Category Archives: Culture

Me and Make Believe

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In science, a lot of time and effort is put into framing a problem. You have to have an agreed upon set of rules before you can investigate the natural world. Those rules need constant updating as new information is discovered. You can’t test something unless you know what you are testing and how to evaluate the possible outcomes. In the gum-flapping game, an old rhetorical trick is to frame your argument in such a way that the only good conclusions just happen to be those you are asserting. The point here is that framing an issue is a big part of understanding it, or not understanding it as the case may be.

That’s what we see here with this column by Ross Douthat. Since I’m prone to saying horrible things about people I don’t like, let me just say I have no opinion of Mr. Douthat. For some reason he is widely read by the commentariat. There are a lot of writers out there and I can’t know all of them. What got my attention is the cornucopia of incorrect premises in this one piece.

Some years ago now, when the conservative media group Newsmax put in a bid to buy the limping, failing Newsweek, I wrote a post arguing that trying to reinvent one of the newsweeklies as a (moderately) right-of-center publication was as good a bet as any. Here was the nub of my argument:

What’s “right-of-center”? This expression gets used a lot, but no one ever bothers to define it. It seems to be a label for non-liberals the Cult does not want to murder. Otherwise, right-of-center is the Bigfoot of political positions.

I thought back to that piece when I read this week’s big Pew report on media and political polarization. The report includes lots of fun tidbits (conservatives have more friends who share their views, but liberals are more likely to break off a friendship over politics), but like a lot of people I was most struck by this chart, showing where, roughly, on the ideological spectrum different publications and channels find their audiences. You’ll see that the overwhelming majority of the media properties surveyed had audiences clustered somewhere on the left-of-center, with Yahoo! News and the Wall Street Journal claiming audiences closest to the political middle. Meanwhile, exactly one property, Fox News, had an audience that was more conservative but within hailing distance of the center, and then there was a small cluster of shows and programs with audiences to Fox’s right (Breitbart, Drudge, Limbaugh, The Blaze, etc.).

What’s a “conservative”? The term liberal is easy as they make the boundaries clear. Throwing the Reason Magazine crowd in with the National Review types and then sprinkling in The Weekly Standard people is the definition most liberals give, when pressed. That still leaves a vast area of political thought outside the Hive that does not fall into the conservative bucket.

Then we have the mythological political spectrum, upon which all of us my reside somewhere – or else. Liberals claim Hitler is the extreme right so that puts him right next to Thomas Sowell somehow. The fact that neither man have a thing in common does not seem to matter. Putting that aside, how can someone be sort of a Stalinist? That’s what left-of-center must mean, if the commies are over on the left end of this spectrum. Therefore, being left of center means you want to starve some Ukrainians, but not all of them, I guess.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve found it tough to pay much attention to people who play along with the Left’s bifurcated view of the world. Putting Steve Sailer in the same bucket as Jonah Goldberg is useless if you are trying to understand the ideological map of the country. The reason this is popular with the Left is they are only interested in who is and who is not in their movement. If that’s not obvious to you, I’m not sure if you have anything to contribute to the debate. That and it is simply boring. A lifetime of watching guys like Mr. Douthat try to fit the world into the fantasy map of the Left has just been done to death.

What tries my patience even more than that is the insistence that there are two morally equivalent ideological forces battling it out for the soul of the people. No one in the ruling class has any serious thoughts about changing things. Why should they? It’s a good deal for them. What we have is a jostling for minor status points amongst the political parties. No matter who wins, nothing will change. Both parties talk big in the same way beer companies subtly promise you their product will get you laid. Carrying on like there’s a real ideological battle being waged with real consequences just makes the writer a sales rep for the status quo.

The Pansy-verse

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The weird emotionalism of modern times is one of those things that goes on without anyone commenting upon it. If you read cultural writers, it seldom comes up. Maybe it has always be thus, but it seems like the propensity to burst into tears in public is stronger now than ever. After 9/11, I remember watching Bush get choked up on camera and thinking, “He’s no Churchill.” Can you imagine Eisenhower blubbering on stage after the Normandy invasion?

Anyway, this was in my sports feed.

