RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&i

We’re barely a week into the Biden presidency, and it’s been a literal blizzard of Executive Orders, so many that nobody can even keep up with them. Trying to review them in at least a general way, I can’t find a single one that is a good idea. They range from bad to catastrophic.

The overall summary is that the dopes have taken full control. All adult supervision has now been banished from the vast federal government, and the wokest (and stupidest) of the woke progressives are to have the full run of the place. Resources are now infinite, tradeoffs among competing priorities are no longer necessary, and all human problems are to be solved and perfect fairness and justice instituted within a matter of weeks if not days. Best of all, the Bidenistas think that all this will work because they are so “smart.”

At Jacobin magazine, writer David Sirota captures the spirit of the moment in a piece titled “There’s Really No Need to Compromise, Joe.” The specific focus of the piece is advocating for immediate legislation to pass out checks for $2000 each— as opposed to any smaller amount — to most every American. But the bigger theme is that compromise is not needed because now there are no more limits on how much money the federal government can pass out, nor is there any cost or other downside to just throwing out money as fast as possible. The route to improving your and everyone else’s life is endless big handouts of free money from the Feds:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/speech-and-sedition-in-2021-11611962910?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Most Americans learn in school about flagship political excesses in U.S. history like Joe McCarthy’s 1950s inquisitions, the post-World War I Red Scare and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Yet a recent Washington Post opinion piece purports to explain “what the 1798 Sedition Act got right.”

The law banned a wide range of political speech and publication. It was passed by the ruling Federalists to suppress the rival Democratic-Republicans, whom they saw as seditious. The Post piece argues that though their solution was “flawed,” the Federalists had reason to worry about “unregulated freedom of the press.”

We highlight this as one example among many of the emerging appetite for viewpoint suppression among journalists, intellectuals and Democrats in the wake of the Trump Presidency. They increasingly see domestic enemies wherever they look, and are devising ways to use levers of power to restrict, regulate and boycott opposition. It’s an extraordinary and ominous turn in a democracy.

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Many calls to sanction opposition media come from voices that claimed to be most alarmed by Donald Trump’s attacks on the free press. Margaret Sullivan, the Post’s media columnist, wrote this week that “corporations that advertise on Fox News should walk away,” declaring that the outlet’s “role in the 400,000 U.S. lives lost to the pandemic and in the disastrous attack of Jan. 6” has been “deadly.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/01/marginalising-conservatives-until-we-vanish/

Pithy quote:

It is divisive by definition to recognize there can be two or more points of view, which is not a bad thing if people of good will anoint their disagreements with the oil of civility. But when a dominant group insists on its version and silences those who dare to differ in part or whole, as we are seeing today, purges and show trials are not too far down the road.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/01/the-science-is-settled-lefties-are-fearful-scolds/

“We all know that modern liberals can’t argue a case and that their stock standard response to ideas other than what they have been told to believe is flinging insults — ‘racist’, ‘homophobe’ ‘bigot’ etc — and decamping to the coda of a farewell ‘shut up’. Well there’s a reason they’re that way, poor things, as a team of US and New Zealand researchers have just laid out.”

There is more than a modicum of truth in the old joke that the definition of a ‘racist’ is anyone who is winning an argument with a leftist.  When a woke leftist’s evidence and logic don’t stack up, a bit of name-calling (‘racist’, ‘bigot’, ‘deplorable’, etc.) will enable them to seize the presumed moral high ground and thereby claim victory, at least to their own satisfaction.  Moral one-upmanship is the woke leftist’s go-to position: ‘I’m good, you’re bad, so just shut-up’. If you’re of the Left, it’s the all-purpose, not-so-sotto-voce debate clincher. 

Such ‘virtue-signalling’ by the morally self-righteous Left is supported by anecdotal evidence galore but now there is hard scientific evidence for its empirical reality, as demonstrated with regard to the ‘moralisation’ of COVID-19 by the lockdown-Loving Left.  Researchers from New Zealand’s University of Otago and two universities in the US recently published the results of their study , ‘Moralization of Covid-19 Health Response: Asymmetry in Tolerance for Human Costs‘, in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. It’s a doozy.

People who see the SARS-COV-2 virus as an “urgent and visible threat”, the researchers find, moralise the social distancing policies, especially lockdowns, claimed to contain and eliminate the virus.  Lockdown is framed by such moralisers as a “question of right or wrong”, and so “staying at home and complying with mask mandates”, for example, are presented as matters of “ethical duty and commitment to the common good”.