Ingredients of Charismatic Leadership

Posted on May 25, 2021 by Luke Ford

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NYT: As Israel’s Dependence on U.S. Shrinks, So Does U.S. Leverage

Posted on May 25, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 Tucker Carlson Calls For Immigration Moratorium , https://vdare.com/posts/tucker-carlson-calls-for-immigration-moratorium-pause-as-we-ve-been-doing-for-more-than-20-years
05:00 George Floyd death anniversary marked by gun fire
11:00 What do ugly people do?
13:00 Why do some women like rough sex? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_BFndX5xWQ
15:00 Lovemaps: Sexual/Erotic Health and Pathology, Paraphilia, and Gender Transposition In Childhood, Adolescence and Maturity, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=130433
17:00 Perversion: The Erotic Form Of Hatred, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=130652
20:00 The Dynamics Of Sexual Excitement, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=130652
30:00 The Date Master – Why Women Love Rough Sex, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPTY21HsHg0
36:00 NYT: As Israel’s Dependence on U.S. Shrinks, So Does U.S. Leverage, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/24/world/middleeast/Israel-American-support.html
45:30 David Pakman: I’ve Been Censoring Myself to Avoid Toxic Backlash, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwlGuTiY3ws
51:30 Pakistani Minister Drops Anti-Semitic Slur on CNN, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wtq63W-sALI
54:30 Start your day with a mouthful of gay pride, https://www.unz.com/isteve/st-george-floyd-day-starts-off-with-a-culturally-appropriate-bang/
57:40 Greg Johnson of Counter Currents Interviews Jared Taylor about white identity
58:30 Book banning
1:05:00 Nick Fuentes vs Robert Barnes on the Middle East
1:11:30 Guillermo and OG Del Rancho get interviewed on the Anglo Question, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTDpyGqeAeQ
1:12:00 Why Matt Parrott hates Duginism
1:18:10 Richard Spencer on ethno-nationalism, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47mA9U9jlik
1:42:00 E. Michael Jones on ADL losing its bid to get Tucker Carlson fired, https://rumble.com/vhbeqf-e.-michael-jones-on-the-assault-on-free-speech-and-the-pro-life-requiem.html
2:50:40 Tucker Carlson leads with the topic of gender dysphoria
3:28:00 Sean Hannity opening on the MSM and the origins of Covid

https://www.menshealth.com/sex-women/a30026303/rough-sex-psychology/
https://www.lehmiller.com/blog/2017/4/28/why-we-crave-sexual-novelty
https://www.redbookmag.com/love-sex/sex/a47424/why-women-like-rough-sex/
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/news/a31879/rough-sex-november-2014/

Why Some Women Love Rough Sex – and 4 Hot Ways to Try It


https://medium.com/@brendascouch/rough-sex-what-women-really-want-during-intimacy-f3c2a06064a4
https://www.quora.com/Do-women-like-rough-sex-and-why
https://www.askmen.com/dating/love_tip_100/129_love_tip.html
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33564979/
https://www.psypost.org/2020/04/study-women-initiate-rough-nearly-as-often-as-men-and-it-usually-isnt-that-rough-56006
https://misters.in/en/blog/why-women-want-you-to-be-rough-in-bed-1161-1203/

Posted in America | Comments Off on NYT: As Israel’s Dependence on U.S. Shrinks, So Does U.S. Leverage

Why Is There Sexual Repression?

Posted on May 24, 2021 by Luke Ford

Sociologist Randall Collins writes:

Social rules are embedded in tacit understandings as to when a rule is to be invoked. Freud would have called this unconscious; Durkheim called it pre-contractual solidarity. There are many persons and many situations where one cannot ask for consent, or even bring up the topic.

By way of generating some sense of the social conditions, ask yourself: how many people can you ask to have sex with you? Think of the variations of how to say it to particular persons: politely, indirectly, blatantly, using slang, using obscenity: “Excuse me ma’am (or sir), would you like to fuck?” What would happen if you said this? In some situations today one would be accused of using inappropriate language, in others, of sexual harassment. In the era before WWII, you could get your face slapped.

I have appealed to your imagination of real-life occasions because in the vast number of situations where someone has a sexual interest in someone else, it does not get expressed at all. David Grazian’s book, On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife, shows what happens when young adults are out in the scenes where they are most explicitly looking for sex. Although both the boys and the girls* talk about what they are aiming for and what happened, they do this among themselves before they go out and after they come back. When they are on the front lines in the night club, virtually no one ever says anything like, let’s hook up. They are playing a game of pickup, but at a very distant level. Most of the excitement is in the tease and innuendo, and sexual scores are so rare that the boys end up bragging about getting a girl’s phone number, and the girls laugh about giving out fake numbers. Like most ethnographies, Grazian cuts through the ideal and shows the social realities of how the atmosphere of sexual excitement is constructed, like putting on a performance in a theatre.

Why doesn’t this scene, about as blatantly sexual as they come, have more real sex or at least more sexual talk? This means asking about the sociological processes that repress sex. We will come to the list of causes shortly; here they have little to do with the kind of sexual repression which concerned Freud.

Compare the few places where expressing one’s sexual desire face-to-face with its target is actually done. One is in front of fraternity houses, on heightened occasions like party-night afternoons, or at the beginning of term when new student cohorts arrive. There can be a lot of raucous hooting at passing women, commenting both positively and negatively on their sexual desirability. Notice two things: This is sexual expression, but without a serious aim to get consent from any particular woman; in fact, the impersonal and collective nature of the hooting makes this impossible. Secondly, even the frat boys’ tactic of strength-in-numbers-and-anonymity does not necessarily shield them from the negative reaction they would likely get if one of them said the same things to an individual woman. As social movements and administrative organization have mobilized, fraternities hooting at women are sometimes sanctioned or even closed down (as happened for instance at San Diego State University in 2014). The sociological pattern holds: expressing sexual desire is limited even in the most liberated society; it can be gotten away with more if it is ostensibly not really serious, or is carried out at a safe distance. Today, the most blatant sexual talk is telephone sex [Flowers 1998]. Sexual expression also gives rise to counter-movements. The sociological pattern is not sexual expression alone, but sexual conflict.

Inside the fraternity house, the situation is not too dissimilar from Grazian’s description of downtown nightclubs. [Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape; Armstrong and Hamilton, Paying for the Party] There is a lot of bragging talk about sex within the male-bonded group; but only a small sexual elite actually gets very much action. At parties, disguised by loud music, semi-darkness, and plentiful alcohol, the reality is that most of the frat boys are on the sidelines watching their sexual heroes. So, are they the ones who boldly ask for sex? Even here, the conversations are more tacit and oblique than blatant; the most successful approach is by sheer body language, dancing in high sync, laughing together. The less formal and coherent the talk, the more likely it is to build the mutual mood that may lead to sex. Uninhibited extroversion is favored by the scene, not the rational-legal language of discussion and consent.

