The world has gone mad. Disclaimer: I’ve been vaccinated and think other adults should be, too. But this is ridiculous.
This is concerning at the baseline level. This becomes even more concerning when you overlay that both the kidney donor and the transplant patient are unvaccinated and aligned without issue. The hospital is refusing the transplant surgery based solely on their vaccinated status.
It’s not as if the virus has a low survival rate. It’s not as if the vaccine has no potential complications and is perfectly effective. It’s not as if other treatments haven’t emerged for the virus.
So what is going on with death sentences for not getting vaccinated?
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It’s been frustrating to listen to Charles Murray discuss his latest book, Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America, on conservative podcasts, like this episode of Andrew Klavan’s show. The experience is of watching two friends have a disagreement when they’re missing some obvious common point, and you’re unable to jump in and point it out. The interviewers seem to really, really want to (but can’t) find that key difference from Murray that will allow them to distance themselves from his arguments, because they know how the mainstream media characterizes such beliefs.
Let’s enter into the topic beginning with the other side.
The critical race theorists’ narrative is that society implicitly breaks people into racial (actually, intersectional) groups and discriminates against them, even if you can’t point to a single example of overt racism. The only fix for this state of affairs, they claim, comes in two parts:
- Forcibly repair the damage where it manifests in outcome disparities (education levels, job placements, income, electoral success, and so on), and
- Repeatedly and loudly attack the near-metaphysical force behind the systemic racism — which they’ve labeled as “whiteness” — so as to scourge our society so thoroughly as to root out even racist tendencies we don’t realize and don’t actually exhibit.
Based on interviews he’s given, Murray’s point is that we have to treat people as individual human beings and acknowledge other causes that help explain the disparate outcomes when we group them statistically, whether those causes are cultural or genetic. If a group is more likely to be present in a high-crime area, for example, then it will have more encounters with the police. If, statistically, one group has a lower average on some aptitude test, that doesn’t mean that any individual can be judged on that basis, but it does mean that one would expect fewer people from that group in an occupation that requires that aptitude.
Even if differences at this level are entirely coincidental, they have explanatory power which, at the very least, has implications for our repairs. If you divide up a classroom of children randomly into two teams and one group, the one given green jerseys, just happens to have more athletic students, you wouldn’t address the uneven outcomes by blaming systemic anti-greenness.
Only by acknowledging actual differences can we address their effects. (This isn’t to say we should inflate the importance of those differences, of course.) If the differences can be reduced (with additional supports, for example), then our solutions should focus there. If they can’t be reduced, then we have to broaden our perspective. The kids who keep losing the athletic game might win at an academic one, and in any event they’re all part of the family of the classroom.
Instead, the radicals’ solution is to attack alternate explanations, no matter what that requires them to destroy. Rather than address differences in propensity for logic or punctuality, they’ll say that the culture that privileges such things is merely displaying its white supremacy. Similarly, they’ll insist that any test that finds differences is only proving the systemic racism at the core of their faith.
An absolutely essential point is too often lost in the mix, here, and it goes back to the principle of actually valuing people. If we want the best for everybody, we have to actually understand them as people… as they are. This is obvious when it comes to individuals: you don’t help a person by building up fictions around him or her and pretending he or she doesn’t have shortcomings. You address the person as he or she is, treated as an equal human being with personal agency and personal responsibility.
Featured image by Clay Banks on Unsplash.
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Glenn Reynolds shares a really good point from a friend of his:
[Open full post]Remember: They’ll spend trillions on bills they haven’t read but want details on how you spent $600.
Patrick Anderson is reporting in the Providence Journal that another woman involved with the Rhode Island Political Cooperative is being made to answer for having shared something on Facebook that strays from the dogmatic progressive line. Actually “reporting” is probably not the correct verb. As far as one can tell from the article, Anderson is the one bringing the matter to light and making it a controversy, but let’s put that aside on the grounds that mainstream journalists tend to be part of the progressive movement anyway.
