Archive for 2020

MORE WOKE STUPIDITY: A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk About Race. It Ignited a Fury.

Notices went up. Anger built. How could we invite a man to speak, members asked, who downplays racism in a time of plague and protest? To let him talk, the organization’s Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus stated, was “reactionary, class reductionist and at best, tone deaf.”

“We cannot be afraid to discuss race and racism because it could get mishandled by racists,” the caucus stated. “That’s cowardly and cedes power to the racial capitalists.”

Amid murmurs that opponents might crash his Zoom talk, Professor Reed and D.S.A. leaders agreed to cancel it, a striking moment as perhaps the nation’s most powerful Socialist organization rejected a Black Marxist professor’s talk because of his views on race.

“God have mercy, Adolph is the greatest democratic theorist of his generation,” said Cornel West, a Harvard professor of philosophy and a Socialist. “He has taken some very unpopular stands on identity politics, but he has a track record of a half-century. If you give up discussion, your movement moves toward narrowness.”

Toward? It’s narrow, and dumb as a bag of hammers. And the activists have already ensured that their “once in a generation opportunity” has been squandered.

Professor Reed is an intellectual duelist, who especially enjoys lancing liberals he sees as too cozy with corporate interests. He wrote that President Bill Clinton and his liberal followers showed a “willingness to sacrifice the poor and to tout it as tough-minded compassion” and described former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. as a man whose “tender mercies have been reserved for the banking and credit card industries.”

He finds a certain humor in being attacked over race.

“I’ve never led with my biography, as that’s become an authenticity-claiming gesture,” he said. “But when my opponents say that I don’t accept that racism is real, I think to myself, ‘OK, we’ve arrived at a strange place.’”

Oh, he attacked Biden. That’s why he’s being cancelled. No racial or feminist critiques of Slow Joe are permitted between now and November. Know your place, peasants!

GOOD NEWS: Mid-2020 Gun Sales Eclipse All of 2019 Sales. If only ammo production could keep up.

What’s revolutionary here, though, is that in the past a lot of gun sales were the 4th — or 40th — gun sold to someone who already owned one or more guns. Now there are a lot of new first-time gun owners out there.

HOW MANY PEOPLE DID NEWS MEDIA PANIC-MONGERING KILL?

The comments offer a different image than how much of the press has painted the Texas governor — “If the virus has presented a leadership test, Abbott’s metrics are getting worse,” the Texas Tribune reported last month.

And compared to the fawning national coverage of New York’s Andrew Cuomo, who was provided the opportunity for months to be interviewed by his brother, CNN host Chris Cuomo, without questioning over New York’s alarming rate of nursing-home COVID deaths, the differences are even more glaring. . . .

But the initial logistical shortcoming — coupled with apocalyptic headlines like NBC’s “‘All the hospitals are full’: In Houston, overwhelmed ICUs leave COVID-19 patients waiting in ER” — led to a spiraling crisis.

“All of that was overblown. We never even got close to capacity,” Delgado stated. “It’s just crazy. Crazy, crazy, out of control, overblown stuff. It’s fear, basically. It’s a fear-factor so the patients, particularly older patients, are afraid to death to do anything. There’s elderly people with chest pain staying at home and just dying, or coming in late — someone brings them in — they’ve already had a big heart attack. A lot of that is going on, and it’s really unsettling.”

“Hospitals are probably the safest place you can go to. If you’re worried about contracting coronavirus, hospitals are extremely safe — they’re safer than a grocery store, they’re safer than a restaurant,” McKeon added.

Davis told National Review that he estimates 5 to 10 percent of his patients are choosing to avoid necessary treatment. “The longer you let that go, the bigger the number will get,” he warned.

The press is never held to account for the damage it causes, yet it’s an industry that does more harm than the tobacco industry.

VITAMIN D UPDATE: Trials Seek to Answer if Vitamin D Could Help in COVID-19: In clinical studies worldwide, researchers are testing the possibility that supplements of the vitamin could prevent or decrease the severity of SARS-CoV-2 infections.

This is interesting, but I’m supplementing — and getting sun — anyway. By the time the study results come out, it’ll probably be too late. And maintaining healthy Vitamin D levels is a good idea anyway for lots of reasons.

DAVID HARSANYI: No Kamala, Ebola Was Nothing Like Coronavirus.

Though the Ebola talking point might end up being a potent political attack, it’s also complete nonsense. It’s tantamount to the Trump administration taking special credit for its excellent work stopping the Eastern equine encephalitis pandemic of 2019. Ebola wasn’t a crisis or a pandemic, but rather an outbreak in West Africa. At the time, the highly esteemed Dr. Anthony Fauci noted that the risk of a normal person contracting was “extraordinarily low” and an “extraordinarily remote threat.” The Mayo Clinic tells us that Ebola is not “transmitted through the air and does not spread through casual contact.” Those who do contract it are obviously ill and easily avoided.

Not one person who contracted Ebola in the United States died from the disease. An American had a far higher chance of being killed by a bee sting or being eaten by a shark than they did of contracting Ebola. Coronavirus, on the other hand, is a highly contagious worldwide pandemic that nearly every nation has struggled to contain, with a fatality rate higher than the common flu.

Yes, but did Harsanyi pronounce Harris’ first name correctly when he typed it?

U. OF CENTRAL FLORIDA GOES MEDIEVAL ON PROFESSOR: Holding a 9-hour, 2-part inquisition into a professor’s in-class speech, complete with anonymous and ill-defined accusations, because of the below tweet.

Charles Negy tweet

WHAT HATH CUOMO WROUGHT: COVID-19 deaths in NYC ‘comparable’ to 1918-1919 flu pandemic. “‘Excess deaths’ in the city in the first two months of the new coronavirus outbreak were about 70% as high as those recorded during the peak of the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, likely because of population growth, the researchers said.”