I intentionally used the word “Statism” in place of “Socialism” in the title to this piece because no matter what anybody ever says “socialism” is, it isn’t that; that being whichever most-recently-failed flavor of Marxism has descended into an authoritarian dystopia in which the “workers of the world” are getting it good and hard, promises of free “healthcare” and free “education” (and more) notwithstanding. More importantly, however, I do so because in the United States are two genus of Statist philosophies, one known as Republican and the other as Democrat, and rather than get confused by their official histories, I’d like to offer an alternative philosophical taxonomy (and history) that helps explain why Americans keep losing freedom with each successive election, regardless of which party wins, and in spite of what both claim publicly to be doing for Individual Liberty.
Taxonomically speaking, and in the broadest sense, there are only a few possibilities for the philosophies that circumscribe an individual’s relationship to some authority over him/her that can – and does – mandate rules for Man’s conduct. God (Religion) or Government (State) are the two most well-known members[1] of that family and come in an almost endless supply of genus and species that can be grouped under certain objective, measurable criteria, in much the same way a red fox (Vulpes vulpes) is a particular species of the genus fox (Vulpes), which is a member of the larger canine (Canidae) family. (As an aside, Aristotle’s “Categories,” part of the larger Organon, does this for, well, everything, and is one of the great intellectual undertakings of any age, in my opinion. It is well outside the scope of this piece, but it looms in the background any time one engages in taxonomy.) I’ve left out “None” (Anarchy) as the other major player, and the possible fourth of Minarchism, which might include Market rules that dictate how a person may voluntary participate in commerce with others because they are beyond the scope of this essay’s concern.
The Statism Tree in America has two trunks – or maybe it would be more correct to say one trunk with two branches: the first I will call “Religious Utopianism” and the other I will call “Social Utopianism.” The first version would include most of the early settlers you’ve read about and for whom you’ve eaten turkey the third Thursday every November. The Pilgrims were undoubtedly fleeing religious persecution in their homelands, but it is no exaggeration to say that the Puritan Separatists were the Christian equivalent of the Taliban of their day. It was no accident they needed to go to completely undiscovered lands outside of Europe to live.
Lest this seem a bridge too far, consider that 35 of the 102 passengers aboard the Mayflower were Puritans, an illegal (under English law) and radical Christian sect who originally fled England for the more religiously tolerant Netherlands in 1607 – so that they could oppress each other… more freely… without any interference from their English King. After a few short years, however, fearing the loss of their English identity among the Dutch, they decided to go to the New World and join the already existing Virginia colony – in the area around the Hudson River. Navigation being what it was in the 1600s, they wound up at what is now Cape Cod. Before they even went ashore, however, there were problems. While the Puritans made up the largest minority on the ship, some 60 or so ‘others’ – known by the Pilgrims as ‘strangers’ – decided they were no longer bound by the original charter because they weren’t in the Virginia Company territory. (We might call these people the original American anarchists or minarchists).[2]
Only 41 people signed the Mayflower Compact, an explicitly Christian charter. We might well have a very different history as a Nation but for the combination of the New England winter of 1620-1621 and disease, which together wiped out over half of the original 102 travelers who went ashore in what is now Plymouth, MA… leaving only the Puritans. So much for early attempts at minarchism(!) – and the Mayflower Compact continued in force until 1691, when Plymouth Colony became a part of the larger Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The very next year, 1692, were the Salem Witch Trials, in which John Hathorne (1641-1717), the great-great-grandfather of author Nathaniel Hawthorne, was one of the chief inquisitors and by all accounts an incomparably cruel man. He was also a Church elder, businessman, and among the leaders of the Puritan community in Salem. His father, Major William Hathorne, was one of the original settlers of Massachusetts Bay Colony and the stories of him include that he once chopped a man’s ear off with an axe for some breach of religious doctrine – I believe it was for drinking or not keeping the sabbath or somesuch – and then tied the “sinner” to a wagon and paraded him through the town to serve as an example.
“He was, as Hawthorne later characterized him, ‘a bitter persecutor’ of Quakers. In particular, he is remembered for ordering the whipping of Ann Coleman.” (from the embedded link)
Having lived in Afghanistan for some 16 months, 11 months of it in one particular place, and having worked with hundreds of Afghans who told tale of their suffering at the hands of the Taliban religious police, I stand by my statement that the early Puritans were not unlike the Taliban in their religious fervor. I had an interpreter who was caught by the sharia police for not having a long enough beard. They surmised that he must have shaved it sometimes recently and so he was thrown in jail to await a public lashing at the local soccer field. Luckily, he and several others escaped the day before they were due to be lashed.
Judge John Hathorne had a man crushed to death, slowly, using rocks, when the man refused to “acknowledge” that he was a witch. When the hysteria of the Witch Trials began to wind down, judge Samuel Sewall eventually recorded in his diary that on January 14, 1697, he – Sewall – stood up in church while his minister read his confession of guilt for having persecuted the innocent; John Hathorne, however, never publicly repented of the Witch Trials.
