Archive for 2021

March 13, 2021

BELIEVE IN THE SCIENCE: Research fails to prove racism behind police shootings of Black men.

In fact, per the 2018 US National Crime Victimization Survey, the only group of people systematically killing Black people are other Black people and overwhelmingly so. The Bureau of Justice Statistics also reports that “the offender was of the same race or ethnicity as the victim in 70 per cent of violent incidents involving Black victims.” This directly confronts assertions, especially by celebrities and politicians, that Black people are “literally hunted,” as Lebron James put it. . . .

According to the Washington Post’s database on police shootings, in 2019, 243 Black men were shot and killed (24.3 per cent of total), of which only 11 were unarmed. In contrast, 379 white men were killed (38 per cent of total), of which 23 were unarmed. . . .

In short, there is no definitive conclusion that racism plays a primary or significant role in citizen deaths at the hands of the police. Research, so far, has not “proven” the hypothesis that (white) racism is to blame for racial disparity in the use of force. Any such attempt will be correlational at best, with a variety of variables to consider. Equally as important but rarely addressed, what explains the underrepresentation of other minority groups?

What, indeed?

Posted at 1:28 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Mar 13th, 2021

CUOMO GETS MOCKED MERCILESSLY OVER BLANKET PIC:

Last night, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo excited a lot of comment when he was spotted wearing a blanket with a drink in his hand on the phone. This was after a NY Magazine story ran that it was now 30 women who had accused him of bullying or harassing them and after Senate Majority Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) called on him to resign.

The picture, caught by Reuters, was something else and really captured how embattled he is at the moment with the calls to resign and the move by the New York State Assembly to start an impeachment investigation.

Iowahawk’s take is a hoot:

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Mar 13th, 2021

MEGHAN ’N’ JOE’S EMPIRE OF THE SENTIMENTS:

If your facts don’t care about my feelings, then my feelings aren’t obliged to care about your facts. The facts in Joe Biden’s energetic, inspiring and exhilarating address to the nation last night were frequently as unsteady as the speaker. But the feelings that Biden expressed were, unlike the previous president who must not be named, unimpeachable.

He knows how it feels, he said with that now-customary surge of anger, as if he’s not fully in control of his frontal cortex. And we know how it feels when someone says they know how we feel. Consider everything fixed: COVID, racism, opioids, deficits, the collapse of the schools, the children at the border. The Therapeute-in-Chief is here, dispensing serotonin the way Barack Obama dispensed drone strikes.

It doesn’t matter whether Biden means what he says, any more that it matters whether Meghan Markle told the truth when she implied that her son was denied a prince’s title because he might have dark skin. It’s the feelings that matter: feelings of security, empathy and contentment, and especially the feeling that Nietzsche correctly foresaw as the root feeling of modern life, resentment.

The result is the rule of sentiment over thought and symbols over reality. The Biden administration didn’t invent the moral and humanitarian disaster at the southern border. But it has produced a new crisis by altering the laws to satisfy sentiment.

It feels cruel to return unaccompanied minors, as the Trump administration did, and to hold them in prison-like conditions, as both the Obama and Trump administrations did. But the fact is, Biden’s policies have fostered a greater cruelty.

Biden has created new incentives for human trafficking and the worse kinds of child exploitation. The result is a surge in border crossings that even a professional euphemist like secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas calls ‘overwhelming’, and the spectacle of would-be illegal immigrants kneeling at the border while wearing t-shirts reading ‘Biden let us in’.

This is what Biden gets for taking a knee as a craven genuflection to BLM. This is what he gets for accusing Donald Trump of being a racist and sadist for caging unaccompanied minors — even though Biden was vice president when the cages were built, and even though Biden now presides over a greater influx. And this is what we get: a theater of the sentiments, in which the actors and audience are so jaded that their senses and check books can only be stimulated by that reliable and obscene soap-opera trick, putting children’s lives in the balance.

