Monday, May 11, 2020

Radio Courtoisie — Commentaire de l'Actualité Américaine




Le 15 janvier 2020, le patron d'émission du Libre journal du Nouveau Monde recevait trois invités à Radio Courtoisie pour aborder un “commentaire de l'actualité américaine”.

Cliquez sur le lien pour entendre l'émission d'une heure et demie…
Evelyne Joslain, assistée de Stanislas, reçoit : 
  • Paul Reen, membre du groupe des Républicains américains à Paris 
  • Anntoinette Lorrain, membre du groupe des Républicains américains à Paris
  • Erik Svane, membre du groupe des Républicains américains à Paris
Thème : “commentaire de l’actualité aux Etats-Unis”
Evelyne Joslain est l'auteur d'une poignée de livres sur les États-Unis.

Wednesday, May 06, 2020

A Pulitzer Prize?! Among the 1619 Defenders Is "a Fringe Academic" with "a Fetish for Authoritarian Terror" and "a Soft Spot" for Mugabe, Castro, and Even Stalin


As the 1619 Project wins a Pulitzer Prize (showing exactly, if it is still necessary, how much — or, rather, how little — the "Walter Duranty" prize is worth) — albeit, only for commentary — the Capital Research Center points out that among the project's "sturdy scholarly source[s]" who stand outraged about American slavery, is one Professor Gerald Horne, who turns out to be "a fringe academic" harboring, as he does, "a soft spot" for Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Cuba's Fidel Castro, and even the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin.

American slavery bad? Agreed.

But where are the principles involved when one professor who (rightly) joins in condemning slavery (albeit only in America) turns out to be someone with "a fetish for authoritarian terror" abroad?

As you can see, the only time that slavery, or murder, or society in general, or anything at all, is/are bad — actually a shame and a disgrace and an outrage — it's when they take place in the U.S. of A., and in its free market system.

When they concern any other country or any other system — especially if they are rivals of Uncle Sam — then they are not only neutral, they are a positive good. 
• See also 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History
The Pulitzer Prize win leads to a question from The New Neo:
Hey, if Arafat could get a Nobel Peace Prize, and Obama could get one for merely existing, and Walter Duranty can get a Pulitzer for dastardly lies, why not give it to the NY Times for its bogus anti-American “history” lesson known as the 1619 Project (I’ve written about the project many times before)?

 … No surprise there.

Nobel peace prizes and Pulitzer prizes increasingly have become awards not for objective accomplishments in their respective fields, but for politically correct (that is, leftist) achievements. The achievement of the 1619 Project is as leftist propaganda, which is now the most basic function of the news. The project has already become accepted as a study guide – one of its goals from the start – in many public schools, and as such will serve to shape the views of a new generation:

 … The MSM and entities connected with the press are not content to write propaganda for adult readers only. They want to get the ears of children, and to do that, education is key.
Sarah Hoyt adds that
ALL THE GREAT AWARDS AND PRIZES HAVE LONG SINCE — AS IN MOST OF MY ADULT LIFE — BEEN SKINSUITED. THEY NOW REWARD ONLY POLITICALLY-CORRECT-THINKING. OBJECTIVITY IS PUNISHED
FYI, here is the description of the Capital Research Center's Architects of Woke:
The Architects of Woke series takes aim at far-left post-modernist and Marxist thinkers and activists responsible for the spread of identity politics from college campuses to society at large. 
 The sixth episode, “The 1619 Project's Fake History”, covers the New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project. Directed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project attempts to reframe our understanding of American history by alleging the central event in the founding of the United States was the first importation of enslaved Africans to Virginia in 1619 and not the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The project has been notably criticized by esteemed historians for its factual errors. Despite this, schools across the nation have embedded the 1619 Project into their curriculums, perhaps endangering our nation's understanding of its founding for generations to come...
 … The Architects of Woke is hosted and directed by filmmaker Rob Montz …
RELATED: 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery

NO MAINSTREAM HISTORIAN CONTACTED FOR THE 1619 PROJECT

• "Out of the Revolution came an anti-slavery ethos, which never disappeared": Pulitzer Prize Winner James McPherson Confirms that No Mainstream Historian Was Contacted by the NYT for Its 1619 History Project

• Gordon Wood: "The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world" — another Pulitzer-Winning Historian Had No Warning about the NYT's 1619 Project

• A Black Political Scientist "didn’t know about the 1619 Project until it came out"; "These people are kind of just making it up as they go"

• Clayborne Carson: Another Black Historian Kept in the Dark About 1619

• If historians did not hear of the NYT's history (sic) plan, chances are great that the 1619 Project was being deliberately kept a tight secret

• Oxford Historian Richard Carwardine: 1619 is “a preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past”

• World Socialists: "the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history" by the New York Times, aka "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party"

THE NEW YORK TIMES OR THE NEW "WOKE" TIMES?

• Dan Gainor on 1619 and rewriting history: "To the Left elite like the NY Times, there’s no narrative they want to destroy more than American exceptionalism"

• Utterly preposterous claims: The 1619 project is a cynical political ploy, aimed at piercing the heart of the American understanding of justice

From Washington to Grant, not a single American deserves an iota of gratitude, or even understanding, from Nikole Hannah-Jones; however, modern autocrats, if leftist and foreign, aren't "all bad"

• One of the Main Sources for the NYT's 1619 Project Is a Career Communist Propagandist who Defends Stalinism

• A Pulitzer Prize?! Among the 1619 Defenders Is "a Fringe Academic" with "a Fetish for Authoritarian Terror" and "a Soft Spot" for Mugabe, Castro, and Even Stalin

• Influenced by Farrakhan's Nation of Islam?! 1619 Project's History "Expert" Believes the Aztecs' Pyramids Were Built with Help from Africans Who Crossed the Atlantic Prior to the "Barbaric Devils" of Columbus (Whom She Likens to Hitler)

• 1793, 1776, or 1619: Is the New York Times Distinguishable from Teen Vogue? Is It Living in a Parallel Universe? Or Is It Simply Losing Its Mind in an Industry-Wide Nervous Breakdown?

