Foolhardiness

Will Herman Cain’s Death Change Republican RepuGNican Views on the Virus and Masks? His publicly dismissive attitude about the pandemic reflected the hands-off inconsistency of many party leaders.

74 - an age cohort with high mortality from COVID-19.

Male - twice the mortality rate of females.

Black - a racial group with as-yet-unexplained higher mortality from COVID-19. [Kain did not fit the impoverished, crowded housing, high-public-exposure-job explanation typically offered for higher mortality in blacks.]

Attended a Narcissist-in-Chief rally, defiantly, like so many of his fellow RepuGNicans, not wearing a mask.

[Will his avoidable death convince RepuGNicans to abandon defiant macho folly? Probably not. Unfortunately, the foolhardy and their lives are soon parted.]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/us/politics/herman-cain-gop-coronavirus.html

Increasingly Authoritarian Wrong

Twilight of the Liberal Right: Conservatism always contained the seeds of authoritarianism.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/opinion/anne-applebaum-twilight-of-democracy.html .

Cult of Selfish Stupidity

The Cult of Selfishness Is Killing America: The right wrong has made irresponsible behavior a key principle.

[If selfishly unmasked wrong wingers predominantly pass SARS-CoV-2 to other selfishly unmasked wrong wingers, then natural selection will take its course. America will be fortunate if as few as 250,000 die of COVID-19.]

First in boastfulness

America surely grates, but great? Nope. A powerful military and supremely greedy billionaires do not a great society make. Racism, greed, misogyny, bigotry, xenophobia, control-freak religiosity, gun culture, and boastful ignorance make the USA even worse.

The Real Reason Biden Is Ahead of LIAR-in-Chief? He’s a Man: It’s a lot easier to run a cautious, inoffensive campaign when you’re not up against a culture of misogyny.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/opinion/trump-biden-popularity.html .

Natural Consequences Delayed

UNpresident Idiot-in-Chief's national security adviser, Robert O'Brien, has tested positive for coronavirus, the White House has confirmed.

The aide has mild symptoms and there was no risk of exposure to Putin's Puppet or Lady-in-Waiting Mike Pence, a statement said. [Pity!]

America's Tradition of Racism

[US] Medical Schools Have Historically Been Wrong on Race: While the blatant horrors of the past are gone, the ideas that fueled race-based medicine stubbornly linger. We can America should change.

[Only in America. Shameful.]

Unfortunately, in this age of OnlyBlackLivesMatter, in many Western nations the pallid target group of reactive racism has been unjustly accused of causing every personal misfortune that has ever befallen the New Racist Agitators.

Fairness and equal opportunities are important, but OnlyBlackLivesMatter is problematic:

a) racism is racism, no matter its target group

b) there will inevitably be a backlash against excessive demands

c) blaming others for every personal failing is counterproductive in that, like anti-semitism in Nazi Germany, it fails to address the actual problems, and,

d) blaming others for our own failings retards achievement of maturity

e) when all the statues have been torn down, when penance has been vengefully demanded, when reverse discrimination has impeded merit, and yet the blame-victimization individuals still have not prospered, what will they demand next?

Remember this ...

Putin. Whores. Pervert. Videotape. Puppet.

Many Americans continue to fail the cognitive test.

Russian Government = Habitual LIARS

Russia satellite: Kremlin accuses US and UK of 'distorting' truth: "Accusations from the US and UK that Russia recently tested anti-satellite weaponry in space are "distorted", Russia's defence ministry says."

I doubt that any sane person in the West believes anything that the "plausible deniability" LIARS of the Russian government say. After all, they denied shooting down MH17, trying instead to blame the Ukrainians. They were subsequently proven to be LYING. 

A sad loss ...

Tributes to civil rights leader John Lewis who marched with Martin Luther King > .

Sociopathetic Just-Us Whiners in 2014

# CancelColbert and the Return of the Anti-Liberal Left: The left can only afford to be contemptuous of liberal values when the right wrong isn't in charge.

"Perhaps every political generation is fated to be appalled by the one that succeeds it. In the 1960s, longtime socialist intellectuals were horrified by the anarchic energies of the new left. Then some of those new leftists reached middle age and watched, aghast, as new speech codes proliferated on college campuses during the first iteration of political correctness. I was in college then and am now in my thirties, which means it’s my turn to be dismayed by a growing left-wing tendency towards censoriousness and hair-trigger offense.

