RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/13/expert_models__fear__stress_pandemic_143428.html

“It’s the science, the science, the science, not politics.” This from leaders calling for the continuation of the shutdown. It is “the science” they say they’re responding to when they tell us how to live every moment of our waking lives. It is the science that tells citizens in Michigan not to buy seeds, not to take their boats out on the lake. It is lifesaving not to go to church. It is lifesaving to wear masks even when you are walking in the park. It is lifesaving to stay six feet apart. Listen up. We, your leaders, have no choice. It’s the science. And remember, if you don’t listen to us, it’s death, and more death, everywhere death.

Apparently, our science-induced leadership has a formula to solve the virus pandemic: Science + (or x) Fear = The Virus Cure. In other words, shut down the economy. Again, there was no choice. Lives were at stake.

Here is what John Kay of the Financial Times has written about science: “The objective of science is not an agreement on a course of action but the pursuit of truth. … Science is a matter of evidence. … The route to knowledge is transparency. … The route to truth is the pluralistic expression of conflicting views. … There is no room in the process for any notion of scientific consensus.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/scott_adams_has_had_a_brilliant_insight_about_the_demand_for_reparations.html

Whenever Democrats push race to the forefront of the news, reparations pop up. The theory is that, because their forebearers were kidnapped from Africa and enslaved in America, blacks will never catch up economically to whites. It doesn’t matter that there are no slaves or slaveowners today; that most whites are not descended from slaveowners; or that racism impoverished, rather than enriched the South.

Scott Adams’ brilliant insight cuts through all this: The comparison isn’t between black wealth and white wealth in America. Instead, the comparison must be the difference between black’s average net worth in America versus black’s average net worth in Africa. After all, the act of stealing blacks from Africa is the “but for cause” of all wrongs done to blacks.

Adams imagines a neutral space alien calculating reparations. He informs earthlings that black versus white net worth in America isn’t the correct calculation:

“If I’m going to calculate the, let’s say, the theft from the black community, if you were to measure the theft — let’s say just theft – that this slavery was. In other words, you stole the productive part of their lives, etc., and you used it for yourself. So here’s the number I need: I need how does the average economic situation for the average black person in this country and then, to compare it, I want to compare it to the average life of a black African.:

And you say, “What?”

When will there be a March to Support Law-Abiding Police Officers?

As the country sees the spectacle of anti-cop rants and total disrespect for the badge, I am reminded of the 1925 piece by William Faulkner titled “The Cop.”  It is way past due to hearken back to the time when, as a young lad, he would desire to

… be a patrolman; in a blue coat and swinging a casual stick and with a silver shield on my breast, I would pace the streets away with the measured beat of my footsteps.  What to compare with this grandeur?  To be the idol and fear of the lads, to be looked upon with respect by even grown people; to be the personification of bravery and the despair of criminals.

What a different time and place.  Almost a century ago, most folks understood the danger that police faced and had a respect for the thin blue line that protected them from criminals and murderers.

Fast-forward, and can we really be surprised at the anger and dismay expressed by New York police boss Michael O’Meara as he declares, “Nobody talks about all the police officers that were killed in the last week in the United States of America and there were a number of them.”

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/december-2019/no-need-to-plead-guilty/

“Tempting though it is to just sit back and allow the left to self-harm, we shouldn’t do that. Racial politics is so ugly, and so fundamentally dangerous, as we know from the history of the twentieth century, that we have to expose concepts like “white privilege” for the toxic nonsense that they are. Those of us who live in Britain and America – among the least racist, most tolerant societies on earth – have a duty to stand up to this tsunami of gobbledygook before it sweeps us all away.”

The concept of “white privilege” is some-times credited to the African-American writer W.E.B. Du Bois, but the phrase didn’t enter the lexicon until it was used in a 1989 paper by the feminist academic Peggy McIntosh. “As a white person, I realised I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage,” she wrote in “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” With the American accent very firmly on “white” rather than “privilege” or any other aspect of class which British ears would so much more readily hear.

Not only is McIntosh white, she is, by any measure, astonishingly privileged. She grew up in an affluent suburb of New Jersey where the median income was four times the national average, and her father, who was a high-ranking scientist at Bell Laboratories, owned patents in several valuable electronic inventions.

After attending Radcliffe, UCL and Harvard, where she earned a PhD, Peggy married Dr Kenneth McIntosh, the son of a Columbia professor. According to William Ray, a Canadian journalist who wrote about her for the online magazine Quillette last year: “Peggy McIntosh was born into the very cream of America’s aristocratic elite, and has remained ensconced there ever since.”

But when McIntosh writes about her “privilege” she doesn’t mean in this conventional, upper-class sense. Rather, she is referring to the advantages she enjoys in virtue of being white and which, in her view, all white people share. The “knapsack” she unpacks isn’t a $1,000 Burberry backpack of the kind Peggy and Kenneth might take on a hike in the Adirondacks. No, it’s a bag full of useful things that all white people carry with them, regardless of how disadvantaged their upbringing.

Given the success of Indians across the Anglosphere, it would make more sense to talk about “brown privilege”