The prevailing social pattern when talking person-to-person about possible sex is that explicit sexual desire is never directly expressed, until the situation has evolved non-verbally to the proper point; any violation of this tacit rule gets a negative reaction. The main exception is in commercial sex work, talk between prostitutes and prospective clients (Elizabeth Bernstein, Temporarily Yours). But even here, the initial steps of negotiation are surprisingly round-about. Sex work illustrates a pattern found more generally in social stratification: low-class street prostitutes are most blatant in verbally offering sex; high-class prostitutes or “escorts” play out the girlfriend experience (GFE in advertisements) minimizing explicit negotiations in order to set a non-commercial atmosphere.

The most explicit sexual talk is in scenes dominated by males, not only because they control violence but because they are at the center of the carousing, “where the action is.” This is the pattern in unpoliced lower-class black inner city ghettos, where groups of dominant males– both teenage gang members, and some adult men– fling sexual banter at girls and attractive women, and humiliate those who object. [Jody Miller, Getting Played] This fits the sociological pattern of more blatant sexual talk lower in the class hierarchy. But it isn’t the whole explanation, since upper-middle class fraternities resemble lower-class gangs, except that they have the money for their own club house, and do not need to engage in street crime for income. Whether in tribal societies or enclaves in modern ones, a hyper-sexualized pattern of blatantly exploiting women occurs where the power center is a “men’s house” that is also the ceremonial center of the community.

In the gender-integrated middle and upper classes, much sexual talk is tabooed even when it has nothing to do with consent. Circumstances are rare in which persons can say directly to another: “How big is your penis?” or “You’ve got really great tits.” In the talk regime of liberal late 20th/ early 21st century, such talk would be considered over the top, if not called “politically incorrect,” “sexist,” or actually resulting in formal charges.

Socially constructed age limits

The other part of “consenting adults” is the age limitation. We take this for granted, as all customs generally are. But it is palpably constructed by social regimes, as we can easily see by comparing laws and customs in different historical periods. In this area, instead of a post-Freudian trend of increasing sexual liberation, sexual repressiveness has historically increased.

The strongest contrast is sex in tribal societies. One of the most detailed is Malinowski’s ethnography of the Trobriand Islands north of Australia. The Trobrianders have almost the opposite of the official American position (that adults are sexual and children are sexless, unless adults impose sex upon them). In this tribe, childhood is the time for unrestrained sex; whereas adults are expected to settle down and devote themselves to work. Both girls and boys flaunt their sexual activity; both sexes go off on group sex-seeking expeditions; both show off marks of love-bites and scratches on the skin as proud tokens of sexual passion. This happens almost exclusively among what modern Americans legally define as children.

Among the Sambia tribe of Papua New Guinea, there is a homosexual version (Herdt, Guardians of the Flutes). The normal life-course pattern is for an adolescent boy to become the sexual partner of a young man, the older initiating the younger into sex simultaneously with the mysteries of the warrior men’s house. It is not lifetime homosexuality but a stage of age-graded promotion. The boy is shown the sacred flutes and also taught to suck the man’s penis and swallow the sperm, religiously interpreted as giving manhood. As William Graham Sumner said, the social mores can make anything legitimate.

A similar pattern existed in ancient Greece. Young men of the upper classes, in the long wait for marriage to upper class women (who were snapped up very young by older men), had love affairs with boys of their same social class– preferably adolescents before the beard and pubic hair had grown. These were genuinely passionate love-affairs that would be recognizable today, except that young males rather than females set the ideal of bodily beauty. The ideal eventually became transferred to the female body, once Greek and Roman women became more emancipated. [Dover, Greek Homosexuality; Keuls, Reign of the Phallus]

This is a striking reversal of modern homosexuality, which is legitimate among adults but harshly penalized across age lines. For the ancient Greeks, homosexual relations among adult men was considered ludicrous; and anal sex– the predominant form of modern male homosexual practice [Laumann et al. 1994]– was regarded only as a humiliating punishment.

What can we get out of these comparisons other than that societies change and can decree anything is right and wrong?

Sex between adults and “children”– generally defined by the cutting point of age 18– is now labeled child sexual abuse. It is the most stigmatized of contemporary crimes. The rationalized argument is that the child has no power of consent, and that any adult must automatically be considered as taking advantage of them. This is a legal judgment, not a sociological one.

Where sociological evidence does exist is for the pattern that children who have had sex with adults– victims of child abuse– have many more life problems. [Finkelhor 1986] They have more drug use and alcohol excess; more unstable marriages and sexual partnerships; they are more likely to become victims of spousal abuse and violence; to have more trouble with education and jobs. The data analyses do not always control very well for confounding factors, such as lower social class and broken family structure; but on the whole, one can make out a sociological case why child sexual abuse is a very bad thing in its consequences.

Social shame causes the damage

There is one major problem: what is the causal mechanism? One might assume that a child who has sex with an adult feels traumatized; but this is not always the case. Sometimes the adult uses force, but in many cases the adult is a parent or close relative, often when the opposite-sex spouse is absent, and the child gets an early sense of intimacy and initiation into adult sexual privileges. The mechanism that causes the trauma, most typically, is shame. Shame produced by the reaction of the larger society, shame transmitted to the child by having to keep the sexual relationship secret. Shame and humiliation when the case comes to official notice; even bureaucratic policies to keep such cases secret (as far as the child’s identity is concerned) have the effect of segregating the child in an atmosphere where the secrecy is itself a mark of shame. This is shown in studies of juvenile facilities where children in such cases are segregated; and where a culture of precocious sexuality is further enhanced, since the one thing these kids have over others is more sexual experience, and they share it among their peers.

Social labeling theory has been applied to explaining mental illness, retardation, and numerous other things. The theory has not always held up when controls are applied to the data. But in the case of the life-long effects of being labeled a victim of child abuse, the labeling process is by far the strongest explanation of the debilitating consequences.

As social psychologist/family therapists Thomas Scheff and Suzanne Retzinger have shown, shame is the master motive of social control. Even tiny episodes of shame from broken attunement in a conversation bring hurt reactions; and if the shame is not overtly expressed and resolved, but hidden away (by embarrassment, by shame about being ashamed) it comes out in long-term destructive rage, against self and others. In my own theory of successful and unsuccessful Interaction Rituals [Collins 2004], disattunement and its concomitant shame lead to difficult social relationships; to loss of emotional energy, and instead to a cycle of depression, passiveness, and interactional failure. Via the shame mechanism, it is possible to explain why many sexual relationships between adults and children result in very negative life consequences for the children as they grow up.