• No longer America's "newspaper of record," the "New Woke Times" is now but a college campus paper, where kids like 1619 writer Nikole Hannah-Jones run the asylum and determine what news is fit to print

• The Departure of Bari Weiss: "Propagandists", Ethical Collapse, and the "New McCarthyism" — "The radical left are running" the New York Times, "and no dissent is tolerated"

• "Full of left-wing sophomoric drivel": The New York Times — already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series — promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more

• "Deeply Ashamed" of the… New York Times (!),  An Oblivious Founder of the Error-Ridden 1619 Project Uses Words that Have to Be Seen to Be Believed ("We as a News Organization Should Not Be Running Something That Is Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked")

• Allen C Guelzo: The New York Times offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory

• The 1619 Project is an exercise in religious indoctrination: Ignoring, downplaying, or rewriting the history of 1861 to 1865, the Left and the NYT must minimize, downplay, or ignore the deaths of 620,000 Americans

• 1619: It takes an absurdly blind fanaticism to insist that today’s free and prosperous America is rotten and institutionally oppressive

• The MSM newsrooms and their public shaming terror campaigns — the "bullying campus Marxism" is closer to cult religion than politics: Unceasingly searching out thoughtcrime, the American left has lost its mind

Fake But Accurate: The People Behind the NYT's 1619 Project Make a "Small" Clarification, But Only Begrudgingly and Half-Heartedly, Because Said Mistake Actually Undermines The 1619 Project's Entire Premise


THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

• The Collapse of the Fourth Estate by Peter Wood: No one has been able to identify a single leader, soldier, or supporter of the Revolution who wanted to protect his right to hold slaves (A declaration that slavery is the founding institution of America and the center of everything important in our history is a ground-breaking claim, of the same type as claims that America condones rape culture, that 9/11 was an inside job, that vaccinations cause autism, that the Moon landing was a hoax, or that ancient astronauts built the pyramids)

• Mary Beth Norton:  In 1774, a year before Dunmore's proclamation, Americans had already in fact become independent

• Most of the founders, including Thomas Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, writes Rick Atkinson, despite the fact that many of them owned slaves

• Leslie Harris: Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies (even the NYT's fact-checker on the 1619 Project disagrees with its "conclusions": "It took 60 more years for the British government to finally end slavery in its Caribbean colonies")

• Sean Wilentz on 1619: the movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787, largely inspired by… American (!) antislavery opinion that had arisen in the 1760s and 1770s

• 1619 & Slavery's Fatal Lie: it is more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn't slavery but the effort to abolish it

• 1619 & 1772: Most of the founders, including Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, despite many of them owning slaves; And Britain would remain the world's foremost slave-trading nation into the nineteenth century

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: Slavery was legal in Britain in 1776, and it remained so in all overseas British colonies until 1833

• Not 1619 but 1641: In Fact, the American Revolution of 1776 Sought to Avoid the Excesses of the English Revolution Over a Century Earlier

• James Oakes on 1619: "Slavery made the slaveholders rich; But it made the South poor; And it didn’t make the North rich — So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth"

• One of the steps of defeating truth is to destroy evidence of the truth, says Bob Woodson; Because the North's Civil War statues — as well as American history itself — are evidence of America's redemption from slavery, it's important for the Left to remove evidence of the truth

TEACHING GENERATIONS OF KIDS FALSEHOODS ABOUT THE U.S.

• 1619: No wonder this place is crawling with young socialists and America-haters — the utter failure of the U.S. educational system to teach the history of America’s founding

• 1619: Invariably Taking the Progressive Side — The Ratio of Democratic to Republican Voter Registration in History Departments is More than 33 to 1

• Denying the grandeur of the nation’s founding—Wilfred McClay on 1619: "Most of my students are shocked to learn that that slavery is not uniquely American"

Inciting Hate Already in Kindergarten: 1619 "Education" Is Part of Far-Left Indoctrination by People Who Hate America to Kids in College, in School, and Even in Elementary Classes

• "Distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods": Where does the 1619 project state that Africans themselves were central players in the slave trade? That's right: Nowhere

• John Podhoretz on 1619: the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith

• The 1619 Africans in Virginia were not ‘enslaved’, a black historian points out; they were indentured servants — just like the majority of European whites were

"Two thirds of the people, white as well as black, who crossed the Atlantic in the first 200 years are indentured servants" notes Dolores Janiewski; "The poor people, black and white, share common interests"

LAST BUT NOT LEAST…

Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"

• Victoria Bynum on 1619 and a NYT writer's "ignorance of history": "As dehumanizing and brutal as slavery was, the institution was not a giant concentration camp"

• Dennis Prager: The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks

• The Secret About the Black Lives Matter Outfit; In Fact, Its Name Ought to Be BSD or BAD

• The Real Reason Why Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Land O'Lakes Maid Must Vanish

• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History

Who, Exactly, Is It Who Should Apologize for Slavery and Make Reparations? America? The South? The Descendants of the Planters? …

• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619

Tuesday, May 05, 2020

Wilfred Reilly on 1619: Quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery


The United States of America began in 1776, not 1619
declares Wilfred Reilly in Quillette with regards to the 1619 Project, which has now won a Pulitzer Prize (showing exactly, if it is still necessary, how much — or, rather, how little — that prize is worth).
That one sentence is the thesis statement of “1776”—a non-partisan black-led response to the New York Times’s “1619 Project” initiative, which launched last week at D.C.’s National Press Club. I am pleased and proud to be a part of 1776, along with founder Bob Woodson, Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, Jason Hill, Carol Swain, John Wood, Taleeb Starkes, Robert Cherry, and many others. From my perspective as a member, 1776 has three core goals:
(1) rebutting some outright historical inaccuracies in the 1619 Project;
(2) discussing tragedies like slavery and segregation honestly while clarifying that these were not the most important historical foundations of the United States; and
(3) presenting an alternative inspirational view of the lessons of our nation’s history to Americans of all races.

