US Jews More Likely to Support COVID-19 Vaccine Push Compared With Other Religious Groups

Report: Jewish Americans are among the demographics with the greatest readiness to vaccinate against COVID-19, a survey published on Wednesday found.

The survey, conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI)/Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), concluded that “Jewish Americans are most likely to be vaccine accepters,” with 85 percent of Jews in the US either fully vaccinated or having started the process.

Posted in Corona Virus, Jews | Comments Off on US Jews More Likely to Support COVID-19 Vaccine Push Compared With Other Religious Groups

Talking About Corona Virus With A Philosopher

On May 28, 2021, I published this blog post:

Why Are Ethicists Usually Late To The Party?

Philosopher A tells me: “They tend to pick up social science stuff much later, and deploy it in their own feuds. They prefer reasoning by intuition. But when someone forces them out of it they respond. Moral psychology is a big thing now, but in the past it was just something that someone like Rawls had but didn’t defend.”

Philosopher B tells me: “Philosophy–particularly ethics–attracts people who, even if they’re intelligent, prefer to reason by intuition. They’re not good at critically analyzing empirical work. They usually just accept whatever studies jibe with their intuitions.”

I notice that many people, not just ethicists and moral philosophers, begin their analyses of public policy from the unshakable and unimpeachable foundation of their feelings and then, to the extent that they have any interest in data at all, they only welcome the data that confirms their feelings.

Many of my responses in the following dialogue (about 38 total emails so far) have been rewritten from the time I originally emailed them (so they now may sound more impressive and documented than when my friend received them and responded to them) and many of our emails are not responding to the email directly posted above in the following dialogue, but to some previous email. Also, my friend did not get the opportunity that I took to polish his emails prior to publication here. So this dialogue as I present it is not fair to him. Like many of my blog entries, this post started out as an email correspondence and then I chose to publish parts of it.

My friend the philosopher says to me today:

I want to question your position on Covid a little. My view is that the illness is basically similar to a moderately bad flu for anyone except a few small groups (e.g. very old people, people with serious co-morbidities, the obese). There is no significant change in overall mortality in many countries and regions, which is what you’d expect under this hypothesis. Where there are significant “extra” deaths, this often seems to be due largely to factors other than the intrinsic lethality of the illness (e.g. “treating” people with ventilators that end up killing them, or Cuomo’s decision to put infected people into nursing homes, people not getting normal health care as a result of the Covid response). It might be too early to judge, but I don’t see much strong evidence for any of the official claims about the illness.

So basically I think it’s a (very probably) a real illness that did require some kind of policy response from governments, but also that the danger has been wildly exaggerated; governments and media have been irrationally fixated on this one moderate risk to the exclusion of other more serious problems.

I’d be curious what you think of this guy’s critique, if you have time to check it out. It’s about the Canadian situation but most of it seems translatable to the States. I haven’t tried to verify all of his claims but much of it seems worth considering at least.

Luke:

I don’t think I have a position on Covid beyond an impatience for idiocy. I don’t automatically side with either dissidents or the MSM. I read both views. I don’t have many more specific positions.

Some public policy to limit Covid has been idiotic. For example, restricting people’s outdoor activities are a bad way of limiting the spread of Covid. We don’t have evidence for substantial outdoor transmission of Covid. Also, wearing a mask while out for a walk or when you are driving alone is bonkers.

You write: “My view is that the illness is basically similar to a moderately bad flu.”

“There is no significant change in overall mortality in many countries and regions”

These assertions are obviously false. Perhaps that is why you did not care to substantiate them beyond a link to the amateur analyst Julius Ruechel. I have previously posted links and articles about the dramatic decrease in American life span due to Covid, how the average Covid death cost about 16 years of life, and how Covid is about 40x more deadly than the 2019-2020 flu. We have more than four million worldwide deaths from Covid. Death certificates are something that industrialized nations take very seriously.

I’m curious who are public intellectuals who you tend to take seriously. For example, I generally respect Steve Sailer and Stephen Turner. During confusing times, I turn for help from people like these thinkers.

I Googled Julius Ruechel and I couldn’t find any reason why he would have expertise in anything aside from perhaps farming, which does not mean he’s wrong on Covid, it just means that the odds are at least 1000 to 1 he’s not adding anything.

There are stories that come along where I feel that I have something special to add. I’ve rarely if ever felt that with regard to Covid. I think compared to any pundit I know, I’ve been more diffident. I’ve rarely railed about Covid in any direction, it’s only when I hear something that is obviously wrong that I say something strongly.

With voter fraud, I knew nothing beyond the conventional Republican talking points until I did a deep dive after the 2020 election and realized Republican talking points were bogus.

PHILOSOPHER:

So it seems we might disagree about too many things here for a useful debate–at least for the moment. In order to have a good conversation we’d have to first set up some agreed working assumptions. Backing off from the covid issue for a moment, I’ll just mention two points of disagreement.

(1) You say that this Julius guy lacks relevant expertise and so he’s very unlikely to be right (when disagreeing with authorities). We could debate this issue for a start. Here’s my thinking.

I defer to expert opinion in many situations but not all. Suppose that on a given topic T, we have all these conditions: public opinions about T aren’t tied up with political or moral controversies; public opinions about T aren’t linked to social status and signaling; public opinions about T aren’t likely to be influenced by funding or special interests; T is clearly a subject requiring expert knowledge; there are experts regarding T; and there is clearly a long-standing expert consensus on T.

When some or all of those conditions fail, I’m less likely to defer to the opinions of experts (even if it seems like many are in agreement). So, for example, if the topic is racial differences or gender identity, I don’t defer. Instead, I just do my best to sort through the evidence–bearing in my mind that my own thinking could well be wrong since I’m not an expert myself. When I checked the figures in Julius’ essay they generally seemed correct, and his reasoning seemed plausible to me. I wouldn’t distrust my assessment in this case.

And I’d say that covid is a topic where many of those conditions fail. As far as I can tell, there are many reasons for thinking that mainstream “expert” opinion is influenced by politics, money, special interests, etc. There seem to be many experts who dissent, and their views are never directly challenged or refuted by government-appointed experts; this is suspicious to me. I’m also skeptical that epidemiological modelling is a properly scientific field. (It appears that predictions are generally false or unfalsifiable, for example.) Finally, the people presented to me as experts on the topic don’t seem to be. Here in Canada our “top doctor” who’s constantly pronouncing on covid is a Chinese pediatrician. She seems to have no real expertise on most of the topics that are relevant here. I’ve also communicated with public health officials in Toronto who admitted–in private–that they don’t really have any strong evidence for their policies. So I don’t think this is a case where I should defer.

(2) It does seem that there is significant excess mortality in the US, at least according to some people who’ve studied this. But is it obviously empirically false to suggest that much of the excess is not due to the virus itself, but mainly to poor decisions by political leaders and health authorities? I don’t have a strong opinion about this, but it seems to me that many people have made a strong case. (There are some published studies on this, for example.) You mention death certificates, but it seems that in many jurisdictions these have been recorded in an unusual way–counting deaths “with” covid as deaths primarily caused by covid, even when the empirical evidence for this conclusion seems lacking. This was a policy decision. For various reasons, then, the mere fact that a large number of deaths globally have been attributed to covid is not strong evidence that covid itself is highly lethal. We need to know more about the true causes of any excess deaths in a particular country or region; it’s not obvious (to me) that none of these are due to the pandemic response rather than the virus.

Do you think these arguments are also clearly wrong?

I don’t know that there are too many public intellectuals I rely on. I do like Steve Sailer, but on some topics I wouldn’t trust his judgment. Definitely I do check in with him to check myself. Even when I don’t agree he usually gets me thinking and he can make a good case for an opposing view.

With something like covid, I’m more likely to trust in the judgment of non-public intellectuals. So, for example, when I read stuff by Sukharit Bakdhi–who’s now apparently considered a nutcase–his reasoning seemed convincing. He’s an emeritus professor of immunology or something. (I can’t remember.) Anyway, presumably a real expert on many relevant topics. If it turns out that a majority of similarly qualified people disagree with him, but I just find that their reasoning is less convincing, I’ll tend to go with my own assessment. And I might then trust his judgment in other related areas where I can’t assess.

Here’s one thing that made me skeptical when I first started looking into the topic. The government told us that “growing evidence” indicates that masks prevent transmission. I wrote to various government agencies asking for their evidence, and eventually they responded. The evidence reviews they sent to me all​ said that the existing evidence was “poor”. In fact there was stronger evidence that masks do not​ have any benefit; there had already been many randomized controlled trials that found no effect, and the only supporting evidence was lower-quality “observational studies”. So it seemed that “growing evidence” really just meant “a little more evidence than before”; they weren’t telling us the whole truth, that on balance the existing evidence seemed to show that mask mandates would have no effect. When I wrote back to the public health people to ask about this, they just said things like “That’s not in our area” or “I’ll see if there’s someone who can answer your questions”. Eventually they just stopped responding. Wouldn’t you say that’s pretty suspicious? If “the science” really supports their policies, why can’t they share it with the public?

LUKE:

Disagreeing with people who have expertise is not the same thing as authorities. There’s no connection between authority and expertise. Sometimes those with no expertise are right and the experts are wrong, but that is relatively rare. What are some prominent examples akin to Covid where those with no expertise have been shown to be right? I love the skeptical work of Stephen Turner regarding expertise (link). The case of oophorectomy vs bloggers seems to be a good example of the non-experts being more right than the experts. Also, as a blogger, there have been stories where I was more right than the MSM (for a while).

“As far as I can tell, there are many reasons for thinking that mainstream “expert” opinion is influenced by politics, money, special interests, etc.”

True!

“There seem to be many experts who dissent, and their views are never directly challenged or refuted by government-appointed experts; this is suspicious to me.”

