INSERT HENRY KISSINGER’S JOKE ABOUT THE IRAN-IRAQ WAR HERE: College Democrats of America Imploding as They Embrace Cancel Culture and Accuse Each Other of Racism.
Archive for 2021
November 20, 2021
SCOTT ALEXANDER: Much more than you wanted to know about Ivermectin.
So what do you do?
This is one of the toughest questions in medicine. It comes up again and again. You have some drug. You read some studies. Again and again, more people are surviving (or avoiding complications) when they get the drug. It’s a pattern strong enough to common-sensically notice. But there isn’t an undeniable, unbreachable fortress of evidence. The drug is really safe and doesn’t have a lot of side effects. So do you give it to your patients? Do you take it yourself?
Here this question is especially tough, because, uh, if you say anything in favor of ivermectin you will be cast out of civilization and thrown into the circle of social hell reserved for Klan members and 1/6 insurrectionists. All the health officials in the world will shout “horse dewormer!” at you and compare you to Josef Mengele. But good doctors aren’t supposed to care about such things. Your only goal is to save your patient. Nothing else matters.
I am telling you that Mahmud et al is a good study and it got p = 0.003 in favor of ivermectin. You can take the blue pill, and stay a decent respectable member of society. Or you can take the horse dewormer pill, and see where you end up.
In a second, I’ll tell you my answer. But you won’t always have me to answer questions like this, and it might be morally edifying to observe your thought process in situations like this. So take a second, and meet me on the other side of the next section heading.
Alexander’s hypothesis is fascinating, though, well, it’s fascinating. But the more troubling thing is that, as he says, certain scientific arguments, even when supported by evidence, are now excluded so that people don’t seem to be The Wrong Kind, Dear. And that reliance on social ostracism over reasoned argument is (one of) the worst things about our current elite.
Plus: “I want a world where ‘I did a study, but I can’t show you the data’ should be taken as seriously as ‘I determined P = NP, but I can’t show you the proof.'”
Also:
So “believe experts”? That would have been better advice in this case. But the experts have beclowned themselves again and again throughout this pandemic, from the first stirrings of “anyone who worries about coronavirus reaching the US is dog-whistling anti-Chinese racism”, to the Surgeon-General tweeting “Don’t wear a face mask”, to government campaigns focusing entirely on hand-washing (HEPA filters? What are those?) Not only would a recommendation to trust experts be misleading, I don’t even think you could make it work. People would notice how often the experts were wrong, and your public awareness campaign would come to naught.
Indeed. As Alexander notes, once people have figured out that experts lie — and they do — it’s much harder to argue that “yes, but this isn’t the sort of lie they usually tell.”
Again, to have a high trust society, the people in charge of institutions must be trustworthy. When they’re untrustworthy but full of hauteur, they aren’t trusted entirely independent of whether they’re right or wrong this time.
Also: “And now let’s return to that first word, ‘hostile’. 95% of biology professors are Democrats. Plus medical organizations keep rubbing more and more salt in the wound. . . . If we want to make people more willing to get vaccines, or less willing to take ivermectin, we have to make the scientific establishment feel less like an enclave of hostile aliens to half the population.”
The problem is, America’s gentry class utterly depends on not simply feeling superior to the others, but on loudly denigrating the others, for its self-image. And it values its self image more than objective reality. Sadly, there appears to be no treatment or vaccine for that ailment, which is far more destructive than Covid.
GETTING IT WRONG: Once more with feeling! Media coverage of the Rittenhouse case was hot garbage.
And if you missed it last night: Ranking the Top 10 Most Pathetic Reactions to Kyle Rittenhouse Verdict.
GETTING IT RIGHT: Here Are My Contemporaneous Articles About The Kyle Rittenhouse Shootings, Now Unlocked. From Jesse Singal:
Since the Kyle Rittenhouse trial is underway, I’ve decided to unlock the two contemporaneous posts I did about the shootings — scroll down and you’ll see both of them, one after the other. I wrote about this case twice because it demonstrated, to a disturbing degree, one of my biggest fears about the current media environment: what feels like endlessly accelerating Balkanization. We seem headed toward a point where every major news story generates at least two distinct versions of reality that are summarily adopted as true by many partisans. And the more explosive the story, the more disagreement about the facts.