 … I will note that my recent book Taboo: Ten Facts You Can’t Talk About makes this same point at some length, pointing out that quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery. For example, the Black rate of “illegitimate” out-of-wedlock childbirths was 11 percent in 1938, barely 70 years after slavery ended, but today hovers around 74 percent—and the illegitimacy rate today is approximately 35 percent for American whites. The welfare policies of the 1960s frankly have been a greater cause of this multi-colored social issue than racialized oppression 150 years ago.

The same could be said of a dozen other issues, from opioid and cocaine abuse to high rates of local incarceration, which seem to bedevil our poor white countrymen roughly as much as blacks, while having little effect on West Indian immigrants who are also almost entirely descended from slaves.

A third—at the very least—strategic omission that is consistent throughout almost all the 1619 Project essays is a focus on American slavery in isolation, to the frequent exclusion of both
(1) narratives about the successful American anti-slavery movement and
(2) narratives about the far harsher slave trades conducted around the globe for most of history.

As yet another internationally famous professor, Princeton University’s James McPherson, has pointed out, slavery in the U.S. was not unique, but rather “only a small part of a larger world process that unfolded over many centuries.” In all likelihood, human beings have been capturing and trading slaves since the first Neolithic battle leaders progressed past simply killing and eating their war captives. Slavery was common in ancient Greece—where Aristotle famously described the unhappy life of a slave as being composed of “work,” “beatings,” and possibly “feedings”—universal in Republican and Imperial Rome, and (under the guise of “chattel serfdom”) not abolished in Russia until 1866.
 
If this even needs to be said, beautiful people of colour kept slaves as well. In fact, one of the world’s most significant slave trades, the Barbary Slave Trade, was focused almost entirely around the sale of white European slaves to Moorish and Black purchasers in North Africa. The Barbary Trade operated from the 16th century to the late 18th century, inspired a verse in the U.S. Marine Corps Hymn (“to the shores of Trip-o-li”), and even helped add the word “slave” to English-language dictionaries: The term comes from “Slav,” an ethnic descriptor for the residents of chaotic Eastern European states (today’s Bosnia, etc.) who were frequently sold into slavery to masters of all shades. While some desire on the part of 1619 participants to focus on the evils of our own society is understandable, it is hardly honest to attribute the unique characteristics of American society to slavery, when essentially all societies had slavery historically and only one became the USA. As the 1776 bossman Bob Woodson has noted, lies and omissions are not effective tools with which to fight racism.

All that said, it is not enough merely to critique an opponent’s worldview: A successful movement must provide a worldview of its own. Three core elements of my view of slavery—and, I think it is fair to say, 1776’s as well—are:
(1) recognizing that an anti-slavery movement led by white and Black people of goodwill existed in this country as long as slavery did, and won in the end;
(2) recognizing that slavery did not “build the USA,” but rather made the pre-bellum South into something of a backwater, due largely to the proud if subtle resistance of the slaves themselves; and
(3) recognizing that America paid a diverse butcher’s bill of hundreds of thousands of lives, during the Civil War, in order to FREE the slaves.

A rock-ribbed anti-slavery movement dates back almost literally to the American founding. As early as the 1770s, Black New Englanders, thousands of whom were Revolutionary War veterans, began a petition-writing campaign that targeted Northern state legislatures and demanded an end to slavery. These petitions, essentially, worked. By the 1790s, 10 states and territories, containing more than 50 percent of the free population of the new nation—Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, the North-West Territory, and the Indiana Territory—were free land by law. And the anti-slavery upswell continued. In 1794, Congress prohibited any participation by American ships in the Atlantic slave trade. In 1808, the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves made any shipment of enslaved persons from abroad into the USA a crime. Finally, in 1865 all slavery was declared illegal, at the Constitutional level, in the United States. Since that last milestone, 154 years ago, it is worth noting that the population of the country has grown 874 percent (38,000,000 to 333,000,000) and our GDP has increased 11,796 percent ($15 billion to $18.638 trillion), with both increases driven largely by modern-era foreign immigration.

Even within the South, when slavery legally existed, there is little evidence that reliance on feudal serfdom made American slave states richer than their free counterparts. In fact, historian Mark Schulman points out that before the Civil War, “the vast majority of industrial manufacturing” and other competitive industrial work took place in the U.S. North. In 1860, the South had about 25 percent of the USA’s free population, but “only 10 percent of the country’s capital.” The same was true for physical plant: the North had five times as many modern factories, and at least 10 times as many trained factory workers. Overall, 90 percent or more of the nation’s skilled-trades workers were based in the North. In his magisterial Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Thomas Sowell goes a step beyond Schulman, arguing that the prevalence of slavery in the antebellum South actually led to a mocking attitude toward hard work that continues to plague both “white trash” and inner-city Black communities today.

Finally, any cost-benefit analysis of the impact of slavery on the USA would be incomplete without including the costs of freeing the slaves. In fiscal terms alone, the price tag for the Civil War was a high one. Between 1861 and 1865, the U.S. national debt surged from $65 million to $2.77 billion, an increase of many tens of billions in today’s dollars. And, even this pales in comparison to the great conflict’s human toll. According to History.com’s Jennie Cohen, the generally accepted figure for Union Army battle deaths during the Civil War is 360,222. The equivalent figure for Confederate deaths, which many historians consider a low-ball, is 258,000. All told, about one in 10 American men of military age in 1860 died as a direct result of the Civil War. Among Southern white men in their early 20s, 22.6 percent—nearly one in four—died during the war. It seems no exaggeration to estimate that more than one Union soldier died for every 10 slaves freed. If the USA owed a bill for slavery, we have, arguably, already paid it.