I’m primarily interested in the stats and how valid are they regarding Covid, rather than opinions. I am able to find a robust debate on Covid, not in the MSM, but elsewhere online, so who are the dissident thinkers (PhDs, profs) regarding Covid who have not been challenged by experts?

“I’m also skeptical that epidemiological modelling is a properly scientific field.”

I’m sure there are situations where it is and situations where it isn’t. Generally speaking, epidemiology does not attract our best and brightest.

“Finally, the people presented to me as experts on the topic don’t seem to be.”

Agreed. The talking heads on TV aka Fauci are not impressive.

“It does seem that there is significant excess mortality in the US, at least according to some people who’ve studied this. But is it obviously empirically false to suggest that much of the excess is not due to the virus itself, but mainly to poor decisions by political leaders and health authorities?”

I’m unaware of any evidence of this, or studies supporting this?

“You mention death certificates, but it seems that in many jurisdictions these have been recorded in an unusual way–counting deaths “with” covid as deaths primarily caused by covid, even when the empirical evidence for this conclusion seems lacking.”

I don’t believe this is true.

“For various reasons, then, the mere fact that a large number of deaths globally have been attributed to covid is strong evidence that covid itself is highly lethal. We need to know more about the true causes of any excess deaths in a particular country or region; it’s not obvious (to me) that none of these are due to the pandemic response rather than the virus.”

Well, the word “none” is a bit much. Are there significant errors overstating Covid deaths in industrialized nations? I haven’t read any compelling case for that. Industrialized nations take death certificates seriously.

PHILOSOPHER:

I agree that the following talking point was dumb: “Only 6% had no co-morbidities; therefore, only 6% died of covid”. Clearly that doesn’t follow. The fact that 94% had other conditions doesn’t mean that other conditions caused their deaths. But the more important point, which I didn’t see addressed in MSM “fact checks” was this: If 94% had co-morbidities and​ CDC recommendations are highly liberal with respect to “underlying cause of death”, the fact that 100% had covid​ doesn’t mean that 100% died because of covid. In other words, the CDC data raises the possibility that in some​ of the remaining 94% percent covid was not the most likely cause. And since people were being advised to mark down “covid” even when other serious morbidities were present, and even when covid was merely “presumed” or likely, it becomes plausible that many​ of the 94% were not really covid deaths.

LUKE:

If someone has lived with comorbidities for decades and then they suddenly die with Covid, yes, it makes sense that they likely died from covid. It seems that for 99% plus of people dying with Covid, they did die from Covid.

Death certificates are not taken trivially in industrialized nations…and before they are dismissed, one has to invest the work (20 minutes of reading) to understand how death certificates work.

PHILOSOPHER:

I appreciate that you dissent from the dissenters about as often as you agree. It shows independence. So while we disagree on this I do respect that (I think) you’re just thinking it through dispassionately and not falling in line with a faction.

Here’s one example of a dissenting expert [John Ioannides] whose views seem to make little difference to the public discourse. I mean, what would Faucci say to this guy? Has he ever tried to refute these arguments? I don’t know that Ioannidis is right, but it does seem to me that these arguments have been largely ignored by policy makers and experts with influence.

LUKE:

There are so many published critiques of John P.A. Ioannidis’s with regard to Covid (Greg Cochran). There’s hardly been silence. John P.A. Ioannidis is a buffoon with regard to Covid, he said there wouldn’t be more than 10,000 deaths.

I don’t even consider anyone akin to Fauci, any public health officer (unless compelling reason to do so) seriously because by definition their job prioritizes other values aside from truth. I don’t know if we could even have someone more truth-seeking in Fauci’s position because to climb that greasy pole, you have to put politics before truth.

“If someone is 92 years old, has three serious illnesses, then dies within a month or two of contracting the flu, is it clear that she died from the flu? I don’t think so.”

I agree. People who died from Covid, however, don’t usually have Covid for a month or two. They die much quicker (on average 18 days). If you’ve been overweight all your life, or some other comorbidity, and you get Covid and die at 52, you likely died from covid.

“it’s important that covid is not likely to lead to life-threatening conditions unless the dead person belongs to one of a few special categories.”

Yes. 80% of Covid deaths in the USA are for people over 65. There are very few Covid deaths under 60 for people without comorbidities.

PHILOSOPHER:

Here it seems to me you’re applying a double standard. The experts whose claims were the basis for governments’ covid response have also been wildly​ wrong in their predictions. Ferguson’s Imperial College model predicting over 2 million US deaths, for example, or the initial WHO claim of 3.4% lethality. Trump was ridiculed for estimating less than 1% but it turns out that was far closer to the truth. Ferguson has repeatedly predicted mega-death from various illnesses over decades and been wildly wrong.

Maybe Ionnadis is a buffoon on this stuff. But if he is, shouldn’t we say that almost all the experts are buffoons? I wouldn’t disagree, but this is why I’d generally not trust any expert opinions on the topic.

LUKE:

As I never praised any of the buffoons you mentioned, I don’t think I am using a double standard. I have never praised Neil Ferguson or WHO trumpeting 3.4% lethality or any of the hysterical modeling (I did not criticize it at the time either, I just didn’t feel I knew anything). I don’t think Trump was awful or good regarding Covid. The MSM was a mess (lack of comparison of the US to other industrialized western nations was a major defect in their blaming of Trump for what they alleged was America’s unique awfulness in combating the pandemic when America Covid toll was right in line with other western industrialized nations). Epidemiologists were often horrible.

“shouldn’t we say that almost all the experts are buffoons?”

It depends on which experts in which situations.

Science now depends upon major bureaucratic funding and can’t police itself and often gives distorted findings to please funders.

The WHO has been awful re Covid. Even an academic lefty friend of mine who works for the WHO has confided this. Also ridiculous that social media lets WHO and CCP determine what we can say on social media about covid.

I don’t think the death of a 70yo from Covid is as wrenching and sad as the death of a 20yo (which happened more with the Spanish Flu). So that covid primarily kills the old and those with comorbidities make it less serious to me than if it were primarily killing healthy 20 somethings. Still, those studies saying each covid death took
about ten years of life means it is moderately serious.

No evidence for substantial outdoor transmission of Covid.

PHILOSOPHER:

“If you’ve been overweight all your life, or some other comorbidity, and you get Covid and die at 52, you likely died from covid…”

It’s “likely” enough, sure. Is it less likely that the other morbidity was the cause? That may depend on further facts. (What kind of condition? What’s your life expectancy with that condition? What happened physiologically to bring about death?)

But in any case, how many of the official covid deaths were like this? We agree that the vast majority of deaths are people over 65. The highest number is among those over 80. So let’s just think about those, ignoring the far less common case where the person is 52.

Even granting for the sake of argument that most die within one month of infection, how many were very old and seriously ill with other conditions that are often lethal?

In most places the average age of “covid death” is more than a year over than the average life expectancy. So, for many of these people, it was already pretty likely they’d die around the time that they did. There’s a lot to take into consideration, but I don’t think we can safely assume in all these cases that covid was the cause of death.

Let’s say that in half the cases, there was already something else present which was also quite “likely” to kill the person around the same time. In the absence of hard evidence regarding what happened physiologically, I don’t see why we should think covid is more likely than the other condition. I’d guess that in a fair number of these cases, covid was present or was a merely contributory cause–not the underlying cause. But CDC advises that covid may be recorded as the underlying cause (for the bad reason that covid can cause life-threatening conditions). To me this seems like a recipe for over-counting.

LUKE:

If you’ve lived with various comorbidities such as obesity and high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes for decades, and then you catch covid and die within 48 hours, it seems reasonable to say you died from covid. I don’t see what’s terribly complicated about that. Sure, there will be exceptional circumstances where this might not be accurate, but they will be few and far between.

You write: “Is it less likely that the other morbidity was the cause?  That may depend on further facts.  (What kind of condition?  What’s your life expectancy with that condition?  What happened physiologically to bring about death?)”

A condition that you have lived with for decades, and your life expectancy with the condition is for at least another decade (average covid death costs ten years of life), and what happened physiologically fits in with the Covid, yes, it sure seems like covid killed you.

Dr. David Gorski: “Part I of the death certificate includes the proximal cause of death, or what directly caused the death, and Part II lists conditions that contributed to the death.”

“For example, if a patient dies of respiratory failure due to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which was the result of pneumonia, which was the result of COVID-19, the proximal cause of death was the respiratory failure, but contributing causes were ARDS and COVID-19, with the one farthest up the chain being the underlying cause of death under Part I. If the patient had hypertension or asthma, that would go under Part II.”

You write: “In most places the average age of “covid death” is more than a year over than the average life expectancy.  So, for many of these people, it was already pretty likely they’d die around the time that they did. There’s a lot to take into consideration, but I don’t think we can safely assume in all these cases that covid was the cause of death.”

According to this study in Nature magazine, a prestigious journal, “The average years of life lost per [covid] death is 16 years.”

I would say that it is worth taking some strong public health measures (I don’t know which are most effective after vaccines, prior to vaccines wearing masks indoors around other people seems at least as prudent as it is with any influenza) to reduce the occurrences of this type of disease. Sixteen years per death is an enormous toll.

So, no, contrary to what you repeatedly allege, the overwhelming number of Covid deaths were not of people about to die anyway.

You love to use absolute language to make your points as if one anecdote discredits established statistics and policies. You write: “I don’t think we can safely assume in all these cases that covid was the cause of death.” Nobody assumes perfection in any human activity, including the writing of death certificates. If one in ten thousand death certificates inaccurately lists Covid as a cause of death, so what?

PHILOSOPHER:

David Gorski: “These are contributory factors, but if you have one or more of these conditions when you contract COVID-19 and later die, it’ll very likely be the COVID-19, not your underlying health condition, that killed you.”

