Tag Archives: responsibilities

Peaceful Protesting, Portland Style

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Several times the Portland police have had to declare a riot in progress in response to Portland’s peaceful protests and the peaceful protesters’ behavior. Saturday was the third time in a row.

Protesters broke into a building, set it on fire and started dumpster fires late Saturday night in Oregon’s largest city, police said….

And

On Saturday evening, two groups of antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters terrorized Portland, squaring off against police and federal troops. One group attacked the Portland Police Bureau’s North Precinct and the Portland Police Association (PPA)—the police union—while the other group targeted the federal courthouse and Justice Center, returning to set yet another bonfire at the ruins of the elk statue nearby. Antifa broke into the PPA and set it on fire.

But these are peaceful protests. Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty says so.

…thousands of Portlanders came out to exercise our constitutional right to free speech and peaceful assembly.

This is the Newspeak of today’s Progressive-Democratic Party.

The Kancel Kulture

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Alexandra Duncan, an author, has canceled her own book just before publication. Duncan, an American author who happens to be white, had written a fictional tale in which there appeared scenes depicting an American who happened to be black, with Gullah heritage. She wrote the scenes from the American black’s perspective.

And that’s why she canceled her book.

My own limited worldview as a white person led me to think I could responsibly depict a character from this [Gullah] culture. …  I am deeply ashamed to have made a mistake of this magnitude.

Can’t comment on/write about/depict in fiction (or elsewhere) certain subjects unless the commenter/writer/depicter is of a particular race.

The assumption that the commented on/written about/depicted person or group is so fragile they have to be protected by the segregation of identity politics is just an extension of the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Duncan should be ashamed of her own racism, not of her attempt as a writer, a condescension form of racism that also was noticed, and decried by John McWhorter, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, when he called out the author of another book on race.

The racism of Kancel Kulture is made manifest.

On the Count of Three

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…let’s all panic. One, two—oh, wait. It’s just the NLMSM trying to stampede us over Republican-run Florida’s increase in Wuhan Virus detections, a six-fold increase since early June. I’ll elide the positive-test rates being falsely inaccurately reported in so many counties.

Here are some inconvenient truths about that rise, though, from one of those actual experts Progressive-Democrats are so insistent we hear and obey. Just not one of their experts, but an actual expert.  Dr Charles Lockwood, Dean of the University of South Florida’s College of Medicine, is one such:

case fatality rates—that’s the number of deaths over the number of cases—is 1.5%
…
[even accounting for the lag in death rates,] we should now be seeing a much higher case fatality rate. It has been predicted that our fatality rate would kind of do a “U” and be heading back up. It’s not. In fact, today in Hillsborough County [where Tampa is located], our case fatality rate was 0.9%

And

We are picking up asymptomatic cases, [and] picking up milder cases than we did before[.]

Hmm….

Experimenter Bias

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There is a study newly released that purports to link willingness to honor social distance guidelines during the present Wuhan Virus situation to our mental capacity in retaining multiple pieces of potentially conflicting information in our head, which is referred to as working memory capacity.

What interests me isn’t so much the nature of this paper as an example of the publish or perish paradigm of what passes for scholarship in what passes for academia today. Nor is it the purported linkage.

It’s this claim by the lead author, Weizhen Xie, a postdoc at the National Institutes of Health:

As a researcher in cognitive psychology, I feel that it is our duty to figure out why some people follow the developing norm of social distancing while others ignore it.

Xie needs first to investigate the role or experimenter bias in forming hypotheses. A researcher in cognitive psychology should know better.

There is no “developing norm of social distancing.” Social distancing is only temporary stopgap for interrupting an infection cycle.

Canceling

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It’s really gone too far—as if the first occurrence hadn’t already taken the false piety too far.

ESPN suspended NBA insider Adrian Wojnarowski a day after a profane email from him to Senator Josh Hawley [R, MO] was leaked to social media, according to multiple reports.
Outkick and the New York Post both reported that the basketball reporter was suspended. The newspaper reported he was suspended without pay. It was unclear how long the suspension is for.

Wojnarowski’s offense was the end of an exchange wherein Hawley had criticized the NBA’s timidity and hypocrisy regarding “pre-approved, social justice slogans” on jerseys after “censoring support” for law enforcement and criticism of the Chinese Communist Party. Wojnarowski’s response was a two-word crudity.

Then he publicly apologized.

Wojnarowski plainly screwed up, badly. But he apologized, and did so without hiding his apology under a bushel. Now it’s time—or it should be—to see whether he’s actually changing his behavior, correcting it.

Insufficient, though, and we got yet another overreaction by the Left’s Kancel Kulture, this time by a cowardly corporate manager, the Timid One in charge of ESPN.

Plainly, the Left does not believe in second chances. The Left does not believe in rehabilitation. The Left does not believe in the possibility of redemption.

Every error—as defined by the Left—must be a capital crime.