It might well be asked by the discerning reader what this history, however interesting it may be, has to do with modern American political sensibilities. I would submit that John Hathorne is the perfect example, the very archetype, of how we arrive at modern evangelicals in the Republican party. Now, I can hear my conservative friends throwing their collective backs out trying to jump up to say it’s a long way from the Puritans to the modern Republicans, but I’m not talking about a direct political line of descent from one to the other, but rather a broad philosophical one. The urge to punish religious dissenters for heresy is rooted in nothing more than the urge to protect the prevailing orthodoxy.
How does a guy like Hathorne come to be? As I have previously detailed in the piece I wrote on public education in America, the first mandatory public school law in the U.S. was in Massachusetts. The “Old Deluder Satan Law” of 1647 was explicitly intended to ensure that the Bay Colony’s children could read the bible and knew the central tenets of their Puritan faith; John Hathorne was 6 years-young when it was passed and almost assuredly was a byproduct of the mandatory public school system of his time. Hathorne may have been unusual in his lack of mercy, but he was no black swan among his peers. All of the judges of the Salem Witch Trials were learned and respected men and most went on to careers in the law and in Massachusetts government, some even after the Witch trials. (Some might say that they were the “Toppe Men” of their day).
A big chunk of the settlement of the early American colonies took the form of “religious utopianism” and the desire to build communities that could properly worship God. Of course, what properly meant was the subject of such intense debate – and the Puritans such… well, puritanical a-holes that they even spawned new colonies… of religious utopians. One notable exception to all of this, however, was Roger Williams. Williams was a Separatist like his fellows in Massachusetts, though he was not a part of the first wave. He came to the New World in 1631 and had a post in the same church – at Salem, of all places. By 1635, however, he’d worn out his welcome by preaching that King James’ charters were “a lie” because the land should have been purchased from the Native Americans. He was more than once called before the General Court in Boston to answer for his “erroneous” and “dangerous opinions” between 1632 and 1635 and finally convicted of sedition and heresy in October of 1635. He was ordered to be banished, but allowed to stay through the winter if he shut his mouth.
Of course he wouldn’t… and didn’t.
Local officials came to his house to discuss his heresy in January of 1636, but they found that Williams had already fled three days earlier – during a blizzard. He took shelter among the Wampanoag natives 55 miles to the south until spring, then he founded Rhode Island. Despite being a Puritan himself, Williams founded Li’l Rhody on the concept of religious freedom and separation of religious opinions and engines of the State. Williams and Rhode Island were the first colonists to explicitly divide the two and allow for complete “liberty of conscience.” They accepted notable exiles and dissenters from all over, but principally from other Massholes who had also gotten sick of the Puritans.
These early anglo-Americans strains of Religious Utopianism perpetuated themselves through Statism, specifically through two kinds of laws: laws mandating indoctrination (i.e. “public education”) to ensure the next generation were properly learned and laws against heresy. The founding of other religiously dedicated or dominated colonies along the eastern seaboard, from New Sweden’s Lutherans (near modern-day Wilmington, DE), to Lord Baltimore’s haven for catholics a little further south, became necessary because if there was one thing the various Protestant denominations in the New World could agree upon, it was the absolute need to repress the “papists” and keep them from having any kind of control of government or even strong influence on the people. If this seems to prove too much, one can peruse the correspondence of Thomas Jefferson and George Wythe in 1786 and find rampant anti-catholic sentiment; public education was intended to ensure that the papists didn’t ruin the minds of the children.
To the larger point about Statism, the problem with Religious Utopianism – with the notable exception of Roger Williams – is that it couldn’t – and never can – allow heresy to “peacefully coexist” with existing orthodoxy. And if my religiously conservative friends are feeling a bit beset upon, I ask them to indulge and read a bit further; we’re coming to the political Left’s turn (speaking of persecution of heresy!) and this is a point to which we shall return.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Volumes have already been written about Karl Marx, so there is no need for me to even attempt what others have already done better. (Although I will note that there is a rather nice gloss on his economic theories on his Wikipedia page). Of salience for this essay, however, is only one quote from Wikipedia regarding a far less well-known work, Marx’s doctoral thesis:
The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,[52] which he completed in 1841. It was described as “a daring and original piece of work in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom of philosophy.” (emphasis mine)
I hate to draw too much from a work I haven’t read, but Marx is also widely known to be atheist, and it appears that his graduate thesis was an attempt to show the inferiority of theology to philosophy, an undoubtedly controversial position to hold in 1841. This is not to say that he was blazing new ground, as many others had come before – and done it better – during the Enlightenment, but Marx remained, if not hostile to religion, opposed to it because he saw
Religion [as] the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
For Marx, poor people are religious solely because of the misery of their circumstances. If the workers could be liberated from their capitalist oppressors and given ownership of the means of production, then they would no longer need the opium-like escape of belief in God. They could… kick the religious habit, so to speak.
It’s all too-easy to find the philosophical strains of Marxism in the current Democratic party, but the line from the original Jacksonian Democrats to the current Bernie-Bros and Progressive SJWs is such a twisted skein that has been covered – and covered up – so much that arguing over particular issues that led us to where we are is an exercise in futility. Historians and apologists (but I repeat myself) line up issues using the European Left-Right political dichotomy and ignore the essential axis of Liberty-Authority that undergirds the origins of the American experiment, causing significant confusion about how we got the democratic platform of (of 1828) to the current Marxism.