The vision of 1776 goes far beyond disagreement with the political Left about questions of historical slavery. When I talked to the project’s founder founder Bob Woodson on February 3rd, he described the broader vision behind 1619 as “just more of the same.” Sounding quite similar to Dr. Oakes, Bob pointed out that the thesis underlying many 1619 Project essays—and, arguably, most arguments on the identitarian Left—can be summed up as “You do not control your own life.” This claim might be dismissed as an exaggeration, but it is not: in what sense can one be said to have free will, if the true cause of (say) the individual decision to father a child out of wedlock was a lost race war back in 1856? Modern ideas of miasmatic racism make the radical argument seem stronger and more tempting: If the REAL reason young brothers struggle with the SAT is “the subtle institutional structural racism of the white gaze,” and not the fact that we study a bit less for the exam, then why ever bother to study more?
RELATED: 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery

NO MAINSTREAM HISTORIAN CONTACTED FOR THE 1619 PROJECT

• "Out of the Revolution came an anti-slavery ethos, which never disappeared": Pulitzer Prize Winner James McPherson Confirms that No Mainstream Historian Was Contacted by the NYT for Its 1619 History Project

• Gordon Wood: "The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world" — another Pulitzer-Winning Historian Had No Warning about the NYT's 1619 Project

• A Black Political Scientist "didn’t know about the 1619 Project until it came out"; "These people are kind of just making it up as they go"

• Clayborne Carson: Another Black Historian Kept in the Dark About 1619

• If historians did not hear of the NYT's history (sic) plan, chances are great that the 1619 Project was being deliberately kept a tight secret

• Oxford Historian Richard Carwardine: 1619 is “a preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past”

• World Socialists: "the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history" by the New York Times, aka "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party"

THE NEW YORK TIMES OR THE NEW "WOKE" TIMES?

• Dan Gainor on 1619 and rewriting history: "To the Left elite like the NY Times, there’s no narrative they want to destroy more than American exceptionalism"

• Utterly preposterous claims: The 1619 project is a cynical political ploy, aimed at piercing the heart of the American understanding of justice

From Washington to Grant, not a single American deserves an iota of gratitude, or even understanding, from Nikole Hannah-Jones; however, modern autocrats, if leftist and foreign, aren't "all bad"

• One of the Main Sources for the NYT's 1619 Project Is a Career Communist Propagandist who Defends Stalinism

• A Pulitzer Prize?! Among the 1619 Defenders Is "a Fringe Academic" with "a Fetish for Authoritarian Terror" and "a Soft Spot" for Mugabe, Castro, and Even Stalin

• Influenced by Farrakhan's Nation of Islam?! 1619 Project's History "Expert" Believes the Aztecs' Pyramids Were Built with Help from Africans Who Crossed the Atlantic Prior to the "Barbaric Devils" of Columbus (Whom She Likens to Hitler)

• 1793, 1776, or 1619: Is the New York Times Distinguishable from Teen Vogue? Is It Living in a Parallel Universe? Or Is It Simply Losing Its Mind in an Industry-Wide Nervous Breakdown?

• No longer America's "newspaper of record," the "New Woke Times" is now but a college campus paper, where kids like 1619 writer Nikole Hannah-Jones run the asylum and determine what news is fit to print

• The Departure of Bari Weiss: "Propagandists", Ethical Collapse, and the "New McCarthyism" — "The radical left are running" the New York Times, "and no dissent is tolerated"

• "Full of left-wing sophomoric drivel": The New York Times — already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series — promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more

• "Deeply Ashamed" of the… New York Times (!),  An Oblivious Founder of the Error-Ridden 1619 Project Uses Words that Have to Be Seen to Be Believed ("We as a News Organization Should Not Be Running Something That Is Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked")

• Allen C Guelzo: The New York Times offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory

• The 1619 Project is an exercise in religious indoctrination: Ignoring, downplaying, or rewriting the history of 1861 to 1865, the Left and the NYT must minimize, downplay, or ignore the deaths of 620,000 Americans

• 1619: It takes an absurdly blind fanaticism to insist that today’s free and prosperous America is rotten and institutionally oppressive

• The MSM newsrooms and their public shaming terror campaigns — the "bullying campus Marxism" is closer to cult religion than politics: Unceasingly searching out thoughtcrime, the American left has lost its mind

Fake But Accurate: The People Behind the NYT's 1619 Project Make a "Small" Clarification, But Only Begrudgingly and Half-Heartedly, Because Said Mistake Actually Undermines The 1619 Project's Entire Premise


THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

• The Collapse of the Fourth Estate by Peter Wood: No one has been able to identify a single leader, soldier, or supporter of the Revolution who wanted to protect his right to hold slaves (A declaration that slavery is the founding institution of America and the center of everything important in our history is a ground-breaking claim, of the same type as claims that America condones rape culture, that 9/11 was an inside job, that vaccinations cause autism, that the Moon landing was a hoax, or that ancient astronauts built the pyramids)

• Mary Beth Norton:  In 1774, a year before Dunmore's proclamation, Americans had already in fact become independent

• Most of the founders, including Thomas Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, writes Rick Atkinson, despite the fact that many of them owned slaves

• Leslie Harris: Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies (even the NYT's fact-checker on the 1619 Project disagrees with its "conclusions": "It took 60 more years for the British government to finally end slavery in its Caribbean colonies")

• Sean Wilentz on 1619: the movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787, largely inspired by… American (!) antislavery opinion that had arisen in the 1760s and 1770s

• 1619 & Slavery's Fatal Lie: it is more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn't slavery but the effort to abolish it

• 1619 & 1772: Most of the founders, including Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, despite many of them owning slaves; And Britain would remain the world's foremost slave-trading nation into the nineteenth century

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: Slavery was legal in Britain in 1776, and it remained so in all overseas British colonies until 1833

• Not 1619 but 1641: In Fact, the American Revolution of 1776 Sought to Avoid the Excesses of the English Revolution Over a Century Earlier

• James Oakes on 1619: "Slavery made the slaveholders rich; But it made the South poor; And it didn’t make the North rich — So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth"

• One of the steps of defeating truth is to destroy evidence of the truth, says Bob Woodson; Because the North's Civil War statues — as well as American history itself — are evidence of America's redemption from slavery, it's important for the Left to remove evidence of the truth

TEACHING GENERATIONS OF KIDS FALSEHOODS ABOUT THE U.S.

