Humiliating Trump in effigy is the consolation prize for those who cannot do it in reality. All they can do is preach to the choir with their little crafts.

I don’t think these people have a just bone in their body. Either way, systemic wokeness is becoming a fearful reality.

Strange times. Here’s Katai’s pandering apology:

"I strongly condemn white supremacy, racism and violence towards people of color. Black lives matter. This is a mistake from my family and I take full responsibility."

"I will ensure that my family and I take the necessary actions to learn, understand, listen and support the black community."

I would love to see his wife’s full quotes, because I suspect that they are being portrayed as more than they are.

If you find an instance of me firing someone because their spouse made comments I didn’t like you can rightfully call me a hypocrite. Until then bringing up irrelevant info about unrelated events doesn’t convince me that I’m being unreasonable or inconsistent.

I guess they should expect some blowback.

Oh Trump. That didn’t take long.

People punished for the crimes of their family. That’s something you find in tyrannical societies.

That's not some form of organised suppression of dissent though, and the conclusion that the ideas supposedly "protected" by the suppression is weak simply doesn't follow, as my initial example illustrates.

I never said nor implied the suppression is organized. In fact I think it’s capricious. But the sheer volume of people being coerced into silence and conformity is frightening. If dissent isn’t suppressed to protect the orthodoxy, why is it suppressed?

You can always tell when a bad idea has entered the discourse by the amount of censorship its dogmatists resort to in order to suppress any dissent. People are losing jobs and being ostracized for doubting this or any comparable narrative.

In the UK a radio host was suspended when he questioned his white privilege. A former Canadian cabinet minister was forced to resign from 3 positions for denying systemic racism exists in Canada. A chief reporter from the Western Mail was axed for opposing the protests. NYT Op-Ed editor James Bennett resigned due to the outcry over publishing an opposing opinion. A top Philadelphia Inquirer editor was forced to resign for daring to write the headline “Buildings Matter, Too”. Alexander Katai was dropped from the LA Galaxy because his wife made unpopular comments.

The irony of the corporate world becoming the propaganda wing of an arguably anti-capitalist movement isn’t lost on me. But the suppression of any dissent also hints at the weakness of the ideas being put forward. Truth does not require protection from the withering powers of criticism.

I was complaining about corporate censorship, not leftists. But sorry I thought this was the low quality one. My mistake.

But it’s all one-sided, aimed only at those who express dissent from the current orthodoxy and is guided by the whims of emotion. It’s a testament to both the weakness of the orthodoxy, and the inability of its proponents to support it.

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I like your thinking and writing.

The previous chain of cause/effects inexorably determined where I ended up. So to is it with what we do. We do what we do because all the relevant preceding cause/effect events inexorably led up to that very act and no other. We HAD to do what we did.

This is a fundamental point you’re making. But I think it’s an argument for free will rather than against it, because isn’t the cause to each one of your actions, within each anterior state, yourself?

If so it follows that you are the cause of your own actions. If you are both cause and effect, what other than yourself can determine your actions?

Yes I absolutely get that. And to stand next to him, but not imitate him. When Democrats go down on at knee in the Capital then you know the gesture has been stolen.

The hashtags, kneeling and placard-waving protests are the bona fides. They are the means with which to signal ones conformity. Beyond that I do not think they serve any function. People were repeating the hashtag #defundthepolice, for instance, before they even understood what it entailed. When a protester asked the mayor of Minneapolis if he would “defund the police”, he tried to confirm if that meant abolishing the police. Upon finding out that #defundthepolice in fact meant abolish the police, he said he disagreed and was booed out of the area.

These expressions resemble the “duckspeak” of Orwell‘s 1984: “pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc”. “It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck”.

The “defund the police” movement was a fringe idea two weeks ago. Now it is the rallying cry du jour. So it’s no wonder that, according to a YouGov poll, close to two-thirds of Americans oppose cutting funding to police—and of those who do support such measures, those who make $100k a year are over represented. So while some over-educated, trusty-fundy types are working to make their dreams become a reality, most Americans are wary of such proposals.

This is utterly false.

Sweden has 465 deaths per 1 million where Denmark has only 102 as of now.

I think you have to check your stats.

You’re right. I was looking at the rate for today, and not the entirety. Thanks.

What is concerning is that we based these policies on insufficient evidence. What was true yesterday is untrue today.

