…from the last few days on social media….
As anyone may have noticed, I’m not very big into “protests.” I turned on the idea of mass protest pretty thoroughly when I stumbled into Seattle’s 1999 WTO protests by accident, and then watched (from a safe distance) as the protests spiraled into mass violence.
Since I also opposed the WTO, you might think I would have been simpatico with the protesters. But no: they were mainly left-anarchist poseur hippie boys and their earnest, professional girlfriends, spouting contradictory and incoherent gibberish, unlearned and anti-factual and rather stupid.
The biggest difference never receives official attention: “right-wing” protests almost never lead to violence, “left-wing” protests almost always do.
This wasn’t always the case, and much depends upon how you define left and right, which I blogged about once again today. But in recent memory, left-wing protest tends to lead to rioting.
Remember just a few months and then weeks ago normal Americans — mostly but not all white — were promoting the Second Amendment in Virginia and then protesting the lockdowns in Michigan? In both cases the major media freaked over the weaponry on display. But there was zero to scant violence, during and after.
The main complaints were “I saw a Confederate Flag!” and “They aren’t social distancing!”
But media folks — they don’t mind seeing commie and anarchist flags, pointing their cameras elsewhere, and I haven’t heard any umbrage taken about the protesters in Minneapolis not wearing medical masks.
There were mask-wearers, of course, but those appeared to be rioters — and the Men in Black who were instigating mayhem.
So, one reason there may be violence associated with left-wing protests is that right-wingers sabotage them. But that isn’t the full story, for the anarchists at the WTO riots, and antifa and BAMN at more recent protests, are very, very left-wing, and very, very violent.
And do a lot of instigating.
While being institutionally supported by George Soros.
Further, masses of leftists seem more violent than masses of rightists.
The lack of objective reporting by the press is interesting.
It could be ideological: we rah-rah our side, we boo their side!
But it may be more craven: the media likes to cover violence, so encourages the protests that give corporate heads the stories that help with the bottom line.
I have never denied that SARS-CoV-2 is extremely dangerous. Why, it makes even the uninfected go mad.
Does it need to be said? No matter who instigates a destructive riot, riots are bad. No matter who casts the first stone, so to speak, does not let off the hook the second thrower, or the third, or the fourth. We can make judgments about people who attack innocent people and their property. Condemnation is the standard, traditional, and quite justified judgment.
“Outside instigators of violence” should worry those who think their protests are legitimate. If they go ahead and protest, and do not patrol their ranks, and their peaceful protest breaks out into looting and arson and street violence, then that’s a tragedy. If, however, every time a protest of your cause ends up that way, and yet you organize protests, you become complicit (to some extent) in the horrors of the crime wave.
I have seen credible (but not certain) accusations of instigation to violence in Minneapolis and elsewhere of undercover/off-duty police and of antifa and other anarchist groups, and much speculation about criminals, political groups, etc. What if it were a perfect storm of influences, from left, right and center?
Would it matter to protesters? If what they do is set off violence, then what they do is at best counter-productive.
Something other than protests need to be thought. I have suggestions.
But because they are rational suggestions, irrational people will not engage in them, now, will they?
Defending “peaceful protest” is fine, but if it always ends up violent, the defenses are inapposite.
Remember Martin Luther King, Jr.? Somehow, he took a lot of care to make his marches peaceful.
Today’s protests generally repudiate the principles of MLK. Yet everyone claims to admire him.
Par for the current course, though: seemingly earnest pieties are regularly repudiated in action.
Were you aware that notorious pick-up artist Roosh V. has repudiated his past and now preaches traditional Christian ethics?
I first became aware of him as he began undergoing his transition. It has been interesting to watch. I was of course aware of “the game” for many years, but had never really followed it. Roosh, however, is an interesting case.
So, the challenge is here: the famous anti-HCQ study is probably a fraud.
I had seen someone else make the case yesterday. On Twitter or Gab. Somebody else other than this linked author who deals with data on a regular basis was utterly incredulous about the data set described:
If you’re following at all the search for COVID-19 treatments, and possibly even if not, you will have seen the flurry of media coverage for the observational study in The Lancet ‘Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis. It made the news not least because hydroxychloroquine is the drug President Trump says he is taking in the belief that it will reduce his chance of catching COVID-19. This view is not backed up evidence until some randomised trials come in. Getting in before the trials, the Lancet study used propensity score matching to try to control for the non-random treatment. It found that taking hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine were associated with an increased risk of heart problems.
Peter Ellis, “A health data firm making extraordinary claims about its data,” free range statistics, May 30, 2020.
I am highly skeptical of the powers of hydroxychloroquine with relation to COVID-19 (‘skeptical’ in the sense that I have suspended judgement for now – there simply isn’t evidence either way). But I want the test of its properties to be done properly, with random controlled trials. And if we are to use observational studies (which I do not object to, they just aren’t as useful as an experiment where you can manipulate the treatment), they have to use real data.
The data in that study, and in at least one preprint on a second treatment, were provided by an Illinois firm called Surgisphere. Allegedly the data represents the treatment and health outcomes of 96,032 patients from 671 hospitals in six continents. However, there is simply no plausible way I can think of that the data are real.
I’ll say that again – I believe with very high probability the data behind that high profile, high consequence Lancet study are completely fabricated.
So, a major journal accepts a study on a highly politicized subject and — if this charge holds — scandal ensues.
This is par for the postmodern course, from what I can tell. We do not have as much actual science going on as we are led to believe. Much of it is scientism — pseudoscience. I assume you are aware of the replicability problem that has been dogging the heels of institutional science for the last decade. Many journals have also become corrupt or, at best, inefficient. (I just read the abstract of a paper co-authored by Dan Klein about “the paucity of theory in the Journal of Economic Theory.” Hilarious.) Much of the academic world has lost its way. The “scientific method” is not in practice when the “public testing” element is institutionally scuttled.
The problem, I believe, is government funding. For that puts science into the whorl of special interest incentives, and makes the subject area liable to something very much like “regulatory capture.”
Whole domains of science seem untrustworthy to me:
climatology
paleontology
ancient history
economics
. . . I could go on and on.
Only when academics are held accountable on objective grounds can they be saved from corruption by politics and funding. And since the academy is by definition an exclusionary institution, accountability has to be imposed. It is imperative that non-academics speak up.
And let us be frank: this case is in part about TDS.
To what extent is COVID-19 panic driven by class insecurities? Most illnesses the well-off can avoid or pay for. The panic began when being rich did not seem to help, while lockdown mania grew as it became clear that the well-off were less negatively affected than the proletarian middle and lower income groups.
twv
Wirkman Comment 