• 1619: No wonder this place is crawling with young socialists and America-haters — the utter failure of the U.S. educational system to teach the history of America’s founding

• 1619: Invariably Taking the Progressive Side — The Ratio of Democratic to Republican Voter Registration in History Departments is More than 33 to 1

• Denying the grandeur of the nation’s founding—Wilfred McClay on 1619: "Most of my students are shocked to learn that that slavery is not uniquely American"

Inciting Hate Already in Kindergarten: 1619 "Education" Is Part of Far-Left Indoctrination by People Who Hate America to Kids in College, in School, and Even in Elementary Classes

• "Distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods": Where does the 1619 project state that Africans themselves were central players in the slave trade? That's right: Nowhere

• John Podhoretz on 1619: the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith

• The 1619 Africans in Virginia were not ‘enslaved’, a black historian points out; they were indentured servants — just like the majority of European whites were

"Two thirds of the people, white as well as black, who crossed the Atlantic in the first 200 years are indentured servants" notes Dolores Janiewski; "The poor people, black and white, share common interests"

LAST BUT NOT LEAST…

Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"

• Victoria Bynum on 1619 and a NYT writer's "ignorance of history": "As dehumanizing and brutal as slavery was, the institution was not a giant concentration camp"

• Dennis Prager: The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks

• The Secret About the Black Lives Matter Outfit; In Fact, Its Name Ought to Be BSD or BAD

• The Real Reason Why Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Land O'Lakes Maid Must Vanish

• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History

Who, Exactly, Is It Who Should Apologize for Slavery and Make Reparations? America? The South? The Descendants of the Planters? …

• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619

You Better Fact-Check Your Text Messages Before Sending Them; Here Is Why

If I am still alive today, it's only because
in the nick of time, I prevented myself
from committing an irreparable gaffe
 
The other day, on Facebook or some
such social media, I came upon a picture
of a female friend (a pretty lass, too)
outside in her garden
 
She was wearing a heavy coat,
and it looked like it was freezing,
so I decided to send her a text:

You look cold!

Except that these days, I hardly type anymore;
I dictate into the phone, and the text comes out
the way I say it — usually.



Incidentally, every punctuation mark must
be dictated too, so I get a lot of ribbing from
my friends — no wonder one of them calls me
Mr. Comma while another calls me New Line
New Line! — when they hear me dictate
a sentence (?!) like
What the journalist asked was colon open quote Did you know that California comma Texas comma Florida comma and New York are the largest states in the USA question mark end quote new line new line The amazed citizen open parenthesis who hails from Illinois close parenthesis answered colon open quote I had no idea exclamation mark exclamation mark exclamation mark end quote
(Of course, even if you are not mumbling,
there is the risk of a "typo" — just a day or two ago,
a friend told me he had no idea what I was talking about, 
turns out that the word "statist" in my SMS had ended up as "status" — 
so you better fact-check yourself)
 
Back to my brush with death:
My sentence was so short and uncontroversial
that I hardly took a second look at it
 
Right before I hit the Send button,
I did fact-check myself, and then
I nearly spit my coffee all over the screen.
 
Can you imagine how my friend would have
reacted if she had received a message reading:
"You look old"?!
 
So raise your coffee mug, and drink a toast 
to your friend Erik, who managed to save
his life in the nick of time.

Monday, May 04, 2020

The Lockdown Is Not Only Useless, Says Veteran Epidemiologist; It Is Counterproductive


For a century or more, one thing that has been so much taken for granted that it is not even a subject of contention anywhere in the world is that three things that are essential for a healthy body and soul as well as in the fight against most, if not all, diseases, are: 1) fresh air, 2) sunshine, and 3) exercise. So what is the deal with the lockdown by keeping us cooped inside our homes?

Actually, the lockdowns are not just useless, reports Daniel Payne at the College Fix, quoting a veteran scholar of epidemiology. They are counterproductive.

The former head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at the Rockefeller University in New York City
has warned that the ongoing lockdowns throughout the United States and the rest of the world are almost certainly just prolonging the coronavirus outbreak rather than doing anything to truly mitigate it.

Knut Wittkowski … said in an interview with the Press and the Public Project that the coronavirus could be “exterminated” if we permitted most people to lead normal lives and sheltered the most vulnerable parts of society until the danger had passed.

“[W]hat people are trying to do is flatten the curve. I don’t really know why. But, what happens is if you flatten the curve, you also prolong, to widen it, and it takes more time. And I don’t see a good reason for a respiratory disease to stay in the population longer than necessary,” he said.

With all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity. About 80% of the people need to have had contact with the virus, and the majority of them won’t even have recognized that they were infected, or they had very, very mild symptoms, especially if they are children. So, it’s very important to keep the schools open and kids mingling to spread the virus to get herd immunity as fast as possible, and then the elderly people, who should be separated, and the nursing homes should be closed during that time, can come back and meet their children and grandchildren after about 4 weeks when the virus has been exterminated,” he added.

Wittkowski argued that the standard cycle of respiratory diseases is a two-week outbreak, including a peak, after which “it’s gone.” He pointed out that even in a regime of “social distancing,” the virus will still find ways to spread, just more slowly:
You cannot stop the spread of a respiratory disease within a family, and you cannot stop it from spreading with neighbors, with people who are delivering, who are physicians—anybody. People are social, and even in times of social distancing, they have contacts, and any of those contacts could spread the disease. It will go slowly, and so it will not build up herd immunity, but it will happen. And it will go on forever unless we let it go.
Asked about Anthony Fauci, the White House medical expert who for weeks has been predicting significant numbers of COVID-19 deaths in America as well as major ongoing disruptions to daily life possibly for years, Wittkowski replied:
“Well, I’m not paid by the government, so I’m entitled to actually do science.”