This time, it’s state senator Cynthia Mendes, the co-op’s candidate for lieutenant governor, and her sin is that she shared a couple of Facebook posts five and seven years ago making “the feminist case against abortion.” Mendes’s response is that she’s thought about the issue and changed her mind:
“Like many other working-class candidates, I never planned or expected to run for office,” Mendes wrote in an email. “We didn’t get to attend Ivy league schools, and we haven’t all lived our entire lives as perfect progressives with all the right positions. We’re first and foremost human, and we got to this place by actually living, and learning, and struggling.”
On this issue, I think Mendes’s conclusion is tragic, but the pressure she’s feeling from her co-ideologues is telling. Apparently, absolutely no dissent is permitted on that side of the aisle.
This series of controversies for the co-op began over Facebook posts by Newport senatorial candidate Jennifer Jackson. Jackson, who has been incredibly engaged in her community and was a healthcare worker, had the audacity to differ from the elite line that unvaccinated healthcare workers should lose their jobs. She was also so bold as to suggest giving preference to homeless veterans over refugees and to complain that the government is driving up the cost of living to the point that parents must work constantly, at the expense of time with their children.
Such sentiments are unforgivable among progressives.
Between Jackson and Mendes, the radicals’ probing spotlight outed Tarshire Battle. Her offenses (again committed through Facebook post sharing) were to “appear to defend religious exemptions for COVID-19 vaccines” and to share an article about atheist attacks on Hobby Lobby for a religiously themed Independence Day ad.
The statements of the people involved throw around terms like “working families,” but it’s difficult not to see that as a mere talking point. They really don’t seem to care about people. People sometimes have different opinions, to change their minds, to have nuanced views, and to say things that are a little off from time to time. What they care about is ideology and power.
Women and minorities who are attracted by progressive words that sound supportive of them should take note, and so should everybody else who might find themselves under progressive rule one day. That support is entirely contingent on being “perfect progressives with all the right positions.”
Jackson’s beliefs went too far, but if Battle and Mendes manage to shake off the criticism, it will only be because they’ve repudiated their past beliefs and anybody they know who still holds them.
Featured image from The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu.
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I’d caution against reading too much into this development, but it does provide some important context for U.S. public health decisions:
Swedish health officials on Wednesday paused usage of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine for younger people and children after reports of possible side effects including myocarditis, while Denmark also announced that it halted the shot for those under the age of 18. …
The agency said it now recommends the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine instead for people born in 1991 or later, noting that the decision is valid until Dec. 1. Those from that age group who got the first Moderna dose should not get a second dose, the agency added.
This doesn’t surprise me, which is why I sought out the Pfizer vaccine. But in any event, it does raise a question: as public officials increasingly dismiss alternate possibilities for people (e.g., natural immunity or protective gear in lieu of a vaccine), maybe they should have to agree to give up their lives if the risk they’re forcing on others turns unexpectedly bad.
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One needn’t endorse or repudiate the Oath Keepers organization to observe that the hack and release of its internal communications raises disturbing questions at a time when state and federal government agencies are seeking more of a view into private donor lists and personal bank accounts:
The emails were obtained by BuzzFeed News after an anonymous group claimed to have hacked the Oath Keepers’ servers and released the records to a group called Distributed Denial of Secrets, which posted much of the data publicly and shared some additional files with journalists and researchers.
Although the hacked Oath Keepers data does not appear to be complete, it provides an unprecedented glimpse inside the workings of the secretive organization, which was founded in 2009 by former Army paratrooper Stewart Rhodes and gets its name from the oath to uphold the Constitution sworn by all law enforcement and military personnel.
The facts are thus: An anonymous group — which could have been small-time activists, a foreign government, federal agents spying on Americans, or somebody else — stole the group’s information and released it publicly. Mainstream media organizations (and BuzzFeed is definitely not alone) took the cue and rushed to investigate individual Americans with gusto. Despite having claimed in the past that hacked data could not be shared on their platforms, the major social media sites are promulgating its spread in this case. One also can’t help but connect this with the U.S. military’s bizarre pledge to root out white supremacists from its ranks.