Many sexual relationships, not all of them. We know that because of societies like tribal New Guinea and ancient Greece, where adult-child sex was honorable and celebrated, not regarded as shameful at all. In those societies, it had no negative consequences.

The purpose of this discussion is not to make sexual policy; but here is a point where sociological theory suggests what is being done wrong, and what could be done to solve it. The negative consequences of adult/child sex could be eliminated if society stopped treating it as shameful.

Who Can Touch Who When?

The formula “between consenting adults” has similar limitations in explaining the tacit social norms about touching another person.

Consider the range of touches that exist in our society, whether commonplace, restricted, or forbidden:

— shaking hands
— patting on the shoulder (usually clothed)
— kisses of all varieties: air kisses, cheek kisses, gentleman-kissing-lady’s-hand, kissing the Pope’s ring, lip kisses, tongue kisses, tongue-to-genital kisses

Notice, apropos of consenting adults, hardly anyone ever asks, “Can I kiss you?” (although social consent is explicit in the traditional wedding ceremony, with its climax “You may now kiss.”) When persons kiss, and what kind of kiss it is, is a tacit, unspoken part of a particular kind of social relationship. If it is the wrong social relationship, or the wrong kiss, there are repercussions. This is a sociological rule for all forms of touching.

Similarly with hugs. The style has palpably changed in American society, with a big shift in the 1970s towards much more hugging– not necessarily spontaneous, because it has become so strongly expected in particular situations. Take a look at the polite hugs which are now de rigueur in social gatherings of the higher classes– hugs around the shoulders, leaning forward, avoiding full body contact. In the 1940s, an enthusiastic hug consisted in grasping the other person’s arms with both hands, above the elbows– more enthusiasm shown by more body contact, within the limitations of the time. The ritual of sports celebrations (victories; home-runs crossing the plate) has shifted from merely verbal, to hand-shaking, to the now-required full-body pile-on. It is notable that body contact among American men is more extensive the more violent it is; swinging high-fives, forearm smashes, chest bumps, pile-ons are more favored than gentle contact, probably because the violence sends the message that it isn’t sexual.

Historical comparison helps explain the meanings of body contact vary. In traditional societies such as Arabs, it was common for groups of men in public to walk along holding hands or linking arms. Similarly, women in traditional societies linked arms in public. It was an explicit show of group tie-signs. It had nothing sexual about it; it expressed the politics of the situation when kin-groups and other close solidarities were all-important. As modern societies have become more individualized, tie-signs such as hand-holding or linking arms have narrowed in meaning, explicitly confined to sexual ties. It is the same with the decay of old kissing rituals like the French official who kisses the recipient on both cheeks after pinning on a medal.

In our sexually liberated age, many bodily gestures are restricted, because the default setting is to take them as sexual.

Four causal mechanisms that control sex

[1] Sexual property regimes
[2] Sexual markets
[3] Sexual domination and counter-mobilization
[4] Sexual distraction and sexual ugliness

These mechanisms, in one degree or another, have existed in every society. What varies is the strength of the ingredients that go into each mechanism.

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Sexual Repression In 2021 (5-24-21)

Posted on May 24, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 Blokes over 40 should reconsider polo shirts
04:00 Kenneth Brown feels exhausted, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ulz5HGioYE
10:00 Bitcoin’s Troubles Go Far Beyond Elon Musk, https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/bitcoins-troubles-go-far-beyond-elon-musk
17:30 Secession 2.0? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaxShgPONcA
21:00 Was I bullied?
23:00 Sexual repression in 2021, http://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2015/02/why-does-sexual-repression-exist.html
1:40:30 Mersh is skeptical of Mr. Metokur’s cancer diagnosis
1:53:30 Apollonian Germ on Greg Johnson, Richard Spencer, Keith Woods, the Rothschilds, The Scamdemic & More, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arxtmaLOk_0
2:20:20 Stephen Miller on illegal immigrants getting put up in luxury hotels
2:03:40 RICHARD SPENCER & ED DUTTON | The Collapse of World Civilization, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47mA9U9jlik
2:13:40 The KMG Show EP 303 I Have Returned, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7Aecqtg0Bw
2:16:30 When You Buy The Top of Every Investing Trend, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oG58PiZ5U8
2:18:40 Hyperinflation is here… But has it just begun?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CJyFKoTxEs
2:23:35 Tucker Carlson on the origins of Covid
2:38:00 Joel Kotkin: The Rise of Corporate-State Tyranny, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl78OxcY0kc
2:50:00 Bill Gates song
2:56:00 JF Gariepy says no reunion with Andy Warski, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOjTIwydMPM

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ASSAULT ON THE CAPITOL: 2021, 1917, 1792

Posted on May 24, 2021 by Luke Ford

Sociologist Randall Collins writes Jan. 28, 2021:

* The iconic image of January 6 is a protestor sitting with his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, and another in the Senate Chair. These are reminiscent of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1928 film, October, a documentary of the Russian revolution of November 1917. Attacking the seat of government in Petersburg, the Winter Palace, revolutionary soldiers break into the Czarina’s bedroom: amused by uncovering the jeweled top of her chamber pot, then ripping through her feather-bedding with their bayonets. The same in the French Revolution in its many repetitions between 1789 and 1792, and its replay in 1848, where the crowd took turns sitting on the vacant throne after the guards had collapsed and the royal family had fled.

There are differences, of course. The 1917 and 1792 revolutions were successful in overthrowing the government. The 2021 Capitol assault may have had few such ambitions in the minds of most protestors; and in any case, they occupied the outer steps of the Capitol for five hours and penetrated the corridors and chambers inside for three-and-a-half, with momentum on their side for less than an hour.

The similarities are more in short-term processes: The building guards putting up resistance at first, then losing cohesion, retreating, fading away; some fraternizing with the assaulting crowd, their sympathies wavering. They had weapons but most failed to use them.

Higher up the chain of command, widespread hesitation, confusion, conversations and messages all over the place without immediate results. Reinforcements are called for; reinforcements are promised; reinforcements are coming but they don’t arrive. Recriminations in the aftermath of January 6 have concentrated on this official hesitation and lack of cooperation, and on weakness and collusion among the police.

In fact it is a generic problem. Revolutions and their contemporary analogues all start in an atmosphere of polarization, masses mobilizing themselves, authorities trying to keep them calm and sustain everyday routine. Crowd-control forces, whether soldiers or police, are caught in the middle. At the outset of surging crowds, there is always someplace where the guards are locally outnumbered, pressed not just physically but by the noise and emotional force of the crowd. They usually know that using their superior firepower can provoke the crowds even further. Sometimes they try it; sometimes they try a soft defense; in either case they have a morale problem. If there is a tipping point where they retreat, the crowd surges to its target, and is temporarily in control.

