “Black Americans are one of the Democratic Party’s most loyal voting blocs, and President Trump won just 8% of black voters in 2016, according to exit polls. Mr. Biden is expected to easily win the demographic in November. But if the 2020 presidential election is as close as the 2016 vote, some Democrats say losing even a small number of black men to Mr. Trump—or seeing more of them stay home on Election Day—could hamper Mr. Biden’s White House chances.”
Well, objectively, Trump has done more for blacks in four years than Democrats have done in 40. For all the talk this week, his criminal-justice reforms dwarf anything the Democrats have even attempted, and actually undo some “tough” criminal laws pioneered by . . . Joe Biden.
UPDATE: Uh oh. Even Talcum X has figured out that “systemic racism” is a Democratic Party problem.
Possibly related:
HMM. FOR A WHILE THEY WERE SAYING TO AVOID IT AS DANGEROUS: Coronavirus: Ibuprofen tested as a treatment.
The trial will use a special formulation of ibuprofen rather than the regular tablets that people might usually buy. Some people already take this lipid capsule form of the drug for conditions like arthritis.
Studies in animals suggest it might treat acute respiratory distress syndrome – one of the complications of severe coronavirus.
Prof Mitul Mehta, one of the team at King’s College London, said: “We need to do a trial to show that the evidence actually matches what we expect to happen.”
Early in the pandemic there were some concerns that ibuprofen might be bad for people to take, should they have the virus with mild symptoms.
These were heightened when France’s health minister Oliver Veran said that taking non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, such as ibuprofen, could aggravate the infection and advised patients to take paracetamol instead.
A review by the Commission on Human Medicines quickly concluded that, like paracetamol, it was safe to take for coronavirus symptoms. Both can bring a temperature down and help with flu-like symptoms.
Hmm.
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Plus, deals in CDs and Vinyl.
REVOLVING DOOR REVOLVES: MSNBC and NBC News hire Lisa Page as a legal analyst.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): This is as if the press had hired G. Gordon Liddy to do color commentary on Watergate.
NOT MUCH OF A RESULT: Hydroxychloroquine For Avoiding Infection? “That means what you think it means: there was no statistical difference in infection rate between the HCQ group and the placebo group. . . . So this trial was negative, although one should remember that it could have missed asymptomatic cases. It also tended to enroll relatively healthy people, and can’t speak to any possible protection of high-risk groups.” Some people in both groups were taking zinc.
A better study would have tested people for infection, rather than relying on self-reported symptoms, but I would have hoped to see a positive result here.
RESEARCH: A cohort study to evaluate the effect of combination Vitamin D, Magnesium and Vitamin B12 (DMB) on progression to severe outcome in older COVID-19 patients. Of course, you should be making sure to get enough of these anyway. And this is a small study, but interesting.
Related: Paging Dr. Hamblin: Does Vitamin D Help Fight COVID-19? Evidence is slowly mounting. Some researchers think that’s enough to recommend it. Of course, you should be making sure to get enough Vitamin D anyway. . .
AMID DEMONSTRATIONS, LIBERAL ELITES PRAISE VIOLENCE AS PROTEST TOOL:
There’s an astonishing story in the Boston Globe-Democrat — it’s hard to imagine it appearing anywhere else — in which Newbury Street shop owners hit by looters and vandals Sunday night still stand by the protest “heroes.” These stores were ransacked, and not for survival gear or basic foodstuffs, but sneakers, coats and luxury goods.
No matter. The events on the streets in response to the killing of George Floyd are good. Period.
If you think it’s unfair to throw peaceful protesters and violent rioters under the same bus, you make an excellent point. That’s almost as bad as treating all cops like racist murderers — throwing bricks at them, screaming in their faces, calling them “pigs,” — because one despicable dirtbag in Minnesota used his badge to perpetrate a horrific crime.
So yes, it’s possible to support protests and not support violence. Unfortunately, many members of the social justice platoons are determined to defend both. And so the headline from Slate.com is “Non-violence is an important tool for protests, but so is violence.”
Nine local police officers were injured trying to protect the lives and property of Bostonians, and Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins takes to the mic Monday to attack the cops as murderers.
In a New York Magazine piece entitled “The Rioters Aren’t Here to Convince You,” Zak Cheney-Rice defends the violence in and of itself, arguing that, like The Joker who wanted to see everything burn, “you might begrudge the rioters their insistence on seeing some of it burn for a few nights. But then again, you’d be missing their point.”
As Stacy McCain writes, it’s “The Return of the Riot Ideology.”
AT AMAZON, ASICS Women’s Gel-Kayano 26 Running Shoes.
WASHINGTON POST BLASTED OVER INACCURATE ‘GRIM MILESTONE’ TWEET ON UNEMPLOYMENT RATE: ‘IT’S NOT TRUE.’
The Washington Post was blasted on social media after it jumped the gun with an inaccurate tweet Friday claiming the May U.S. unemployment rate was close to 20 percent, moments after the actual report indicated the rate unexpectedly had dropped to 13.3 percent.
“Grim milestone to be reached as May unemployment rate nears 20 percent,” the Post wrote in a now-deleted tweet to accompany a now-edited story with the same inaccurate headline.
WHY NOT TAKE A BREAK FROM THE SERIOUS NEWS FOR A FEW MINUTES? Florida Man Friday: Gators Gone Wild!
TAKING COVID-19 SERIOUSLY: PJ Media writer Matt Margolis and co-author John Cox have a new book out. Oh, The Places You Can’t Go!
THAT SEEMS USEFUL: Bosch introduces automatic emergency calls for motorcycle accidents.