When Boston was rocked by bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, the Bruins and their fans received unconditional support from the NHL and the other 29 teams. Now, the Bruins will return that favor.

On Wednesday, a gunman entered the Parliament area in Canada’s capitol city of Ottawa and killed one solider and injured another person. The Senators were scheduled to host the Toronto Maple Leafs Wednesday night, but the game was postponed.

The tragedy in Ottawa hit close to home for members of the Bruins. Coach Claude Julien is a native of Ottawa, while Zdeno Chara and Chris Kelly both played for the Senators.

“It was very shocking, especially for that area. It’s a capitol city but it’s fairly quiet and not a busy area, so to see something like that happening is very shocking, very surprising,” Chara said. “Obviously, you’re feeling for everybody in the city and in the country. I know when it happened here we received so much support from everywhere around the league, across the country and around the world, so for sure it’s something we’re thinking about and people in Ottawa and Canada are in our thoughts and prayers.”

Julien said Wednesday’s situation in Ottawa was unsettling.

Last night, a dozen people were murdered in Chicago. Toronto is not a crime riddled city, but they have plenty of homicides. Why is this one so emotionally unsettling?

Added Julien, “Every city rallies around its own city and I’ve talked to a few people, including my family that’s still back there. My parents and brothers and sisters, it’s affected them even if they weren’t around that area. It affects the whole city like the bombing affected us here. They’ll have to get used to it in a way where that’s reality, unfortunately, and it’s happening. Again, Ottawa is a pretty — or Canada is a pretty laid back country that tries to continue to be laid back. But it’s also a country that supported the U.S. in some of its decisions and more than likely those are the consequences that it faces because of that.”

This is what I’m getting at. Why do public figures have to pretend to be emotionally distraught over events happening far away from them? If the gunman shot someone he knew, then sure, he should be upset. If it happened at his place of work, I can see it. Further, how is a hockey game healing anything? What in the hell does healing even mean in this context?

It seems like the high status males in modern times feel the need to blubber in public. I’m not sure why that is or what it means. Like the stoic male lead, the level headed male leader is a thing of the past. Instead, the hallmark of high status is the ability to emote on cue.

Just In Time For The Election!

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New polling says the Democrats are in deep trouble with the voters. That is assumed to be good news for the ever so slightly less liberal alternative, the Republicans. The key will be getting the black vote out in force and what better way than a race riot? That looks like the plan. News reports coming from Ferguson Missouri indicate the cop will not be charged.

A report by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch this morning shows the official autopsy supports Ferguson officer Darren Wilson’s claim that Michael Brown struggled with him in his patrol vehicle, and that Brown did not have his hands up when he was shot Aug. 9.

A source tells the Post-Dispatch that Wilson testified to the Grand Jury that when he tried to get out of his SUV to talk to Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson about the theft of cigarillos, Brown slammed the door shut and punched him in the face.

Wilson pulled his weapon, and Brown grabbed it. At one point, the barrel was pointed at Wilson’s hip, then a shot was fired hitting Brown’s hand.

Wilson says he then chased Brown, who turned and ran toward him. Wilson said “stop,” then fired. Brown kept coming, so Wilson fired several more shots.

The Post-Dispatch also had three experts examine the official autopsy.

St. Louis medical examiner Dr. Michael Graham says the report supports claims that there was a “significant struggle” in Wilson’s patrol car, and Brown suffered a hand wound at “relatively short range.”

A forensic pathologist from San Francisco, Dr. Judy Melinek, says based on a bullet wound to Brown’s arm, Brown’s palms could not have been facing Wilson in the standard surrender position – with hands up and palms out – when he was shot, and Brown was falling forward or lunging when he was hit by the fatal shot to the top of his head.

Looks like what everyone probably knew it was all along, but that’s not the point. At least the family is ready to play their role in the effort.

Michael Brown’s aunt believes Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson will “feel the wrath of God’s vengeance” for the shooting death of the 18-year-old.

Speaking to MailOnline, Sheryl Davis believes Wilson committed murder. A grand jury is expected to decide by next month whether Wilson will be indicted in Brown’s death.

“It’s murder and they will feel and see the wrath of God’s vengeance come upon them in a mighty way, just as he promised all who do evil in his sight,” she said.