From this point of view, the lesson of January 6 is how protective forces regain control relatively quickly. Comparing the Winter Palace on the night of October 26, 1917* or the Tuileries Palace on August 10, 1792, tells us what makes for tipping points that wobble for a bit but then recover; or not.

* Looting and ritual destruction

By ritual destruction I mean behavior that is seemingly purposeless, to outsiders and opponents. But it is meaningful, or at least deeply impulsive, for those who do it: a collective, social emotion for those involved.

Looting is generally of this sort. It rarely takes anything of value. In riots, including those that take place in electrical black-outs, the early looters tend to be professional thieves, but the crowds that come out to look and see broken-in store fronts are often caught with goods that they have no use for; they just join in the collective mood, a holiday from moral restraints when everything seems available for free. (This is also visible in photos taken during the looting phase of riots.)

In political protests and uprisings, looting does something else. Usually in the first phase of riot, especially a neighbourhood riot, after the first confrontation with the police, there is a lull while the police withdraw from the outnumbering crowd to regroup and bring reinforcements. In this lull, the emotional mood will drain away unless there is something for the crowd to do. Looting is a way to keep the riot going– sometimes along with arson, even if it means burning your own neighbourhood; the smoke and flames in the sky carry a visual message of how serious the situation is. And looting is made possible, and easy, because police are visibly absent. Without opposition, the atmosphere is like a holiday; and at least temporarily it is a victory over the absent enemy. Looting is emotionally easy; there is no face-to-face confrontation. It provides a kind of pseudo-victory over the symbols of the enemy.

This was the situation in the Capitol after about 3 p.m. The attackers had been driven back from their political targets. Heavily equipped and menacing-looking tactical police squads are now pushing back the crowd, chiefly in the dense areas of the Capitol around the Rotunda. But it is a building with several wings and multiple floors, numerous stairs, a labyrinth of offices. This is the period when rioters spread out, penetrating far-flung corners where the last would not be dislodged until after 5 p.m. This is when the looting and ritual destruction mostly took place.

A prime target was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. Looters flipped over tables, ripped photos off the walls, damaged her name plate on the door. One of her laptops was stolen, as were those in other offices. The office of the Senate Parliamentarian was ransacked, as were other offices. Some places had graffiti: “Murder the media” was one of them, at Press rooms with damaged recording and broadcast equipment. These we can interpret as specific political targets.

Broken doors and cracked or smashed windows were throughout the building, leaving the floors littered with glass and debris. Some of this happened in the process of breaking into locked areas. But it continued in remote office spaces; presumably this was ritualistic destruction, just prolonging the attack– precisely in places where guards were not present, while their main force was concentrated elsewhere.

Photos taken in the aftermath do not show a great deal of trash or destruction in the main corridors. Some of the furniture piled up was from improvised barricades by the defenders. Art works in the main galleries and display areas were not attacked– presumably these had little meaning as enemy targets for the intruders. Some statues and portraits were covered with “corrosive gas agent residue”– this would include tear gas and smoke bombs set off by the defenders, and (perhaps a small amount of) bear spray used by the attackers. In other words, this damage was an unintended by-product of the fighting that took place. Note too that these were “non-violent” weapons, designed to drive away opponents and avoiding lethal force.

If the looting and ritual destruction was intended to be a symbolic attack upon the Capitol, it succeeded in frightening and angering its officials. It was a ritualistic exercise on both sides– which is to say, a war of emotions.

* What was unusual about the Capitol assault of January 6, 2021 was how quickly and easily it was defeated. Yes, it had factional splits and dispersed centers of command, wavering and dissenting about sending reinforcements; it had police retreating before an aggressive crowd; reluctance to shoot; some fraternization between attackers and guards; some ritualistic looting at the end. It had a background of long-standing and accumulating tension between two sides, counter-escalating social movements, politicians jumping on and off of bandwagons. But in historical comparison, it had no overwhelming consensus that the regime was toppling, much less that it ought to topple. The assault was defeated, in a momentum swing of about an hour, and with an historical minimum of serious casualties. That it could be put down so easily is a testament to American institutions. [In a] federal democracy, with powers shared and divided at many levels among executives, legislatures, and courts, there is no place to turn the switch that controls everything. Decentralized democracies like the USA can have civil wars– if geographical splits are severe enough and include the armed forces; but it cannot have coups at the top or revolutions in the Capitol.

Posted in America | Comments Off on ASSAULT ON THE CAPITOL: 2021, 1917, 1792

Beverly Hills Rally For Israel – United Against Terrorism (5-23-21)

Posted on May 23, 2021 by Luke Ford

David Suissa writes:

When we reached Santa Monica Boulevard, across the street we saw an ocean of people waving large Israeli flags. We could hear music and chanting. There was a festival atmosphere. We were immersed in a whole different kind of noise.

I’m sure lots of people were there because they’re outraged and angry at the rise in antisemitism. But I didn’t feel any anger among the crowd. What I felt was more like solidarity, and what I saw were joyful faces.

Maybe it was the fact that so many people were gathered around a common cause that made them feel safe and put a smile on their faces. Maybe it was the cool Israeli music. Maybe it was the sparkling blue sky. Whatever it was, I felt a mood of celebration.

Perhaps people were celebrating the very fact that they are not alone; that plenty of other people feel the same way, feel the same love.

There may be lots of loud Jew-haters out there, but on this Sunday in Beverly Hills, not far from where Jews were assaulted recently at a sushi restaurant, Jews came out to make their own statement: We’re proud to be Jews, we stand with Israel against terrorism, we stand against the evil of antisemitism, and we aren’t going anywhere.

Deep down, they came to express love, a love for a cause they cherish and believe in. That noise of love needs to drown out the noise of hate.

https://www.foxla.com/video/936281
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/05/23/photos-hundreds-rally-for-israel-in-beverly-hills-los-angeles/
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/man-arrested-in-attack-on-jewish-men-outside-la-restaurant/2601595/
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-05-19/l-a-sushi-restaurant-attack-is-being-investigated-as-an-antisemitic-hate-crime
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/fight-beverly-grove-sushi-fumi-restaurant-hate-crime-lapd-investigation/2598874/
https://patch.com/california/beverlyhills/pro-israel-rally-draws-2000-people-beverly-hills
https://abc7.com/antisemitism-rally-jewish-israel-palestine/10685474/

2,000 Activists Gather in Beverly Hills to Support Israel


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9611923/From-Beverly-Hills-Ground-Zero-Pro-Israel-Palestinian-rallies-remain-largely-peaceful.html

Posted in Beverly Hills | Comments Off on Beverly Hills Rally For Israel – United Against Terrorism (5-23-21)

Globalist Elites Doubled Our Lifespans (5-23-21)