Why is this “very likely”? Why wouldn’t that depend on the specific other conditions present, any one of which has its own likelihood of being lethal? Again, when CDC has recommended that covid be recorded as the UCOD simply because it can be “life-threatening”, that would make it likely that other (equally life-threatening) conditions are sometimes or maybe regularly being dismissed out of hand. CDC does not make this recommendation for influenza.

There’s also this embedded quotation, which makes no sense to me: “Regardless of where covid is listed on the certificate–underlying or contributing–it was a CAUSE of death. Ergo, people die of covid, not with covid.” By this reasoning any one of those 94% of deaths “of covid” can just as correctly be called deaths “of” or “from” one or two or three other conditions. However, they were not​ recorded as deaths from those other conditions; they were recorded as covid deaths. Why? It seems arbitrary.

If covid was not justifiably deemed the underlying​ cause of death, but the death is counted as a “covid death” regardless, that implies that covid deaths are not counted in the same way as other deaths. Someone who dies from condition C with influenza as a contributory cause is not counted as an influenza death, as far as I know. (Is that what they do for influenza? If so, how do they avoid double-counting? Every death with two co-morbidities would count as three deaths…?)

Here’s why I say the article seems question-begging. The objection I’m making has to do with policies for writing death certificates. I’m saying there seems to be evidence that they’re not being filled out in a normal, rational way. The article seems to just assume that they are being filled out normally and rationally. So it seems to assume the very thing I’m questioning.

LUKE:

You write: “Why wouldn’t that depend on the specific other conditions present, any one of which has its own likelihood of being lethal?”

If you have lived with a comorbidity for decades and your life expectancy with this comorbidity is at least another decade of life, and then you catch covid and die within 48 hours, it seems obvious to me that it would not be surprising to see covid listed as the UCOD.

You write: “when CDC has recommended that covid be recorded as the UCOD simply because it can be “life-threatening”, that would make it likely that other (equally life-threatening) conditions are sometimes or maybe regularly being dismissed out of hand.”

Where do you come up with the idea that death certificates dismiss other causes of death out of hand when someone died with Covid? You just made that up. You invented it. You fantasized it and it was real to you. It seemed like a stunning argument to you even though it was pure delusion.

As explained in detail in the referenced article, other underlying factors are listed in a death certificate. A death certificate does not always just list one cause of death. Did you read referenced article with any comprehension or did you just blank out anything inconvenient to your desired beliefs? To repeat a quote: “For example, if a patient dies of respiratory failure due to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which was the result of pneumonia, which was the result of COVID-19, the proximal cause of death was the respiratory failure, but contributing causes were ARDS and COVID-19, with the one farthest up the chain being the underlying cause of death under Part I. If the patient had hypertension or asthma, that would go under Part II.” Oh, so it is stating here that contributing causes are listed, not just Covid. So where on earth, aside from your desire to not understand basic English because it is inconvenient to your agenda, do you get the idea that the CDC wants to dismiss other causes of death out of hand? You don’t want to understand the most basic facts if they are inconvenient to your desire to be outraged. 

Any death certificate that solely lists Covid as a cause of death is an improperly filled out death certificate. From Dr. Gorski’s article: “There should be zero death certificates that list COVID-19 alone. The CDC report basically tells us that 6% of death certificates were incorrectly completed.”

“Part I of the death certificate includes the proximal cause of death, or what directly caused the death, and Part II lists conditions that contributed to the death…”

“Part I lists a single UNDERLYING cause, which lead to another cause, which lead to another cause, and so on, until the final cause which immediately caused the death. Part II may list zero or more additional CONTRIBUTING causes. Sometimes called “multiple causes”.”

“For example, if a patient dies of respiratory failure due to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which was the result of pneumonia, which was the result of COVID-19, the proximal cause of death was the respiratory failure, but contributing causes were ARDS and COVID-19, with the one farthest up the chain being the underlying cause of death under Part I. If the patient had hypertension or asthma, that would go under Part II. As I like to say, if you suffer a cardiac arrest due to blood loss after being shot, the cardiac arrest might have been the proximal cause of death, but you still died of a gunshot wound.”

“Sometimes these underlying causes contribute to the death. For example, if you have hemophilia and suffer a stab wound that leads you to bleed out and die when someone with normal blood clotting probably would have survived, then you still died of a stab wound, but the hemophilia was a contributing cause of death.”

“In the end, the final causes of death are always one of a few things, the underlying cause, however, is what matters.”

PHILOSOPHER:

I can only say that when I asked the government for their evidence they sent me (reluctantly) some evidence reviews conceding that the highest quality studies were inconclusive at best. I could look up those documents if you’re interested. But here’s something else that seems important: We’ve had mask mandates in lots of places for a long time now, and also lots of places without them. As far as I know there’s no pattern whatsoever. There seems to be no difference in terms of “case” numbers or hospitalizations or deaths. If masks in public settings work, why don’t we find any pattern?

I agree it seems like common sense, but if common sense is relevant here we should probably reject most of what we’re told about covid. It’s also common sense (for me) that masks and lockdowns aren’t going to eliminate the flu but not covid. It’s common sense that lockdowns will only delay the spread of the virus, possibly making it worse. As soon as people start going out again, it starts spreading again; so then we have another lockdown. What’s the point of this behavior? But that’s what we’ve been doing up here for a year and a half.

LUKE:

“Well, I can only say that when I asked the government for their evidence they sent me (reluctantly) some evidence reviews conceding that the highest quality studies were inconclusive at best.  I could look up those documents if you’re interested.”

No, you can’t only say this. You are perfectly capable of investigating the matter beyond what some bureaucrats or politicians deign to email you. Why would you not Google this? Why not look up studies? Why depend on what others feed you?

“We’ve had mask mandates in lots of places for a long time now, and also lots of places without them.  As far as I know there’s no pattern whatsoever.”

How much effort have you put in, aside from contacting the government, to see the evidence for lockdowns and mask mandates as useful tools in some circumstances to reduce the transmission of covid?

“It’s common sense that lockdowns will only delay the spread of the virus, possibly making it worse.  As soon as people start going out again, it starts spreading again; so then we have another lockdown.  What’s the point of this behavior?  But that’s what we’ve been doing up here for a year and a half.”

Treatment gets more effective over time. Also, over time, the virus will mutate out of lethality. The Spanish Flu burned out in two  years. Now we have vaccines that are highly effective at saving lives. So, yes, delaying the transmission of covid seems to have some solid arguments in its favor. 

PHILOSOPHER:

How do we know that in all or even most of the 94% of cases this​ is what happened? For example, in how many cases did the person died of respiratory failure (and didn’t have a co-morbidity that also often causes respiratory failure)? We don’t know that. And we have reason to suspect that’s not what’s happening in at least some of the 94% because of the CDC recommendation I mentioned (and similar guidance in other countries).

LUKE:

We know that all industrialized nations take death certificates seriously. So unless you have evidence that there’s massive incompetence in the execution of death certificates in industrialized nations, I think we have to go with the notion that death certificates bear a strong relationship to reality.

You write: “I think it’s plausible that the covid response was more lethal than the virus would have been had it been treated like a regular flu.”

I am curious if there is anyone who makes that case strongly? It’s such a compelling matter that I would not think we would have to rely on those with no expertise. Surely somebody with a PhD in a related field has investigated this and reported back?

Philosopher:

Many of your comments are gratuitously insulting. I don’t think I’ve said anything similar to you, so I’m not sure what it is that you’re responding to. Does this style of communication serve you? Do you think it’s ethical, or enlightening? If you want to continue debating the issue, that’s great, but I do expect basic respect and charity. No one learns anything from condescension and insults. And it’s bad for the soul.

LUKE:

You are right. I slipped my leash and I am sorry for that. I’ve spent the day thinking about how I would act differently in future situations of similar frustration and have decided that when I feel like I am not able to contribute on a discussion like we’ve had, to pause until such a time and situation when I feel like I can be useful. When I get upset, there’s something wrong with me, there’s some part of reality I am not accepting.

These situations have often come up for me and I don’t like how I have handled them. Sometimes, I addictively keep trying to make a point and I get out of alignment and shouty and accuse the other person of cognitive shortcomings. Neither approach has been good for me, let alone others.

PHILOSOPHER:

I watched some of your livestream and now I’m pretty sure you’ve misunderstood what I was saying. Of course, I agree with this: “Just because covid isn’t the proximate cause doesn’t mean it’s not the underlying cause.” You seemed to be saying that I don’t grasp this obvious point. But I never made the argument you’re refuting.

In the first email I wrote to you on this issue, I said that the following inference is dumb: “Only 6% had no co-morbidities, therefore co-morbidity was the underlying cause in the other 94%.” The mere fact that covid was the proximate cause in only 6% doesn’t mean that covid was not the underlying cause 100% (or 90% or 85% or whatever). It could be that covid was the underlying cause in all or most cases where co-morbidities were present.

In other words, the first thing I said about this was exactly what you think I fail to understand.

What I’ve been saying is this: (i) When covid was one contributory cause among others, it’s possible that covid was not the underlying cause; (ii) When covid was merely present, it’s possible that covid was not even a contributory cause; (iii) some of the guidelines for recording covid deaths seem to imply that merely being one contributory cause or merely being a condition present at death is sufficient for being an underlying cause. And that’s enough for me to be skeptical regarding the official numbers.

There are two ways to directly attack this reasoning. You could dispute the logical part. For example, you could argue that being a contributory cause or merely being a condition present at death is a sufficient condition for being an underlying cause. But then you’d be misunderstanding causal concepts. Or you could dispute the empirical part. For example, you could deny that these guidelines mean what I claim, or you could argue that the guidelines have no significant influence on how deaths are recorded. But as far as I can tell, your objection is just that “we know that industrialized nations take death certificates very seriously”. That could be true, but in this context it begs the question: The argument is that, given (i)-(iii), we have reason for doubting that industrialized nations are producing correct death certificates where covid is involved.