From Wikipedia:
The Democrats represented a wide range of views but shared a fundamental commitment to the Jeffersonian concept of an agrarian society. They viewed the central government as the enemy of individual liberty. The 1824 “corrupt bargain” had strengthened their suspicion of Washington politics. […] Jacksonians feared the concentration of economic and political power. They believed that government intervention in the economy benefited special-interest groups and created corporate monopolies that favored the rich. They sought to restore the independence of the individual – the artisan and the ordinary farmer – by ending federal support of banks and corporations and restricting the use of paper currency, which they distrusted.
Quite the shift to now, no?
The original democrats may have had very different policy prescriptions than their current name-claiming descendants who wear blue and bear the donkey logo, but populism, and majoritarian impulses more broadly, have always been at the heart of the democratic party. It is no wonder then that they would simply switch out their economics in the 1920s for the broad populist veneer (and appeal) of Marxism – and ignore what it meant in principle.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
One of the most important ways to understand American politics and its history is to understand that no party has ever had a monopoly on the American voter: the two U.S. political parties have always had to cobble together coalitions to accomplish their goals at the ballot box. This is the reality of the “melting pot” and the founding of distinct colonies with variegated histories, religions, languages, and cultures: and terrain upon which to exercise their prerogatives. Rust Belt voters had – and have – very different political concerns than southern farmers and Maine lobstermen.
To find the common root between these the two seemingly-opposed political viewpoints of the democrats and republicans, you have to look to the Progressive Movement in America. Progressivism united significant numbers of these two seemingly disparate factions in response to the externalities of rapid American industrialization and modernization. The urge of Progressivism was the “purification” of American society: the elimination of waste and excess in both business and broader society. Among racist democrats, this meant disenfranchisement of blacks and a push for more direct democracy: the referendum, the direct election of senators, and what amounts to municipal administration. The abolitionist movement, with its strong roots in Christian notions of the equality for all, having achieved de jure status for blacks, now turned its eyes to the bigger chunk of the disenfranchised: women. Organizations like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union saw themselves as a part of this broader reform movement and agitated for child labor laws, mandatory public education to get children off of the streets, and – of course – the franchise for their core constituency. It was this merger of seemingly disparate ideologies, of populism with a demand for more “efficient” and “clean” government, of equal franchise for women and education for children, that yielded some of the most important structural changes in the country, including the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th Amendments at the height of Progressive political power.
It is also important to note that progressivism included numerous legal luminaries of the day, including Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The Progressives used “social science” methodology – statistics and legislative committee studies – to “prove,” for example, it was necessary for “society” to sterilize people being held in institutions for the mentally handicapped. It was the populist impulse – the democratic political ideology – that gave “society” a voice in denying the individual the protection that the Constitution had previously been deemed to afford. It was the republican religious impulse that helped guide Progressivism on matters related to childhood education, women’s suffrage, and the Prohibition of alcohol. For almost 50 years, Progressivism dominated the American political landscape and cut a swath through its institutions. The modern, TL/DR version of this history is that the Progressive Era was the perfect fusion of the Karens with the Racists, allowing for the widespread disenfranchisement of newly freed blacks, the growth and imposition of the bureaucratic state, and the restriction of civil rights for everyone else.
Modern Marxist democrats will be appalled at this re-casting of history, but most of them are direct philosophical descendants of the Progressive fusion of republican religious zeal with a slavish devotion to the State as new church of the secular social scientist. There is no better example of this than the current “hate speech” codes and the tendency of Progressives to rely upon the phrase “You can’t shout fire in a crowded theater!” with absolutely zero awareness of just how terrible that Progressive era decision is, how wrong Holmes was in his example, nor that the petitioner in the case were socialists union organizers who were jailed for distributing leaflets arguing that the draft for WWI was a violation of the 13th Amendment.
“Fire in a crowded theater” is now simply a phrase that Progressives repeat like a cafeteria catholic reciting the Lord’s Prayer, except with more faith and less understanding from the former than the latter. Indeed, any moral person who has given the matter more than a moment’s thought would consider it a moral imperative to yell “Fire!” if they thought they saw one in a crowded theater. The issue isn’t solely the possibility of injury in the resulting stampede – it’s weighing that against the possibility of everyone being burned to death trapped in a theater if it actually is a fire. Holmes trick was to focus solely on the one harm while ignoring the other by inserting the word “falsely” and giving no discussion to the actual competing interests at stake. That it continues to be cited – and recited – by modern democrats to allow them to shout down and shut down their opponents’ speech is an irony that requires actual understanding to appreciate.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
The “breakup” of the Progressive fusion back into respective Republican and Democrat camps was largely as a result, in my opinion, of two forces. First and foremost, they succeeded wildly in their ambitions, achieving four Constitutional Amendments and a slew of Supreme Court decisions that were the functional equivalent of amending the Constitution. It is extremely difficult to hold together a political coalition in the aftermath of success. The second reason was the increasing atheism and racism of the populist democrats into the 1920s and 1930s that nicely dovetailed with the burgeoning eugenics movement. Margaret Sanger might be the archetype of the split in the Progressive movement and I would encourage anyone to read even the wikipedia entry on her life for illustration of the point. Her journey from daughter of a Christian stonemason to ardent advocate for eugenics, including of blacks, perfectly illustrates the split in the Statist tree, when some Christians in the Progressive movement went back to their ‘republican’ roots and Progressives heard the clarion call of socialism and its atheist founder, Marx. The misapplication of both Darwin and Einstein led intellectuals down some dark alleys from which we have yet to recover.
