The Activists Protesting the Death of George Floyd Are Doing Everything Wrong

I made the mistake of subjecting myself to the viral video starring Tamika Mallory of formerly of Women’s March fame. She gave an extended diatribe about the protests (and riots and looting) that happened in response to the death of George Floyd. She claimed that America looted its wealth from black people and Native Americans. She claimed that “mental illness” had been inflicted on black people by the system. She claimed that the state preferred to “preserve a white nationalist and white supremacist mindset.” And she claimed that it’s OK to burn down Target, because Target should be on the streets with her. Amongst other things.

There’s a lot to unpack there. For starters, the primary thing worth noting is that the speech (as is typical of social justice activists) makes dozens of accusations without offering real proof. For example, I’ve noted before that the “America was stolen” narrative is a reductive and lazy view of American history. Reality is far more complicated than the simple story social justice activists tell themselves. But this is frequently asserted as irrefutable fact by the more radical members of the left.

As for some of the other inanities she pushed, let’s start with this idea that America has inflicted mental illness on black people. This is a common talking point intended to explain away things like higher crime rates or rates of single motherhood (a factor that has been shown to lead to higher crime rates) that a normal person would imagine is a failure of personal responsibility. The idea is that because the system is the way it is, these behaviors have actually been inflicted on black people. It’s a fairly transparent way to deflect blame and responsibility.

This is obviously ridiculous, since studies show that about 15% of the black male population (the numbers are obviously smaller for women) have spent time in prison. So it sure looks like the overwhelming majority of black people are quite capable of avoiding criminal behavior. It’s kind of hard to argue that a behavior is inflicted on a community when so many appear immune to it.

But there actually is one form of mental illness that is being inflicted on the black community. It happens every time she and people like her insist that America is white supremacist and systemically racist. If you say this often enough, even when all of the empirical evidence seems to indicate the literal opposite, people will start to believe it. This is a great way to increase anxiety amongst black people.

I remember something the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt once said. He noted that “trigger warnings” actually increase anxiety. One example he provided was that when test subjects were warned that they were entering a dangerous neighborhood, their anxiety increased. Trigger warnings don’t set people at ease. They make things worse.

So what do we suppose happens to black people when we tell them their nation is racist? Serious anxiety, that’s what. Such claims just encourage black people to assume the system is rigged, and thus not put forward the effort necessary to achieve something. This is called a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the mental illness that is being inflicted on black people. Although, clearly not all of them.

And the idea that America is white supremacist and white nationalist is patently absurd. We’ve worked harder than most countries to reduce racism. And I find it ironic that Tamika Mallory, who accuses all of America of being white supremacist, has actual ties to a hate group. Specifically, the Nation of Islam, one of the few black supremacist groups recognized by the Southern Poverty Law Center. This is one of the reasons she was forced out of the Women’s March.

Oftentimes when activists throw around nebulous terms such as “White Supremacy”, and “Systemic Racism” are just code for economic inequalities between races. The mistake made by people who utter these pat phrases is that they presume that inequality must be the result of injustice. This is so intellectually lazy that it’s painful. More serious critical thinkers will acknowledge that systemic issues can contribute to inequality. But they would also have to acknowledge that personal choices also contribute. Like, say, having kids out of wedlock.

And lastly, the idea that Target should be in the streets with the activists is the most entitled thing I’ve ever heard. Particularly because the reason they aren’t getting support from many of us is their own fault. They took an incident on which there was near 100% agreement on, and started pushing absurd, loony, radical politics into it which immediately drove away anyone with an ounce of sense. And even more of us were repelled when the fires broke out.

But I think this is actually all of secondary importance. The most important takeaway from the lengthy harangue is that very few real solutions were offered. Apart from “arrest the cops”, by which she means arrest cops all over the country who unjustly kill a black person. Of course, since 235 black people were killed by cops last year (the overwhelming majority of which were justified) that wouldn’t result in many arrests. Apart from that one little tidbit, there’s no explanation from her of how to solve “white supremacy” and so forth.

Listening to the protestors isn’t much more helpful. Apart from the typical “Dismantle the Patriarchy” and “Dismantle White Supremacy” stuff, the only specific policy request I saw was
“Defund the Police.”. Which is a clear demonstration of the protester’s limited grasp on reality. Defunding the police would cause a surge in crime, most of which would be concentrated in minority communities. This isn’t something you do if you think Black Lives Matter™. Police reform would require an investment in better recruitment and training and certain equipment (body cams, etc.) which would cost money. So reform probably requires more money, not less.

Apart from these minor demands, I see very little in the way of specific policy goals. This reminds me of the Occupy movement, although that was a bit different since that movement seemed to have millions of various tiny demands from the assorted splinter factions that showed up to its rallies. This movement doesn’t appear to have any significant, tangible demands at all. But the thing they do have in common with Occupy is that there is no cohesive message.

This ambiguity manifested in the somewhat ill-fated discussion on The Breakfast Club between Charlamagne Tha God and Rush Limbaugh. I was pleased that it wasn’t a complete $#!+show. But poor old Charlamagne did a great job of showing everything that’s wrong with the rhetoric of the activists currently in the street.