Sometimes it’s reasonable to reject an argument just because its conclusion seems obviously false. If someone argues that Biden is Chinese I’m going reject the argument even if I don’t know what exactly is wrong with it. Maybe you think it’s just absurd to imagine that death certificates are being filled out incorrectly–so absurd that any argument to the contrary can be dismissed without identifying the mistake. That’s fine. We just have very different background assumptions in that case. But then the disagreement has nothing to do with whether an underlying cause may not be the proximate cause.

You’re also lumping me in with people “denying covid”. On the contrary, I said at the beginning that I think it’s a somewhat serious illness (and very serious for some groups) and some kind of response was justified. I just don’t think that the actual response was justified or effective. (I think in many cases it made things worse.)

You say you’re sharing real scientific findings, while people like me simply ignore the research. But I’ve been reading that stuff too. Of course, you can find studies or articles supporting the mainstream narrative about covid–16 years of life lost, etc. I can find studies that support the skeptical narrative. For example:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13484 ; https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-3025-y What follows? Maybe nothing much. It’s normal that scientists disagree, that there is no definite consensus for non-experts to just accept. You appeal to one or two studies as evidence that skeptics are wrong on a given point–e.g. how serious covid is. When I mention other studies that support skepticism–RCTs indicating that masks in community settings have no effect–you just say that it’s “common sense” that masks would help. On the blog you say that while you haven’t checked out the research on masks or lockdowns, it just “makes sense” to you that these measures would help. I have no problem with this response. Life is short and we have to rely on intuitions or common sense. But how is this different from what I’m doing? We just have different intuitions or assumptions.

You write on the blog: “just because politicians and health officers reversed themselves quickly on the efficacy of face masks to reduce the spread of an influenza pandemic is not strong evidence that face masks are not useful in some contexts.”

I agree. But who ever said this was “strong evidence” for that conclusion? The evidence is the RCTs, along with comparisons we can now make between regions where masks were mandated and others where they weren’t. Maybe the evidence isn’t strong enough to draw any firm conclusions. I don’t know.

Overall, it seems to me that you’ve been reacting to things I never said. You seem to have preconceived ideas about how “covid skeptics” think and you project these beliefs and arguments on to me.

But I’m glad you’re rethinking your approach. People can reasonably disagree about this topic. There are so many different issues involved that no one is really an expert on the topic. It’s not just immunology or epidemiology but also psychology and politics and economics and ethics, etc.

You think any religious belief depends on a leap of faith. There’s no ultimate rational basis, but when people take the same leap they can reason within shared assumptions. I agree. But I think every topic is like that. Your basic orientation on covid is centrist, and that determines which sources you’re willing to take seriously, which topics you’ll investigate, which claims just “make sense” and don’t need to be rigorously tested against scientific studies. My orientation is more suspicious, so I approach things differently. There’s no objective rational basis for either orientation. Any argument you can come up with (or I can come up with) is ultimately going to be circular. It’s going to rest on presuppositions that won’t be plausible for someone whose basic orientation–faith–is different.

I didn’t say that there’s been no excess mortality but rather that (a) in some places there’s been none, and (b) in places where there’s been significant excess mortality it’s likely that the pandemic response is a significant factor, possibly more important than the virus. In Ontario, we’ve had over 200k delayed surgeries and 1 million missed cancer screenings, for example. Then there are all the extra suicides and drug overdoses. So in some regions it seems likely (at least) that excess mortality isn’t tracking covid accurately. But I definitely don’t deny that covid has produced some excess mortality.

More importantly, I don’t base any of these claims on feelings. Yes, in moral philosophy that’s standard practice; there isn’t really any other method available. But no sane moral philosopher would use that method in trying to figure out facts about epidemiology or excess mortality! My basis for these claims is simply what I’ve been reading about excess mortality: various different StatsCan reports, some published studies about Canada and other countries, stuff I find in the news, etc.

Feelings come into this at a deeper level. For example, if I come across government statistics that seem intuitively weird or incompatible with my experience, my suspicion toward government is strong enough that I’d be ready to suspect they’re lying or incompetent. Though that depends a lot on the topic and situation.

LUKE:

Live streams are not exact or as precise as writing, particularly when I’m riffing.

As I understand it, Covid like AIDS is never the proximate cause of death.

” (i) When covid was one contributory cause among others, it’s possible that covid was not the underlying cause; (ii) When covid was merely present, it’s possible that covid was not even a contributory cause; (iii) some of the guidelines for recording covid deaths seem to imply that merely being one contributory cause or merely being a condition present at death is sufficient for being an underlying cause. And that’s enough for me to be skeptical regarding the official numbers.”

Yes, it is possible that covid is not a contributory cause. Given what I have read, however, it seems to me that our Covid death toll overall is dramatically understated, but yet, there are some grounds to argue it is overstated, and yes, it is possible that government responses killed more than did Covid itself (though I don’t find this a strong possibility overall, but maybe in some times and places it is true).

“The argument is that, given (i)-(iii), we have reason for doubting that industrialized nations are producing correct death certificates where covid is involved.”

Yes, industrialized nations take death certificates seriously, and yet like all human endeavors they will inevitably be filled with errors and biases and reactions to incentives.

Neither of us is an expert in death certificates. Here is a case where I would be 1000 times more interested in what those with expertise in death certificates have to say about your arguments than what anyone without specialized knowledge has to say on this. I know nothing beyond 30 minutes of reading.

“Maybe you think it’s just absurd to imagine that death certificates are being filled out incorrectly–so absurd that any argument to the contrary can be dismissed without identifying the mistake.”

I would want evidence (logical argument is not evidence, but it can help the search for evidence) before I questioned the general accuracy of death certificates in the US and other industrialized nations.

“You’re also lumping me in with people “denying covid”. On the contrary, I said at the beginning that I think it’s a somewhat serious illness (and very serious for some groups) and some kind of response was justified. I just don’t think that the actual response was justified or effective. (I think in many cases it made things worse.)”

I was sloppy.

“You say you’re sharing real scientific findings, while people like me simply ignore the research. But I’ve been reading that stuff too. Of course, you can find studies or articles supporting the mainstream narrative about covid–16 years of life lost, etc. I can find studies that support the skeptical narrative. For example:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13484 ;
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-3025-y

What follows? Maybe nothing much. It’s normal that scientists disagree, that there is no definite consensus for non-experts to just accept. You appeal to one or two studies as evidence that skeptics are wrong on a given point–e.g. how serious covid is. When I mention other studies that support skepticism–RCTs indicating that masks in community settings have no effect–you just say that it’s “common sense” that masks would help. On the blog you say that while you haven’t checked out the research on masks or lockdowns, it just “makes sense” to you that these measures would help. I have no problem with this response. Life is short and we have to rely on intuitions or common sense. But how is this different from what I’m doing? We just have different intuitions or assumptions.”

If you go back to your first email on this topic, you are starting out with your feelings about reality (for example, that there has not been excessive mortality, which seems to me obviously wrong) and then it seems to me you are logically reasoning from your feelings about reality and seeking out evidence to support your intuition. This is how ethicists and moral philosophers generally work (I have been told by philosophers). I am not aware of starting with any strong feeling or intuition about government responses to Covid (aside from reading Paul Barry’s book on the 1918 Spanish Flu early on and thereby being open to strong governmental response including restrictions on freedom), which is why I had few strong opinions until recently. I
went more than a year without staking out any position, and after more than a year of reading different things, some things have become clear to me lately, I think.

In my spontaneous videos, I am reacting to a caricature of your thinking, and I am often imprecise and unfair to your views. In my defense, I am somewhat the same way with myself in these videos.

So how is my approach different from yours in that we are both relying on limited evidence? I feel like I am starting with the evidence I’ve read and it seems like you are starting with your intuition. You are reasoning like a moral philosopher and I am operating like a bloke who wants to be data driven but is lazy, sloppy and not so sharp with data.

When anyone says or writes anything, it is important to ask — what is he reacting to? I am reacting to my audience which is disproportionately covid-skeptical. I am not primarily reacting to you even when I am ostensibly reacting to you. That’s why I’ve misrepresented your views because in my videos, I am not primarily talking to you, I am primarily talking to my audience that is dominated by covid skeptics and our dialogue is just an excuse or stimulus for me to engage again with my audience. Making a video takes tremendous energy, and a good source of energy is when I want to react to an ongoing irritant (not you, but my covid skeptic audience).

“You think any religious belief depends on a leap of faith. There’s no ultimate rational basis, but when people take the same leap they can reason within shared assumptions. I agree. But I think every topic is like that. Your basic orientation on covid is centrist, and that determines which sources you’re willing to take seriously, which topics you’ll investigate, which claims just “make sense” and don’t need to be rigorously tested against scientific studies. My orientation is more suspicious, so I approach things differently. There’s no objective rational basis for either orientation. Any argument you can come up with (or I can come up with) is ultimately going to be circular. It’s going to rest on presuppositions that won’t be plausible for someone whose basic orientation–faith–is different.”

I agree.

My perception is that I change my mind more than anybody I know. I’m a bit of an intellectual gigolo — falling in love with every comely idea that comes along and ultimately staying loyal to none.

I often make my own psyche the achimedian point for analyzing the world, which is not data driven of me.

Much of my audience thinks elites are sinister. I think elites are just like you and me only they are elite and that they are no more inherently sinister or good than we are.

So I don’t begin with the suspicion that elite directed covid lockdowns are any more sinister than how I conduct myself when I have some power. Sometimes I’m a jerk, sometimes decent, and often a mix and usually I am just doing the best I can in sometime difficult circumstances. I don’t think governors Cuomo and Newsome are evil, just flawed like me. I used to bang as many chicks as I could because that was the best tool I had at the time to meet my needs (does not mean I don’t need to make amends, but I don’t beat myself down for my promiscuous past).