This is why we find ourselves in the current era with only two political parties, both well-studied in the use of the State to enforce their own particular views onto others. It is also why both find solace in Schenck’s ignorant command: the most important value common to both modern democrats and republicans is their intolerance for heresy – neither is capable of allowing dissent from orthodoxy. This is also why the First Amendment finds itself in tatters, and the values it was meant to protect nearly dead. Courts now look at the list of particulars and treat the Amendment as a collection of individual “interests” to be “balanced” against the “State’s” countervailing “interests,” rather than understanding that the Amendment as a whole is meant to protect dissenters and heretics. Period. The entirety of the First Amendment is like a monument to Roger Williams, the one-time Puritan who felt compelled to speak up against the orthodoxy of his day. The rights of free speech AND free association AND freedom of assembly AND freedom to publish AND separation of church and state (the establishment clause) are ALL ideas that are the fruits, individual blossoms, of a single tree designed to preserve Liberty – and the most important right for a free man or woman is the right to be able to speak their mind and associate with others of the same view. Forced association, speech codes, speech defined down because it makes money (commercial speech), all derive from a crippled understanding of Liberty. But if you’re looking for a reason why both Progressive democrats and conservative republicans agree you need to be quiet, why Twitter and Facebook now sound just like the moms and church ladies who were against rap music and explicit lyrics, it’s because neither is really interested in you correctly shouting “bullshit!” to what both have to say in the theater of public opinion. Heresy is the ultimate sin.
_____________________________________________________________
[1] There are arguments to be made for various others in the class, including “None,” under which we might place both Atheism and Anarchy, or make additional distinctions that would allow overlap and hybrids, or even a slightly different taxonomy. Regardless, both are outside this essay’s scope of concern.
[2] It also included some people who were not specifically religious, but only one kind – explorers – might fall under banner the “None”
I intentionally used the word “Statism” in place of “Socialism” in the title to this piece because no matter what anybody ever says “socialism” is, it isn’t that; that being whichever most-recently-failed flavor of Marxism has descended into an authoritarian dystopia in which the “workers of the world” are getting it good and hard, promises of free “healthcare” and free “education” (and more) notwithstanding – I am sorry but you obviously don’t spend enough time on tankie Twitter. You will find out it was all socialism, the debate being only which was better, Stalin, Mao or Enver Hoxha. Sadly our local boy Nicky C rarely makes the all star lineup 🙁
It’s the difficulty in having to look up how to spell his name while in the midst of an intense online argument rapidly approaching the godwin threshold.
Aha! So, it isn’t just me.
don’t spend enough time on tankie Twitter
I should think it commendable that a person doesn’t plunge into a sewer for a daily swim.
It was the populist impulse – the democratic political ideology – that gave “society” a voice in denying the individual the protection that the Constitution had previously been deemed to afford.
Although there is a certain alignment these days, as “populists” oppose unelected and overbearing “elites”, between populism and some protection for individual rights, I am confident it is ephemeral. Those rights mainly have value in our system to the extent the majority cannot lay hands on them. Whne “rights” are deployed strategically to achieve partisan ends, then they will be discarded by their so-called defenders when it is no longer necessary to do so.
IMO, a big part of that is the loss of understanding of the difference between “negative rights” and positive ones.
Indeed. Its hard to deploy a negative right strategically for political advantage. Positive “rights”, on the other hand . . . .
Freedom/Liberty are amazing in that it really is the one thing that doesn’t cost anything of anyone else. If someone, or some group, is made freer, it doesn’t “hurt” anyone else… but you see people get angry about it – because the public education system has done a masterful job of indoctrinating everyone to the notion that we’re all each other’s keepers.
So, for a controversial example, if a company has to pay less (gets a tax ‘break’) suddenly there’s a wailing and gnashing of teeth; the Dems are wonderful at weaponizing this politically. I get the fairness/equality before the law argument , but one would think that eventually someone would come up with the notion that maybe things would be better if EVERYONE were freer, but that never gets mentioned.
IOW, why doesn’t Amazon or ANYONE say, “Yes, Amazon got a tax break, so what should happen is that ALL businesses should get that same break.”
Nope. That NEVER happens. Instead, it’s all screaming and wailing and in the end NO ONE gets to be freer.
This reminds me of a joke I’ve heard (in Spanish) about a kid who goes to work on his uncle’s crabbing boat off the coast of southern tip of Texas. The boat is bringing crabs from both sides of the border. American crabs go in the barrel with the lid firmly secured while the Mexican crabs are put in the barrel with no top on it. The kid asks his uncle what the difference is between the crabs. “If an American crab gets close to crawling out of the barrel all the other American crabs will cheer him on and help him.” “If a Mexican crab gets close to the top of the barrel all the other Mexican crabs will pull him down with them.”
