RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/covid_the_after_times.html

The Covidian orthodoxy is beginning to crumble. Some governments have discovered that their approach did not improve anything. On the contrary, at least one study shows that the myriad restrictions on normal life have had the opposite effect. That confirm what many people said 18 months ago, when challenging the official dogma was considered an act of heresy.

Now what? There is going to be a clear delineation of human interactions in the aftermath when compared to the before times. It is almost impossible to expect otherwise.

Like many of you, I have learned things about people I thought I knew that were hard to believe. It has been quite the learning to curve to find out who would happily serve as an enforcer to push the state’s dictates, who would just as happily shut people out of society, celebrate their firing, or deny them healthcare for the sake of a making a political point. Once you have seen the true measure of a person, one who would support steps that harm friends and relatives and justify that support hesitation or regret, how can you see such people in the same light again?

You can’t trust them. You can’t discuss anything of substance with them. You can’t pretend that none of this happened. It is impossible to once again respect or like people whose inner tyrant rose to the surface so easily, and that will be among the lasting legacies of this sorry spectacle, one that should sadden us all. The friendships forever tarnished, the family ties that are irreparably broken, the neighbors you no longer recognize; for many people, those will be the most tangible results of their COVID experience.

There is no joy in saying “I told you so” as the narrative starts falling apart.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/chesa_boudin_is_starting_to_sweat.html

With a voter recall four months away, things aren’t going too well for San Francisco’s far-left District Attorney Chesa Boudin, whose office appears to now be a dumpster fire of controversies.

Thursday the news got out through court transcripts that a shouting match broke out in a courthouse, between Chesa’s staff and the lawyers of a witness, Magen Hayashi, who testified that Chesa’s D.A. office told her to withhold critical evidence that could exculpated an officer in a police brutality case. The D.A.’s investigation of the matter neglected to mention that the cop in question was answering a domestic violence call and didn’t just start beating the suspect for no good reason. The officer’s defense team thought that relevant, and apparently, Chesa’s staff were intimidating the witness.

According to the San Francisco Examiner:

“After the court exited the courtroom,” [Defense attorney Nicole] Pifari told the judge, attorneys for the DA’s office “started yelling at… began to yell at counsel for Ms. [Magen] Hayashi telling him to do his job.”

Pifari told the judge that one of the attorneys for the DA’s office “pointed at the witness and told her she was being accused of a crime. It’s intimidating a witness, it’s unprofessional, it’s very problematic that they’re trying to affect the testimony of this witness off the record. I have a real problem with what just happened. They were yelling at her attorney in open court.” It’s not clear what crime the attorney allegedly referred to.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-was-chuck-schumer-thinking/

“Chuck Schumer may turn out to be personally responsible for the collapse of the Democrats’ agenda to a degree we’ve never seen in the modern Congress.”

Four months ago, in marveling at the then still-ongoing slow-motion collapse of the Democrats’ legislative agenda around here, I suggested one factor in that mess that seemed particularly worthy of attention:

I think Senate Democrats must still be digesting the absolutely bizarre signed, written arrangement Schumer reached with Manchin back on July 28 — which laid out detailed if (sort of) nonbinding terms for Manchin’s engagement with the Democrats’ social-spending bill that both senators then kept secret from most other Senate Democrats for two months. I can’t think of a more imprudent and downright strange move by a party leader in the modern Congress. You have to imagine that every Democrat will now want Schumer’s signature on an individualized statement of terms on every issue that matters to him or her, since after all every Democrat is the essential 50th vote on every party-line bill. And you have to assume that every Democrat will now also wonder if Schumer has made such an agreement in secret with every other Democrat on every such bill. It’s nuts, but it’s also a kind of encapsulation of Schumer’s leadership style.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/supreme-court-trouble-affirmative-action/

In lauding Joe Biden’s promise to fill the upcoming vacancy on the Supreme Court with a black woman, last week the commentator Jonathan Capehart effused on PBS NewsHour that any black woman was bound to duplicate the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer’s famous pragmatism, because “there is no more pragmatic people in the world, of necessity, than a black woman [sic].” With no other knowledge of the prospective nominee beyond her race and sex, Capehart trotted out confidently that she will “probably be more impressive, have more qualifications, be more brilliant than the folks who have come in before her, because people used her race to downgrade and belittle and not think much of her simply because she was black.” With any black female pick, “we all know from jump that that person is more than qualified, is more than worthy, is more than able to sit on the bench.”

That’s because all black women are the same. Given that they’re all the same in good ways, this casual stereotyping is OK.

Let’s digress. When promoting my 2020 novel The Motion of the Body Through Space, I had a bracing encounter on a books show in the UK, which I’d blithely expected to be a cake walk. On meeting the hosts, I hastily recalibrated, for one of the women was large and tall with a shaven head. Her bearing was intimidating, her floor-length gown a shimmering purple. Oh, and did I forget to mention? She was black.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/public-health/2022/02/covid-politics-and-psychology/

The whole world has gone nuts, clinically-speaking, in this age of COVID.  What was it that was going on inside people’s heads that has made almost everyone shut themselves up at home, wear germy rags over their mouths, keep their kids out of school, sanitise until their hands bleed, hoard toilet paper, queue for hours to take a meaningless test to see if they have the coronadoom, demand Novak Djokovic’s head on a pike, salivate at the prospect of booster upon booster of an experimental, liability-free, gene-therapy product from the corporate suits of Big Pharma and all the rest of the bizarre behaviour and superstitious ‘safety’ rituals we have had to endure for two years of unrelenting virus hysteria?