He made the mistake of claiming that because of white privilege, what happened to George Floyd would not happen to a white man. Except, that it did happen. To Tony Timpa in Dallas. Who was also cuffed and pinned to the ground, and eventually died. This didn’t make national news, and the cops involved were convicted of nothing. So the idea that white people would have privilege in a case like this is sort of unproven. If anything, the reality is quite the opposite.

Having said that, it does leave the door wide open for certain police reforms. Because it’s not just a black/white issue. Literally anyone can be the victim of a brutal cop. And finding ways to prevent brutality would therefore benefit everyone. But the idea that lethal use of force happens disproportionately to blacks is false. Approximately 25% of crime is committed by blacks, and approximately 25% of people killed by cops are black. So the higher rate of deaths caused by police in the black community is really just a symptom of crime rates. The real solution to that would be reducing criminality. But activists appear to be more interested in reducing the number of police, which would probably just make things worse.

Charlamagne went on to claim white supremacy was done by design and the whole purpose was to marginalize black people. This is a true statement in Mississippi. Fifty years ago. It’s not so true today. White supremacist nations don’t have Affirmative Action programs and various public assistance programs for minorities. And they sure as hell don’t elect black presidents.

He also said we must “Dismantle the mechanism of white supremacy.” Whatever that means. It’s certainly not the David Duke/Richard Spencer definition of white supremacy. That type of white supremacy, which assumes white people are genetically superior, has been relegated to the fringes of society. It’s followers are treated with scorn and derision by virtually everyone. That type of white supremacy has effectively already been dismantled. So clearly he must be talking about something else. But he never got around to defining it.

If we can’t specifically identify which parts of the system are white supremacist, how can we know what to dismantle? Unless, he thinks the entire system is white supremacist. He wouldn’t be the only one. Bernie Sanders rather strangely claimed that our system is “top to bottom racist”. Yet another assertion that went unexplained, by the way. And the sheer volume of “revolutionary fist” avatars I see on Twitter posting in such ridiculous hashtags as “#boycottAmerikkka” suggests that there are many involved in this discussion who want to dismantle the entire thing.

But no one says what they’d replace it with. Although the “quiet part” with the fist activists is that they want to replace everything with socialism or communism. Tamika Mallory hinted at this as well in an interview on Democracy Now, when she vaguely placed blame on “capitalism”. And numerous activists have openly stated on Twitter and other places that their true goal is replacing capitalism. Apparently, George Floyd just provided them with a convenient excuse.

The problem with this is that, historically, systems like that have produced greater injustice than others. These systems typically result in starvation, poverty, and oppression (See: Gulag Archipelago. See Also: Xinjiang Re-education Camps) And they really aren’t good for minority populations. Just ask the Tatars or the Uyghurs. So if you think Black Lives Matter ™, this isn’t a good idea at all.

So that’s a non-starter. And if that isn’t the solution, then the only plausible approach is the gradual reforms we’ve achieved over the years using the powers and rights built into our constitution. But we can’t do that if no one will bother to tell us what the problem is. This is why Occupy fizzled, and it’s why this movement will fail too.

They need to come up with specifics. Right now, all we’ve got are spurious claims of widespread racism, which are inconsistent with known, empirical data. And all of this spurred on by a murder which we haven’t even proven was racially motivated yet. Derek Chauvin could have just been a bad cop. There were many complaints against him, including some from white people. It is plausible he was just a brute, and not necessarily racist.

So if the current movement doesn’t want to fizzle out like Occupy, the first objective is to unload the most radical views. We’re not replacing our system with a brutal, repressive ideology that was rendered obsolete in the early nineties. We’re not going to have massive reparations or wealth redistribution. Similar attempts made in other countries have historically ended in disaster. Police and other reforms are possible. But we need to know what specific reforms the protesters want, or there’s no conversation.

One of the oft-repeated themes from black writers is that black people understand white America better than white America understands them. Another is that white people can’t see the privilege and systemic oppression. I don’t know if that’s true. It does seem to vastly underestimate the ability of white people to have empathy or be able to understand a new concept, which I find a little offensive. But let’s assume that these things are true. That would mean that white people cannot fix the problem without someone explaining it.

But the activists in the street appear either unwilling or unable to explain it. Infuriatingly, asking for an explanation or evidence tends to result in accusations of white privilege or racism. So this leaves us at an impasse. Because we are also often told that white people are responsible for fixing these problems. But if we accept the assumption that white people can’t see it, we can’t fix anything if no one takes the time to explain where the racism is.

We know that simple disparate impact or inequality is not in and of itself evidence of racism. We know that completely dismantling the system and replacing it with something radically different is off the table. The only option is for the dissidents clamoring for justice to get specific. Tell us what you’d do to fix the system. Get past repeating these vagaries such as “Dismantle White Supremacy” or “Dismantle The Patriarchy”. Tell us what you think is wrong with the system and how you’d fix it. Then the rest of us will push back against anything you say that seems incorrect or unworkable. And it’s time to start accepting that challenging these ideas are not evidence of racism and are not evidence of “White Fragility”™. This is how real progress is made. Through dialogue. Not by dubious accusations and vituperative rhetoric. And certainly not by setting cities on fire.