It’s increasingly clear that we are entering a new era of political correctness. Recently, we’ve seen the calls to # CancelColbert because of something outrageous said by Stephen Colbert’s blowhard alter ego, who has been saying outrageous things regularly for nine years. [Now Colbert uses sarcastically inane euphemisms.] Then there’s the sudden demand for “trigger warnings” on college syllabi, meant to protect students from encountering ideas or images that may traumatize them [the oh so precious snowflakes] ; an Oberlin faculty document even suggests jettisoning “triggering material when it does not contribute directly to the course learning goals.” At Wellesley, students have petitioned to have an outdoor statue of a lifelike sleepwalking man removed because it was causing them “undue stress.” As I wrote in The Nation, there’s pressure in some circles not to use the word “vagina” in connection with reproductive rights, lest it offend trans people.

Nor is this just happening here. In England’s left-wing New Statesman, Sarah Ditum wrote of the spread of no-platforming—essentially stopping people whose ideas are deemed offensive from speaking publicly.

....

Call it left-wing anti-liberalism: the idea, captured by Herbert Marcuse in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” that social justice demands curbs on freedom of expression.

“[I]t is possible to define the direction in which prevailing institutions, policies, opinions would have to be changed in order to improve the chance of a peace which is not identical with cold war and a little hot war, and a satisfaction of needs which does not feed on poverty, oppression, and exploitation.” ... “Consequently, it is also possible to identify policies, opinions, movements which would promote this chance, and those which would do the opposite. Suppression of the regressive ones is a prerequisite for the strengthening of the progressive ones.”

Note here both the belief that correct opinions can be dispassionately identified, and the blithe confidence in the wisdom of those empowered to do the suppressing. This kind of thinking is only possible at certain moments: when liberalism seems to have failed but the right is not yet in charge. At such times, old-fashioned liberal values like free speech and robust, open debate seem like tainted adjuncts of an oppressive system, and it’s [it was] still possible for radicals to believe that the ideas suppressed as hateful won’t be their own."

[Instead, many of the recent attacks have targeted liberals whose rational views ought to be those of any individual seeking genuine social justice. Instead, the recent crop of bandwagon-following Sociopathetic Just-Us Whiners fail to understand that justice requires apprehension of reality, tolerance of differing opinions, compassion, and growing a spine. Being triggered, or more likely pretending to be triggered, over imagined or projected slights reveals an immaturity typified by pre-teens. Puerile emotional fragility is justification for individual psychotherapy, not for the "cancellation" of the victimhood-target-du-jour.]

"It’s no surprise, of course, that right-wingers wrong-wingers like Michelle Malkin, author of a defense of Japanese internment, glommed on to the recent anti-Colbert campaign. Anti-liberalism is, after all, supremely useful to the right wrong. Some day president Paul Ryan or Ted Cruz or Rand Paul [even worse, the Electoral College stuck the world with Putin's Puppet] is going to be sworn in, and an ascendant, empowered conservatism C*N*servativism will once again try to curtail dissent in pop culture and academia, just as it always does. Public art won’t be taken down because it’s considered triggering—it will be taken down (or covered up) because it’s considered indecent. There might be another # CancelColbert campaign, but it won’t come from the left [not so fast, Michelle]. Maybe people will be ashamed, then, that this one did.

[Unfortunately, it's possible that, in this day of social-media anonymity and pseudonyms, some of the victimhood-targets-du-jour are being chosen—a la

Cambridge Analytica and (Russian) Internet Research Agency—by the wrong. In other words, some of the pre-surge moralistic finger-pointing could be engineered by distract-from-DUHnocchio's-sociopathic-gaffes agents of RepuGNican cronies/trolls/shills and Putinesque agents. Even more unfortunate, those who are governed by emotions rarely rip curtains aside and wonder who might be deliberately pressing their oversensitive buttons.]