The shooting has sparked protests in Ferguson over the past two months as tensions are mounting following a New York Times report revealing new details about the incident.

The New York Times reported Friday evening that Wilson told authorities that Brown reached for the gun during a scuffle. The officer’s account to authorities did not explain why he fired at Brown multiple times after emerging from his vehicle, according to the newspaper.

The Times reported that the account of Wilson’s version of events came from government officials briefed on the federal civil rights investigation into the Aug. 9 shooting that sparked racial unrest and weeks of protests, some of which turned violent. Wilson is white and Brown black.

One protester warned what would happen if Wilson is set free.

“If there is not an indictment, excuse my French, all hell is going to break loose,” the protester told CNN.

The best thing that could happen here is for respectable blacks to take the side of the police on this issue. That will never happen, of course. The usual suspects will make sure of it, but funding the bomb throwers. These rent-a-savages will burst forth and make sure the drama unfolds as usual.

As I’ve pointed out before, the biggest obstacle to black people in America now is this stubborn racial solidarity that leads otherwise sensible people to defend savagery. Italians, Irish, Jews, Poles and other “ethnics” used WW2 as a chance to abandon their ethnic identity and become simply Americans. That often meant abandoning their old neighborhoods and their old neighbors. If you wanted to be a hood, the respectable Irish/Italians/Jews/etc wanted nothing to do with you.

Blacks have gone the other way and placed racial solidarity above all else. Defending ghetto culture may have been necessary in the 50’s, but it is self-defeating today. But, the ruling class needs the blacks to stay at the bottom of the social hierarchy so this is unlikely to change.  Ben Carson is shunned by respectable white liberals, but Al Sharpton gets a prime time TV show.

Rich People

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I have a mild resentment toward rich people. Every society has rich people. That’s just the natural order and every human society has had an elite that enjoys a better material existence than the rest. It’s not always obvious why. I look at the wealthy elites of today and I don’t see a collection of geniuses. CEO’s are smart guys and they work hard, but they are not that smart and they don’t work that hard.

The number of rich people who invented some product or service that made human existence much better is tiny. In most cases, the guy inventing stuff is getting hosed by the rich guy who owns the company where he works. In other cases the guy with the great new idea has it stolen by someone how gets rich off it. Facebook stole the idea from MySpace, for example.

That said, getting rich in business is no easy task. You have to be ruthless and you have to take a lot of abuse on the way up. There’s a fair amount of dumb luck involved as well as chicanery. It’s why CEO’s, partners in white shoe law firms and entrepreneurs are often horrible people. They are very good at getting ahead and climbing the greasy pole, but they suck at most everything else.

Even so, dumb luck and serendipity play a defining role. Mitt Romney won the lucky sperm contest. Bill Gates was handed the golden ticket by IBM. Mark Cuban hit the lottery when Yahoo threw a billion at his worthless company. If you have the choice between being a ruthless and crafty businessman or being a lucky businessman, take the latter. This is the lesson of The Rocking Horse Winner.

When I look at the list of the super rich, I can live with the fact they are mostly assholes and they got lucky. If we started from scratch, all of them would do better than most and some would get rich all over again. Maybe not top-400 rich, but they would do OK. Like I said at the start, mine is a mild resentment.

That said, I look at this story from the Telegraph and I wonder if we have not lost our minds. The first guy on the list, Richard Branson, did not exactly come from the gutter, but he made his money in a real tough business and he made the business better. But, look at the rest of the list. Six of the ten are clowns. These are people who entertain us by pretending to be people they are not. Every society has entertainers, but we have made them into our ruling elite! Johnny Depp? David Copperfield?

Troll though Manhattan or LA and you can find a thousand people with the acting ability of Johnny Depp. He got rich on pure dumb luck. He showed up at the right casting call on the right day with the right look. His show had some success and a few lucky turns later he is a star. Nothing wrong with it, but what does it say about a society where this guy is super rich? My goodness. He’s not friggin’ Shakespeare. No one will remember him once his time is done. His footprints will wash away in a few years after his death, maybe sooner.