The Internet Is Right That George Floyd Was Murdered And Wrong About Almost Everything Else

A cop stuck his knee in George Floyd’s neck for about five minutes. Despite the fact that he was handcuffed and begging for the cop to stop. He didn’t, and when Floyd went limp, the cops called an ambulance. Floyd was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Now there have been some, many in fact, cops caught on tape whose actions may have appeared questionable to some, but in fact were completely justified. This is not one of those cases. Putting a knee in the neck is a not unheard of way to subdue a suspect. But when the suspect is cuffed and on the ground, it is not necessary. Certainly not for five minutes. There’s a reason this move is no longer sanctioned by most Minnesota law enforcement agencies.

There are always a few people saying “we don’t know what happened before the tape.” In many cases in the past, that has been a relevant statement. But not in this one. It appears, from the things the officers say, that he was resisting getting into the car. But no amount of resistance justifies sticking a knee into the back of someone’s skull for five minutes.

This is a murder. Even if he didn’t actually intend to kill him, it is a murder. The law holds that gross negligence is the same as intent. So even if the officer wasn’t trying to kill him, he of all people should have known that the force he was using was excessive, and his willingness to continue doing it is grossly negligent. I’d expect him to be charged with second or third degree murder, since there’s no evidence of the premeditation that would be necessary for first degree murder. And the cops who failed to stop Derek Chauvin should be charged as accessories.

Even though it’s abundantly clear that this was murder, what’s not at all confirmed is if this was racially motivated. But, predictably, people all over the Internet, especially the cesspool that is Twitter, are all too quick to blame all police, systemic racism, the history of Jim Crow and slavery, and the entire United States collectively for this single incident.

The Young Turks‘s Cenk Uygar ranted at great length about how all cops are racist across the country and are trained to be thugs and trained to believe that black lives don’t matter on his YouTube channel. He sneered at any attempt to proclaim that police departments across the country might be a bit different. And he pompously declared that anyone who was against the Black Lives Matter movement is racist. Amongst other things. It’s a rather lengthy diatribe full of all sorts of generalizations, smears, and straw man arguments.

It should be patently obvious that different cities and different states have noticeably different police departments. They’re not all structured the same way and they’re not all trained the same way. Sloppily conflating all of them is an exercise in intellectual laziness. Perhaps he should follow the example of Samuel Sinyangwe, who pointed out (although I haven’t confirmed this personally) that the Minneapolis police department has a poor record of violence and Derek Chauvin had many complaints against him. At least he’s willing to acknowledge that the problem may be local. Certain police forces have a bad reputation, like Baltimore. But not all.

Many activists, including protestors in Minneapolis, made the spurious charge that cops are more dangerous than COVID. Cops killed about 1,000 people in 2019, according to the Washington Post, which was about the same as previous years. That’s actually not that many. More people die per year from freezing to death (about 1,300) than are killed by police. It would take the police departments of the country 100 years to do the same damage as COVID. And a review of the data on Mapping Police Violence shows that the overwhelming majority of incidents where the police kill someone are justified. As usual, the activists exaggerate the threat. Which helps no one.

Various other inhabitants of the Twitterverse belabor the fact that about 25% of the people killed by police are black, even though they’re only about 13% of the population. Therefore, AmeriKKKa is racist. Checkmate. But the fact is, about a quarter of crime is committed by black people, so if a quarter of people killed by police are black, that is in direct proportion to the crimes committed. Which is where it should be. So this rhetoric falls flat too.

Still others draw a false equivalency with Dylan Roof, the Charlottesville mass shooter. They point to the fact that he was arrested without incident and was given a meal, implying that cops would go easy on a white man. But this is a ridiculous comparison. Dylan Roof didn’t resist at all, and the cops involved are literally different people. They’re in a different city and a different state. This particular slice of the Twitter mob is making the same mistake Cenk made and judging all police by the actions of a few. And by the way, if you don’t give food to a kid that hasn’t eaten in days, it’s a civil rights violation. How do you think people would feel if Roof got off on a technicality?

Others push a meme of Colin Kaepernick kneeling next to the officer kneeling on George Floyd. Personally, I never cared about Kaepernick’s kneeling. He’s allowed to say and do what he wants. And I’m uncomfortable with the fact that he could never get a job in the NFL again, since firing or refusing to hire someone due to their political beliefs is wrong.

My problem with Kaepernick was that he, like much of Twitter, started pushing excessively woke and revolutionary (Read: Reductive, revisionist, and cognitively bankrupt) rhetoric. He typifies the flawed rhetoric of Black Lives Matter activists, who exaggerate the threat and push false narratives. The way to push back against detritus like this is to challenge the flawed narrative with facts and logic, not to silence it.