Sweden faired better than other lockdown countries in Europe and elsewhere, so I’m not sure why we’d limit the comparison to Norway, Finland and Denmark. What about the UK, Ireland, Belgium. And Denmark is at 0.34 deaths per million while Sweden is at 0.3.

I wager there would be no such recession had everyone went the Swedish route.

Now the WHO is saying that the spread of covid-19 through asymptomatic patients is very rare.

“From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit.

“We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing,” she said. “They’re following asymptomatic cases. They’re following contacts. And they’re not finding secondary transmission onward. It’s very rare.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/08/asymptomatic-coronavirus-patients-arent-spreading-new-infections-who-says.html

All that social distancing....for what?

Recently the Shaw Memorial in Boston was defaced in the BLM protests. The Shaw Memorial was the first civic monument to pay homage to the heroism of black soldiers during the civil war. They also vandalized a Gandhi statue in Washington. These aren't newly liberated peoples striking back at their former dictators; these are mobs as entitled and certain as they are stupid.

Nothing but straw. As I said there is a debate about these issues.

A mob defacing statues is not the sign of a debate but of the perverted and illiberal use of violence and force to assert political expression.

Droll. You complained about presentism, I set out common declarations of his time on the basic of which he could be considered a war criminal and racist. So no presentism. What other problems do you have with this qualification?

You are applying present-day attitudes to a historical figure and have furnished one quote in order to pretend that was the general attitude of 1945.

It wasn’t much of a question.

I don't think one opinion of Churchill is sufficient either.

Judging Churchill by the standards of some woke, effete, privileged college kids from London doesn't make any sense to me.

There is a debate raging in the UK about which statues should be pulled down and if it is justified to pull them down and how to determine which should, or shouldn't be pulled down. People are saying should we now pull down the statue of Churchill in parliament square.
I was there when this happened, nice Mohican.

Sick. Barbarism premised on presentism. It’s Year Zero nonsense. A culture that will not defend its past is unlikely to defend its future.

Not only in language, but by extension thinking. If we view individuals as individuals rather than a component of this or that race we negate any foundation for race-thinking.

I’ve been trying to give the systemic racism theory a fair shake. Here are my thoughts.

The racism of South Africa or the United States was explicit and enshrined in law. That kind of racism was overt and concrete, made real in the countless interactions between the individuals involved insofar as they were motivated by racist ideology. I refuse to conflate that sort of racism with the "systemic racism" being put forward here.

But when the institutional racism has finally vanished and the racist ideologies have been discredited and proven dangerous, what can account for the disparities in the results whenever we view them through a racist microscope? Why is there a wealth gap between races, for instance? Since we cannot find any company or institution paying blacks less than whites, and whites less than Asians—it is illegal to do so— there must be something other than personal choice and will perpetuating these disparities.

I take the "systemic racism" theory to mean that there must exist some racist algorithm inherent in the "system". Racism has left the human brain and has found a new home in “systems and structures”, though it is not clear what those are. Any state that had its genesis marred in slavery or racism no doubt carries with it a shameful past, but is also cursed to perpetuate it. Even though the slavery and institutional racism has all but vanished it’s “legacy” remains. It's in our DNA. It exists in our individual thoughts, compelling the countless interactions—political, economic, cultural—between individuals in a given society, especially as they are demarcated on the basis of their phenotypes. We ought not just oppose individual acts of racism, but we should also oppose the system that allowed them to happen in the first place.

But I suppose it’s a testament to the “system” that we have shifted from talking about the overt racism of slavery, apartheid, or segregation to a “subtle” more invisible racism that no one can really point at but are certain is there.

The problem is this shift maintains focus on the least racist societies while doing little about the most racist. Meanwhile there is still slavery in Africa and the Middle East. There are more than three times as many people in forced servitude today as were captured and sold during the 350-year span of the transatlantic slave trade. There are concentration camps and ethnic cleansing in communist China. And there are no marches for their victims.

Please. Like they are the only people who love to argue in this forum.

My preferred pronoun is “he”.

There you go, that's it. Thanks for saying it better than I could.

It's not just policies, it's culture too. Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables" comment sums up the snotty superior mindset of so much of leftie culture pretty well. We need to face that attitude squarely and do something about it.