That’s not to say there’s not some talent involved with being a good actor. It’s just not that hard. Lots of people can do it well enough to be believable on stage or on screen. I was at a fall festival no long ago where some local college kids were doing Shakespeare. It was as good as anywhere else, by anyone else. I once stayed at an inn where they had a small theater. Local kids and adults put on plays for the locals. It was as good, in terms of acting, as anything I’ve seen on Broadway. All over America, people are entertained by community theater. There’s a threshold level ability that is pretty low. Once you cross it, you can be a credible actor. In this case and this case, you can be horrible and still make a living.

I think that’s where my resentment rears its ugly green head. I look at a Johnny Depp and his island and wonder how that makes any sense. I see a Mark Cuban and think crime actually pays. In isolation it is not a big deal, but we have a lot of this, too much of this. A healthy society is one that produces a healthy, restrained elite. Our cultural and financial elites are corrupt, brutish and stupid. We’ve turned the culture over to pimps who made their whores millionaires. The financial affairs of the nation are ruled by con-men and bank robbers, skimming from the economy without every adding grain of sand to the wealth of humanity.

We have a rich people problem.

Pink Shirts

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Cultural Marxism started with the appeal for tolerance. Normal people had to drop all of their cultural habits in order to include the “historically excluded.” Never mind that it was nonsense. Sensible people fell for it. In the 1980’s and 1990’s people were sent off to sensitivity training on a regular basis as a part of the employee training. All of our ideas about life would no longer be tolerated. There was always an “or else” lurking behind the words. Here’s the “or else”:

The city of Houston has issued subpoenas demanding a group of pastors turn over any sermons dealing with homosexuality, gender identity or Annise Parker, the city’s first openly lesbian mayor. And those ministers who fail to comply could be held in contempt of court.

“The city’s subpoena of sermons and other pastoral communications is both needless and unprecedented,” Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Christina Holcomb said in a statement. “The city council and its attorneys are engaging in an inquisition designed to stifle any critique of its actions.”

ADF, a nationally-known law firm specializing in religious liberty cases, is representing five Houston pastors. They filed a motion in Harris County court to stop the subpoenas arguing they are “overbroad, unduly burdensome, harassing, and vexatious.”

“Political and social commentary is not a crime,” Holcomb said. “It is protected by the First Amendment.”

The subpoenas are just the latest twist in an ongoing saga over the Houston’s new non-discrimination ordinance. The law, among other things, would allow men to use the ladies room and vice versa.  The city council approved the law in June.

The Houston Chronicle reported opponents of the ordinance launched a petition drive that generated more than 50,000 signatures – far more than the 17,269 needed to put a referendum on the ballot.

However, the city threw out the petition in August over alleged irregularities.

After opponents of the bathroom bill filed a lawsuit the city’s attorneys responded by issuing the subpoenas against the pastors.

These thuggish tactics have always been the main part of Cultural Marxism. Few would ever go along with this nonsense without the “or else” in there. That’s what attracts the adherents. It is the opportunity to push people around that gets them excited. The Nazis built their movement on low-IQ street toughs looking for a reason to dress up and crack skulls. It’s why every left-wing movement ends in a bloodbath. They have no choice. That’s the only way “or else” can work.

I’ve commented before that you rarely, if ever, run into a jolly lesbian. In part, they are not trying to compete with other women for men. Males like women who are happy and flirtatious. Lesbians have no desire, allegedly, to attract males so they have no need to be happy and flirtatious. In fact, they have an incentive to be unappealing to men. The nastiness may simply be a way to ward off interested males, but heterosexual women also find lesbians to be unpleasant so who knows.

The other part is that the odds of meeting an available sex partner are extremely low. Lesbians are probably 2% of the population of females. Social science says the number is higher, but think about the number of homosexual males versus females you see on a regular basis. Throw in the fact lesbian relationships are highly volatile and it is easy to see why they would be unhappy.

There’s that and the strong possibility that homosexuality is just the most obvious item in a basket of pathologies. Every lesbian I know self-mutilates. They have all sorts of metal crap in their faces and visible tattoos. Non-lesbian girts do this too, but it was once called lesbian chic for a reason. The butchered haircuts and the wearing of rags all indicate a high degree of self-loathing. Then you have the outlandishly high addiction rates. There could be many sensible reasons for it, but one of those sensible reasons is mental illness.