But I digress. The Kaepernick meme repeats the mistake of assuming that this was racially motivated and implies, as Kaepernick falsely did, that black people receive disproportionate violence at the hand of police. Something I’ve already disproven.

Still others are even more laughable. Many pushed a meme purporting to show Chauvin in a “Make Whites Great Again Hat”. This was later debunked by Snopes and the Washington Post. It was actually internet troll Jonathan Riches. Others claimed that Chauvin was praised at a rally with President Trump. This was debunked too. These fails should, if anything, demonstrate why one shouldn’t get carried away. You’ll start believing any old nonsense.

This is where activists go off of the rails. Instead of pushing for justice in this specific case, they try to push narratives that America is white supremacist. The truth is, America is one of the least racist places on the planet. They also push the perception that violence against black people is on the rise. It’s not. Violence has declined across the board for forty years or more. This is the safest time to be alive in American history. Even with the coronavirus.

At least one meme out there appears to at least acknowledge that there isn’t an increase in violence. It claims (I’m paraphrasing) that there isn’t more racism, we’re just catching more on tape. This is partly true. There isn’t more racism. Racism has been declining for decades. But where the meme gets it wrong in assuming this incident was racist. That is not proven yet. All that is proven is that a cop used excessive force. There is no proof as to motive. It is entirely possible that this cop is merely a brute who would use excessive force on any suspect, regardless of race. And attempting to broadly apply that to the entire department or all police departments is precisely the sort of bigotry that activists purport to be opposed to.

It is important to be careful when condemning police violence. In the past, certain cases, such as Walter Scott and Botham Jean were obviously unjustified shootings. But others were not. I marveled today at the activists in Minneapolis with their hands up in the “Hands up, don’t shoot” posture. They still don’t appear to realize that Michael Brown never had his hands up. The Justice Department reported, under Eric Holder’s leadership, that two of the witnesses who claimed this later admitted to lying. The third one prevaricated when confronted.

Some of the cases protested by Black Lives Matter and other activists have been actual illegal acts. Others were tragic mistakes, such as the cop who shot Tamir Rice, not knowing that his toy gun was not real. Others have ended up being entirely justified. So treating all of these cases as identical and calling them police murders is counterproductive.

You may have noticed that Black Lives Matter has been out of the news for a while. I’m sure part of it was their tendency to back narratives that ended up being false. And their willingness to blame all police and all of society, in spite of empirical evidence sufficient to override the false impression a few anecdotal incidents may give, severely damaged their credibility. And therefore damaged any momentum towards reform.

There are always things that can be improved, but if the rhetoric of activists rages out of control and ignores facts, the inevitable result will be push back from opponents and apathy from all others, who don’t know who to believe. If activists (including Twitter slacktivists) don’t stick to the truth, they sabotage their own credibility. An activist who truly desires change will carefully analyze the facts, and not lash out in ill-considered rage.

The United States Is Not Based on Slavery and Genocide

So when left leaning types have nothing better to do, they tend to drop deuces all over America. Last week liberal pundit Anand Giridharadas slammed Americans for being “freedom-obsessed” even though we’re “a country founded on slavery and genocide.” Ta-Nehisi Coates has famously claimed that “slavery made America”. Nikole Hannah-Jones, who won a Pulitzer recently for her dubious work in the New York Times frequently panned “1619 Project” included in her essay the oft-repeated throw away line “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.” As with most people who echo this odd sentiment, she never bothers to explain what they mean by that. And of course, failed presidential candidate Bernie Sanders called America “racist from top to bottom.”

Honest historians acknowledge that slavery was a significant part of the economy in past centuries. But how much of the growth in the North, South, and West in those centuries can truly be attributed to slavery is a subject of much debate. Clearly, much of the southern economy was driven by slavery. And there were bankers and businessmen in the much larger northern economy who benefited from slavery. Bankers would make money financing the slave trade and certain mill owners used southern cotton in their textile mills.

But if the northern economy received most of their income from slavery, why were northerners so intensely opposed to new slave states? We are often told, often by left leaning historians, that many in the North were not motivated by moral reasons to end slavery, but economic reasons. If that is true, then it suggests that they were not deriving most of their income from slavery.

And this would not be surprising. The burgeoning northern economy in those days was characterized by a move away from slave labor. And it was five times larger than the southern economy. So, it is true that some of the American economy was based on slavery, but to state that all or most of it was is not a statement consistent with known facts.

Honest historians also acknowledge that there were wars with indian tribes as well, although they stop short of calling them genocide. The Indian Wars started for a variety of reasons. In some cases the United States started the wars, and in others a conflict was started by an indian tribe. These wars were messy, and usually consisted of the two sides trading horrible atrocities. No one is really clean. For every massacre at Wounded Knee there is a Fort Mims Massacre.

Land was taken in those wars, some of which might have been justified and some of which might not have, depending on the circumstances of the particular conflict. But at worst, this was conquest, not genocide.

And it’s well known that the overwhelming majority of native deaths came from the spread of disease. Native tribes, having never come into contact with smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella, or any number of other European diseases, succumbed in droves. If unintentionally spreading disease is genocide, then the Chinese have a little explaining to do with COVID-19.