In a 2005 article in the New Criterion, James Piereson explored “Lyndon Johnson and the Cult of Sentimentality:”

Needless to say, Lyndon Johnson did not believe for a second the foolishness he uttered in the campaign ad against Goldwater. He certainly did not waste any love on his Republican opponent, whom he was eager to demolish in the election. Johnson recognized sentimental humbug when he heard it, and he was known to despise the hippies when they arrived on the public scene a few years later. He reckoned, in good Machiavellian fashion, that a sentimental appeal to love would be effective in a culture that, in the wake of the assasination of President Kennedy, was being overtaken by sentimental platitudes of all kinds. The surprising thing is that Johnson, perhaps guided by his advertising men, saw this culture emerging in 1964 a few years before it really came into open view.

It is perhaps too easy to draw the lesson from this that sentimentalists are destined to be ruled by Machiavellians who know how to exploit their attachment to sentiment and emotional expressions like “We must love one another, or we must die.” Yet, just as Johnson sought to exploit the emerging culture of sentimentality, he was also brought down by it because he was so obviously ill-suited to the role of pied-piper to the young and sensitive. The sentimentalists were hard-headed enough to see (leaving Vietnam aside) that Johnson was not one of them. Johnson, no matter how hard he tried or how much liberal legislation he passed, was simply not convincing as an exemplar of peace and love.

No, the growing army of sentimentalists of the time preferred to march behind Robert Kennedy — a far more Machiavellian figure because Kennedy, unlike Johnson, understood that a politician in a sentimental age must not only say sensitive things, but must also appear authentically to be sad, mournful, and burdened by the tragedies of the world. Robert Kennedy appealed to this emerging culture because he looked like the real thing, a man broken by the tragic but senseless death of his brother. Yet, if this was the case, as to come extent it was, it did not stop Kennedy from exploiting it in his own quest for power and high office. Perhaps the only lesson to be learned from this bizarre period is that, in the end, sentimentality can never answer nor succeed in putting aside the permanent questions of politics, namely: conflict, ambition, and the pursuit of power.

So far, the Biden administration appears on-track to end as badly as LBJ’s did, if not far worse.

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 13th, 2021

SOME LESSONS FROM THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION:

More than 70 years ago, George Orwell explored the intention behind the dystopian determination to deprive the individual of his true self. Emptied of all his former ideals, meanings, and priorities, he would become an empty vessel for totalitarian dogmas: “You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

Intellectual subversives have left American youth with no ideal that cannot be dismantled. And the young are angry—at their parents, who failed to empower them with deeply rooted values; at their semiliterate and confused school teachers, who beg for respect and try to win it by teaching children to respect nothing; at their college professors who, having forsaken their commitment to education, assist political efforts “for a peaceful and just society.” Professors fail to provide knowledge or to teach critical thinking; instead, they urge students to scorn outmoded beliefs and send them off to adult life with a farewell message that life is meaningless. Losers—in a morphological sense of the word, for they are as lost as have been their “dislocated” peers in the past—the young are famished for new principles to fill the yawning hollowness. They are perfect material for political demagogues.

“A sacred place cannot be empty,” affirms a Russian proverb. To the new “progressive” creed the rebels must hold on for dear life: Aside for allowing them to redirect their accumulated anger toward newly defined enemies, it offers a brand-new core identity, an illusion of values, and a sense of belonging. Revolutionary activity is highly addictive, and unlike other narcotics, the perpetual pursuit of visionary ideals provides a never-ending sense of exhilaration, backed by the promise of an impending grand triumph.

Meanwhile, Matt Taibbi explores The Sovietization of the American Press:

We now know in advance that every Biden address will be reviewed as historic and exceptional. It was only a mild shock to see Chris Wallace say Biden’s was the “the best inaugural address I have ever heard.” More predictable was Politico saying of Thursday night’s address that “it is hard to imagine any other contemporary politician making the speech Biden did… channeling our collective sorrow and reminding us that there is life after grief.” (Really? Hard to imagine any contemporary politician doing that?).

This stuff is relatively harmless. Where it gets weird is that the move to turn the bulk of the corporate press in the “moral clarity” era into a single party organ has come accompanied by purges of the politically unfit. In the seemingly endless parade of in-house investigations of journalists, paper after paper has borrowed from the Soviet style of printing judgments and self-denunciations, without explaining the actual crimes.