Posted on May 23, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 ‘Take a good look at who is speaking out against Jew-hate. And who is staying silent.’ https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-new-furies-of-the-oldest-hatred
32:00 Nightwave Radio Banned From YouTube, Panhandling Intensifies
35:00 Is podcasting getting back to radio? https://www.buzzsprout.com/1215062/8094350
37:00 Why do people who leave California bash California?
48:30 DIVINE RIGHT: RICK WILES AND MILO YIANNOPOULOS TALK ABOUT PAGAN LEFT, https://www.bitchute.com/video/gof6Nr223T4C/
1:00:00 New York’s prospective teachers will no longer have to pass controversial literacy exam, https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2017/3/13/21111588/it-s-official-new-york-s-prospective-teachers-will-no-longer-have-to-pass-controversial-literacy-exa
1:37:00 Do whites suffer from pathological altruism? https://odysee.com/@TRSDotBiz:a/the-culture-of-kmac-hour-2:9
1:51:00 Steven Johnson: Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJ15cEW06qA
1:56:00 Experts challenge ‘virus warfare’ reporting, https://youtu.be/NHGaDBVXGfc?t=259
2:02:00 A critique of Nicholas Wade’s essay on Covid’s origins, https://www.econlib.org/the-real-story/
2:23:00 Nicholas Wade: the case for the Covid lab-leak theory, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVVE6MD7tRw
2:27:00 BAKED ALASKA GETTING KICKED OUT & YELLING AT MASK WEARERS
2:32:00 Alex Jones on medical dictatorship in 2009
2:33:00 Sam Hyde: Level Up In Life And You Will Become A Threat To Them
2:38:20 Why I SOLD All of My Bitcoins… IT’S OVER., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFp86n7QCf0
2:44:00 Why Bill Gates’ Wife Left Him, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiW3RDmF_78
3:07:00 Do you care about you?
3:07:30 Revenge of the CIS on anti-Jewish attacks, https://youtu.be/JZepl3BmENY?t=5403
3:10:00 Goyim Defense League
3:16:00 Is Tim Pool a Grifter?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3vyF_1je_I
3:20:30 Anti-Semitic Attacks SURGE As Israel-Hamas Cease-Fire Holds

Posted in America | Comments Off on Globalist Elites Doubled Our Lifespans (5-23-21)

Were The Lockdowns Good Or Bad?

Posted on May 21, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 Taking an Uber/Lyft these days is like playing the lotto
02:00 On a date when surge pricing hits
03:00 My nightmare about trying to record on my iphone before a UCLA panel discussion
05:00 The Etiology of Victimology | Glenn Loury & John McWhorter, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSrDiBMHEtw
10:00 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/what-thomas-kuhn-really-thought-about-scientific-truth/
16:00 What is post-modernism? https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139495
24:00 Thomas Kuhn, The Spanish Flu & Covid-19, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGNqM-ChiJk
31:00 Jews under attack in USA
42:00 Matt Parrott on Unite the Right lawsuits
46:00 Ten common sense ways to avoid being sued, https://sites.hanover.com/articles/architects-engineers-avoiding-lawsuits.html
1:01:00 DAVE REILLY: THE COMMONALITY IN THE SITUATIONS OF WESTMEN AND THE PALESTINIANS, https://www.bitchute.com/video/e8GfPMotyze3/
1:05:30 Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L70T4pQv7P8
1:09:00 Charlottesville — Unite the Right — the Aftermath | Jared Taylor/Jason Kessler, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc43nql2g_w
1:14:00 Male virgins
1:26:00 CBS Host GRILLS Netanyahu: Are You Killing People to Stay in Power?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAzy4Z2WGgc
1:30:00 Israel’s Military Inflicted a Heavy Toll. But Did It Achieve Its Aim?, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-war-ceasefire.html
1:31:00 Mike Enoch calls Vanity Fair writer Peter Savodnik about US State Dept. official Matthew Gebert’s connection to TRS, https://odysee.com/@TRSDotBiz:a/say-no-ask-zionism-israel:0
1:34:00 Matthew Gebert: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know, https://heavy.com/news/2019/08/matthew-gebert/
1:50:00 Thomas Baden-Riess vs Greg Johnson, https://odysee.com/@ThomasBadenRiess:7/FuckGregJohnson:8
1:57:00 Thomas Baden-Riess still hates Keith Woods, https://odysee.com/@ThomasBadenRiess:7/HateKeithWoods:e
2:02:20 Kevin MacDonald talks to Mike Enoch about Nathan Cofnas, https://odysee.com/@TRSDotBiz:a/the-culture-of-kmac-hour-1:0
2:11:00 Dutton and Spencer on the Impossibility of Jewish Nationalism, https://odysee.com/@radix:c/jewish-nationalism:8
2:14:00 Noah Smith: Yes, lockdowns were good, https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/yes-lockdowns-were-good
2:22:00 The evidence is clear — COVID lockdowns saved lives without harming economies, https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-05-19/covid-lockdowns-worked
2:29:45 Terry Marks-Tarlow: Embodied creativity & the courage to face uncertainty, https://www.relationalimplicit.com/marks-tarlow/
2:40 The fear of emasculation, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139480
2:42:00 Dennis Prager on the Left and anti-semitism
2:46:00 Deconstructing John Oliver on Israel and Palestine, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrZ9Ki1OI2o
3:04:00 GDL triggers Mersh, https://www.bitchute.com/video/sVQKAJfTCIEF/
3:07:00 Tucker on the origins of Covid
3:20:00 Tucker on America’s crime surge
3:25:20 OJ Simpson on Tim Tebow
3:27:00 MICHELLE MALKIN DISCUSSES NICK FUENTES’ UNCONSTITUTIONAL PLACEMENT ON THE NO-FLY LIST
3:30:00 NICK FUENTES || WHY’S THE REGIME SUDDENLY BLAMING THE WUHAN LAB AGAIN? https://www.bitchute.com/video/Q9taWwWEqqnU/
3:33:00 Ed Dutton: Why We’re On the Brink of an Overpopulation Crisis, Famine and an Unprecedented Population Collapse, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmhEOQuUahU

Posted in America | Comments Off on Were The Lockdowns Good Or Bad?

What Is Post-Modernism?

Posted on May 21, 2021 by Luke Ford

Comments at Andrew Gelman:

* “Postmodernism” in the humanities and humanistic social sciences arose out of the failure of the mid-century modernist idea that you could treat human beings and their behavior like classical-physics particles–categorizing them, modeling them, and predicting them, all according to stable rules. It turned out that people are more complicated than that, and also that the very terms of your categories and models (your language, your political institutions) shape the human beings you’re supposedly analyzing at a remove. Things are a lot less stable than modernists hoped. So all the theories that get lumped together as “postmodernism” are basically an attempt to say, “now what?”