Also, much of the land occupied by America was not conquered, but purchased from the natives. And not every tribe was conquered, some willingly joined with the United States. In some cases this was entirely voluntary, in other cases this was in self-defense, such as when the Crow sided with the United States seeking protection from the Lakota tribe that was aggressively trying to seize the central plains.

The point is, reality is far more complicated and nuanced than the somewhat intellectually lazy and broad assertions that are repeatedly spewed by left-leaning pundits. America has dark parts of her history, but truthfully no more so (and frequently less so) than other nations. This does not make us unique. And the idea that these bad chapters are the only thing that shapes our history is something that an agenda driven activist would attempt to bandy about, not an honest student of history.

As for this idea that racism is in the DNA of America, since no one bothers to explain what that means, I’ll identify it for them, I guess. The DNA of America is the Declaration of Independence. The most pure rendition of our basic principles. There is no part of this declaration which evinces intrinsic racism or a desire for slavery or conquest. On the contrary, these principles produced an environment that would gradually allow us to move away from these antiquated ideas that existed for most of human history.

We’ve never quite lived up to our highest ideals. But who has? It is normal for people to fall short of high standards. The founders obviously fell short in many ways. And the higher the standards, the easier it is to fall short. One could argue that if we ever succeeded in living up to our standards, it would just mean that our standards weren’t high enough.

What is true is that over the years we’ve drawn consistently, incrementally closer to that original ideal. The original Constitution encapsulated some of the ideas from the Declaration. It also retained certain sections that were inconsistent with the DNA of America, such as an allowance of the existence of slavery. This is because the original Constitution was a compromise, agreed upon by thirteen very different colonies. Perfection was not possible. But over the years, the Constitution has evolved to become an increasingly closer representation of our true founding document.

One thing that these pundits frequently miss is the simple fact that the overwhelming majority of wealth and economic growth in the United States has happened in the past fifty years. After the passage of civil rights laws. After the end of segregation and Jim Crow. Well after the end of slavery and the Indian wars. If anything, one could argue that our economy is not based on slavery or genocide or racism, because it only grew faster after we started to move away from those practices. As we drew closer to the ideal of freedom set down on July 4, 1776, things continued to get better.

Some, such as Bernie Sanders, point to the wage and wealth gap as evidence of the legacy of slavery and genocide and oppression. But the wage and wealth inequality argument falls apart when we see that the wage and wealth gap actually increased after the end of Jim Crow, redlining, and other such practices. Although it does coincide with a large increase in single motherhood. These gaps, and their true underlying causes, should be addressed, but assuming the cause is events of previous centuries is sloppy reasoning.

And one thing that makes these more negative interpretations of American history highly suspect is the fact that the people pushing the idea of America being based on slavery, genocide, and racism are of a particular political mindset. Not just liberal, because true liberals would be interested in setting the record straight, not engaging in reductive, historical revisionism. The people I’m talking about are true leftists, not liberals. People who want to change the American system into something radically different. And they definitely have a motive to distill American history down in the most negative way possible.

When you have a system that, despite numerous flaws, generally works well, and better than most (if not all) other systems in human history, it’s difficult to convince people that radical change is necessary. The only way to do this would be to somehow invalidate the system. To claim that the system was the result of theft and oppression and not productivity and innovation, for example. This is especially true if the alternative system being proposed is something of Marxist origin with an extremely poor record of success.

These same people pan our gradual progression towards an increasingly perfect union as “incrementalism”. But incrementalism is how the world works, if you believe in peacefully negotiated progress. Our system has not only produced more freedom than others, but has constantly improved as a result of collective action by all Americans of all races, national origins, and ethnicities. Incrementalism is what happens when these disparate groups carefully debate improvements to society. Radical change typically only happens with violence and oppression, as we saw throughout the twentieth century in Eastern Europe, Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. And this typically produced the opposite of progress.

The proposed alternative by the variously woke of the world is a system that has not only not produced justice and equality, but has consistently made things worse. This was seen in the Soviet Union and various Marxist revolutions throughout the world. This was more recently seen in Zimbabwe and Venezuela, which were crushed under the corruption that appears to inevitably result from socialism.

These attempts at revisionism, often from misguided acolytes of the polemicist Howard Zinn, do not seek to correct the record from a history that has at times been somewhat whitewashed. Instead, they seek to interpret the facts of history in the least charitable way possible. Instead of seeking the truth, they seek to create new truth that is convenient for their ideology.

The United States is not based on racism, slavery, or genocide. These do not exist in our true DNA. Instead, the people who have been tasked with realizing the vision have had the common human condition of being imperfect. And have fallen short of the ideals. But we are always drawing closer to them. So, whatever problems we may be facing, they are not reasons to change radically. Instead, we should keep continually reforming as we always have, and drawing closer to the goal of becoming a true reflection of the DNA of the United States as laid out in the Declaration of Independence.