Punitive Heretic-Hunting = Far-Left McCarthyism

Do Progressives Have a Free Speech Problem?: The illiberal left is a lot less threatening than the right wrong. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

"Like the people who wrote the letter, I think left-wing illiberalism is a problem, though I’ve mostly stopped writing about it since Idiot-in-Chief was elected installed despite losing the popular vote, because it seems like complaining about a bee sting when you have Stage IV cancer.

So I signed. The statement, published in Harper’s Magazine as “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” spawned takes and countertakes, most of them, despite my modest effort, about “cancel culture.”

At first I avoided wading into discourse about what’s now called the Letter. It seemed self-indulgent to write about media angst when the country is self-immolating because of unchecked disease and an economic catastrophe that’s about to get much worse. But as the debate over free speech grew and grew, I started to think I was using the burning world as an excuse to avoid personal discomfort."

...

"At the same time, a climate of punitive heretic-hunting, a recurrent feature of left-wing politics, has set in, enforced, in some cases, through workplace discipline, including firings. It’s the involvement of human resources departments in compelling adherence with rapidly changing new norms of speech and debate that worries me the most."

...

"Anyone venturing ideas in public should be prepared to endure negative reviews and pushback on social media. Internal workplace reviews are something else. If people fear for their livelihoods for relatively minor ideological transgressions, it may not violate the Constitution — the workplace is not the state — but it does create a climate of self-censorship and grudging conformity."

...

"It should be said that many people on the left, including some who are often dismissive of the idea of left-wing illiberalism, condemned Shor’s firing. Surely one reason this episode has been invoked so often is that there aren’t many comparable examples of such obvious social justice overreach."

[I have yet to find a full analysis of the multiple factors feeding the predominantly-American subset comprising cancel-culture, social-mob, opinionated, oversensitive, illiberal, non-prescient, holier-than-thou Social Just-us Whiners, but I suspect an array of factors: 

a) helicopter parenting that increased interpersonal dependence and fostered an expectation/demand that every emotional twinge should be mollycoddled, 

b) every-opinion-counts platitudes that were intended to boost children's confidence, yet promoted a bizarre combination of emotional insecurity plus hubris devoid of metacognition/cognitive humility/attempts to achieve fairness,

c) a defective educational system in which a) and b) are not merely encouraged, but armed with postmodernist counter-biological psychobabble,

d) profit-focused educational institutions whose administrators fold under the slightest pressure, rather than upholding rationality and justice-oriented values,

e) social-media screen-obsession which has robbed youth of non-anonymous, nuanced, interpersonal communication skills,

f) polarized, profit-chasing media outlets which either (wrong-wing) actively amplify divisions—even to the point of encouraging dangerous (mask-refusing) rebellion and outright violence—or (placatory left-wing) organizations which cower in the face of clamorous, moralistic criticism,

g) social-platform algorithms which feed increasingly paranoid and blaming material to conservatives, and increasingly self-righteous and blaming material to supposed-liberals.

h) increased anxiety thanks to science-ignorant DISinformation rebelliously swallowed by those raised to distrust expertise; excessive free time; and, utter lack of the calming distraction of gainful employment—ALL necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the resurgent first wave.]

DUHnocchian fIQ-Eugenics

Coronavirus: [Cowardly Bonespurs wears a mask, but] vows not to order Americans to wear masks.

Democrats know better than to trust Idiot-in-Chief, which suggests that most of the inevitable deaths will impact DUHsuckers—hence "fIQ-eugenics".

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53453468 .

Even worse than DUHnocchio

Pubic-Enemy-#1 isn't the Worst Covid President. Just Ask Brazilians - NYT > .

Deadly self-delusion

Man, 30, Dies After Attending a ‘COVID Party,’ Texas Hospital Says: “I thought this was a hoax,” the man told his nurse, a hospital official said.

"A 30-year-old patient [statistically twice as likely to be male as female (EDIT = a male)] died after attending a ‘“COVID party”, believing the virus to be a hoax, a Texas medical official has said.

“Just before the patient died, they looked at their nurse and said ‘I think I made a mistake, I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not,’” said Dr Jane Appleby, the chief medical officer at Methodist hospital in San Antonio.

Appleby said: “I don’t want to be an alarmist, and we’re just trying to share some real-world examples to help our community realise that this virus is very serious and can spread easily.”