I also don’t think there’s an overall moral difference between individuals on the left and right. People are different and experience the world differently and we’re all doing the best we can.

I have no patience for the view that any race or religion or social class is sinister (more than the average human) or that people who live in cities are useless or that people who live in Cleveland are losers. I find these views widespread in my audience.

When I read the news or watch a movie, I assume the characters are just as flawed as I am, just in different ways and facing different situations than I’ve faced. I can empathize with anyone, even Hitler, Stalin, Mao.

PHILOSOPHER:

From my perspective, people who refused to wear masks might just be people adequately informed about the very poor evidence that wearing masks has any effect on the spread of the virus. No doubt some are also jackasses. But then I’ve had a lot of experience by now with “maskers” being jackasses. Or just being very weird. I find it disturbing that I regularly see people alone in a car with a mask on. This is weird behavior. One of the biggest problems that the covid thing has brought to the surface is the profound lack of trust and respect between “citizens”. People who can’t seem to find tolerable ways to navigate basic daily life–shopping or lining up at the bank or sharing a sidewalk. Almost anything can become a moralistic showdown, with each faction treating the other as if they were complete morons or demons.

It’s reasonable for many people to refuse the vaccine. There are so many reasons, but the most obvious one is just that if you’re young and healthy the very low risk of covid may not be worth the presently unknown long-term risks of vaccination. There might be some obligation to protect others, but that’s very complicated. The obligation might be cancelled if the risk to most others is low, or if there are many other ways for them to protect themselves just as effectively, or if there’s some basic principle of autonomy at stake, etc. People will assess things differently. The ones who presently don’t want the vaccine are not all “jackasses”. It’s a simple-minded and arrogant point of view.

One reason there’s probably no obligation to others is that the vaccines may have no effect on transmission. If those others want protection, they should just vaccinate themselves.

And on that issue, the authors write:

“That the ‘science’ keeps changing is unsurprising. We only know what we know when we know it. It’s what makes a “novel coronavirus” novel.”

But this was always likely. Anyone who read past the headlines was aware that the vaccine trials weren’t designed to provide any evidence regarding infection or transmission. That’s why people like me were frustrated by the government and media “messaging” to the effect that once enough people were vaccinated things could “get back to normal”. How could they know that? At most, they might reasonably hope that vaccinating a majority of people would result in fewer deaths and hospitalizations. But then mass vaccination would be pointless. Just vaccinate those in high-risk groups.

Something is very wrong when a non-expert, like me, ends up being right about this stuff more often than Faucci or Biden or Trudeau. Or the CDC. I’ve been called a science hater and conspiracy theorist (etc) for making this rather obvious point. (The next big idea that may eventually make it into the mainstream: the variants might be due to the vaccines.)

So this doesn’t seem very insightful to me. Maybe covid is “novel” in some respects, but that’s irrelevant; if you don’t even test for X, don’t just assume that your product will have an effect on X. From my perspective this piece has an air of rationalization. I get the sense they invested too much in the establishment’s unscientific narrative, and now they want to minimize how badly this has turned out. The reason people are angry is not that “science keeps changing” but that the leaders and pseudo-experts they trusted to design policies based on science were apparently just making things up. What was the point of the massive campaign to persuade and pressure us to get vaccinated? Why did they insist for months on end that the vaccines were “effective”? They must have known that “effective” strongly suggests “effective in reducing transmission”, that most people were not going to read the fine print.

It’s not just that the messaging has been bad, though it has. The problem is that there seems to have been no coherent rational plan behind the messaging. Maybe people should all be wearing masks again (granting for the sake of argument that it helps). But why were they ever told they wouldn’t need masks after vaccination? It should have been obvious to the authorities that there was no reason for thinking vaccinated people wouldn’t be spreading the virus, or even that they’d be less likely to spread it. Again and again, they ignored the real state of the evidence.

A doctor emails about Covid death accuracy:

The ultimate determinate of Covid-19 mortality will be a detailed look at excess mortality. Given the way that these “probable” deaths are to be certified, if they are done correctly, one should be able to get a sense of how many “non-tested” COVID deaths there were. In addition, COVID-19 testing is tracked by public health departments. For example in Connecticut, anyone with a COVID-19 positive test gets reported to the DPH. Comparisons are made with test results, fatalities, and death certificates to correlate these factors and to ensure we are capturing the appropriate deaths. This process may vary in other jurisdictions but by comparing the death certificates and the test results, one should be able to get a sense of how many deaths were certified as covid-19 but did and did not have a positive test. There are literally thousands and thousands of different physicians and nurse practitioners who were and are certifying these deaths. There are some physicians who will only certify a death as covid-19 if there is a positive test. Plus there may be out of hospital covid-19 deaths that are missed. No system is perfect but when one is seeing hundreds of thousands of deaths that have occurred in hospitals with extensive testing, what is the “big picture” effect of any imperfect system? Once testing ramped up, it was unusual to have any hospital or nursing home death that did not already have a COVID test.

Posted in Corona Virus | Comments Off on Talking About Corona Virus With A Philosopher

The Late Religious Scholar Jonathan Z. Smith

From an interview June 2, 2008:

* I despise the telephone. That’s probably why. I don’t like it. I’ll reveal my age, but I don’t like the notion [that] for a nickel…anyone could get a hold of me any time they want. I think the cell phone is an absolute abomination. I don’t understand people really needing to take a telephone with them. I have one in the kitchen, and it has an answering machine, and I pay no attention whatsoever.

SS: How about e-mail?

JS: I’ve never used a computer.

SS: What got you interested in the religions that you study?

JS: Because they’re funny. They’re interesting in and of themselves. They relate to the world in which I live, but it’s like a fun house mirror: Something’s off. It’s not quite the world I live in, yet it’s recognizable. So that gap interested me… I sometimes have to deal with religions that keep going. And they’re more problematic because then you deal with people who believe things. They also find their own beliefs puzzling or challenging or interesting—they’re almost synonyms. So they have not only their beliefs, but their interpretations of those beliefs. And I have my interpretations of their beliefs. Sometimes we can sit like this and negotiate it. Other times it’s in a book or transcript. And then in a third sense you have to run back and forth. You have to represent both sides of the conversation as you try to figure out what it’s all about.

* I went to another philosophy professor and I said where can I go to study Greek myths. He said, “Why don’t you go to Yale Divinity School and study the New Testament, it’s the biggest piece of Greek myth that’s still around.”

* In between is where you always are.

* And so, you’re always in the middle, because translation’s always in the middle. It can’t impose its language on someone else’s language. On the other hand, if it just repeats the other person’s language, it ain’t translated.

* There’s an example, of a great scholar, also named Smith—Wilfred Cantwell Smith, just died a couple years ago—that was his fundamental principle. His specialty was particularly in Islam, and he held that if he said something about Islam, they had to sign off on it. And I said “Wilfred, the difference between you and me is that I’m at Harvard and you’re at Chicago. You’re rich, I’m poor. Who are you calling up? My God, what a phone bill! I mean, you’re calling up the entire Muslim world, and asking what they think of your sentence? Because if not, I want to know how you picked out the person you asked. And I suspect you picked him out because he talks just like you!” And then you’re asking a mirror, “‘How do I look today?” I mean, it’s a crazy idea. Call up the whole world and ask them, “What do you think about what I was about to say? Every sentence?” I mean good lord, what a bill. I think even with the cell phones, I see all the ads say “unlimited”—I don’t think they had that in mind. So no. Now, there are some self-appointed loudmouths who say ‘unless I approve of what you say’—but who the hell appointed them?

SS: I know one of the people you’ve criticized is Joseph Campbell. What’s it like to take on big fish like that?

Joe makes it all easy! All myths are one! Well, see, I think that’s terrible. I really do. If that’s all it is, if all myths tell the story of a hero who at a certain stage in his life blah blah blah blah, why read more than one? For that matter, why not just read Joe Campbell? [That’s] exactly what he had in mind. Now his popularity does not depend on spirits. His popularity depends on his aura—legitimating the mysterious world of the East, legitimating the hunters and gatherers and their deep rapport with nature! “Oh, you like mushrooms? Mushrooms, too, let me tell you about mushrooms”—Joe would affirm anything. He was terrific!

* He had the gift of…oh, I don’t know…societies that still honor the storyteller. We don’t, but he had the gift of a storyteller. He had the gift, unbelievable. And then the Irish drawl would come out the more he drank, which made the stuff more lilting…. But this is a business—and I don’t think we show students enough of this—but this is a business that lives by high noons. It’s shoot-’em-ups and rewards. Your job, in part, is to take somebody down. Their reputation shouldn’t be a big deal, but obviously it is.

* We can’t experiment on our subject matter… But it’s really terribly important that if the human sciences are sciences at all, they have to have something analogous to experiment. So talk is one of those. Comparing is another one. Experiment interferes with whatever it’s looking at. It’s not watching a natural process just going along naturally. It sticks a pin in or drops some irritant on it or does something to it or smashes it in a multibillion dollar hole. But comparing is doing something—bringing two things that have no reason in creation to be in the same pond together—throw them in and see what happens… I look at the Book of Mormon in relationship to the Koran. I’m dropping one in the other’s pond to see what happens. So to me, if we’re a science, we have to have something analogous to an experiment.

* And one of things about religion is they take it all! They talk about everything! They’re not like most of who think they have a certain expertise so they pick their beliefs about this narrow range of things, and they’re doing pretty good.

* Martin Luther says, “What think you of Jesus Christ is the only question!” Well that’s the only question, but what hundreds of questions are wrapped up in that question? Religions will try to simplify themselves, strip off the things—they say, “Well, those are not so essential.” But nobody needs to leave any religion over a single issue. Because fortunately, unlike some of our political groups, there are no single-issue religions. There really aren’t. Part of the problem is they have no modesty. So they’ll talk about everything, and have a belief about it, and it makes them fun. It also makes them asses sometimes.