No, the United States is Not The Worst Place For #CoronaVirus

So, just recently the United States became the country with the most cases of coronavirus in the world. And woke folks from the darkest, deepest morass of the Internet (also known as Twitter) began trashing the U.S. in a desperate attempt to out-virtue signal each other.

Naturally, it’s wildly overblown. When scientists and doctors and assorted other intelligent people look at this data, they don’t look at total numbers. They look at trends and rates. They don’t care so much about who has the largest number of cases or deaths. They look at per capita numbers.

So I decided to take the few extra minutes it takes to do some real research, instead of unleashing verbal flatulence from my frontal lobe as the wokescolds do. And a simple look at per capita numbers is all it takes to dismantle the madness of this particular crowd.

Sorting the numbers by per capita figures on the Worldmeters website shows totally different countries at the top of the list. Now the ones at the very top are a little misleading. Many of these appear to have high rates mostly because they’re just countries with small populations concentrated in relatively small areas. Even larger places in terms of geographical area, like Iceland, would have populations concentrated in relatively small areas like Reykjavik, where a third of the population lives. So these are likely special, unusual cases.

The top two in particular stand out. San Marino is a tiny little province fully within the boundaries of Italy. And the Vatican is obviously just a tiny little section of Rome. And when you consider that Italy is one of the highest large countries on the list, it’s not a huge surprise that these two places would have a lot of cases too.

So it makes more sense to just compare countries that have a high number of cases, are relatively high in population, relatively large economically, and with relatively sophisticated health care systems. The ones Bernie Sanders somewhat vaguely refers to as “major countries”.

When you piece together a list of these countries, a peculiar pattern emerges. The United States is lower than many, if not most, of the European countries. You know, the ones with ostensibly better healthcare systems. Overall we’re about halfway down the list in terms of total cases per capita and total deaths per capita. These numbers are constantly changing, though, so things might not stay that way.

Another thing of note is that with the exception of South Korea, Japan, and China, the first detected case in the United States happened before these other countries. So for us to have a relatively low number of cases, despite the fact that we had it days or weeks before these other countries, indicates that we’re doing fairly well. It’s not clear if this is due to luck, skill, or perhaps that there are many undiagnosed cases out there that we don’t know about. But it does suggest that the presumption that we’re doing worse than other countries is misguided.

Now, more than a few people have noted that the number of Chinese cases is very low per capita, despite being the apparent source of the virus. But that assumes that the Chinese government is telling the truth. The way they covered up the early stages and silenced the doctor who discovered the COVID-19 outbreak vaguely reminds me of the Soviets spreading disinformation about the Chernobyl disaster.

But even if it’s true, China can lock down easier than other countries. They are a communist country, not a free country. Although, technically not they’re not really communist anymore. They have a degree of private ownership of property and business, but with heavy state control and influence, which would technically make them fascist. Either way, authoritarian regimes can use force to lock down their populations, because they have no real interest in human rights. The free world has to do things the hard way.

Despite any early appearances of incompetence or actual incompetence, the United States is doing fairly well, based on what we know now. Of course, it could be that we haven’t peaked yet the way some European countries have. And the lack of testing might mean that the known numbers in the United States are lower than the actual, and as more of these undiagnosed cases are diagnosed, the numbers could go up rather dramatically.

But the takeaway here is that these Twitter goons are just being intellectually lazy. In their haste to piss on the United States, they decided that logic, reason, and critical thinking were unnecessary. And they completely missed the real story that the stats tell us.

Instead of bellyaching over the situation and blowing things out of proportion, maybe we should instead ask ourselves why Japan and Russia are so low. What happened there that caused them to have such low infection rates, despite their relative proximity to the source in China? The United States is not the worst, but we’re not the best either, and we should be curious about whether those countries that are did something differently or just got lucky.

The United States is not the worst place for the virus. Not yet, anyway. It’s entirely too early to get carried away with condemnations. But I guess getting carried away is what Twitter is for, so we shouldn’t be surprised.

The Left Goes Too Far When They Murder Vietnamese Catholics

I’ve been puzzling over a question I heard the Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson ask a while back. He mentioned that society has become pretty good at identifying when the right goes too far. These lines have been drawn pretty clearly. Racism, racial supremacy, jingoism, and nativism are all examples of the right wing going too far. We’re fairly sensitive to these things. In a nutshell, the right goes too far when they start pushing for racial or ethnic purity. But when, Peterson asks, does the left go too far?

I’ve been noodling over this for a while. He appears to have asked because even though there have been numerous documented cases where the left went too far, especially in the 20th century, the line between behavior that is too far and not too far is not so clear as it is for the right. Our society, especially in the press, appears to not be capable of identifying this frontier. Indeed, we see certain acts of violence from left-leaning groups, such as Antifa or Occupy, that many in society and the press appear to make excuses for, rather than condemn outright. But I think I’ve figured out where the line is. It happens when the left starts murdering Vietnamese Catholics.

This occurred to me when I was reading about the period before the Vietnam War where the French were attempting to retake their empire in the wake of World War II. Having driven out the Japanese, with the assistance of the United States, the Viet Minh (which would later become the Viet Cong) was resisting the French attempts to retake Indochina.