So, we have a small population of bitter, often angry people who have their sexual wiring confused. Putting them in charge of anything sounds like a bad idea. Giving them an ideological sledgehammer to wield against a society with which they feel they are at war is nothing short of lunacy. The people of Houston put a Nazi drag queen in charge of their city and the results naturally follow.

Self-Policing

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I remember when Slate first started publishing. Michael Kinsley was going to reinvent journalism, along with his super-rich patrons at Microsoft. The early version was just a PDF that you could read on your PC or print off at home. It was not a very interesting magazine at the time. Kinsley was a professional apple polisher and toady. He knew how to be interesting to rich people in private, but he had no skills of interest to a broader audience. If you look at his career, he is similar to Barak Obama in that he has a gift for currying favor with super-rich white people willing to give him stuff.

Today, Slate seems to be click bait. No one goes to Slate for incite or analysis. You go there for hilarious examples of some weird Liberal tick. The near total lack of self-awareness by the writers there makes for some comedy gold. A favorite, it seems, is Jamelle Bouie. Liberal whites love to decorate their website with a youngish black male writer willing to flatter liberal white people about race. The Atlantic has TN Coates and Slate has Baba Bouie.

His latest work of nonsense has the usual stuff, but it contains one useful bit of incite.

The glib response to stats on blacks and police is to cite so-called “black crime” or “black criminality.” But this depends on a major analytical error. Yes, blacks are overrepresented in arrest and conviction rates. At the same time, “criminal blacks” are a tiny, unrepresentative fraction of all black Americans. If you walked into a group of 1,000 randomly selected blacks, the vast majority—upward of 998—would never have had anything to do with violent crime. To generalize from the two is to confuse the specific (how blacks are represented among criminals) with the general (how criminals are represented among blacks). Statisticians call this a “base rate error,” and you should try to avoid it.

In fairness, you could apply this to police as well. The number of cops who shoot—much less shoot black Americans—is a small percentage of all cops. Why judge the whole by the actions of a few?

Why indeed. But, it is what we do as humans. We look for patterns. We assess risk to ourselves, our children and our chances of biological success. We then act on what we think are the patterns in a way that reduces our risks. It’s why old Jewish ladies don’t go out for walks at night in the ghetto. They know it is much riskier than sitting at home watching TV. It is why young black males go the other way when they see cops. Right or wrong, they believe cops are a threat to them so even when they have nothing to hide, they avoid the cops. Asking people to do otherwise is demanding them to commit violence against themselves.

There’s a social benefit here. Cops need cooperation from the people to do their job. They have to self-police if they are to stay on friendly terms with the public. In all cases where the police are hated by the community, you find a lack of self-policing. The cops get defensive and see the public as their enemy. It gets cleaned up when new pols hire new police chiefs who clean up the rot and re-establish relationships with the people they serve. The NYC PD under Giuliani is a perfect example of how self-policing works.

Human populations have been self-policing since the beginning. Some groups are better at it than others. Jews, for example, were exceptionally good at “boiling off” their members who did not really fit the tribe’s goal. The slow-witted and lazy would marry off into the gentile population, leaving the smart and faithful in the tribe. Do that for enough generations and you have a population of very smart and very loyal people. The Amish may very be the result of the same process. All people, in all times and places, have had to figure out how to deal with their troublesome fraction.

In America, whites of all types have figured this out pretty well. Instead of relying on old customs from Europe, they used geography. America is a big country with lots of useful land. That means the stupid, lazy and criminal can be set aside physically. That’s not to say the old ways were abandoned. Class distinctions reinforce the physical divide. Whites can identify their kind just by the look and location. Even to out-groups like Asians and Hispanics, this guy is a very different person than this guy, even from a great distance.

Orientals have relied on the old ways for the most part. Shame is a powerful tool to force cooperation and compliance, but it is also a useful tool for segregating the troublesome. I’ve known a few Koreans who basically abandoned their families because they could not or would not abide by the cultural mores of their community. They either conformed or walked away. The tremendous success of East Asians has allowed them to follow the white pattern and use distance and culture to weed out the troublesome from their ranks. This guy is not this guy even to this round eye.