Wizard of Id: Another Prescient Cartoon Who Seems to Foretell the Coronavirus Outbreak


Another cartoonist, besides Scott Adams, with an uncanny sense of timing, is the Wizard of Id's Mason Mastroianni who manages to capture the Coronavirus scare in a February 27 cartoon. What is "spooky", as one reader writes below, is to bear in mind that all cartoons are written and drawn probably a month or two before publication…
flagmichael  
The spooky thing is knowing this strip was drawn long enough ago for the “novel coronavirus 2019” not to be a widespread fear. Certainly before Iran’s deputy health minister insisted there was no major problem in Iran as he displayed his symptoms.
See also: Dilbert

Thursday, April 30, 2020

We have to be safe! The coronavirus shutdown is airport security for the whole country


What do you think of the media's coverage of the Wuhan virus?
asks Ann Coulter
It's like a nonstop "War of the Worlds" broadcast, which in 1938 panicked more than a million Americans into believing Martians had landed in New Jersey, sending people fleeing to the mountains, loading their shotguns and barricading their homes. And that was a single radio broadcast!

Today we have nearly all of media -- which I notice are doing fantastically well during the crisis -- terrifying the public about an apparently indestructible, omnipresent virus.

You don't think the China virus is as dangerous as they say?

 … we know virtually nothing about this virus: why it kills, what stops it, how it's transmitted.

Actually, we know one very important thing: By total serendipity, the Wuhan virus mostly kills people over the age of 70. Nearly 80 percent of all coronavirus deaths in the U.S. are of people over 70 years old.

What about Italy?

About 80 percent of the dead were over 70.

That sounds a little callous.

Not at all. It's a stroke of good luck! We'd be lucky if the virus targeted any specific group -- the nearsighted, left-handers, golfers -- because that would allow us to concentrate protections on that one group.

But it's doubly good news because the Wuhan targets people who are mostly out of the workforce anyway. And we already have their names and addresses! How about the feds send a box of masks along with Social Security checks every month?

How will you get Democratic governors to go along with that?

Liberals can triple down on all their fascist stuff -- as long as it's limited to the vulnerable.

Over 65? You need a note from the governor to leave your home!

Fine! But let the rest of us get back to work.

Why haven't they done this already?

Because that wouldn't have the effect of wrecking the economy before the election.

 … Liberals enjoy controlling people, especially with enragingly nonsensical rules.

I thought Trump was the authoritarian!

No, he's the lazy, narcissistic blowhard. Liberals are the authoritarians.

The shutdown is airport security for the whole country. Nineteen Muslim immigrants flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and suddenly little old ladies from Oklahoma had to be goosed at airports. We have to be safe!

A horrible Chinese virus sweeps the planet, which is devastating to older people but virtually harmless to the young -- and the entire country has to be shut down. We have to be safe!

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

The 1619 Project is an exercise in religious indoctrination: ignoring, downplaying, or rewriting the history of 1861 to 1865, the Left and the NYT must minimize, downplay, or ignore the deaths of 620,000 Americans


"The United States very literally paid an atoning sacrifice for the sin of slavery," writes Erick Erickson in a Resurgent article titled The Atoning Sacrifice of the Union Soldiers Means Nothing to the New York Times’ 1619 Project: "… the Civil War … was divine wrath poured out on the nation for enslaving a population. While the New York Times may get there, its revisionist, reframing exercise right now totally misses all of that. In fact, the progressive rhetoric of the day and calls for reparations from Democrat politicians are poured out into a void of willful ignorance as they ignore the body count of mostly white Union soldiers who died that slavery might end. They paid reparations with their lives, The nation lost 2% of its male population."

Remember that as many Americans died during four years in the 1860s as in all wars during the 20th century combined. So I would tend to agree with all that Erick Erickson writes (which is why I reference his Resurgent article below), but something that doesn't always seem to be pointed out lately, in regards to the 1619 Project, is that the South's numerous dead — one Southern man of fighting age in four lost his life during the conflict — also means that the South was punished for slavery.

So the dead from the North and the dead from the South are two sides of the same coin: Why are reparations necessary 150 years (!) after slavery ended when hundreds of thousands of Northern fathers had to bury their sons for atoning for slavery while hundreds of thousands of Southern fathers and mothers had to bury their sons for being punished for slavery?
 … Through Christ shedding blood, God can overlook our sins because they were placed on Christ.

This is a concept Abraham Lincoln knew well and it is one he applied to the Civil War. In his second inaugural, Lincoln said,
Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
It gets to the idea of the blood being shed on the battlefield being an atoning sacrifice for the nation’s original sin. The Union soldiers were the propitiation for our national sin. The Battle Hymn of the Republic quite exquisitely wraps around the whole idea of the War being about atonement, propitiation, and making right with God.

620,000 Americans lost their lives in the Civil War. On the Union side, 596,670 soldiers were killed, wounded, captured, or went missing in action. 490,309 Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, captured, or went missing in action.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
The United States very literally paid an atoning sacrifice for the sin of slavery. Union preachers of the day and the President of the United States came to see the war in that light. Prior to the Civil War, more and more prominent Americans began discussing it in that light. The war was divine wrath poured out on the nation for enslaving a population.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
While the New York Times may get there, its revisionist, reframing exercise right now totally misses all of that. In fact, the progressive rhetoric of the day and calls for reparations from Democrat politicians are poured out into a void of willful ignorance as they ignore the body count of mostly white Union soldiers who died that slavery might end.