The urge to chop down the tallest tree – envy, by another name – is one of the worst things to watch in human beings.
And we’re in a particularly bad place nowadays as the Left is encouraging and legitimizing that envy as a political force.
I’ve heard the same joke about Soviet hell. The Jews had to be heavily guarded because they were all trying to get out. The Russians had a few guards because some of them were trying to escape. The Ukrainians didn’t need guards because when one of them tried to escape, the others pulled him back in.
If someone, or some group, is made freer, it doesn’t “hurt” anyone else – well that is not true. It hurts those who profit from the group being less free.
A rising tide raises all boats. In purely material terms, everyone benefits from the increase, but when you have every material thing you could want adding wealth doesn’t add happiness or comfort. On the other hand, having plenty while others are starving gives you power over those others.
A rising tide raises all boats – meh some people make fat cash from graft. Take that away and even in a wealthier society hey would either make less or need to work more/better
Someone with a government sinecure making good money for almost know work and a high living standard often does not want more money for actual work.
Someone with a monthly check keeping them in cheap booze and filling food for 0 work sometimes does not want to work for a better living standard.
It’s because we have developed a zero sum sort of belief when it comes to politics. We’re trained to believe that if someone gets rich, it’s not because of their ingenuity or hard work, but it’s as a result of oppressing others. People think that the pie stays the same size and therefore never think of increasing the size of the pie which would enable more people to get a slice.
Couldn’t agree more, Ed.
I was blessed that my last boss was a “grow the pie” type of guy. Fundamentally a libertarian who saw business as all about growing the enterprise. I was amazed out what a fight it was to get people – even our own – to understand that single concept.
That may have been when I realized that public education had ruined this country.
I, too, had a pro growth boss. He turned me loose with one instruction (or two). 1. Make money and remember, profit sharing pays for itself. 2. Make money honestly.
It worked out well for me, the company and the owner.
if someone gets rich, it’s not because of their ingenuity or hard work, but it’s as a result of oppressing others – which it often is due to corruption of the state. But people don’t make the difference.
“…Freedom/Liberty are amazing in that it really is the one thing that doesn’t cost anything of anyone else.”
You are correct but the nihilists do not see it that way. Power is a fixed pie so every piece you have is one they do not.
liberty is annoying. People around you doing things in ways you don’t like. cutting across 3 lanes of traffic rather than just turning around at the next intersection. Focusing on the least important things in life. Painting their houses purple with pink polkadots.
It’s not a fixed pie, but it’s a pie in the face to anybody with any amount of ego.
Yeah; I’ve posted this Amazon story a couple of times, and everybody thinks its great that Amazon should have no rights because people are jealous of how much money Amazon makes.
You can selectively deploy a negative right for political advantage.
In the game of power, it can only ever be a defensive or blocking move, though. With perhaps a few exceptions.
You can try to block your opponent from getting what he wants, but its hard to deply a negative right to get what you want – namely, more power over something. As we know to our sorrow, you can’t build an electoral majority out of people who want to leave the other guy alone. Winning elections doesn’t seem possible without some element of putting the boot in to somebody.
I suppose it’s a question of perspective, but if I obtain power and give freer speech to my own supporters but not to my opponents that seems like a weaponized negative right. Though, one could argue the real weaponization potential is of the restriction on speech.
I see what you’re getting at, but I think that’s more denying the negative rights to your enemies than anything else. Its part and parcel of converting negative rights into a privilege, available to some and denied to others, so they aren’t really negative rights at all any more.
It was this merger of seemingly disparate ideologies, of populism with a demand for more “efficient” and “clean” government, of equal franchise for women and education for children, that yielded some of the most important structural changes in the country, including the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th Amendments at the height of Progressive political power. – I was under the impression that originally the women’s orgs were pretty racist themselves…
I can’t paint with that broad a brush, Pie, because my research found that there were clearly folks among the WCTU (for example) who had been serious abolitionists. Were there likely also racists in there? Oh yeah. Hence why the two camps eventually split. A difference in views on economics was also part of it.
Maybe I was thinking of some suffrage orgs… But that is why I said I was under the impression… Not sure… did not particularly study the issue
While elites push more or less furtively various philosophies of marxist strains or otherwise, I am sure the average person is just authoritarian to the bone and latch on accidentally or fashionably to one philosophy or the other. If it wasn’t marxism it would be something else. Most people – a good 90% I wold guess – simply do not think. They just don’t. Politics wise i mean. They know little and understand less. So the rules will bring out one ideology or other to control them. This is not unique to the States.
Most people – a good 90% I wold guess – simply do not think. – these days I mean it is possible in the past it was different, the struggle to survive and lack of modern education…
I doubt it was ever different. The apparent increase in stupidity seems likely to be the result of higher modern literacy rates increasing the number of idiots writing.
As well as the spread of social media allowing them to spread their thoughts to everyone in the world at amazingly fast speeds.
More chimpanzees added to the typing pool…
Plus 1
The biggest problem is that they “know” a lot. If in truth they realized that they only “believed” these purported facts there might be some way to reach them and get them to challenge their beliefs.
Nice piece Ozy. Minor quibble: Maryland was founded to provide a refugee for Catholics who were being persecuted in England.