Like many other sets of academic ideas or theories, they share powerful insights and also some pretty big problems, and like every other idea or theory, sometimes they are applied well and usefully, and sometimes they degenerate into self-parody. There is definitely nonsense among the humanities, and on the margin humanists could probably be a little more active in clearing it out. What the humanities aren’t, despite their critics, is **indifferent** to truth, as you suggest they are. Even if postmodernists do think that we need to think harder about what “truth” means and how we as imperfect human observers can ever access it, they aren’t callous about it.

In fact, that humility towards knowledge is an area where you and the “postmodernists” you’re criticizing might well have something to talk about! It’s no good when lazy humanists criticize social science as “the approach of saying nonsense using a bunch of technical-sounding jargon,” and it’s not any more constructive the other way around. We all have a lot to learn from each other!

* About the (death of the) author. It’s been a while since I was interested in these issues, but the point is a subtle one. Take films (which might make the idea sound more intuitive). We talk about a Stanley Kubrick film, even though we realize there are a host of other creators involved in in the production of a movie (screenwriters, actors, etc). If you say the “director” is dead, you’re not saying a film has no director. You’re basically saying that a “director” can’t serve the purpose of saying that there is only “one” guiding voice that defines the only way to determine something as the director-function or the myth of the “Director” in the 20th century, would imply. Again, it’s not to say that directors as individuals don’t play a role, its just that the particular cultural/ideological idea of the director has changed.

* The death of the author is more about understanding that authors are grounded in context like all “truth”. That’s the over-arching postmodern message—truth isn’t “out there” X-files or Plato style. The world is out there, though, so things aren’t as ungrounded as the anti-postmodernist caricature might have you believe. The problem is that “truth” is a human construction grounded in vague and intertwined natural language. One has to start by asking what the unit of truth-bearing is. It’s certainly not the sentence, because sentences like “It is raining” have no meaning outside of the context in which they’re used.

JOHN HORGAN WRITES FOR SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN:

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions…may be the most influential treatise ever written on how science does (or does not) proceed. It is notable for having spawned the trendy term “paradigm.” It also fomented the now trite idea that personalities and politics play a large role in science. The book’s most profound argument was less obvious: scientists can never truly understand the “real world” or even each other.

…He nonetheless traced his view of science to an epiphany he experienced in 1947, when he was working toward a doctorate in physics at Harvard. While reading Aristotle’s Physics, Kuhn had become astonished at how “wrong” it was. How could someone who wrote so brilliantly on so many topics be so misguided when it came to physics?

Kuhn was pondering this mystery, staring out his dormitory window (“I can still see the vines and the shade two thirds of the way down”), when suddenly Aristotle “made sense.” Kuhn realized that Aristotle invested basic concepts with different meanings than modern physicists did. Aristotle used the term “motion,” for example, to refer not just to change in position but to change in general—the reddening of the sun as well as its descent toward the horizon. Aristotle’s physics, understood on its own terms, was simply different from rather than inferior to Newtonian physics.

Kuhn left physics for philosophy, and he struggled for 15 years to transform his epiphany into the theory set forth in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The keystone of his model was the concept of a paradigm. Paradigm, pre-Kuhn, referred merely to an example that serves an educational purpose; amo, amas, amat, for instance, is a paradigm for teaching conjugations in Latin. Kuhn used the term to refer to a collection of procedures or ideas that instruct scientists, implicitly, what to believe and how to work. Most scientists never question the paradigm. They solve “puzzles,” problems whose solutions reinforce and extend the scope of the paradigm rather than challenging it. Kuhn called this “mopping up,” or “normal science.” There are always anomalies, phenomena that that the paradigm cannot account for or that even contradict it. Anomalies are often ignored, but if they accumulate they may trigger a revolution (also called a paradigm shift, although not originally by Kuhn), in which scientists abandon the old paradigm for a new one.

Denying the view of science as a continual building process, Kuhn held that a revolution is a destructive as well as a creative act. The proposer of a new paradigm stands on the shoulders of giants (to borrow Newton’s phrase) and then bashes them over the head. He or she is often young or new to the field, that is, not fully indoctrinated. Most scientists yield to a new paradigm reluctantly. They often do not understand it, and they have no objective rules by which to judge it. Different paradigms have no common standard for comparison; they are “incommensurable,” to use Kuhn’s term. Proponents of different paradigms can argue forever without resolving their basic differences because they invest basic terms—motion, particle, space, time—with different meanings. The conversion of scientists is thus both a subjective and political process. It may involve sudden, intuitive understanding—like that finally achieved by Kuhn as he pondered Aristotle. Yet scientists often adopt a paradigm simply because it is backed by others with strong reputations or by a majority of the community.

Kuhn’s view diverged in several important respects from the philosophy of Karl Popper, who held that theories can never be proved but only disproved, or “falsified.” Like other critics of Popper, Kuhn argued that falsification is no more possible than verification; each process wrongly implies the existence of absolute standards of evidence, which transcend any individual paradigm. A new paradigm may solve puzzles better than the old one does, and it may yield more practical applications. “But you cannot simply describe the other science as false,” Kuhn said. Just because modern physics has spawned computers, nuclear power and CD players, he suggested, does not mean it is truer, in an absolute sense, than Aristotle’s physics. Similarly, Kuhn denied that science is constantly approaching the truth. At the end of Structure he asserted that science, like life on earth, does not evolve toward anything but only away from something…

“Different groups, and the same group at different times,” Kuhn told me, “can have different experiences and therefore in some sense live in different worlds.” Obviously all humans share some responses to experience, simply because of their shared biological heritage, Kuhn added. But whatever is universal in human experience, whatever transcends culture and history, is also “ineffable,” beyond the reach of language. Language, Kuhn said, “is not a universal tool. It’s not the case that you can say anything in one language that you can say in another.”

But isn’t mathematics a kind of universal language? I asked. Not really, Kuhn replied, since it has no meaning; it consists of syntactical rules without any semantic content.

…I said, the hypothesis that AIDS is caused by the human immunodeficiency virus is either right or wrong; language and metaphysics are beside the point. Kuhn shook his head. “Whenever you get two people interpreting the same data in different ways,” he said, “that’s metaphysics.”

* He had a painful memory of sitting in on a seminar and trying to explain that the concepts of truth and falsity are perfectly valid, and even necessary—within a paradigm. “The professor finally looked at me and said, ‘Look, you don’t know how radical this book is.'” Kuhn was also upset to find that he had become the patron saint of all would-be scientific revolutionaries.