They paid reparations with their lives, The nation lost 2% of its male population.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal”;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.
The New York Times and progressives have no concept of grace. Secular progressivism has, in fact, become a religion of its own. It has its own sacraments in the form of abortion and activism. It has its own tenets accepted not by fact or science, but by faith, including that boys can become girls. It has its own ecclesiology in how it conducts protest and activism. It has its own priests in the form of Planned Parenthood and other celebrities. It has its own eschatology in how the world will end — always badly in climate change. It has its own plan of salvation in that the saved cannot be saved unless those who dissent from the religion are silenced as deniers, haters, bigots, or the like. Unlike Christianity wherein the destruction of the wicked happens, but is not necessary for the salvation of any one person, the wicked must always perish for the righteous to be saved in progressivism. This is why leftwing totalitarian regimes always end in mass murder, by the way.

What progressivism lacks are two things. It lacks a sense of history. To have one would be to root progressivism, but an ideology always on the move, even against itself, cannot be rooted. It also, like all religions outside Christianity, lacks a concept of grace.

Secular progressives show no grace and very little mercy to those inside and outside their religion. One must always convert to new levels of wokeness or be exposed as a heretic.
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
Into this, the 1619 Project of the New York Times is an exercise in religious indoctrination. It is a systematic theology for wokeness. It is also a confession of faith by which heretics can be determined, outed, and marginalized.

Should one take any issue with the claims made, no matter how fictitious or devoid of historic accuracy, that person can be labeled a white supremacist, or an other destined to be cast out of the conversation. Should one agree with the revisionist reframing, but disagree on the solutions, that person too can be cast out for not doing their fair share to make a heaven on earth.

To accomplish all of this, what the left and the Times must do is ignore, downplay, or rewrite the history of 1861 to 1865. They must minimize, downplay, or ignore the deaths of 620,000 men, the majority of whom died, as the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” declares, “to make men free.”
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Our God is marching on
RELATED: 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: quite a few contemporary Black problems have very little to do with slavery

NO MAINSTREAM HISTORIAN CONTACTED FOR THE 1619 PROJECT

• "Out of the Revolution came an anti-slavery ethos, which never disappeared": Pulitzer Prize Winner James McPherson Confirms that No Mainstream Historian Was Contacted by the NYT for Its 1619 History Project

• Gordon Wood: "The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world" — another Pulitzer-Winning Historian Had No Warning about the NYT's 1619 Project

• A Black Political Scientist "didn’t know about the 1619 Project until it came out"; "These people are kind of just making it up as they go"

• Clayborne Carson: Another Black Historian Kept in the Dark About 1619

• If historians did not hear of the NYT's history (sic) plan, chances are great that the 1619 Project was being deliberately kept a tight secret

• Oxford Historian Richard Carwardine: 1619 is “a preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past”

• World Socialists: "the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history" by the New York Times, aka "the mouthpiece of the Democratic Party"

THE NEW YORK TIMES OR THE NEW "WOKE" TIMES?

• Dan Gainor on 1619 and rewriting history: "To the Left elite like the NY Times, there’s no narrative they want to destroy more than American exceptionalism"

• Utterly preposterous claims: The 1619 project is a cynical political ploy, aimed at piercing the heart of the American understanding of justice

From Washington to Grant, not a single American deserves an iota of gratitude, or even understanding, from Nikole Hannah-Jones; however, modern autocrats, if leftist and foreign, aren't "all bad"

• One of the Main Sources for the NYT's 1619 Project Is a Career Communist Propagandist who Defends Stalinism

• A Pulitzer Prize?! Among the 1619 Defenders Is "a Fringe Academic" with "a Fetish for Authoritarian Terror" and "a Soft Spot" for Mugabe, Castro, and Even Stalin

• Influenced by Farrakhan's Nation of Islam?! 1619 Project's History "Expert" Believes the Aztecs' Pyramids Were Built with Help from Africans Who Crossed the Atlantic Prior to the "Barbaric Devils" of Columbus (Whom She Likens to Hitler)

• 1793, 1776, or 1619: Is the New York Times Distinguishable from Teen Vogue? Is It Living in a Parallel Universe? Or Is It Simply Losing Its Mind in an Industry-Wide Nervous Breakdown?

• No longer America's "newspaper of record," the "New Woke Times" is now but a college campus paper, where kids like 1619 writer Nikole Hannah-Jones run the asylum and determine what news is fit to print

• The Departure of Bari Weiss: "Propagandists", Ethical Collapse, and the "New McCarthyism" — "The radical left are running" the New York Times, "and no dissent is tolerated"

• "Full of left-wing sophomoric drivel": The New York Times — already drowning in a fantasy-land of alternately running pro-Soviet Union apologia and their anti-American founding “1619 Project” series — promises to narrow what they view as acceptable opinion even more

• "Deeply Ashamed" of the… New York Times (!),  An Oblivious Founder of the Error-Ridden 1619 Project Uses Words that Have to Be Seen to Be Believed ("We as a News Organization Should Not Be Running Something That Is Offering Misinformation to the Public, Unchecked")

• Allen C Guelzo: The New York Times offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory

• The 1619 Project is an exercise in religious indoctrination: Ignoring, downplaying, or rewriting the history of 1861 to 1865, the Left and the NYT must minimize, downplay, or ignore the deaths of 620,000 Americans

• 1619: It takes an absurdly blind fanaticism to insist that today’s free and prosperous America is rotten and institutionally oppressive

• The MSM newsrooms and their public shaming terror campaigns — the "bullying campus Marxism" is closer to cult religion than politics: Unceasingly searching out thoughtcrime, the American left has lost its mind

Fake But Accurate: The People Behind the NYT's 1619 Project Make a "Small" Clarification, But Only Begrudgingly and Half-Heartedly, Because Said Mistake Actually Undermines The 1619 Project's Entire Premise


THE REVOLUTION OF THE 1770s

• The Collapse of the Fourth Estate by Peter Wood: No one has been able to identify a single leader, soldier, or supporter of the Revolution who wanted to protect his right to hold slaves (A declaration that slavery is the founding institution of America and the center of everything important in our history is a ground-breaking claim, of the same type as claims that America condones rape culture, that 9/11 was an inside job, that vaccinations cause autism, that the Moon landing was a hoax, or that ancient astronauts built the pyramids)