Early on, they spent a fair amount of time killing people who collaborated with the French. Now, this in and of itself doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I mean, I have a hunch that the killings involved no due process and were frequently quite brutal. But killing traitors in a war isn’t necessarily wrong. I’m sure if we’d have shot Benedict Arnold in the face during the Revolution, it would’ve been perfectly fine.

But then the Viet Minh got a little paranoid. They started going after people who might be collaborators. And they started to think of Catholics, a group of people who’d obtained their religion from the French, as potential collaborators. And then they started doing all manner of terrible things to them. They didn’t stop there. They eventually got to the point where they were killing Trotskyites, which is really just another variant of communism. But apparently, that wasn’t pure enough, and the Viet Minh had to kill anyone who wasn’t toeing the party line.

This sort of purging is all too common in left leaning revolutions. Obviously, Pol Pot got a little nuts one country over from Vietnam in Cambodia. In the late seventies, communist revolutionaries in Afghanistan imprisoned, tortured, and or killed a variety of religious leaders, politicians, and intellectuals who weren’t on board with the new regime. Che Guevara famously executed hundreds at La Cabana. Even more minor revolutions, such as in revolutionary Catalonia, had this problem.

The progenitors of many of the communist revolutions, the Soviets, had their own purges. Before World War II, the Soviets, in violation of the treaty of Versailles, helped the Germans train their tank corps. But when the Germans turned on the Soviets, both sides became suspicious of the troops that had trained together. The Germans imprisoned and tortured many of the officers that had worked with the Soviets. But Stalin chose a simpler approach. He just wasted anyone who’d had anything to do with the Germans. This was not the only purge by the Soviets, but this one in particular would come back to haunt them.

Not only had they helped create the Nazi Blitzkrieg, but when it attacked them, many of their best officers were dead by Stalin’s orders. This may explain why the Russians got hammered so hard. Early on, many of their units were commanded by inexperienced commanders who the Germans overwhelmed.

But it’s not just the communist revolutionaries who did this. Long before the existence of communism, the earliest left-leaning revolution of the revolutionary age was the French Revolution. They got so carried away that they started sending butlers and housemaids of the aristocracy to the guillotine, just for fear that they might be a problem for the new revolutionary government.

If the right goes to far when it starts purging people in the name of ethnic or racial purity, the left goes to far when they purge people in the name of ideological purity. And I can’t help but think we’re seeing early indications of this today, in the form of Cancel Culture.

Cancel Culture is the peculiar tendency to attack, harass, and attempt to end careers of people who stray from the orthodoxy of the new left. We saw this when Yale students protested and harassed Nicholas Christakis. He’s a professor who had the nerve to defend his wife Erika’s e-mail, which advised students to not get too carried away if they saw offensive costumes on Halloween. Both were subjected to harassment and threats.

We also saw this with Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying. Both professors at Evergreen college, they dared to push back against the “Day of Absence”. Originally, this was a day where minority students and faculty voluntarily stayed home to highlight their contributions to the college. But in 2017, somebody decided to change it up and declared that the white students and teachers should stay away that day. When Weinstein pushed back, he was met with endless protests. Both he and his wife ultimately resigned.

And of course, there’s the aforementioned Jordan Peterson. He got blowback when he criticized a Canadian bill involving preferred gender pronouns. He claimed that this violated civil rights by compelling speech. He didn’t get fired, but he did get (and still does get) an endless cacophony of online hate.

These are all examples of the new left attempting to eliminate ideas that don’t conform to their ideological dogma. It is assumed that their beliefs on race, cultural appropriation, and gender pronouns are incontestable. Opposing views, or even nuanced views, are not tolerated. Anyone who dares step out of line is crushed, even people who are more closely aligned with them than with the right. Such as all of the professors I just mentioned, who identify as left leaning.

The new left isn’t quite so violent as the alt-right (yet), but that doesn’t mean they can’t become that way. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time. And I can’t help but see a parallel between their paranoia and the paranoia of the Viet Minh when they began killing Vietnamese Catholics.

So this is the line where the left goes to far; the line that the press seems to always miss. They go too far when they become so paranoid that they’d rather silence people with differing opinions, or even people who they suspect of not-conformance, rather than engage with them in a mature and intelligent way. And if we let it happen, we run the risk of weakening ourselves the way Stalin weakened the Soviet armies.

Internet Broken By People Who Menstruate

So there’s a bit of a row over whether or not trans people menstruate. This is not a new debate amongst the loudest portions of the Internet, but it appears to have flared up in response to an article on some website. I think it was NPR, but I just realized I don’t really care. The article in question was discussing the quantity of sanitary pads and tampons and whatnot that are used each year. Apparently, the sales tax alone is $150 million. That would be about one dollar per woman, per year, on average. But that’s beside the point. Something much smaller caused things to go off the rails.