Well, yes, but that’s not unrelated to the issue that Catholics weren’t welcome in MA, either… or basically anywhere else. The anti-Catholic sentiment in England was rabid after the split and that absolutely got transported to the colonies. I feel confident in asserting that if there had been a place that Catholics could have comfortably settled among existing colonies, they would have. But they couldn’t.
The second reason was the increasing atheism and racism of the populist democrats into the 1920s and 1930s that nicely dovetailed with the burgeoning eugenics movement.
Welcome, the SoCons!
I actually think this birth and then split of Progressivism somewhat undercuts your critique of the oppressive orthodoxy. Postmillennial Christianity has always been a fringe belief. Heterodox, if not totally heretical. However, Postmillennial Christianity plus Industrial Revolution plus Abolitionism birthed the social gospel, which primed the pump for the progressives.
Would there still have been a massive shift in this country without the postmillennial protestants sparking off a culture war with the catholics ? I don’t think it would have been as successful. It was a complicated situation that’s hard to distill into a single battlefront, but I think that the hardening of the lines between protestant and catholic made for easy growth of the Postmillennial heresy that promised heaven on earth before the second coming.
Heresy is sometimes helpful in reining in the excesses of orthodoxy and correcting their missteps. It’s also a vehicle for injecting the populist passions of the mob with airs of legitimacy. I think we’re seeing this now. Western intellectual orthodoxy has been thoroughly co-opted and undermined by postmodern critical theory heretics. The critical theory ideas themselves are laughable, but when the intellectual elites espouse them, an aura of legitimacy is created. Now that the pomos are establishing themselves as the new orthodoxy, does the dynamic change?
I’m always questioning myself. Am I against their tactics, or do I find their tactics distasteful because I’m against their ideas?
apologies. my comment is a meandering piece of dreck.
No biggie. I enjoy your passion for the subject.
It means I at least wrote something that touched you… but not in… uh, you know, that way… not the Catholic priest way.
😉
So just like a high school teacher? Or you just aren’t going to give him the candy bar? 🙂
I think “giving the candy bar” is the problem in the first place.
Your teachers gave you candy bars??
Now we see why the education system is so bad.
😉
One ponds Orthodoxy is another Lakes Heterodoxy. I’ve been musing lately over the inevitability (in a democratic society) of being beholden to the will of the mob/majority. I see what happens in Portland and how the minorities of thought are punished, and how property owners are expropriated, and yet they serious challenge to their mayor is not from the right but someone even further left. The Puritans were themselves a fringe, unorthodox group. It was only when the fled and were granted control of a small area that they were the “orthodoxy”. The issue is, imo, not so much the minor local orthodoxies, as the large ones that seek to expand their dominion over all.
People should return to actual Orthodoxy . Join the Romanian Church
Yep. See my comment below, which was Brooks’d (in my defense, I’m pretty sure I replied to Trashy directly, so Imma blame it on the Protestant squirrels).
I’m sorry Trashy, I don’t quite understand what you mean.
The Puritans were oppressive. Full-stop. They were fucking awful. Whatever happened after that can in no way retroactively go back in history and make that better.
i.e. The Salem Witch Trials aren’t suddenly made better because the Progressives were ALSO oppressive AF as a result of heretical beliefs that produced post-modernism.
Indeed, the crux of my argument is that they’re both awful because they miss the essential element of American Exceptionalism that is in the First Amendment: the protection of heretics, including the requisite disjunction of religious orthodoxy as “law.” The Protestants – in their defense – had seen enough of that with the Catholic Church’s excesses, in both politics and the lives of the faithful, prior to the Reformation. Indeed, if we want to go back to Europe, you could argue the Catholics only got what was coming to them as a result of indulgences and all of the other nonsense the Church (as an organization) had engaged in.
But the Puritans were downright awful.
As to your last question, as always, por que no los dos?
Dogma is evil. Even if an aspect of your dogma turns out to be absolutely correct the conversion of a true idea into a dogma makes it oppressive because the character of dogma is that it renders disagreement or even questioning into heresy and therefore sin.
yeah, as I mentioned, I wrote some meandering dreck. My apologies on that.
To tighten up what I was trying to get across: This is all well and good when the orthodoxy are the clear bad guys and the heretics are clear good guys. What happens when it’s reversed? How does the besieged orthodoxy (Those in support of liberty, justice and western civilization) effectively deal with the heretical hordes at the gate (cultural marxism/postmodernism/woke/etc.)?
I’m not convinced that letting the heresy live and flourish and overtake institutions in a spirit of tolerance of dissent has worked. I’m also not sure that there’s any effective alternative that doesn’t involve making a deal with the devil by compromising the liberal ideals that made western culture great.
I agree that the puritans sucked. I agree they went well into the realm of oppression. I wonder if the difference between right and wrong in that situation was merely a difference of degree. I certainly don’t have an answer to that, which is part of the reason for the verbal diarrhea I put on the page.
Ahhh, yes, I see what you’re saying now.
My answer to that is that I think you’re coming at this from the perspective of “top down” rather than “bottom up” and that it’s also partly a chicken-egg phenomenon. We won’t get “more liberty” until Americans are a liberty-loving people again. They currently are not – at least not in numbers large enough to ensure the protection of negative rights.