A “COVID party” is a gathering held by somebody diagnosed with coronavirus to see if the virus is real and to see if anyone gets infected, she explained."

[Self-delusion? Tragic self-delusion. Despite abundant evidence on reputable sources that SARS-CoV-2 can be debilitating or deadly—mostly to the elderly with health issues, but also to young previously-healthy individuals—some choose to hold self-serving (let's party!) beliefs counter to the evidence. In the USA it appears that willful disbelievers—and obstinate mask-eschewers—are more likely to be CONservative DUHnocchio supporters who swallow DUH's and FAUX's habitual lies and place their lives (and others' lives) at risk by attending rallies, rushing to bars, attending raves, and stupidly hosting or attending COVID parties. Alas, this is natural selection at work. Sad, but difficult to prevent when a partisan segment of the population has been trained to distrust legitimate authorities. Thus, paranoia-indoctrinated denialists cannot be informed or policed into sensible behavior. Lamentable, yes, but believing LIES is their option. However, it is unconscionable to place health professionals and essential workers at unnecessary risk.]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/12/us/30-year-old-covid-party-death.html .

DISinformation kills

Richard Rose Dies of COVID-19 After Saying Masks Were Hype! > .

https://twitter.com/MeanwhileinCana/status/1282092702159572992/photo/1

Hear, hear, Senator Duckworth!

[editorial alterations mine] Tammy Duckworth: [_ucker Carlson] Doesn’t Know What Patriotism Is. Neither does [Putin's Puppet].

"What I actually said isn’t the reason [_ucker Carlson and DUHnocchio] are questioning my patriotism, nor is it why they’re using the same racist insults against me that have been slung my way time and again in years past, though they have never worked on me.

They’re doing it because they’re desperate for America’s attention to be on anything other than [Incompetent-in-Chief’s] failure to lead our nation, and because they think that [Bully-in-Chief]’s electoral prospects will be better if they can turn us against one another. Their goal isn’t to make — or keep — America great. It’s to keep [Agent Orange] in power, whatever the cost.

It’s better for [General Bonespurs] to have you focused on whether an Asian-American woman is sufficiently American than to have you mourning the 130,000 [+] Americans killed by a virus he claimed would disappear in February. It’s better for his campaign to distract Americans with whether a combat veteran is sufficiently patriotic than for people to recall that this [multiply]-failed commander in chief has still apparently done nothing about reports of Russia putting bounties on the heads of American troops in Afghanistan.

[Crook-in-Chief] and his team have made the political calculation that, no matter what, they can’t let Americans remember that so many of his decisions suggest that he cares more about lining his pockets and bolstering his political prospects than he does about protecting our troops or our nation."

[I suspect that, perhaps aware of the NYT article suggesting that Tammy Duckworth would be an ideal running mate for Joe Biden, Narcissist-in-Chief and his cronies are eager to vilify a potential VP prospect.]

God, I despair of religionists

(where "despair of" is a euphemism) ... and am increasingly disgusted with both "S"COTUS and the USA.

Supreme Court Lets Employers Opt Out of Birth Control Coverage: The justices upheld regulations from the Bigot-in-Chief Badministration that allowed employers with religious objections to decline to provide contraception coverage.

"The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a Misogynist-in-Chief Badministration regulation that lets employers with religious or moral objections limit women’s access to birth control coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

As a consequence of the ruling, about 70,000 to 126,000 women could lose contraceptive coverage from their employers, according to government estimates.

The vote was 7 to 2, with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissenting.

Contraception coverage has emerged as a key battleground in the culture wars, one in which successive administrations have switched sides."

...

"The Crook-in-Chief Badministration took the side of the [DUHsucker] religious employers, saying that requiring contraception coverage can impose a “substantial burden” on the free exercise of religion. [Poor little control-freak snowflakes cannot cope with not having full control in all matters where they regard their hypersensitive feelings and fictional deity as more important than health/death risks to female employees.] The regulations it has promulgated made good on a campaign pledge by UNpresident DUH, who has said that employers should not be “bullied by the federal government because of their religious beliefs.”

The new regulations also included an exception for employers “with sincerely held moral convictions [read, fervent desire to control others' sex lives and bodies] opposed to coverage of some or all contraceptive or sterilization methods.” 