The NPR article did not say that “women” spend that much. It said that “people who menstruate” spend that much. And since much of the Internet is primed and ready to pounce on anything that appears to vaguely touch on the subject of transexuality, all hell broke loose.

In fairness to NPR, “people who menstruate” is not necessarily them acquiescing to the dark hordes of the woke Gestapo who seem to spend their entire lives hunting and punishing all those who dare to cross the lines of political correctness. There are a large number of women who don’t menstruate. They’re called, old women. Post menopausal women do not menstruate. It is entirely possible they were just referring to them. On the other hand, why not just say “women who menstruate.”?

Having said that, there are trans people who menstruate. Trans men (who are biological women) still have uteruses, and therefore still menstruate, although I gather that the hormone treatments can interrupt this or make it irregular. But the most odd part of this debate is the insistence by some that trans women have periods.

The denizens of the Interweb machine were already on a razor’s edge in the wake of the second annual International Pronouns Day and the first ever National Period Day. Those two celebrations of gendered wokeness resulted in endless virtue signalling and trolling and rubbed a lot of nerves raw. So pretty much everyone with too much time on their hands had trans on the brain. As a result, the hate tweeting ramped up in the past few days.

Angry vituperations from the religious right and from many left-leaning feminists (strange bedfellows indeed) insist that trans women cannot have periods, because they do not have uteruses. Angry responses from trans activists insist that trans women can have period-like symptoms, including cramping and various other things, brought on by hormone treatments.

I don’t pretend to know everything about this, and one thing that aggravates me is the sheer number of people who insist that they do know everything about this and vehemently defend their points of view as if they are holy writ.

In the case of the angry feminists, I at least understand why they would take umbrage at this. Maybe trans women have some cramps and other symptoms, but they do not dispose of a uterine wall on a monthly basis. I’m sure regular women would consider this to be getting off light.

What’s confusing to me is why trans women are so committed to convincing people that they have periods. They may feel that they are women. And I don’t pretend to understand the science (Spoiler alert: Nobody does; it’s far from settled), but why would the periods be so important? It seems like the least awesome part of being a woman.

And the fact that I’ve never been a woman doesn’t mean I can’t know this. Firstly, every guy has noticed that women get a bit cranky during their time of the month, so one can deduce that they’re not having a good time. Secondly, women have straight up told me how much it sucks. The only woman I have ever met who was even slightly okay with getting her period was one that was worried that she was pregnant, and did want to be. This was not my doing, by the way. This girl put me in the friend zone almost immediately. Anyway, even when the period came, her relief was not enough to offset her normal irritation because of menstruation. The point is, if it were possible to experience being a woman (presuming that one wanted to) without having periods, that would seem to be a bonus.

I don’t get the insistence that we all must believe that trans women have periods. If you want to take hormones, get surgery that fundamentally changes your body, and believe that you have periods (even if it means referring to hormone side effects as a period), then you’re welcome to do and believe whatever you like. Although I might push back a bit if you expect other people to pay for it. But why is it so important that everyone thinks as you do?

This actually seems like less of a big deal than the pronouns arguments a few days ago. Maybe someone who, say, believes that they are a woman born into a biologically male body might find it irksome when someone uses the “wrong” pronouns. For example, if I were confronted by a large, male appearing person, say, in a Gamestop, I might say “sir” even though this is not the case. And I can understand how hearing the wrong pronoun can be irritating.

I was once referred to as “ma’am” when I was sixteen. Not because I’m particularly feminine looking. I was handing out food at a homeless shelter, and I think the homeless guy who called me ma’am was high, or drunk, or both. But it was annoying, and if it happened to me daily, I’m sure it would be really annoying.

But it seems there is less of a reason to obsess over the period thing, because I can envision no circumstance where someone might accidentally inform you that you do or don’t have periods when the opposite is true or you believe the opposite is true. What are the chances of someone “mis-perioding” you? How would this even come up in a normal interaction?

You’re not going to just walk up to the dude in the video game store and instead of saying “sir” say “person who doesn’t have periods”. Even someone who is either hardcore evangelical or a rage-filled TERF wouldn’t do that. They might use the “wrong” pronouns, but why would anyone bother bringing up periods? Why would we bother policing speech that isn’t likely to happen at all?

One thing that has always been a bit off-putting for me (and many others) is this insistence that we all must hold conform to the increasingly myriad rules of political correctness. It is not enough that we be accepting or tolerant. We must believe exactly as the paragons of the new left do, or fall victim to a deluge of Internet outrage. Failing to acknowledge that biological men have periods or that not only women have periods is the latest law of progressivism, and woe betide anyone who violates these precepts. Although, there is one upside to this for heterosexual men. If one of our dudebros is acting overly emotional, we can accuse him of being on his period and it won’t be crass or toxically masculine. It would actually be woke.

My advice is that if you want to insist that you can do things biological women can do, instead of picking one of the least awesome things about being a woman, why not one of the most awesome? Like multiple orgasms? Why not declare that that’s a thing? Maybe it is? I even thought about researching it. But I think if I started Googling “trans women multiple orgasms” I’d probably just get a bunch of porn.