• Mary Beth Norton:  In 1774, a year before Dunmore's proclamation, Americans had already in fact become independent

• Most of the founders, including Thomas Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, writes Rick Atkinson, despite the fact that many of them owned slaves

• Leslie Harris: Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies (even the NYT's fact-checker on the 1619 Project disagrees with its "conclusions": "It took 60 more years for the British government to finally end slavery in its Caribbean colonies")

• Sean Wilentz on 1619: the movement in London to abolish the slave trade formed only in 1787, largely inspired by… American (!) antislavery opinion that had arisen in the 1760s and 1770s

• 1619 & Slavery's Fatal Lie: it is more accurate to say that what makes America unique isn't slavery but the effort to abolish it

• 1619 & 1772: Most of the founders, including Jefferson, opposed slavery’s continued existence, despite many of them owning slaves; And Britain would remain the world's foremost slave-trading nation into the nineteenth century

• Wilfred Reilly on 1619: Slavery was legal in Britain in 1776, and it remained so in all overseas British colonies until 1833

• Not 1619 but 1641: In Fact, the American Revolution of 1776 Sought to Avoid the Excesses of the English Revolution Over a Century Earlier

• James Oakes on 1619: "Slavery made the slaveholders rich; But it made the South poor; And it didn’t make the North rich — So the legacy of slavery is poverty, not wealth"

• One of the steps of defeating truth is to destroy evidence of the truth, says Bob Woodson; Because the North's Civil War statues — as well as American history itself — are evidence of America's redemption from slavery, it's important for the Left to remove evidence of the truth

TEACHING GENERATIONS OF KIDS FALSEHOODS ABOUT THE U.S.

• 1619: No wonder this place is crawling with young socialists and America-haters — the utter failure of the U.S. educational system to teach the history of America’s founding

• 1619: Invariably Taking the Progressive Side — The Ratio of Democratic to Republican Voter Registration in History Departments is More than 33 to 1

• Denying the grandeur of the nation’s founding—Wilfred McClay on 1619: "Most of my students are shocked to learn that that slavery is not uniquely American"

Inciting Hate Already in Kindergarten: 1619 "Education" Is Part of Far-Left Indoctrination by People Who Hate America to Kids in College, in School, and Even in Elementary Classes

• "Distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehoods": Where does the 1619 project state that Africans themselves were central players in the slave trade? That's right: Nowhere

• John Podhoretz on 1619: the idea of reducing US history to the fact that some people owned slaves is a reductio ad absurdum and the definition of bad faith

• The 1619 Africans in Virginia were not ‘enslaved’, a black historian points out; they were indentured servants — just like the majority of European whites were

"Two thirds of the people, white as well as black, who crossed the Atlantic in the first 200 years are indentured servants" notes Dolores Janiewski; "The poor people, black and white, share common interests"

LAST BUT NOT LEAST…

Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"

• Victoria Bynum on 1619 and a NYT writer's "ignorance of history": "As dehumanizing and brutal as slavery was, the institution was not a giant concentration camp"

• Dennis Prager: The Left Couldn't Care Less About Blacks

• The Secret About the Black Lives Matter Outfit; In Fact, Its Name Ought to Be BSD or BAD

• The Real Reason Why Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and the Land O'Lakes Maid Must Vanish

• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History

Who, Exactly, Is It Who Should Apologize for Slavery and Make Reparations? America? The South? The Descendants of the Planters? …

• Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619

Monday, April 27, 2020

Ignore the Mass Hysteria, Ms. Prime Minister, and Break the Chains of the Danish People


A shortened version of No Pasarán's post on the Coronavirus pandemic appeared in the Danish newspaper Villabyerne.
DEBAT: Ignorer massehysteriet, Moder Mette, og frigiv folket
Villabyerne - 27. april 2020
Af Erik Svane
Lider Danmark igen af massehysteri? Regelmæssigt får vi nye panikfremkaldende oplysninger om, at f.eks. dødstallet i Spanien nu er vokset til 18.000! Det giver indtryk af en tsunami.

Men hvorfor får vi aldrig besked om procentdelen vedrørende de adskillige aldersgrupper, hvilket ellers er normen for alle andre sygdomme (f.eks. kræft)?

Så vidt jeg ved, er der kun et eneste land, der har offentliggjort procenttal for aldersgrupperne, og disse bekræfter rygterne: "De fleste af Israels dødsfald fra coronavirus har været ældre mænd med andre medicinske tilstande ... kun 6 % er under 60 år, [og] gennemsnitsalderen for Israels døde var 79,8 år gammel."

Det giver et helt andet billede, hvis det viser sig, at gennemsnitsalderen af de døde skulle også i andre lande være omkring 80. De fleste inficerede overlever og bliver raske igen. I så fald, hvorfor skal hele samfundet så lukkes ned? Hvorfor skal alle sidde i husarrest? Hvorfor skal hele økonomien ødelægges?

Hvis det er muligt at stå i kø i et supermarked eller i et apotek og være ansvarlig, så skulle det være muligt at gøre det samme i en skov, på en strand, i en tøjforretning, eller på Københavns gader.
Jeg siger ikke, at alle regeringernes beslutninger er forgæves, men en borger er er voksent menneske, Moder Mette, og ikke et barn, som mangler sund fornuft.

Jamen, det er vigtigt, at vi alle skal være solidariske, protesterer man.

Men økonomien har også en humanistisk side: Kan isolationisme, husarrest og arbejdsløshed ikke føre til nød, depression, hjerteanfald, alkoholisme eller endog selvmord?

Det hverken hjælper, eller er solidarisk med de inficerede, at de raske skal deltage i at ødelægge et lands økonomi.
Tilbyd de ældre og dem med svage immunsystemer karantæne, Moder Mette, og sæt resten af befolkningen fri til at komme tilbage til initiativ og arbejde.