The one group in America that has not figured this out is blacks. Successful blacks are under extreme pressure to avoid being white. They have to “keeps it reelz” in order to avoid being called an Oreo. This is not just for highly successful blacks. Middle-class blacks are under constant pressure to embrace black culture. Sports coaches tell me it is nearly impossible to get black kids into soccer and lacrosse. They all want to play basketball and football. You know see little black kids playing instruments anymore either. That’s for white and Asian kids. Hip-hop is black music.

This becomes a problems when it comes to distance. A black family moves out to the burbs and their new neighbors are in tears having finally acquired a black neighbor. Then one weekday night the new neighbors have a party that starts at ten at night. All of their old neighbors from the ghetto show up and party into the wee hours. That sounds nuts, but I know of dozens of such examples. Suddenly, diversity is not so cool. The for sale signs go up and the neighborhood changes. The black people are left to think that white people just hate living near black people, when it is really just middle-class people not wanting to live in the ghetto.

Bill Cosby used to rant about this before he was hissed off the stage. Chris Rock had a great bit on the same theme. He was pressured to stop doing it because “white people misunderstood it.” That’s hilarious for a number of reasons. How long racial solidarity can keep the black middle-class from jettisoning their ghetto brothers is a mystery. A run through the television dial suggests the elites are fighting it which means it will not happen. That means the majority of blacks who commit no crimes and just want to live decent lives will remain chained to the ghetto visually and geographically, paying the tab for those who commit the bulk of the social trouble in modern America.

The Atheist’s God

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Atheism is just another secular religion. Unlike the radical politics, it has no Utopian aspects to it. There have been some atheists who preached about how the end of religion, by which they mean Christianity, will make the world a better place, but they always seemed to get tripped up by their hatred of Christianity. That’s the peculiar aspect to atheism. Other religions seek to crowd out the all other religions, but atheists just have it in for Christianity. Anyway, it is good to see I’m not alone in this view.

If an autobiography can ever contain a true reflection of the author, it is nearly always found in a throwaway sentence. When the world’s most celebrated atheist writes of the discovery of evolution, Richard Dawkins unwittingly reveals his sense of his mission in the world. Toward the end of An Appetite for Wonder, the first installment in what is meant to be a two-volume memoir, Dawkins cites the opening lines of the first chapter of the book that made him famous, The Selfish Gene, published in 1976:

Intelligent life on a planet comes of an age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilisation, is: “Have they discovered evolution yet?” Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.

Several of the traits that Dawkins displays in his campaign against religion are on show here. There is his equation of superiority with cleverness: the visiting aliens are more advanced creatures than humans because they are smarter and know more than humans do. The theory of evolution by natural selection is treated not as a fallible theory—the best account we have so far of how life emerged and developed—but as an unalterable truth, which has been revealed to a single individual of transcendent genius. There cannot be much doubt that Dawkins sees himself as a Darwin-like figure, propagating the revelation that came to the Victorian naturalist.

Note how the author ties evolution into the cult like aspects of atheism. The Darwin Fish people are a lot like liberals in that they love science as long at it is a weapon against their enemies. Atheists tend to get light headed when you explain the evolutionary importance of religion and modern humans. They start fainting when you explain the importance of teleology and Christianity to the growth of science.

It is a different matter when those he sees as his intellectual underlings—religious believers and any who stray from the strictest interpretation of Darwinism—refuse to follow his lead. Recalling his years at boarding school, Dawkins winces at the memory of the bullying suffered by a sensitive boy, “a precociously brilliant scholar” who was reduced to “a state of whimpering, abject horror” when he was stripped of his clothing and forced to take cold baths. Today, Dawkins is baffled by the fact that he didn’t feel sympathy for the boy. “I don’t recall feeling even secret pity for the victim of the bullying,” he writes. Dawkins’s bafflement at his lack of empathy suggests a deficiency in self-knowledge. As anyone who reads his sermons against religion can attest, his attitude towards believers is one of bullying and contempt reminiscent of the attitude of some of the more obtuse colonial missionaries towards those they aimed to convert.