The New York Times coverage of the recent staff revolt at Teen Vogue against editor Alexi McCammond noted “Staff Members Condemn Editor’s Decade-Old, Racist Tweets,” but declined to actually publish the offending texts, so readers might judge for themselves. The Daily Beast expose on Times reporter Donald McNeil did much the same thing. Even the ongoing (and in my mind, ridiculous) moral panic over Substack ties in. Aimed at people already banished from mainstream media, the obvious message is that anyone with even mildly heterodox opinions shouldn’t be publishing anywhere.

Those still clinging to mainstream jobs in a business that continues to lay people off at an extraordinary rate read the gist of all of these stories clearly: if you want to keep picking up a check, you’d better talk the right talk.

Thus you see bizarre transformations like that of David Brooks, who spent his career penning paeans to “personal responsibility” and the “culture of thrift,” but is now writing stories about how “Joe Biden is a transformational president” for casting aside fiscal restraints in the massive Covid-19 bill. When explaining that “both parties are adjusting to the new paradigm,” he’s really explaining his own transformation, in a piece that reads like a political confession. “I’m worried about a world in which we spend borrowed money with abandon,” he says, but “income inequality, widespread child poverty, and economic precarity are the problems of our time.”

Maybe Brooks is experiencing the same “evolution” Biden is being credited with of late. Or, he’s like a lot of people in the press who are searching out the safest places on the op-ed page, the middle of the newsroom middle, in desperate efforts to stay on the masthead. It’s been made clear that there’s no such thing as overdoing it in one direction, e.g. if you write as the Times did that Biden “has become a steady hand who chooses words with extraordinary restraint” (which even those who like and admire Biden must grasp is not remotely true of the legendary loose cannon). Meanwhile, how many open critics of the Party on the left, the right, or anywhere in between still have traditional media jobs?

Having seen centrist liberals like Bari Weiss and Donald McNeil utterly defenestrated by their now-former colleagues at the Times, no wonder Brooks is toeing the party line. And/or he simply likes the tailoring on Biden’s trousers.

Posted at 10:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 13th, 2021

JIM TREACHER: Sarah Silverman Is Sick of the Democrats Too.

“It’s the absolutist-ness (sic) of the party I am in that is such a turnoff to me. It’s so f***ing elitist, you know? For something called ‘progressive,’ it allows for zero progress. It’s all or nothing, no steps toward, all or f***ing nothing. Again, righteousness porn… I don’t want to be associated with any party anymore. It just comes with too much baggage. Every party. It comes with so much f***ing baggage that no ideas can be taken at face value. And without ideas, what are we? Without a common truth, how can we talk about it?”

Yep. A lot of people reject any idea that doesn’t confirm their biases. Not just in politics or “culture war” stuff, but everything they see and hear.

Of course, there’s plenty of this to go around. I hear from people like this every day. Some people hate my guts because I’m supposedly “alt-right,” which is just the new “teabagger.” But other people hate my guts because I refuse to pretend Donald Trump is incapable of error. Any criticism of him is somehow “disloyal.” Disagreeing with a politician is “treason.” What nonsense! I didn’t swear an oath of fealty the first time I ever voted for a Republican. I’m under no obligation whatsoever to say anything I don’t believe to be true, just because it might inconvenience someone in power or his dimwitted adherents.

I spent eight years resisting a cult of personality. Then I spent four more years resisting a different cult of personality. If you liked me then and hate me now, or vice versa, I really don’t see how that’s my concern. I’m not the one who’s changed.

Although as Bridget Phetasy tweets, Silverman will “change her mind when Trump runs in 2024.”

She’ll even dust off her Nazi uniform as well.

Posted at 9:44 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 13th, 2021

HUMAN SACRIFICE! DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER! MASS HYSTERIA! Revenge of the Gods. California’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum urges students to chant to the Aztec deity of human sacrifice:

R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, the original co-chair of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, developed much of the material regarding early American history. In his book Rethinking Ethnic Studies, which is cited throughout the curriculum, Cuauhtin argues that the United States was founded on a “Eurocentric, white supremacist (racist, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous), capitalist (classist), patriarchal (sexist and misogynistic), heteropatriarchal (homophobic), and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.” The document claims that whites began “grabbing the land,” “hatching hierarchies,” and “developing for Europe/whiteness,” which created “excess wealth” that “became the basis for the capitalist economy.” Whites established a “hegemony” that continues to the present day, in which minorities are subjected to “socialization, domestication, and ‘zombification.’”