BuzzFeed all but laughs in the face of one police officer caught up in the hack, quoting his email to Oath Keepers as saying he’s “not looking to be on some Liberal hit list.”
The potential at any time to end up on a hit list is the future that the Left wants for all Americans. To a movement that insists “silence is violence” and “colorblindness is racism,” anybody who disagrees is a dangerous insurgent who has forfeit his or her rights to privacy, freedom, or anything else. They will studiously observe a double standard that protects their co-ideologues while thwarting their opposition by any means necessary.
This is why we have to fight at every instance of erosion of our privacy and rights of association, even when it means standing with organizations with which we otherwise wouldn’t engage.
Featured image by Chris Yang on Unsplash.
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I started college in 1993, and I remember people older than me who had gone to urban campuses talking about the dangerousness of the cities — muggings, assaults, break-ins. Those things can always happen as random events, but by the mid-’90s, it kind of seemed like they were largely a thing of the past. Unfortunately, it looks like they’re making a comeback in Providence:
The Providence College seniors were with both of their mothers at the time, who were visiting for parent’s weekend. …
“The people who attacked us were standing on the corner of the street and just came at us for no reason,” [Meghan] Cowl recalled.
One of the suspects shoved Cowl to the ground, injuring her leg.
The past week saw six assaults of students in the area, from PC as well as other schools. This is a direct consequence of the officials whom people have been electing in Providence, and it can and will spread throughout the state if mindsets don’t start to change.
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On LifeNews, Steven Ertelt spotlights Roman Catholic Bishop of Providence Thomas Tobin’s statement on the pro-abortion politics of ostensibly Catholic Democrat Congressman James Langevin:
We are so tired of hearing Catholic politicians say, as Jim Langevin does, “Although I remain personally opposed to abortion . . .” and then go on to support abortion. That pathetic excuse doesn’t fly anymore. Jim Langevin claims to be a “practicing Catholic,” but practicing Catholics do not promote the legalization of abortion which the Church clearly teaches is an “abominable crime.”
Compounding his break from the Church (which is a predictable sequence of sin), Langevin pushed back by hammering away at a wedge within the Church:
Langevin said, “The Holy Father, Pope Francis, has said himself that bishops and priests — as I recall, I’m paraphrasing — need to be guides and shepherds and not disciplinarians. And so, I try and look to the wisdom of Pope Francis, and hopefully all of our theologians and priests and bishops throughout the church will hear that message.”
One might say that “cafeteria Catholicism” has moved from being a private foible to be a public presentation. With his statement, Langevin discards not only the Church’s teaching about abortion, but also its teachings about its own structure, which gets at the heart of its claims to Truth. He is going over the head of his own bishop, as it were, so as to dismiss his authority.
Unfortunately, Pope Francis has muddied these waters, rather than clarified them, with his extemporaneous statements:
“What should the pastor do? Be a shepherd, do not go around condemning … but be a pastor. But is he also a pastor of the excommunicated? Yes, he is the pastor and … he must be a shepherd with God’s style. And God’s style is closeness, compassion, and tenderness,” the Pope said. …
“But always condemnation, condemnation, enough with excommunication. Please let us not place any more excommunications. Poor people. They are children of God. They are outside temporarily, but they are children of God and they want, and need, our pastoral closeness. Then the pastors work things out by the Spirit of God.”
If one is intricately familiar with the nuances of the faith, then one can make sense of something like this (maybe). The problem is that most people cannot be expected to be that familiar. Worse, the Catholics at the center of the storm — the pro-abortion politicians — are clearly in need of instruction.
Taken as a whole, it seems the pope intends to soften the meaning and implications of excommunication. Yes, politicians like Langevin have excommunicated themselves from the Church, but that fact should be approached with sorrow and compassion, not with heat and condemnation, lest (as Pope Francis says) the pastor, himself, becomes a politician.