You see this with atheists. Their new religion is always a tantrum against their old religion. Penn Jillette never shuts up about his atheism. On many occasions he has talked about how it arises from having watched his mother suffer at the end of her life. His answer was that no God could let people suffer like that so there must be no God. His atheism is therefore a mix of narcissism, ignorance and self-pity. Despite the self-absorption, atheists don’t seem to know themselves very well. Maybe that’s why they declare themselves a God.

Pod Poeple on Ebola

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There’s an old joke about the NY Times (or any liberal broadsheet for that matter) goes something like this. A meteor is found to be headed to earth. it is big enough to wipe out all life on the planet. The NY Times runs a headline “Meteor To Destroy Earth” and a subhead of “Blacks and Women to be Harmed the Most.” I recall hearing that at least 30 years ago, maybe longer. The only thing that has changed is the transmission method. By way of example, I offer this gen form CNN.

The tragedy of Ebola is not just its staggering toll. It’s also the implicit racism that the deadly virus has spawned. The anecdotes are sickening, particularly a Reuters report this week that children of African immigrants in Dallas — little ones with no connection to Thomas Duncan, the Liberian Ebola patient who died Wednesday in a local hospital — have been branded “Ebola kids” simply because of their heritage or skin color.

In both the United States and Europe, Ebola is increasing racial profiling and reviving imagery of the “Dark Continent.” The disease is persistently portrayed as West African, or African, or from countries in a part of the world that is racially black, even though nothing medically differentiates the vulnerability of any race to Ebola.

 In both the United States and Europe, Ebola is increasing racial profiling and reviving imagery of the “Dark Continent.” The disease is persistently portrayed as West African, or African, or from countries in a part of the world that is racially black, even though nothing medically differentiates the vulnerability of any race to Ebola.

A Newsweek cover last month showed a picture of a chimpanzee with the headline: “A Back Door for Ebola: Smuggled Bushmeat Could Spark a U.S. Epidemic.” Whatever the intent, the picture was wrong.

Turns out the story was probably wrong, too, as a Washington Post investigation revealed. The new Ebola outbreak “likely had nothing to do with bushmeat consumption,” the Post reported, and there is no conclusive evidence that Ebola has been passed from animals to humans. A theory on animal-to-human transmission with some limited traction centers on dead fruit bats, not chimps.

“There is virtually no chance that ‘bushmeat’ smuggling could bring Ebola to America,” the Post concluded.

But the damage has been done. And as panic deepens, the danger is that racism — on planes and public transportation, in lines, on streets, in glances — deepens further, too.

Ebola is a human tragedy, just like enterovirus D68, which causes sudden muscle weakness and severe respiratory problems, particularly among children. It has shown up in almost all the 50 states, with about 500 Americans infected so far, far more than ever. And it has begun to kill, beginning with a 4-year-old boy in New Jersey. Five new cases were reported in New Jersey alone on Tuesday. And there are no antiviral vaccines or cures. Yet enterovirus D68 is known by a scientific name and number. (Unfortunately for Africans, the Ebola virus was named after the Congolese river where the first outbreak was detected).

The saga of Thomas Duncan reflects racial perceptions. His girlfriend, Louise, whom he had reportedly been visiting in Dallas, had publicly begged for him to be given the same experimental ZMapp medication given to two (white) American missionaries who were infected in Africa and recently flown back to the United States.

“I’m just asking God and asking the American government for the same medicine they’re giving people that come from Liberia,” she said during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “Please, please, please, please, help me save his life. …Talk to doctors. They’ll find means to get a medicine to cure him. He’s so young.”

Louise refused to allow her last name to be used for fear of repercussions. Unfortunately, doctors and the pharmaceutical developer said there was no longer any ZMapp left for Duncan or any other victim. But the imagery that accompanied his plight lingers: Whites can be flown to the United States or Europe at any expense, while Africans are left to die unattended on the streets of Liberia or Sierra Leone. Or now, without ZMapp, in Dallas.

“It’s easy for the world — the powerful world, who are largely non-African, non-people of color — to ignore the suffering of poor, black people,” Harvard Medical School professor Joia Mukherjee said on PRI’s “The World” last month. It’s easy, she said, to “other-ize” the Ebola crisis.