To import a hard lesson I learned in the military: you can’t imprint “freedom and democracy” on a culture where the vast majority of people don’t want it. It’s as true of America as it is of Iraq or Afghanistan.
But if I were looking for places to start, it would be with the destruction of the Progressive theocracy that is public education. Forget about people in their 40s or 50s – they’re lost to use forever. This is how the Progressives/Statists won: they got control of the minds of the young and they knew they’d simply have to wait until people who loved liberty dropped dead.
The line about science proceeding not by new discoveries, but by deaths of old scientists is as true of politics as it is of science.
Kill public education. If we had a free market for education, things would be very, very different because they would be subject to market forces. Reality would eventually win.
How do you propose to maintain a free market in education in an intellectual and political environment that doesn’t value a free market in the market in general?
The COVID hysteria they have whipped up may just do that. Funny how the monsters you create come back to haunt you, no?
“Maintain”?
I’d like to first even be allowed to have competition. Then maybe we can let the results of those two (or more) education systems compete out in the real world.
To be more concrete: at the point which we allow kids to get an education that is more than Marxist pablum, I feel confident that those kids will understand just what an advantage they have over their publicly educated peers. The market will also understand (I believe).
We’ve got to start taking a LOOOONNNNG view of this problem.
I’m not suggesting that it exists, but even if my some miracle you implement it, the pressures will be to abolish it, this I was asking for your strategy.
*raises a glass*
you nailed it. So long as the illiberal types have a 13 year opportunity to imprint their values on 85%+ of each generation, we’re heading nowhere but bad places.
Conservatives decided decades ago to worry about GDP and slaying the Communist demon abroad.
Leaving the tiny, insignificant, no big deal task of educating the children of the country to the commies.
I think this is conflating political goals with non-political goals. Conservatives didn’t depart academia and pedagogy as professionals to go fight the commies as politicians.
You can blame as much of our educational dysfunction on John Dewey (who was no Marxist) as with Gramsci (and the long march). There might even be other factors, if you care to keep an open mind about it. Otherwise, fine, purge out one and then watch in dismay as the same (or nearly the same) plays out again.
“they got control of the minds of the young and they knew they’d simply have to wait until people who loved liberty dropped dead.”
Just as Khrushchev said.
Kill public education. If we had a free market for education, things would be very, very different because they would be subject to market forces. Reality would eventually win.
YES
I am strangely hopeful that all the screaming and wailing over schools opening up during the Lil Rona Panic will lead to a breaking of the teachers’ unions and public schooling.
That’s one potential win I see coming out of this.
College, too.
The education system really hasn’t adjusted for the fact that you can get almost any information online for little to no cost. There could come a point where college is no longer a “must have” provided that you can demonstrate that you know what you’re doing. Education in America is still done (with some superficial differences) the same as it was in the 1800s.
Ozzy, Maybe a critiqe, maybe a support. I think a thing is lets not cross Orthodoxy, vs Fundamentalism/Zealotry. As Trashy points out, much of the Zealotry has always been fringe, and carried on at unorthodox levels. IMO it is often spawned by the kind of thinking that one needs to take action and generate a certain state in the world. I think your quotes from Marx illustrate that handily. He attacks religion, because it gives hope to the downtrodden and poor, and hope that does not require them take forceful action to reshape the world around them. I’m trying to walk a fine line, because i do think that any religious belief worth it’s salt requires that the believer manage his actions in accordance with it’s teachings, but that is something (i think, though can’t elucidate quite yet) from, what i would call zealotry, a belief that he must forcefully enact those changes in society at large.
But, very well written and some good thinking material.
seconded
because i do think
first glance, I read it as “I don’t think” and was very confused for a few moments.
I can’t think.
Not during the workday.
I’d go mad.
This sounds like a semantic argument that hasn’t quite developed yet. How about this, leon:
At the point that orthodoxy uses the mechanisms of civil government – i.e. the state – to enforce its orthodoxy, is it not zealotry? Or fundamentalism?
That’s why I pointed to Roger Williams. He had the temerity to suggest, as a Puritan – publicly and loudly – that King James’ land grants were invalid because the land hadn’t been purchased from the Natives. That was one of the charges he had to go to court in Boston to defend against. For that public position – which doesn’t even seem very religious in nature – he was deemed to be engaged in the crime of heresy and told to shut the fuck up or go to prison.
I’m not sure how that isn’t zealotry, fundamentalism, or whatever term we want to use. It’s exactly what the Taliban did in Afghanistan. It’s exactly what the Progressives are trying to do now: use the mechanisms of govt to ensure there is no dissent from orthodoxy. Progressives are zealots, but they claim to have risen above mere religion to something (that Marx told them) was even higher: philosophy. Marx simply substituted the one word for the other and claimed that would lead to Heaven on Earth. It’s hysterical really.
Like i said, i wasn’t sure if i was critiquing, or adding another argument alongside yours.
Is there any evidence that Simon the Zealot used the mechanisms of civil government to enforce orthodoxy? If not, then I think you are using the term wrong. Hint: You are using the term wrong.