* a first-year will buy anything from anyone with authority. A second-year won’t buy anything from anybody, no matter how authoritative. Finally by the fourth year they learn what you call contextualization. Take some of it and leave some of it…

Posted in Religion | Comments Off on The Late Religious Scholar Jonathan Z. Smith

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities

Eric Kaufman writes in this 2019 book:

* 80 per cent of the world’s 156 major countries have an ethnic majority and half contain a majority of at least 70 per cent. Europe is one of three relatively homogeneous world regions, along with North Africa and East Asia. States in these zones often have ethnic majorities of 90 per cent or more, mainly because geoclimatic variation – topography and soil type – is lower.

* I contend that today’s white majorities are likely to successfully absorb minority populations while their core myths and boundary symbols endure. This will involve a change in the physical appearance of the median Westerner, hence Whiteshift, though linguistic and religious markers are less likely to be affected. Getting from where we are now, where most Westerners share the racial and religious features of their ethnic archetype, to the situation in a century or two, when most will be what we now term ‘mixed-race’, is vital to understanding our present condition.

* The demographic transition is important for politics because it unfolds at different times between world regions, between nations and even between ethnic groups within nations. In Northern Ireland, for instance, Protestants entered the demographic transition sixty to eighty years before Catholics. That meant Catholic birth rates were higher than Protestant ones for decades, which is why the Catholic share of Northern Ireland increased from 35 per cent in 1965 to close to 50 per cent today. Since voting in Northern Ireland largely takes place on ethnic lines, this had serious political ramifications, which played a part in the violence which gripped the province between 1969 and 1994. 21 In other words, it is the unevenness of the demographic transition between groups which carries political implications.

* the West, especially its European-origin population, will be a demographic speck of a few percentage points by the end of the century. Meanwhile, economic power will continue to shift to other parts of the globe. All of which is likely to sharpen the awareness of European origins among tomorrow’s mixed-race Western majorities.

* In East Asia, automation and guest worker programmes drawing on South-East Asian labour are ensuring that the region’s demographic deficit will not produce multicultural nation-states. The same is true in Eastern Europe as rifts over accepting Syrian refugees showed in 2015. The Eastern rejection of cosmopolitan liberalism stands in stark contrast to the Western response, which emphasizes inclusion, multicultural citizenship and a celebration of diversity. This difference, I would argue, largely explains why right-wing populism has not reared, and will not rear, its head in Japan or Korea. These nations remain attached to what I call closed ethnic nationalism, in which proscriptions proscriptions against intermarriage and tight ethnic boundaries coexist with immigration policies designed to maintain majority ethnic predominance. Japan’s foreign-born share is 1.5 per cent, Korea’s 3.4, a fraction of the 10–20 per cent we typically find in the West.

* Over 90 per cent of wars since 1945 have taken place within rather than between countries. Of these, most have been ethnic wars. 24 In developed countries the same forces tend to produce contestation rather than violence, raising the importance of ethnicity in politics and society. In our more peaceful, post-ideological, demographically turbulent world, migration-led ethnic change is altering the basis of politics from class to ethnicity. On one side is a conservative coalition of whites who are attached to their heritage joined by minorities who value the white tradition; on the other side a progressive alliance of minorities who identify with their ethnic identity combined with whites who are agnostic or hostile towards theirs. Among whites, ethno-demographic change polarizes people between ‘tribal’ ethnics who value their particularity and ‘religious’ post-ethnics who prioritize universalist creeds such as John McWhorter’s ‘religion of anti-racism’.

* I chart the four main white responses to ethnic change: fight, repress, flee and join. Whites can fight ethnic change by voting for right-wing populists or committing terrorist acts. They may repress anxieties in the name of ‘politically correct’ anti-racism, but cracks in this moral edifice are appearing. Many opt to flee by avoiding diverse neighbourhoods, schools and social networks. And other whites may choose to join the newcomers, first in friendship, subsequently in marriage.

* rising diversity triggers two responses: conservatism and authoritarianism. Conservatism involves maintaining continuity with the past and resisting change. 26 If the West was diverse and became more homogeneous – as occurred in Poland or Vienna after 1939 – the conservative instinct would be to wax nostalgic about past diversity. Ethnic change is the irritant, not levels of diversity, which is why a meta-analysis of the academic literature I helped conduct shows ethnic change nearly always predicts increased anti-immigration sentiment and populist-right voting. 27 Psychological authoritarianism, by contrast, concerns the quest for order and security. Diversity, whether ethnic or ideological, however long its provenance, is problematic because it disrupts a sense of harmony and cohesion. Thus for authoritarians high levels of ethnic diversity are as much the problem as ethnic change . Even if the rate of change stays constant, high diversity levels increase discontent among those who value existential security and stability.

* A precedent can be found in the anti-immigration agitation of Protestant America in the mid-nineteenth century. The Irish famine and its aftermath saw over a million largely Catholic Irish immigrants move to America, a country which was over 95 per cent Protestant. By the 1850s, Catholics were a majority or large plurality in most north-eastern cities. Horrific violence followed in which mobs torched Catholic churches, vandalized Irish neighbourhoods and attacked priests. Many white Protestants responded by forming anti-Catholic societies or voting for anti-immigration parties. The rise of the Native American (‘Know-Nothing’) Party of the 1850s was breathtaking. In the words of the historian Ray Allen Billington: ‘The result was phenomenal. Whole tickets not even on the ballots were carried into office. Men who were unopposed for election and who had been conceded victory found themselves defeated by some unknown Know-Nothing.’ 28 All but one of the 377 state representatives of Massachusetts were Know-Nothings. They won 22 per cent of the vote in 1856, the most successful third party in American history. Many thought a Know-Nothing President was inevitable until the North–South divide over slavery intervened.

* A second white response is to repress ethnic instincts in the name of anti-racism.

* Our predisposition towards religion, morality and reputation – all of which can transcend the tribe – reflects our adaptation to larger social units. Be that as it may, humans have lived in large groups only in the very recent past, so it is reasonable to assume tribalism is a more powerful aspect of our evolutionary psychology than our willingness to abide by a moral code. Today what we increasingly see in the West is a battle between the ‘tribal’ populist right and the ‘religious’ anti-racist left.

* The fact our tribal makeup can be tricked to apply to sports teams or empires shows that evolution exerts only a distant force on behaviour. We favour genetic relatives, but this primordial tribalism is a weak tie-breaker that comes into play only when everything else is equal. A white American in a foreign airport usually feels closer to a black American than to a white Frenchman.

* As long as political conflicts are centred on ideology or states, primordial tribalism remains latent. What matters most is economic and institutional heft, with nepotistic instincts deciding things only at the margin. A trans-ethnic social group like the left can harness our tribal instincts the same way white nationalism can. Only if the two institutional forces are equally resourced will evolutionary psychology hand victory to white nationalism because it resonates slightly better with our instincts.

* Daniel Bell, used the term modernism to describe the spirit of anti-traditionalism which emerged in Western high culture between 1880 and 1930. With the murderous excesses of communism and fascism, many Western intellectuals embraced a fusion of modernist anti-traditionalism and cultural egalitarianism, distinguishing the new ideology from both socialism and traditional liberalism. Cosmopolitanism was its guiding ethos. Unlike socialism or fascism, this left-wing modernism meshed nicely with capitalism and globalization. The left-modernist sensibility spread from a small elite to a much wider section of middle-class society in the 1960s with the rise of television and growth of universities, taking over as the dominant sensibility of the high culture.

As it gained ground, it turned moralistic and imperialistic, seeking not merely to persuade but to institutionalize itself in law and policy, altering the basis of liberalism from tolerating to mandating diversity… Meanwhile the economic egalitarianism of socialism gave way to a trinity of sacred values around race, gender and sexual orientation. Upsurges of left-modernist fundamentalism became a feature of campus life in the mid-1960s and waxed in the late 1980s and early 1990s as well as in the period since 2013.

* left-modernism laid the basis for a new moral order – a redefinition of sacred and deviant – which pushed immigration restriction beyond the pale, keeping it off the political agenda. This permitted business and humanitarian considerations to override cultural concerns, facilitating the immigration-led ethnic changes which have powered right-wing populism.

* Negative liberalism says we should allow people to pursue their goals as long as they don’t infringe the rights of others. Positive liberalism consists of promoting particular goals, such as autonomy or diversity, as the proper aim of human individuals and societies. 33 Tolerating difference is critical for negative liberalism. Celebrating it is not. If someone doesn’t have a taste for Marmite, asking them to celebrate it is a coercive form of positive liberalism with no roots in the Western legal tradition.

* In the 1960s, resistance to left-modernism came from formerly socialist, primarily Jewish, intellectuals like Bell, Nathan Glazer and others. Glazer was an especially influential critic of the multicultural resurgence of the 1990s. 35 These criticisms shaped intellectual life on the centre-right and informed opposition to bilingualism and affirmative action in the United States. Even so, the multicultural narrative continued in the media while affirmative action was upheld by the courts and practised in elite universities. Events moved more quickly in Europe in the 1990s, where populist-right gains in countries such as France, Italy and Austria prompted mainstream politicians to abandon the rhetoric of multiculturalism. Where left-modernism was formerly able to portray national identity as dangerous, clearing the way for multiculturalism, political change desacralized multiculturalism, permitting it to be debated, whereupon it was swiftly replaced by civic nationalism.
Immigration was the next moral battleground.