The Rittenhouse case was a particularly good (or bad) example, because thanks to the number of cameras on-scene, we had a lot of details about what happened fairly quickly. Watching some major media outlets and otherwise trustworthy-seeming figures selectively ignore or tweak those details to fit a preferred narrative worried the hell out of me. It seemed pretty clear, simply from watching the videos and reading the relevant laws and legal analysis, that Rittenhouse at the very least had a decent self-defense case. Not ironclad, but decent. And yet I watched many influential media figures and politicians engage in this weird snowballing act of collective truthiness — they turned Rittenhouse into a monster, into someone who had committed obviously premeditated acts of murder, in a manner that ran dozens of laps ahead of the available evidence. As I argue in the below posts, this sort of distortion can have serious consequences, especially when it collides with the realities of a courtroom.
Read the whole thing.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: GoKAR!—The University of Texas’ CRT Plan for Four-Year-Olds.
For me and other alumni of the University of Texas, it has become less and less surprising how deeply the gospel of wokeness has permeated and corrupted the institution. Whether it is the dean of UT Law preemptively surrendering to the wokesters and neutering the newly endowed First Amendment Center before it even opened, or UT adopting an Orwellian DEI initiative that puts departmental diversity commissars in command of hiring, promotion, tenure, awards, and funding decisions, or having one of its noted scientists forced to withdraw his academic work because the enlightened feared it might undercut their social engineering efforts, those of us who have been paying attention have pretty much written the Forty Acres off as having gone around the bend. After all, how much worse can it get?
Once again, the administration of UT President Jay Hartzell responds, “hold my soy milk.” Not content to propagandize college students with CRT pseudo-scholarship, or to institutionalize its teachings as official UT policy, UT is now launching a program to “educate” four- and five-year-old children on “anti-racism”:
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Brought to a halt by a complaint: The university is reviewing a complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights regarding a project designed by three faculty researchers. “Because we also expect all research projects to comply with the law and university polices, the university is conducting a legal compliance review of the complaint before this study is launched.”
More people should file these, and send a courtesy copy to University General Counsel, who are generally pretty sensitive to legal issues.
November 19, 2021
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UC Irvine Vice Chancellor Sends an Official Message About the Rittenhouse Trial: Are universities supposed to have institutional views on the facts about self-defense in a case half a continent way?
No. But they can’t help the urge to spread leftist propaganda.
BOB MCMANUS: Above the law, lefties? De Blasio & co. subvert justice in wake of Kyle Rittenhouse verdict. “Except, of course, that is precisely what Friday’s verdict did: It struck a blow for equity, accountability and justice before the law — demonstrating that it’s still possible for 12 citizens to resist enormous pressure and do the right thing before the law. Good for them. And shame on those who elevate politics and prejudice above the Constitution, and justice itself. They do America no favors.”
To be fair, they don’t mean to.
SARAH HOYT: Spit Out That Black Pill. “As Bill Whittle (bless his name) puts it, most casualties happen after we know the war is won or lost. So be careful out there, and keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark. . . . Don’t get sloppy, but fight with all you’ve got, from where you are, with everything you can. Because in the end individual freedom wins.”
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
And nobody on the left is ready to have that conversation because they’re both historically ignorant and politically determined.
UPDATE: A friend emails: “Rittenhouse can escape the opprobrium of NBA teams by establishing a personal tie to the Chinese market.”
Heh. 100% true.
NOBODY’S MORE DISAPPOINTED THAN CNN AND MSNBC: Kenosha Crowd Reacts to Rittenhouse Verdict…and It’s Not What the Lying Media Told You Would Happen. “Not only is the crowd overwhelmingly cheering for Rittenhouse and his right to self-defense, but the majority of the cars driving by were honking their horns in support of the verdict. This reaction gives me hope for America. Perhaps Americans do understand why our Constitutional rights are still important and why the mob cannot be allowed to have power over the law.”
Plus: “The left in this country has used terror tactics, starting violent riots and engaging in property destruction as a matter of right when they feel they have been wronged. We all now expect them to burn down cities when they get bad news. None of that is legal in our system of government. The people who should face a jury are the ones who burned businesses, committed arson, vandalism, and lawlessness, not the people who defended their town against them when law enforcement wouldn’t.”
The leftists are a (fairly small) minority that bullies the majority with the wholeheared support of the media. That’s why they hate any sign of resistance, especially things that demonstrate that they aren’t actually overwhelmingly powerful. See also the “fuck Joe Biden”/”let’s go Brandon” chants.
OPEN THREAD: Crowd Control.