To my reading, what this means for Bishop Tobin and Congressman Langevin in the light of Catholic thought is pretty clear. For the sake of Langevin’s soul, the bishop should explain to him that he is “outside temporarily” and would be knowingly sinning if he continues to receive the Eucharist. And for the sake of other Catholics’ souls, this can’t simply be a private instruction. Langevin is a public figure, and this matter is in the news. Bishop Tobin can’t possibly send a private message to every Catholic whom Langevin might corrupt, so it has to be a public statement.
But tone is important, and it should be issued in sadness, begging those out of communion to return, with an instruction for the rest of us to be compassionate and pray for them.
Featured image by Luca Signorelli.
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This is one of those “wait, what?” items:
[Open full post]“Attorney General Garland has a conflict of interest in bringing this investigation. Erika Sanzi of Parents Defending Education notes that ‘Parents are concerned over intrusive surveys and ‘screeners’ that ask 12-year-olds if they are pansexual or gender fluid. The surveys are often created/administered by’ Panorama Education. ‘Merrick Garland’s daughter is married to the president and founder.’
Sometimes aphorisms or statements of principle are used to steal bases in political debates. Take, for instance, the assertion of the Twitter account for the Roosevelt Society that:
The rights of the group outweigh the rights of the individual, the basis for vaccine mandates. 700,000 deaths many, many could have been avoided with vaccines.
Even taking the principle concerning the balance of rights as true, it has to be clear in its meaning and it has to be judged in a particular situation. Otherwise (and this is very common), one could simply assert that X policy is an exercise in group rights and therefore outweighs Y policy, which is asserted to be an exercise in individual rights. Scarcely an issue could not be distorted to fit into either category, as desired.
So, what precisely is a “group right”? In the hands of the Roosevelt Society, the phrase appears to indicate the desire of the group to help a significant number of individuals by imposing mandates on a larger number of individuals. That doesn’t produce a very useful definition.
If it means anything, “the rights of the group” must implicate the well-being of the whole group, as a group. The classic “tragedy of the commons” concept is that individuals utilize a public resource until it is exhausted and then the entire society is harmed, perhaps fatally, because that resource was not maintained. If your expedition has limited food and everybody eats their fill from the start, the food will run out and the entire group will starve. In such cases, the individual must be restrained, sometimes made to suffer, because the alternative is failure of the entire group.
In the harshest application (in a communist regime, say), “group rights” would produce precisely the opposite conclusion to the Roosevelt Society’s. As tragic as those 700,000 deaths might be, if saving them requires destruction of the economy and the competitive education of a future generation, then they must be sacrificed.
The obvious contrary argument (which — let me be clear — I wholeheartedly endorse) is that it benefits the whole group to cultivate a concern for individuals. To value them. To be pro-life. (Communism universally fails in time, after all.)
Observe what has happened, though. We’ve introduced the group’s perspective on individuals as a value that benefits the group. This applies not only to life, but to other values, as well… such as liberty. That is, it benefits the whole group to maintain the primacy of individual liberty.
This, in fact, is the argument of those whom I imagine the Roosevelt Society is arguing against, whether they articulate it or not. Under the banner of that 0.2% of the entire population of the United States who have died while testing positive for COVID, we’ve uprooted our entire system of government. “Emergency declarations” have been transformed from a short-term ability to address an immediate catastrophe into a long-term waiving of the rules of representative democracy to manage an ongoing problem. Policies around elections that could never have made their way through the legislative process were simply imposed by fiat right in the middle of a contentious election, undermining the faith of probably around half the electorate that our system deserves our complete confidence.
The list goes on, but even those two items are potentially existential threats to the group.
Where does vaccination fit into this? Balanced between the principle of valuing life and the principle of valuing liberty. Nobody objects to inconveniences to save lives. We tolerated lockdowns! But things have to be reasonable, and we have to have a sense that individual liberty remains a social value.
There are alternatives to vaccination, and at the very least, those should be part of the discussion rather than ignored as if they don’t exist under the banner of “group rights” and the assumed authority of the state.
Featured image by Anna Samoylova on Unsplash.
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