* The fact Trump openly talked about building a wall and banning Muslims and still won shifted the so-called ‘Overton Window’ of acceptable political ideas within the right-wing media. This weakened the anti-racist taboo among American conservatives and made it acceptable to openly campaign on a platform of reducing immigration. In Canada, by contrast, the taboo still holds on the right, so talk of reducing immigration lies beyond the bounds of the permissible. The only question is whether levels should remain the same or increase. Thus the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, which was strongly pro-Israel and willing to criticize conservative Muslims, didn’t dare touch Canada’s ‘immigration consensus’. This has produced the highest immigration levels in the OECD and increased the non-European share of the Canadian population from around 2 per cent in 1970 to 22 per cent today.

* Immigrant children typically speak the native language without an accent, but will tend to retain their religion and, if non-white, remain racially distinct. Non-Christian groups, apart from East Asians, generally remain religious over generations, though there is a slow process of secularization under way among Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims. 41 Physical differences likewise erode only over generations, through intermarriage.
Race does much of the work in demarcating whites from minorities today. Religion, despite the challenge of conservative Islam, is becoming less important as the West grows more secular. Current thinking on the role of racial appearance in nationalism divides primordialists, who think race matters because of our tribal instincts to cooperate with those who share more of our genes, and instrumentalists, who think it counts only because it serves people’s material interests.

* The Irish or Jews in America, though outside the Anglo-Protestant ethnic core, were distinguished from African-Americans or Chinese in daily social interactions. Some Latinos can pass as white: whether they do so is less dependent on census categories and laws than emergent, bottom-up social processes of social acceptance similar to those which eventually made gay marriage a non-issue in America. I’m a good example as someone who is a quarter Latino and a quarter Chinese but is considered white by most people…

* Appearance plays a central part in this even if race isn’t ‘real’: physicists tell us there are no actual colours in the electromagnetic spectrum, just a continuum. Yet we perceive colours and develop similar words for them across cultures. This is partly due to the way our brain processes electromagnetic stimuli and partly because of how cultures classify the primary colours. 43 A few small groups, such as the Namibian Himba, don’t recognize the colour green, calling it a shade of blue. 44 Still, broadly speaking, there is cross-cultural consensus around colour and I don’t believe this can be deconstructed. Is the same true for our established racial groups? Broadly speaking, I think so.

* the ultra-Orthodox are a third of Jewish-Israeli first-graders and by 2050 will form a majority of observant Jews in America and Britain. Since these groups are essentially all white, they push against the grain of the West’s racial trajectory… The main reason large sections of Brooklyn are becoming whiter is because of the rapid growth of the city’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, where women bear an average of six to seven children.

* The liberal conceit that whites must be post-ethnic cosmopolitans has outlived its usefulness. Some warm to cosmopolitanism, others prefer to identify with their ethnic group… Elites who use national and supranational institutions to advance a cosmopolitan vision are eroding conservatives’ trust in liberal institutions.

* England is projected to be 73 per cent white in 2050, precisely where the US was in the year 2000. This puts America half a century ahead of Western Europe on the racial transformation curve.

* A ride on public transportation in New York, San Francisco or Chicago is generally a far more ‘majority-minority’ experience than taking the London tube or Paris metro.

* much of our left-liberal lexicon on immigration – multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, anti-whiteness, diversity – developed in America in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

* By the time of American independence in 1776, the free population of the United States was 98 per cent Protestant and almost entirely white apart from a small population of free blacks in the North. Eighty per cent of the colonists were of British descent, predominantly English, but with a significant Scotch-Irish component. The remaining 20 per cent were almost all of North-West European background – German, Dutch, Swedish, French or Irish. African-Americans and Amerindians comprised a fifth of the total, but were effectively disenfranchised and not considered part of the American nation. The Constitution in 1790 restricted citizenship to ‘free white persons’. John Jay, despite his Huguenot ancestry, considered Americans ‘essentially English’ as did foreign visitors like Alexis de Tocqueville.

* Many of the American founders viewed Americans as descendants of the Anglo-Saxons who had fled the Norman yoke in England. This borrowed from British Whig historians who considered the British monarchy, which stemmed from the Norman Conquest, to be a tyrannical institution which quashed the primitive liberties enjoyed by the Anglo-Saxon tribes.

* American political nationhood, as in much of Western Europe, was constructed around what the sociologist of nationalism Anthony Smith terms an ‘ethnic core’. 5 We can think of two aspects to ethnic groups: a time dimension connecting them to ancestors, and a spatial dimension distinguishing them from neighbouring groups in the present. The spatial aspect is referred to in the literature as an ethnic boundary and its symbols typically include one or more of language, religion and physical appearance. At different times, and in different places, certain markers become more important. In Northern Ireland, the groups look and sound the same, but differ by religion. Hungarians and Slovaks look alike and don’t differ much on religion, but language sets them apart. In Britain, Afro-Caribbeans have the same religion and language as white Britons but look physically distinct. Sometimes the boundary markers all matter and reinforce each other, as with white Afrikaner Protestants and black Zulu animists in nineteenth-century South Africa.
In the United States, the boundary markers for the ethnic majority were the ‘W-AS-P’ trinity of white appearance, unaccented English, British or Dutch surname, and Protestant religion.

* Catholicism represented what the Czech-British sociologist of nationalism, Ernest Gellner, calls a ‘counter-entropic’ trait. That is, retained through generations and resisting decomposition over time. Whereas language or accent tends to fade in the second generation, religion and phenotype are often inherited and therefore endure.

* In the 1820s, the Founders’ lofty pronouncements about Anglo-Saxon origins found little echo in the population, most of whom remained attached to denominational, state and regional identities. …These sudden [immigration changes 1820-1860] ignited ethno-nationalist sentiments in the Anglo-Americans who felt threatened by the increase in foreign, and especially Catholic, population.

* As with perceptions of Islam in the West today, Catholicism was viewed as an alien faith with no place in American civilization. …From the 1840s, anti-Catholic political movements had begun organizing and contesting elections. By 1854, these came together as the Native American Party, known as the ‘Know-Nothings’ because of their oath of secrecy. The ‘native’ monicker resulted in a new American term, ‘nativist’, shorthand for Anglo-American ethnic nationalist. The party sought to reduce immigration and introduce a twenty-one-year residency requirement for citizenship. The Know-Nothing Party was the most successful third-party movement in American history.

* Chinese immigration was facilitated by the 1868 Burlingame Treaty with China. But this raises the question of who favoured immigration. Was it humanitarian liberals of the kind that champion open immigration today? Hardly. Liberal Progressivism would not emerge for another four decades. Instead, large businesses, pro-growth politicians and the Protestant clerical establishment comprised the main open-borders coalition.

* The American asylum tradition was not an egalitarian project. Anti-racist egalitarianism played no part in liberal thinking at the time. Americans welcomed immigration to grow the country, and could wax lyrical about the US as a ‘new’ nation made up of various European peoples.

* Ralph Waldo Emerson: “It cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any very high place in the human family … The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all other races have quailed and done obeisance.”

* Opposition to immigration was centred in the urban Protestant working class. An important part of the Republican base consisted of former Know-Nothings, many of whom were tradesmen. Pressure from this quarter led to repeal of the contract labour statute, but the battle would continue in California in the 1870s. Most Protestant Americans lived in the countryside and relatively few inhabited larger cities. Nevertheless, urban labour – especially mechanics and those in the craft unions – drew on the ethnic and racial traditions of American nationhood to call for restricted entry. Meanwhile, older waves of immigrants were progressively assimilated into the white working class. One index of assimilation was Irish-Catholic participation in the anti-Chinese Workingmen’s Party in California whose agitation resulted in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Led by Irish-born Denis Kearney, it brought Protestant and Catholic together in what has been described as ‘the most successful labour-based movement in American history’.

* American Protestant clergy, meanwhile, cherished a laissez-faire theology in which God favoured America, with immigration a sign of divine providence. The more zealous maintained that the ingathering of the world’s peoples was a prelude to the Second Coming.

* Laissez-faire theology dominated more strongly among the Protestant clerical elite of the eastern seaboard than in California, where local pastors generally opposed Chinese immigration. Nevertheless, until 1890, the liberal perspective prevailed at national conventions of the mainline Protestant denominations. Business-oriented Christian support for immigration is still recognizable at the upper level of both mainline and evangelical denominations, and in parts of the ‘country-club’ wing of the Republican Party.

* restriction in America is a function of both raw numbers and the distance of immigrants from the Anglo-Protestant cultural core. When numbers and cultural distance increase together, as they often do, pressure for restriction grows.

* As the country grew into an urban nation, the Social Gospel movement arose, uniting a concern for the working class and the ills of the industrial city with the belief that government should control immigration…

* By 1929, WASP interests had prevailed and the quotas came to be based on the WASPier 1920 population stock rather than 1890 immigrant population. Half the country’s immigration quota was now allocated to Britain – the aim being to freeze the ethnic composition of the US population. 31 American national identity at this point is best described as racial, in the sense of excluding virtually all non-whites, and ethno-traditional, in seeking to maintain a population mix in which Anglo-Protestants remained a majority. This is distinct from ethnic nationalism, which would mean that only members of the WASP group could immigrate or be citizens – which was not the basis of the 1924 Act.

* A new feature of the discussions around immigration in the 1910s and 1920s was racism. American intellectuals considered anti-Catholic bigotry a backward sentiment, but hailed eugenics, the science of improving the inherited characteristics of individuals, to be modern and scientific. Eugenics was connected with scientific racism, which ranked different ethnic groups as more or less advanced. This meant Catholic Irish and Germans were now ‘Nordics’, considered by some race scientists to be on par with Anglo-Protestants, an interpretation which many of the Old Immigrant representatives endorsed. Some race scientists demurred, ranking the Irish lower down the pecking order.
Eugenics, despite its scientific patina, was based on a slipshod methodology which confirmed pre-existing ethnic stereotypes. For instance, when it was discovered that African-Americans were under-represented in the prison population, eugenicists improvised an ad hoc argument that this was only because blacks worked on plantations so couldn’t get into trouble.