The What, When, Who and How of the Great COVID Panic will be pawed over by historians, political scientists and moral philosophers for decades to come, but the ‘Why’ of it all is the crux.  Why did our COVID overlords do what they did?  And why did so many of us go along with it all?  To answer that, we need psychology, the science of human behaviour, to work out the ‘Why’ of it all and how to prevent such a destructive madness ever happening again.

Psychology classics from the research vaults

The 1951 Asch Conformity Experiments were conducted by the American social psychologist, Solomon Asch, to test the degree to which people would adjust their perceptions of reality based on the need to not stand out from the crowd, even when they know the crowd to be wrong. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/just_how_frail_is_joe_biden.html

I must admit that I was very wrong about Biden. I thought he’d be out of office by June 2021 at the latest.  Instead, technically speaking, he’s still in office.  But looking at a recent, very disturbing little video of Joe Biden being gently led away from the podium by his caretaker/wife, Mrs. Joe Biden, one has to wonder what kind of an empty shell of a man is helming what long was the most powerful nation in the world.

Biden was pulled together enough to read a teleprompter speech in which he once again invoked the usefully dead Beau Biden to declare a new war on cancer.  (While I think it’s a real tragedy that Beau, a father, died young from cancer, I’ve said for a while that, given how much Joe uses Beau for political effect and to shield himself from criticism, if Beau hadn’t died, Biden would have had to kill him.)

Once again, Biden did that weird whispering thing into the microphone.  I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing, but it’s creepy:

Creepy does not mean Biden is too decrepit to handle the demands of his office.  However, there are signs that the Democrats are conning the American people into thinking there’s a sentient being in the Oval Office.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/american-athletes-beijing-betrayal/

The Olympics has evolved from a highly politicized, often incredibly exciting, event into an insipid, shiny, corporatized, dictatorship-normalizing television special. It’s not rare for smaller nations to recruit foreign athletes, giving them dual citizenship or residency, as a means of competing in this high-profile event. And American and Canadian hockey players, unable to make their own nations’ Olympic squads, have been playing for foreign nations for years. Can you imagine, however, a Hungarian American playing for the CCCP in 1960 or a Japanese American suiting up for Mao in 1972?

Because it’s hosting the Winter Olympics, China gets an automatic spot in the ice-hockey tournament. And since China has no tradition in the sport, the team’s roster is made up of only six Chinese-born players, along with eleven Canadians, seven Americans, and one Russian. Some of the Americans don’t have any connection to China. One of those players is Jake Chelios, son of NHL Hall of Famer Chris, who has been playing for a Moscow-based Chicom team called the Kunlun Red Star, which competes in the Russian Kontinental Hockey League. (Though they are consistently terrible.) And, after a single day of interviews, the Chinese shut down all communication between the press and players — “a highly unusual decision at an event like the Olympics,” The Canadian Press gently noted. But it’s certainly not unusual for the Chinese.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/03/canadian-convoy-movement-goes-global-next-stop-u-s/

While the big U.S. media mostly pretend Canada’s convoy of truckers disgusted with COVID lockdown culture doesn’t exist, it does. It’s a potent movement that has tapped into a deep vein of cultural anger and resentment over the Canadian government’s authoritarian response to the virus. And guess what? It’s coming here, and soon.

As we’ve discovered again in recent years, the left loves civil disobedience, until it’s someone disobeying them. Then it becomes filled with authoritarian busybodies, more than happy to deny you your rights to enforce their vision of the world – whether it’s COVID lockdowns used to force Americans to follow senseless, unscientific rules, racist America-hating Critical Race Theory forced on school kids, or insane “woke” cancel culture imposed on us all.

But some are now saying, “enough,” and loudly. And they’re not the elites. They’re working people who have seen their livelihoods damaged or destroyed, lost their rights to travel and and speak out, and in general have been treated as subjects, not citizens.

That’s where Canada’s trucker convoy comes in.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/when-artists-become-the-censors?token=ey

In 1984, of all years, rock bands in the Soviet Union were in a panic. The Ministry of Culture had decreed that, for these groups to keep performing and touring in the USSR, they would have to show that 80 percent of the songs in their live sets were not their own, but written by someone from the state-sanctioned Union of Composers.  

This crackdown was part of a Kremlin campaign to push back against what it viewed as the dangers of rock n’ roll—a Western concoction that turned young people against adults and made otherwise normal, law-abiding citizens question authority. 

The Soviet Union is long gone, but the impulse hasn’t died: More recently, Vladimir Putin’s subordinates smeared Viktor Tsoi, the Bob Dylan of the Soviet Union, claiming that Tsoi’s lyrics had been written by Americans seeking to destroy the Motherland. (For the full history of rock music in the Soviet Union read “BACK in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia,” by Artemy Troitsky. It wasn’t long before Troitsky himself, a Muscovite rock critic, found himself banned like the blacklisted musicians he was writing about.)