The religious narrative is even more disturbing. Cuauhtin developed a related “mandala” claiming that white Christians committed “theocide” against indigenous tribes, killing their gods and replacing them with Christianity. White settlers thus established a regime of “coloniality, dehumanization, and genocide,” characterized by the “explicit erasure and replacement of holistic Indigeneity and humanity.” The solution, according to Cuauhtin and the ethnic studies curriculum, is to “name, speak to, resist, and transform the hegemonic Eurocentric neocolonial condition” in a posture of “transformational resistance.” The ultimate goal is to “decolonize” American society and establish a new regime of “countergenocide” and “counterhegemony,” which will displace white Christian culture and lead to the “regeneration of indigenous epistemic and cultural futurity.”

This religious concept is fleshed out in the model curriculum’s official “ethnic studies community chant.” The curriculum recommends that teachers lead their students in a series of indigenous songs, chants, and affirmations, including the “In Lak Ech Affirmation,” which appeals directly to the Aztec gods. Students first clap and chant to the god Tezkatlipoka—whom the Aztecs traditionally worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism—asking him for the power to be “warriors” for “social justice.” Next, the students chant to the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek, seeking “healing epistemologies” and “a revolutionary spirit.” Huitzilopochtli, in particular, is the Aztec deity of war and inspired hundreds of thousands of human sacrifices during Aztec rule. Finally, the chant comes to a climax with a request for “liberation, transformation, [and] decolonization,” after which students shout “Panche beh! Panche beh!” in pursuit of ultimate “critical consciousness.”

The chants have a clear implication: the displacement of the Christian god, which is said to be an extension of white supremacist oppression, and the restoration of the indigenous gods to their rightful place in the social justice cosmology. It is, in a philosophical sense, a revenge of the gods.

California parents should be concerned.

That’s putting it mildly. Tom Wolfe may have passed on, but the coding he wrote to program the Matrix is still working brilliantly.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Does Charlie Stross know about this?

Posted at 9:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Mar 13th, 2021

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY IN THE BIDEN ERA: The U.S. Is Sitting on Tens of Millions of Vaccine Doses the World Needs. “Tens of millions of doses of the coronavirus vaccine made by the British-Swedish company AstraZeneca are sitting idly in American manufacturing facilities, awaiting results from its U.S. clinical trial while countries that have authorized its use beg for access. . . . But although AstraZeneca’s vaccine is already authorized in more than 70 countries, according to a company spokesman, its U.S. clinical trial has not yet reported results, and the company has not applied to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization. AstraZeneca has asked the Biden administration to let it loan American doses to the European Union, where it has fallen short of its original supply commitments and where the vaccination campaign has stumbled badly. The administration, for now, has denied the request, one official said. . . . As frustrations simmer, some European officials are blaming the United States.”

You know things are bad if the NYT is willing to run a piece that’s this critical of a new Democratic administration.

Posted at 9:08 am by Glenn Reynolds on Mar 13th, 2021

I.D. ISN’T RACIST WHEN IT’S FOR SOMETHING DEMOCRATS WANT: Dan McLaughlin: Oh, Now You Have to Show I.D.

NBC 4 in Washington, D.C., reports that the District is concerned that too many people getting the vaccine in DC are not residents, so it’s going to do something about that. . . .

Identification to prove that people are in the right jurisdiction? Funny how this works, when a liberal government is trying to control something it actually cares about. This comes just as congressional Democrats are trying to abolish state voter-identification requirements for in-person and absentee voting and progressives are calling it racist voter suppression to ask voters to cast ballots in their own precinct. We are endlessly told that asking for ID scares people away just as surely as turning fire hoses on them. What if it turns out that this is actually just a routine way for government to verify that it is dealing with people who are entitled to what they are trying to do?

Only when it fits the narrative.

Posted at 9:05 am by Glenn Reynolds on Mar 13th, 2021
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