…Some fields, such as economics and other social sciences, never adhere to a paradigm because they address questions for which no paradigm will suffice. Fields that achieve consensus, or normalcy, to borrow Kuhn’s term, do so because their paradigms, or at least certain components of them, correspond to something real in nature. These paradigms—a few that come to mind are heliocentrism, the new synthesis, quantum mechanics, the Big Bang, the germ theory of infectious disease—rest not on transient, culturally constructed suppositions or inventions but on irrevocable discoveries. Why not call them true?

Posted in Philosophy | Comments Off on What Is Post-Modernism?

Emasculation

Posted on May 21, 2021 by Luke Ford

I sense that much of the audience for talk radio and right-wing punditry feels emasculated. The world has changed and they don’t know how to cope. The more successful part of the audience also sees that the world has changed, but they’re not just coping, they’re thriving.

I can’t think of any right-wing pundit who is not hysterical. The left-wing pundits may be all hysterics too, I just don’t pay them as much mind.

A dominant tone on talk radio and right-wing punditry is male hysteria about a changing world. May 5, 2020, Dennis Prager wrote this hysterical column:

The idea that the worldwide lockdown of virtually every country other than Sweden may have been an enormous mistake strikes many — including world leaders; most scientists, especially health officials, doctors and epidemiologists; those who work in major news media; opinion writers in those media; and the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people who put their faith in these people — as so preposterous as to be immoral. Timothy Egan of The New York Times described Republicans who wish to enable their states to open up as “the party of death.”

That’s the way it is today on planet Earth, where deceit, cowardice and immaturity now dominate almost all societies because the elites are deceitful, cowardly and immature.

But for those open to reading thoughts they may differ with, here is the case for why the worldwide lockdown is not only a mistake but also, possibly, the worst mistake the world has ever made…

The forcible prevention of Americans from doing anything except what politicians deem “essential” has led to the worst economy in American history since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is panic and hysteria, not the coronavirus, that created this catastrophe. And the consequences in much of the world will be more horrible than in America.

The United Nations World Food Programme, or the WFP, states that by the end of the year, more than 260 million people will face starvation — double last year’s figures. According to WFP director David Beasley on April 21: “We could be looking at famine in about three dozen countries. … There is also a real danger that more people could potentially die from the economic impact of COVID-19 than from the virus itself” (italics added).

That would be enough to characterize the worldwide lockdown as a deathly error. But there is much more. If global GDP declines by 5%, another 147 million people could be plunged into extreme poverty, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute.

Foreign Policy magazine reports that, according to the International Monetary Fund, the global economy will shrink by 3% in 2020, marking the biggest downturn since the Great Depression, and the U.S., the eurozone and Japan will contract by 5.9%, 7.5% and 5.2%, respectively. Meanwhile, across South Asia, as of a month ago, tens of millions were already “struggling to put food on the table.” Again, all because of the lockdowns, not the virus.

In one particularly incomprehensible act, the government of India, a poor country of 1.3 billion people, locked down its people. As Quartz India reported on April 22, “Coronavirus has killed only around 700 Indians … a small number still compared to the 450,000 TB and 10,000-odd malaria deaths recorded every year.”

One of the thousands of unpaid garment workers protesting the lockdown in Bangladesh understands the situation better than almost any health official in the world: “We are starving. If we don’t have food in our stomach, what’s the use of observing this lockdown?” But concern for that Bangladeshi worker among the world’s elites seems nonexistent.

The lockdown is “possibly even more catastrophic (than the virus) in its outcome: the collapse of global food-supply systems and widespread human starvation” (italics added). That was published in the left-wing The Nation, which, nevertheless, enthusiastically supports lockdowns. But the American left cares as much about the millions of non-Americans reduced to hunger and starvation because of the lockdown as it does about the people of upstate New York who have no incomes, despite the minuscule number of coronavirus deaths there. Or about the citizens of Oregon, whose governor has just announced the state will remain locked down until July 6. As of this writing, a total of 109 people have died of the coronavirus in Oregon.

When you enrage, you engage. That’s the winning formula for talk radio. I’m not aware of any viable business model for non-hysterical punditry (except for a few elite Substacks and Steve Sailer).

Michael Hiltzik writes May 19, 2021 for the Los Angeles Times:

The published data point to two related conclusions: First, lockdowns played a significant role in reducing infection rates. Second, they had a very modest role in producing economic damage. Conversely, lifting lockdowns has done very little to spur economic resurgence.

Some of the evidence for both propositions has been expertly compiled by Noah Smith, a former finance professor now writing economic commentary for Bloomberg…

A team of UCLA researchers, in a paper first published in May 2020 and updated later, found that “likely Trump voters” reduced their movements by 9% following a local stay-at-home order, “compared to a 21% reduction among their Clinton-voting neighbors, who face similar exposure risks and identical government orders.”

Hostility to social measures short of a lockdown, such as social distancing and masks, bears the same partisan coloration.

It makes sense, therefore to examine the evidence — or rather, gather ammunition for the coming debate.

Numerous studies from across the world have found that lockdowns succeeded in suppressing transmission rates. An Italian team found that lockdowns start to reduce the number of COVID infections about 10 days after they start, and keep reducing the case rate for as long as 20 days following initiation.

French researchers, in a paper published in January, compared the experience in countries that imposed stay-at-home orders early in the pandemic and lifted the restrictions gradually — New Zealand, France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Britain— to that of Sweden, which imposed no lockdown, and the U.S., which had (and still has) a patchwork of state policies often involving late orders followed by abrupt and premature lifting.

The first group saw rapid reductions in infections and a rapid economic recovery, compared to the second. “Early-onset lockdown with gradual deconfinement allowed shortening the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic and reducing contaminations,” the researchers concluded. “Lockdown should be considered as an effective public health intervention to halt epidemic progression.”

The UCLA researchers, meanwhile, estimated that reductions in movement resulting from stay-at-home orders reduced transmission in the hardest-hit communities, such as Seattle, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles by 50% or more.

All these findings point to savings of millions of lives globally. None of it is especially surprising. Compliance with stay-at-home orders meant reducing one’s exposure to strangers whose viral conditions were unknown. That was especially crucial in locations where COVID was raging and therefore the prospect of coming into close contact with an infected individual was relatively high.

That leaves the economic question. Critics of lockdowns typically advocate balancing the public health gains from stay-at-home orders against the economic losses from keeping bars, restaurants, hair salons, and other small businesses closed. They argue, as has DeSantis and other red-state governors such as Greg Abbott of Texas, that concerns about the latter should take primacy over the benefits of the former.

The problem with this argument is that there’s very little evidence that lockdowns themselves damaged local economies more than individual behavior that would have happened anyway, lockdowns or not. Nor is there much evidence that lifting lockdowns produced a faster recovery.

Those who have studied the course of the pandemic in the U.S. and Europe understand why the lockdowns have less economic impact than one might expect. The reason is that people made their own choices to stay at home or to patronize only businesses where they felt relatively safe.

As Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syversen of the University of Chicago said of their study of the economic slump during the pandemic, “The vast majority of the decline was due to consumers choosing of their own volition to avoid commercial activity.”

Noah Smith writes May 16, 2021:

There is copious evidence that lockdowns reduced transmission of the coronavirus. Some types of social distancing restrictions are more effective than others, and some sub-populations benefit more than others, but overall, lockdowns did limit the spread and saved lives.

That’s hardly a surprising result. The bigger question is, what did lockdown do to the economy? Most people make the natural assumption that lockdown hurts the economy — if you ban people from going out to restaurants, that stops people from spending money on restaurants, right? Obviously. Many economists made this assumption when they tried to model pandemic policy. In fact, some people go so far as to blame all the economic costs of the pandemic on lockdowns…

The fact is, even without lockdowns, plenty of people will avoid restaurants and other crowded spaces during a pandemic simply out of fear of catching the virus. And that will hurt the economy.

And lo and behold, when we look at evidence, we find that lockdowns accounted for only a small percent of the economic slowdown. For example, economists Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson looked at the state border between Illinois and Iowa. On the Illinois side, the towns issued stay-at-home orders, whereas on the Iowa side they did not. And guess what — economic activity fell almost as much on the Iowa side as on the Illinois side!

This is very similar to the results of a comparison of Sweden and Denmark. Denmark locked down and saw its economic activity decline by 29%; Sweden chose not to lock down, and saw its economic activity decline by 25%. The biggest economic destroyer by far was not government policy; it was fear of COVID.

In fact, states that didn’t issue stay-at-home orders in the spring of 2020 saw just about the same amount of economic devastation as states that did issue those orders:

How did lockdowns save lives without hurting the economy?

At this point you may be scratching your head (or, if you’re a lockdown hater, seething with rage). How the heck could lockdowns have a big effect on the transmission of the virus, but only a small effect on the economy? Shouldn’t the tradeoff basically be one for one? Doesn’t every infection you stop mean one less meal in a restaurant, one less drink at the bar, one less trip to the store, etc.?

Well, no. That’s not how it works. As the evidence above shows, it’s fear of the virus that was the big economic killer. And if fear is proportional to actual infection rates, then by suppressing the virus, lockdowns reduced fear.

Let’s do a little thought experiment. Suppose in City A, they lock down. People stay home. The economy gets hurt, but the virus gets suppressed and infections go to a low level. Eventually, they can start to reopen safely, and they don’t immediately get another wave of COVID because there just aren’t that many sick people in town. But in City B, they don’t lock down. 80% of people stay home because of fear, so the economy gets clobbered anyway. But the 20% who go out end up spreading the virus, raising the infection rate to a high level. That causes more fear, and eventually even the 20% who were going out get scared enough to stay home. But now it’s too late — infection has a higher baseline, and takes much longer to go down. So the fear lasts longer, and so does the economic pain.

In fact, this is why in the long run, lockdowns might even have helped the economy. Countries that don’t lock down will have higher infection rates, thus prolonging the fear and keeping people in their house for longer (on top of having to pay higher medical costs). In its World Economic Outlook in October 2020, the IMF notes this possibility:

The effectiveness of lockdowns in reducing infections suggests that lockdowns may pave the way to a faster economic recovery if they succeed in containing the epidemic and thus limit the extent of voluntary social distancing. Therefore, the short-term economic costs of lockdowns could be compensated by stronger medium-term growth, possibly leading to positive overall effects on the economy.

And an analysis by some folks at the Institute for New Economic Thinking found that countries that tried to sacrifice lives to save their economies ended up hurting their economies anyway.

In fact, historical evidence shows that something very similar happened in the Spanish Flu, the eerily similar pandemic that hit us almost exactly 100 years ago. A March 2020 study by economists Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck, and Emil Verner found that cities that enacted stricter social distancing restrictions in response to the Spanish Flu saw their economies recover faster.

In other words, we were warned. This isn’t just a case of — pardon the pun — 20/20 hindsight.

In the summer of 2020, right-wing pundits pointed out the hypocrisy of the Left in advocating lockdowns and street protests. Now it is clear that there were virtually no cases of outdoor transmission of covid, so the Left wasn’t so hypocritical after all.

So what’s the solution for emasculation? Number one, accept reality. Reality keeps changing and we can’t change reality. We can only change ourselves to adjust to reality. Number two, develop a life of love and service. When you seek to be helpful to others, you stop feeling emasculated. You only feel emasculated when you focus on what you’re not getting. In other words, you only feel emasculated when you have a selfish attitude. Change your attitude and you change your life. Change your attitude and your rage goes away. Change your attitude, and instead of focusing on what you’re not getting, you look for where you can help others.

A friend says:

All of these persons writing about how the lockdowns saved lives are idiots, or else they are unaware of the fatality rate associated with contracting Covid and actually becoming ill with it. Better than most I can talk about that since I became ill with the disease.

There are a lot of misunderstandings about (1) how transmissible the disease is (2) who gets it (3) how to prevent its transmission and (4) the medical outcomes for those who get it.

The key is to prevent those who are most at risk from the disease from getting it. I am the classic example of someone who is at risk, but not at the severest risk, once I contracted covid. It almost exclusively kills the elderly obese, and poses a risk to non elderly obese with other co morbidities. Everyone else is at a statistically non existent risk of fatality.

The emphasis should have been on isolating those most at risk and letting the rest of the population roam freely. As an example children are not at risk and except for the most elderly and fattest teachers they are not at risk yet schools were closed out of ostensible fear by teachers that somehow or other they would be exposed to children who would give them the virus. This is non sense and no scientific evidence supports that.

Then once one looks at the factors I have set out, you have to do a cost benefit analysis to locking down. Its important to note that some of the original projections were that this is such a virulent disease and we had not therapeutic means of dealing with it that up to 5% of persons who contracted the disease would die from it. In other words it was a modern day bubonic plague. That turned out to be wildly off the mark.

All the statistics cited by Hiltzik and others are based on worst case projections, none of which came anywhere close to be being accurate. We have never before treated a disease which has a specific victim profile, by locking down everyone including those to whom the disease is harmless.

Through that prism, its clear that lockdowns had little effect on mortality rates and what little effect they had was greatly outweighed by the negative aspects of the lockdown.

What conservatives said was hypocritical was the criticism by liberals of college kids frolicking in close range during spring break in Florida and Texas and criticizing the Trump rallies during the closing days of the campaign as well as the outdoor events at the white house while not objecting to (and in some cases encouraging) protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death. The reality is that none of these outdoor activities carried any risk. The best evidence is that only one case (in China) was transmitted outdoors.

Posted in America, Covid | Comments Off on Emasculation