RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.) 

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-695438

Stupidity and evil aren’t mutually exclusive but they’re not synonymous and shouldn’t be treated as such. Nevertheless, people’s penchant for equating or confusing the two is rampant.

The almost symmetrical reaction this week to Whoopi Goldberg’s Holocaust comments and Amnesty International’s report on “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians” is a perfect case in point. 

Though both public expressions of antisemitism deserve reproach, they have little in common other than the peculiar shock that each elicited.

LET’S START with the brouhaha surrounding The View cohost’s asinine description of the Nazi genocide, which she voiced on Monday’s show. Goldberg uttered her now-infamous remarks during a discussion on a Tennessee school board’s decision to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, Maus, from the eighth-grade curriculum.

The book recounts author/cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s parents’ experience as survivors of the German atrocity. The debate was supposed to focus on the justification, or lack thereof, for cutting it from the McMinn County language-arts syllabus.

The reason cited for the ban was the “rough, objectionable language” of the work, which also contains a drawing of a naked woman.

Instead of sticking to the issue of free speech and whether the above should warrant censorship in this context, Goldberg said she was surprised that it was nudity and not the Holocaust itself that bothered the educators. 

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-british-medical-journal-story

In February of 2010, the New York Times released a front page story entitled, “Research Ties Diabetes Drug to Heart Woes.” The lede read:

Hundreds of people taking Avandia, a controversial diabetes medicine, needlessly suffer heart attacks and heart failure each month, according to confidential government reports that recommend the drug be removed from the market.

The Times piece quoted an internal F.D.A. report that said the GlaxoSmithKline diabetes drug Avandia, also known as Rosiglitazone, was “linked” to 304 deaths in 2009, adding the conclusion of the two doctors who authored the report: “Rosiglitazone should be removed from the market.” The story was released in advance of a Senate Finance Committee study that produced a series of damning internal documents, including one in which an FDA safety officer expressed concern that Avandia presented such serious cardiovascular risks that “the safety of the study itself cannot be assured, and is not acceptable.”

One of the chief investigators on that study was Paul Thacker, at the time a committee aide under Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley. Multi-year document hauls like the Avandia report were Thacker’s stock in trade. I first met him around then because his committee frequently dealt with financial crisis issues I covered. Thacker, who went on to contribute to a number of commercial and academic journals, was trained in a tradition of bipartisan committee reporting that relies heavily on documents and on-the-record testimony, i.e. the indisputable stuff both sides are comfortable backing.

https://www.city-journal.org/school-mask-mandates-are-unnecessary

Children are perhaps the most-masked people in America, and clearly the people least needing to be masked. Whether or not one believes that masks work—and the best available scientific research suggests, as I have detailed in City Journal, that surgical and cloth masks provide little to no benefit in stopping the spread of viruses and might even be counterproductive—kids are plainly the least likely to be struck ill by Covid and probably the least likely to spread it.

There’s an extraordinary difference—even greater than widely recognized—between Covid-19’s effects on kids and its effects on adults, as fatality numbers show. Far from regarding this important fact as a godsend for the upcoming generation, however, many policymakers have treated it as an irrelevancy. At the same time, they have ignored that children living in mask-mandate states have had essentially identical Covid fatality rates as kids living in mask-free states.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/ketanji-brown-jacksons-harvard-race-discrimination-problem/

If Biden selects this judge, she will have to answer for her service on the board of a racially discriminatory college.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has a race-discrimination problem, and it just got a lot bigger. That problem could complicate her candidacy for the Supreme Court.

The D.C. Circuit judge is near the top of the very short list to replace Stephen Breyer; indeed, she is widely seen as the front-runner. Just as Brett Kavanaugh was once a law clerk for Anthony Kennedy and replaced him on the Supreme Court, Jackson once clerked for Breyer. A federal district-court judge since 2013, she was elevated last year to the D.C. Circuit, a court long treated by both parties as a farm team for Supreme Court picks. Former D.C. Circuit judges nominated to the Court include Kavanaugh, Merrick Garland, John Roberts, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Clarence Thomas, Douglas Ginsburg, Robert Bork, and Antonin Scalia. She just published her first D.C. Circuit opinion.

The firestorm over Joe Biden’s unpopular pledge to exclude everyone but African-American women from consideration for his first Supreme Court nomination has put Jackson and the other short-listers under a microscope. There are a number of concerns with her judicial record, from her record of reversals by the D.C. Circuit as a district judge to her turgid writing style.

But the timing of the nomination presents a more serious and polarizing issue: Harvard University’s policy of race discrimination against Asian students, which is currently being challenged in a lawsuit pending before the Supreme Court, in tandem with a parallel case involving the University of North Carolina. The parties to the case have just submitted a briefing schedule that would put the case over onto the fall 2022 calendar — after Breyer has left the Court. If Jackson were nominated and confirmed by October, she could potentially be in a position to hear the case.