MEMO TO JEFF BEZOS: LESS LAWFARING, MORE SPACEFARING. Court ruling describes rejection of Blue Origin HLS lawsuit.
Hertling was, at times in the opinion, particularly blunt in his dismissal of Blue Origin’s claims. “Blue Origin is in the position of every disappointed bidder: Oh. That’s what the agency wanted and liked best? If we had known, we would have instead submitted a proposal that resembled the successful offer, but we could have offered a better price and snazzier features and options,” he wrote after rejecting its arguments for an alternative lander concept.
Seriously, work on your hardware. I know lawyers are a lot cheaper than rockets, but they’re not a substitute.
HAHA, THE TIMING FITS:
NOW OUT FROM ANDREW WAREHAM: The Pinchbeck Peer: Book 5. #CommissionEarned.
FANNED BY THE MEDIA’S DISHONEST COVERAGE: Rittenhouse Lawyer: ‘Scary’ How Many Death Threats Were Received During Trial. “
OH NOES, MASCULINITY! The lawless masculinity of the GOP.
Leftists, and especially leftist journalists, are a nasty stew of psychosocial insecurity and neurosis.
WENDY MURPHY: Facts over feelings in Kyle Rittenhouse verdict: He was acting in self-defense. “When Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and injured Gaige Grosskreutz, he was acting in self-defense. So says a jury from Kenosha, Wis., and their verdict is correct because that’s what the facts showed. . . . Prosecutors said Rittenhouse was guilty of murder because he was the aggressor, but video evidence showed that Rittenhouse was leaving the area before he shot any bullets, and that he only started shooting when Rosenbaum and others started chasing him. Rosenbaum lunged at Rittenhouse and grabbed his gun. Rittenhouse said he shot Rosenbaum to stop him. Video evidence also showed that Rittenhouse shot Huber only after Huber started hitting him in the head — and tried to take his gun. Grosskreutz, who was armed, also put his hand on Rittenhouse’s gun before he was shot.”
And “it’s not that the victims deserved to be shot.” Actually, on these facts, I think they kinda did.
Of course, the real responsibility is that of politicians and law enforcement who let armed lefty thugs rampage at will in the streets, necessitating self-defense by people who had every right to expect the government to stand between them and the thugs. This is malfeasance, and in a just world those officials would be on trial.
If you don’t want people taking guns into scenes of civil unrest, then don’t pull police out and leave citizens to fend for themselves in scenes of civil unrest.
I REMEMBER WHEN THE ACLU WAS A CIVIL RIGHTS ORGANIZATION THAT BELIEVED IN DUE PROCESS AND THE PRESUMPTION OF INNOCENCE: SAF Condemns ACLU Statement Branding Kyle Rittenhouse a Deliberate Killer.
SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb was stunned at the ACLU’s reaction.
“While the ACLU should have been complaining about the conduct of prosecutors in the Rittenhouse case,” Gottlieb stated, “the organization instead is calling Rittenhouse a deliberate killer, perpetuating the myth that he deliberately crossed state lines to kill people. It is shocking for the ACLU, which has a long record of defending the rights of individuals against government prosecution to make such an outrageous statement.
“Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted by a jury of seven women and five men for defending himself against multiple attackers in the middle of a riot,” Gottlieb continued. “By being tried in court, he essentially was being held responsible for his actions, which the jury’s verdict clearly indicates were justified under the circumstances.
“We saw the same video evidence everyone else did,” he added. “Any reasonable person who viewed the videos and heard the testimony would easily conclude Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self-defense.”
Now the ACLU is actively encouraging lynch-mob justice.
QUESTION: WHAT IF RITTENHOUSE HAD BEEN BLACK?
ANSWER: Andrew Coffee IV found not guilty on all counts of murder, attempted first degree murder. “Andrew Coffee was found not guilty on all counts of murder and attempted first degree murder Friday. Coffee is accused of firing at Indian River County Sheriff’s Deputies during an early morning drug raid at his home back in 2017. His girlfriend, Alteria Woods was caught in the crossfire, shot 10 times and later died. Coffee was charged with the murder of Woods after a grand jury exonerated two law enforcement officers for her death…Coffee was found guilty on a count of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. He was also found not guilty in the murder of Woods.”
COLOR ME SKEPTICAL: First Wuhan COVID case days later than initially reported: scientist. “The first case of COVID-19 identified in Wuhan, China and presented as such by the World Health Organization was actually days later than previously believed and at an animal market, a top scientist said in the journal Science Thursday.”