* Pro-immigration’s intellectual foundations were classical liberalism, the American tradition of asylum and the theology of divine providence. Its handmaidens were growth-oriented politicians and commercial interests. Pro-immigration liberals like Emerson embodied the same unquestioned racist assumptions as immigration opponents.

* The Liberal Progressives were the first recognizably modern left-liberal open borders movement. They combined aspects of individualist-anarchism, ecumenism and Progressivism into a new synthesis. Two intellectual traditions nourished Liberal Progressivism: Anglo-American anarchism and secularized Reform Judaism. The former was represented in the persona of William James, the second by Felix Adler. James was an established New England writer who developed the philosophical stance known as Pluralism. Pluralism initially had little to say about ethnic diversity but rather called for people to combine aspects of multiple ethical systems in order to arrive at the truth.

* Presbyterian spokesmen pivoted from anti-immigration to pro-immigration positions between 1904 and 1913, and now called for universal brotherhood.

* Notice how the rationale for clerical pro-immigration views changed from ‘God’s Will’ prior to 1890 to secular cosmopolitanism and pacifism after 1910.

* During the revival of the second (anti-Catholic) Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, the elite of mainline Protestantism in both northern and southern states editorialized tirelessly against them in their ecumenical and denominational papers. Denominations routinely fired pastors who backed the Klan. In churches where parishioners sympathized with the hooded order, liberal ministers often chose to be forced out by their flock rather than speak for the Klan. Locally, ministers joined civic leaders and journalists to denounce the organization. Even where a city was Klan-run, as in post-First World War Indianapolis, Protestant leaders, civic elites and local journalists showed their resistance to it by conducting war commemorations in which Catholic, Jewish and Protestant clergy gave joint addresses.

Meanwhile, the mainline Protestant missionary effort, both overseas and among ‘home’ missions in the United States, lost its crusading zeal after the First World War and began to question its entire rationale. Beginning with a critique of Western imperialism, missionaries began doubting the wisdom of displacing non-Christian faiths. Eventually, they abandoned missionary activity altogether.

* In 1924, mainline Protestant clergy were almost unanimous in their opposition to immigration restriction. However, their liberal activism was out of step with the views of their parishioners.

* The Young Intellectuals [of Greenwich Village 1912-1917] were Anglo-American bohemian artists and writers rebelling against their own Protestant culture. Inspired by Nietzsche and Bergson’s romantic individualism and modernism in art, they sought to overthrow what they perceived as a suffocating Puritan inheritance. The Young Intellectuals discovered the joys of Harlem’s black jazz scene, experimented with drugs, exhibited modern art at Alfred Stieglitz’s ‘291’ studio or read poetry aloud in Mabel Dodge Luhan’s salon.

* [Randolph] Bourne, on the other hand, infused Kallen’s structure with WASP self-loathing. As a rebel against his own group, Bourne combined the Liberal Progressives’ desire to transcend ‘New Englandism’ and Protestantism with Kallen’s call for minority groups to maintain their ethnic boundaries. The end product was what I term asymmetrical multiculturalism , whereby minorities identify with their groups while Anglo-Protestants morph into cosmopolites. Thus Bourne at once congratulates the Jew ‘who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his’, while encouraging his fellow Anglo-Saxons to:
“Breathe a larger air … [for] in his [young Anglo-Saxon’s] new enthusiasms for continental literature, for unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton philosophies of power, he feels himself a citizen of a larger world. He may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential to all men and women of good-will if they are ever to save this Western world of ours from suicide.”
Bourne, not Kallen, is the founding father of today’s multiculturalist left because he combines rebellion against his own culture and Liberal Progressive cosmopolitanism with an endorsement – for minorities only – of Kallen’s ethnic conservatism. In other words, ethnic minorities should preserve themselves while the majority should dissolve itself.

* [Bourne split] the world into two moral planes, one for a ‘parental’ majority who would be asked to shed their ethnicity and oppose their own culture, and the other for childlike minorities, who would be urged to embrace their heritage in the strongest terms. This crystallized a dualistic habit of mind, entrenched in the anti-WASP ethos of 1920s authors like Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken and the bohemian ‘Lost Generation’ of American intellectuals such as F. Scott Fitzgerald. All associated the Anglo-Protestant majority with Prohibition, deemed WASP culture to be of no value, and accused the ethnic majority of suppressing more interesting and expressive ethnic groups. The Lost Generation’s anti-majority ethos pervaded the writing of 1950s ‘Beat Generation’ left-modernist writers like Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac – who contrasted lively black jazz or Mexican culture with the ‘square’ puritanical whiteness of Middle America. As white ethnics assimilated, the despised majority shifted from WASPs to all whites. The multiculturalism of the 1960s fused the Liberal Progressive pluralist movement with the anti-white ethos of the Beat counterculture.

* FDR told Catholic adviser Leo Crowley in January 1942, ‘Leo, you know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here on sufferance.’

* Nathan Glazer put it: ‘In the later ’20’s the Quota Act took its toll, then the depression began and nobody wanted to come, so for a long time American public opinion lived in the consciousness and expectation that America was completed … No one expected that America would again become an immigrant society.’

* the US census bureau defines anyone with ‘one drop’ of minority identity to be non-white. This overstates the decline of whiteness. In 2013, half the country’s newborns were categorized as non-white in census terms, yet 60 per cent had at least one white parent.

Posted in Nationalism | Comments Off on Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities

Simone Biles drops out of the Olympics for mental health reasons (7-27-21)

I’m trying and failing to think of some other professional athlete bowing out of competition to concentrate on mindfulness. Can you imagine a QB pulling this?

To quit at the Olympics is the equivalent of taking a mental health day during the Super Bowl. I don’t recall any football player taking a mental health day to avoid playing in the Super Bowl. Simone Biles is on a team, she quit on her team, and on her country.

Wasn’t Simone Biles lecturing America and American gymnastics on its failings? Do they get to have opinions about her choices?

Michael Tracey tweets: “In a way, Simone’s spectacle was probably the most rational thing she could do — it seems to resonate with the current culture more than if she’d actually won the Gold Medal for the USA. Will turn her into an even bigger, more valorized celeb. She’s just responding to incentives.”

A review of major media reveals only gushing stories about Simone Biles. We’re told she’s stunning and brave for quitting on her team.

This story illustrates the benefits of the situationist approach — everybody quits in some situations, everybody is courageous in some situations, everybody has situations where they are honest and situations where they are dishonest. Nobody is always brave and noble and true. Nobody always takes the high road. Nobody is always up to every challenge. Nobody is always helpful.

There’s no such thing as moral character because there’s no true self. Who we are depends upon the situation.

In this situation, Simone Biles feels like the John McCain of US gymnastics. McCain had no interest in winning in 2008, he should never have sought the nomination. “I just felt like it would be a little bit better to take a back seat and work on my mindfulness,” she said.

Should the United States have placed her on the team if there was good reason to believe she would fold under pressure? Why didn’t she bow out ahead of time and let someone else shine?

“[Simone Biles] had been struggling with the stress of being the greatest gymnast in history, she said, and outside expectations were just too hard to combat.”

Biles said: “There’s more to life than gymnastics.” Perhaps she should have shared this attitude with the selectors before dropping out due to sad feelings.

Steve Sailer comments:

It sounds like all this #BlackGirlMagic / #RacialReckoning / #Intersectionality hype might be taking a toll on Naomi Osaka, the torch-lighter who just went out in the first round of the Olympic tennis tournament, and Simone Biles.

The media wants these poor girls to embody #BlackSupremacy and #FemaleSupremacy. That’s a lot to ask of anybody.

COMMENTS:

* This mental illness thing seems to be quite contagious.

Those English soccer players who missed their penalty kicks did the right thing in taking a private jet to the Cayman Islands for a mental health break.

Biles has said that there are more important things in life than sport. Precisely! It is not like she is a highly paid professional athlete or anything. She should just have fun jumping and running and tumbling, but not to the extent of making it an obsession.

* I think part of it is the nihilism of this moment of black ethnocentric politics. There are no laws to be passed and there are no real problems with racism. So without that and without a plan for self-determination, it probably is getting depressing to people other than criminally-inclined males aged 18-24.

If there was some objective this black ethnocentric politicisation was working towards, something positive, the establishment of African-American self-determination, a homeland. Otherwise maybe that unmet need just makes it depressing like for Native Americans who faced into oblivion and white Americans. Whipping people up into an ethnocentric frenzy and telling them the majority population is against them and creating antagonism is pretty depressing when you have to live with those people day to day.

There certainly isn’t a plan to elevate blacks socio-economically in play. Black politicisation is stuck in the 60s, LARPing the civil rights movement with no leadership to move it forward.

00:00 White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07K356517/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
03:00 Simone Biles drops out of the Olympics for mental health reasons, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=141426
05:00 Simone Biles Says She Wasn’t in Right Place Mentally During Olympic Final, https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/27/sports/gymnastics-olympics-results
14:00 Michael Anton: “That’s Not Happening and It’s Good That It Is”, https://americanmind.org/salvo/thats-not-happening-and-its-good-that-it-is/
20:00 Michelle Goldberg: We can replace them,

42:00 Dennis Prager: The Media Produces Derangement: Proof From New York Times Readers, https://dennisprager.com/column/the-media-produces-derangement-proof-from-new-york-times-readers/
45:00 Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=130046
50:00 WOKE JAPAN’S POSTER GIRL FAILS TO GET A MEDAL, https://affirmativeright.blogspot.com/2021/07/woke-japans-poster-girl-fails-to-get.html
55:00 Beate Sirota Gordon and Japan’s Post-WWII constitution, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beate_Sirota_Gordon

Posted in Olympics | Comments Off on Simone Biles drops out of the Olympics for mental health reasons (7-27-21)