Agreed. The condescending class were so out of touch with the country that they believed their chosen candidate had it in the bag right up until the night of the election. Then they cried wolf for years, promising us future Hitlers and nuclear wars, and here we are are still caught in the bubble they have built for themselves.

I was born in the US and I moved here in 2008. Canadian women can be quite convincing.

Is there a point there?

Though I can empathize with your traumatic story, I cannot see any reason to suppose that the skin-colors of those involved had any influence on the criminal behavor or your treatment. Maybe people didn’t rush to your defense because they too live in fear of violence.

That being said, I can understand how people who have been traditionally “racialized” their whole lives would begin to harbor racist beliefs. Routinely being told that you belong to this or that racial group, arbitrarily placed upon a hierarchy of mental apartheid, seems to me to be a breeding ground for racism.

Well said. Many former democrats and independents who voted for Obama have voted for Trump, myself included. This isn’t because we abandoned the left, but because the left abandoned us. Once our former political allies trended towards the illiberal and globalist, there was no home for us in that space.

Would “positive” racial and ethnic discrimination such as affirmative action qualify as systemic racism? Here in Canada there is the Employment Equity Act which requires federally regulated industries to favor women, people with disabilities, Aboriginal peoples, and visible minorities, or in other words, anyone but able-bodied light-skinned men.

Thanks for writing that out.

Wow. This is a crazy story about recent pauses on hydroxichloroquine studies. Let’s hope none of this has put lives at risk, but certainly a lot of people have been fooled.

The World Health Organization and a number of national governments have changed their Covid-19 policies and treatments on the basis of flawed data from a little-known US healthcare analytics company, also calling into question the integrity of key studies published in some of the world’s most prestigious medical journals.

A Guardian investigation can reveal the US-based company Surgisphere, whose handful of employees appear to include a science fiction writer and an adult-content model, has provided data for multiple studies on Covid-19 co-authored by its chief executive, but has so far failed to adequately explain its data or methodology.

Data it claims to have legitimately obtained from more than a thousand hospitals worldwide formed the basis of scientific articles that have led to changes in Covid-19 treatment policies in Latin American countries. It was also behind a decision by the WHO and research institutes around the world to halt trials of the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine. On Wednesday, the WHO announced those trials would now resume.

...

A search of publicly available material suggests several of Surgisphere’s employees have little or no data or scientific background. An employee listed as a science editor appears to be a science fiction author and fantasy artist. Another employee listed as a marketing executive is an adult model and events hostess.

The company’s LinkedIn page has fewer than 100 followers and last week listed just six employees. This was changed to three employees as of Wednesday.

While Surgisphere claims to run one of the largest and fastest hospital databases in the world, it has almost no online presence. Its Twitter handle has fewer than 170 followers, with no posts between October 2017 and March 2020.

Until Monday, the “get in touch” link on Surgisphere’s homepage redirected to a WordPress template for a cryptocurrency website, raising questions about how hospitals could easily contact the company to join its database.

Desai has been named in three medical malpractice suits, unrelated to the Surgisphere database. In an interview with the Scientist, Desai previously described the allegations as “unfounded”.

In 2008, Desai launched a crowdfunding campaign on the website Indiegogo promoting a wearable “next generation human augmentation device that can help you achieve what
you never thought was possible”. The device never came to fruition.
Desai’s Wikipedia page has been deleted following questions about Surgisphere and his history, first raised in 2010.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgisphere-who-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine

What could the motives behind this be?

I just don’t know how an act can be considered racist if it is mostly perpetuated by a member of the same race. What is the evidence that an officer holds a racist outlook when he unjustly kills a man of another skin color? Maybe I haven’t quite fully grasped the concept of “systemic racism“.

Here’s some sobering evidence that kind of throws doubt on the whole claim of “systemic racism” among the police shootings.

https://www.pnas.org/content/116/32/15877

Good point about King. However I think non-violent resistance was not limited to civil disobedience, and included peaceful protests. And his dedication to nonviolence is quite explicit.

“ Occasionally in life one develops a conviction so precious and meaningful that he will stand on it till the end. This is what I have found in nonviolence”

- Where do we Go From Here.

I think racism, at its core, is the belief that human beings can be subdivided into races. Once those sorts of abstract aggregates disappear from thought it becomes impossible to treat them as members of it. I don’t think it’s a human failing so much as it is a rational one.