Fear too often contorts morality and humanity.

It is easy to write off this nut as just another lunatic, but there’s no reason to think she is out of step with the rest of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. It is tempting to think it is just an act. The creepy meta-language is unsettling to the normal ear. Most of us never hear anyone say “other-ize” on purpose. This thing reads like a piece in the Onion so it is tempting to think it a spoof.

But, it’s not. This is how the pod people think.

 

The Cult of Fake Nerdism

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There is a cult like quality to the fake nerd stuff we see in the culture. A lot of these people, particularly the young ones, think they are part of a movement that will make this world like the imaginary one in sci-fi movies. The web site Tech Crunch seems to be one of their propaganda organs. It looks like they are also organizing a hajj for their followers this fall.

Haven’t gotten your tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt Europe yet? The hottest tech conference of the year is coming to London this October, and to celebrate we’re giving away another free pair of tickets to the main event. All you have to do is enter to win. We’ll randomly select the winning entry, and the winner will be notified by email.

About TechCrunch Disrupt:

    • Disrupt is one of the most anticipated technology conferences of the year.
    • We start each day with panels and one-on-one chats featuring our writers, special guest speakers, leading VCs, and fascinating entrepreneurs.
    • Each afternoon, we host the Startup Battlefield competition which culminates in six finalists taking the stage at the end of the event for a shot at winning the Disrupt Cup.
    • The event takes place from October 20 and 21 at Old Billingsgate, London, UK.

The word “disrupt” is a buzzword borrowed from economics that is very popular in the fake nerd world. Every startup begging for money peppers its prospectus with this word. The reader is supposed to think the new company is a part of the glorious future where we all live in gleaming cities run on rainbow dust, where everyone is happy and there are no poor people. The future for these people is a sanitized San Francisco without the gays.

I’ll note the picture they use. You have two sexless people who possess that innocent, Eloi quality so popular with the fake nerd crowd. The one on the left is slightly Oriental, while the one of the right is Occidental. Maybe they are boys or maybe they are girls. We’re not supposed to know. If someone used this picture for a NAMBLA campaign, no one would be surprised. That’s the creepy part of the glorious future. It’s primary appeal seems to be to men who really like boys.

Nothing Changes

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Tyler Cowen likes to pretend the world started doing interesting stuff when he started noticing it, but human relations have not changed much forever. I saw this on his site. I think he called in average is over in dating or something equally stupid.

A new dating app called Luxy matches wealthy singles…to wealthy singles. It describes itself as “Tinder, minus the poor people.” The app’s iTunes page claims members are CEOs, investors, millionaires, and fitness models. So far, there are 3,000 users, and the average male user’s income is $200,000, company spokesman Darren Shuster told Vice. Shuster also told CNN that Luxy’s rich clientele is self-regulating and the app does not (yet) enforce salary verification. “If you show up in a 20-year-old VW Bug, and request to meet at McDonald’s, you won’t last very long on LUXY,” Shuster said. “It doesn’t take long to weed out those who belong on a different kind of dating site.” The app is so controversial that the CEO’s identity is kept anonymous. “With the rise of high-speed digital dating, it’s about time somebody introduced a filter to weed out low-income prospects by neighborhood,” wrote the app’s nameless CEO in a release.

Elites have been dating within their group since we have had elites, which is to forever. The commoner marrying the prince is a fairy tale for a reason. Marrying outside your class has always been a good way to get ostracized. A lot of it is controlled by women. Females born into the elite seek out the high status males in their class. They can be quite ruthless about it, but they also have the toolset to out compete commoners.

That said, I can see this app turning into a call girl service quickly. If you’re a rich guy and can’t find a woman, you have other issues. There’s a reason for $5,000 a night hookers exist. Outside of the US, super high end “escorts” and brothels exist for wealthy clients. I recall Ben Affleck getting caught in a Vancouver brothel when he first hit it big. It was a $1,000 a throw, if I recall correctly. Maybe it was some other douche bag actor, but I’m pretty sure it was him. This app will probably turn into a a way for lonely rich guys to score a hooker without leaving their condos.