[Ya gotta "love" hypocritical C*N*servative religionists. They are more likely than liberals to sexually assault women; more likely to blame women than men for her conceiving (at his pleasure); more likely to divorce; more likely to commit domestic abuse and incest; much more likely to approve of war; much more likely to be against both contraception and abortion; much more likely to begrudge social support of single mothers and children; and much more likely to approve of putting separated-from-parents children in cages --- and then destroying records to avoid political embarrassment.]

The states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey challenged the rules, saying they would have to shoulder much of the cost of providing contraceptives to women who lost coverage under the Put-Greed-First Badministration’s rules."

[Needless to say, if males bore the children, none of this would be an issue.]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/us/supreme-court-birth-control-obamacare.html .

Past time to cancel "cancel culture"

JK Rowling joins 150 public figures decrying 'cancel culture':

Some 150 writers, academics and activists - including authors JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood - have signed an open letter denouncing so-called cancel culture.

They say they applaud a recent "needed reckoning" on racial justice, but argue it has fuelled stifling of open debate. The letter denounces "a vogue for public shaming and ostracism" and "a blinding moral certainty".

Cancel culture refers to online shaming of individuals who cause offence. [In essence, a largely-anonymous internet version of China's regrettable "Cultural Revolution."]

"The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted," says the letter.

US intellectual Noam Chomsky, eminent feminist Gloria Steinem, Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and author Malcolm Gladwell also put their names to the letter, which was published on Tuesday in Harper's Magazine.

                                                                               

                                                                           ⇓

A Letter on Justice and Open Debate ...

[modifications mine]: "Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral[istic] attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in [DUHnocchio], who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing wrong-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right wrong, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us."

[Hear! Hear!]

Natural Consequences

Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, tests positive. He has been a skeptic of antivirus precautions:

President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, who has repeatedly dismissed the danger posed by the coronavirus, disclosed Tuesday that he has the virus, a development that turbocharged the debate over his cavalier handling of a pandemic that has killed more than 65,000 Brazilians.

Speaking to journalists shortly after noon on Tuesday, the president, 65, said he was tested after experiencing fatigue, muscle pain and a fever.

Bolsonaro said he was feeling well on Tuesday, which he credited to having taken hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria pill repeatedly promoted by UNpresident Ignoramus-in-Chief that has not been proven as a treatment for COVID-19 patients.

[Time will tell.]

Bolsonaro has come under criticism for his [MIS]handling of the pandemic, even as Brazil’s caseload and death toll ballooned in recent months. Brazil’s 1.6 million diagnosed cases and more than 65,000 deaths make it the second hardest-hit country, trailing only the [MISmanaged-by-incompetents] United States.

Even as several of Bolsonaro’s aides have tested positive in recent months, the president has often eschewed precautions such as wearing a mask and practicing social distancing. Most recently, he attended a luncheon hosted on Saturday by the American ambassador in Brazil to celebrate the Fourth of July holiday.
...
Bolsonaro is one of a number of world leaders who have contracted the virus.

Prime Minister [Buffoon-in-Charge] Boris Johnson of Britain, who was also criticized for seeming to dismiss the risks of the virus early on, tested positive in March and spent three nights in intensive care. President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras was released from the hospital on Thursday after spending more than two weeks being treated for COVID-19 and related pneumonia. Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin of Russia said he tested positive in April, and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia said that he and his family tested positive in June.

cf Natural Selection Unmasked? ..

Regrettably predictable backlash

Frederick Douglass: Historic US black activist's statue toppled:

A statue of the 19th Century US black activist Frederick Douglass has been toppled in New York state. It appears to have been vandalised on 5 July - the anniversary of a famous speech the former slave gave in 1852. In it he said Independence Day celebrations were a sham in a nation that still enslaved its black citizens.

His statue, in the city of Rochester, could have been targeted in retaliation for attacks on monuments linked to slavery, activists said.

[Unfortunately, some BLM-protesters are pushing an inflammatory vengeance-oriented anti-white agenda, rather than an inclusive pro-justice, pro-fairness message. Justified sentiments do not guarantee a talent for effective public relations. cf, Exactly!, WOKE Dystopia]