Orthodox quite literally means right thinking (orthos, right + dokein, think). It implies that everything else is wrong thinking. For the most part, adherents of various orthodoxies don’t go around killing the heterodox. But whenever a group of people with a shared notion of orthodoxy obtain power, their actions tend toward oppression of the heterodox. Fundamentalism is I think just what we call orthodoxy when it is out of power.
I’d quibble about the idea that an Orthodoxy can ever be out of power. it is just replaced by the new orthodoxy, or there is a schism and a seperation of the societies in which the orthodoxy is in control of.
Like i said above. I’ve been mulling around about how no matter what, you are subject to the will of your neighbors. If they hate your Libertarian crazed ideas enough, they will organize a mob and chase you out. Either you oblige, you flee, or you die in a glorious last stand.
Yeah, I think there’s no end for the potential to quibble here, and my comment itself is a quibble. But gender studies had an orthodoxy before it ever held any substantial pull over the culture; Islamists had an orthodoxy before the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the various monarchies were toppled, or so many Soviet-backed communist states evaporated and the Islamists swept into the vacuum and took power. Each had power in a narrow sense, petit power if you will, but it was the exercise of grand power that brought about tangible oppression. Though, I suppose, to the extent there were ever gender studies professors and students who weren’t Marxists, they were the first to be oppressed by the Marxist orthodoxy, before it got brought to society at large.
whats the point of a forum if we can’t quibble every now and then.
I think we are saying the same thing, just differently. In my view “orthodoxy” is just a matter of scale. If you are talking about the commies in Russia, they were just a minority, but they had, within their own group, an orthodoxy.
I guess one caveat would be that i could see how “orthodoxy” can be linked to “here’s what the ruling class thinks”, rather than what the majority of people actually think. Think iraq under Sadam Hussein.
In the end, the desire to dominate his fellow man is endless in man, and the only cure is to remove the means of him doing so.
“In the end, the desire to dominate his fellow man is endless in man, and the only cure is to remove the means of him doing so.”
^Why our constitution is so despised^
I think the argument they’re making above is: what about when orthodoxy is “correct” in its prescriptions or proscriptions? My answer to that is to reference the flippant line we sometimes use about govt actions: an idea so good it has to use force to get people to do it.
When orthodoxy is “correct” it doesn’t need the power of the state behind it.
Not really. My argument is the same one you outline. Not all orthodoxy requires, or uses the power of the state.
Wonderful article.
had come before – and done it better – during the Enlightenment
Marx was a continental Romantic, so you wouldn’t expect him to be well versed in [predominately British] Enlightenment work. His subsequent engagement with it was as a critic, not a student.
“Fire in a crowded theater” is now simply a phrase that Progressives repeat like a cafeteria catholic reciting the Lord’s Prayer, except with more faith and less understanding from the former than the latter.
Stolen, copied and eagerly anticipating dropping that in response to the next idiot on FB who trots it out.
Go forth and proselytize! (Wait… no. Uhhh, never mind.)
😉
Marx was a continental Romantic, so you wouldn’t expect him to be well versed in [predominately British] Enlightenment work. His subsequent engagement with it was as a critic, not a student.
Indeed. Marx’s Labour Theory of Value had been decisively overturned during the 1870s/80s with the marginalist revolution and its insight that value always arises from the application of human wants/needs to the valuation of a scarce good or service. Marx missed that revolution, either because of poor research or a dogged ideology-in-formation that just didn’t want to go there.
What’s more remarkable to my mind is that generations of people who’ve subsequently read Marx (or more often, haven’t read Marx) don’t seem to have any knowledge of marginal value, or positively disregard the insight because it doesn’t fit some weird-ass Platonic-like view of “value” or “worth” as being somehow inherent or instantiated.
Spot on.
Marx’s attempt at LTV wasn’t really all that different from Smith, et al – and suffered from the same deficiency. Marx of course didn’t care about that deficiency because he immediately went off on the exploitation tangent – which for him, and his followers, is the part that matters. Even though you can’t actually derive anything meaningful from the LTV within economics; you can derive a powerful rhetorical cudgel.
Mid-19th century industrial life was miserable – Marx was a cogent and observant social critic. You get similar depictions of it from an entirely orthogonal source – Charles Dickens. The problem is Marx was a lousy theorist; if you take away the utopian fantasy from Marx you know who you’ve got – Thomas Carlyle.
There were better ideas than Marx’s that were contemporaneous to his, but they did not hold any romantic appeal. The seen and the unseen, for example, while it speaks to our cold libertarian hearts, does not seem to animate young revolutionaries the same way proletarian class struggle does.
Like any good romanticist, Marx did not so much engage Bastiat as dismiss him and his ideas, despite outliving him by more than quarter century.
Well the Proletarian class struggle doesn’t quite animate the proles either.
All mass movements do not require a central idea, but they do require a common enemy – paraphrasing Hoffer (The True Believer).
An interesting example is Chile of recent months. Poverty has been dramatically reduced from what it was pre-Pinochet, so yay! success, right? Not so much, because even though the bottom has been improved, the old hierarchy raised more barriers to upward mobility so that their status was not challenged. From what I’ve read, it is middle class frustration with the old hierarchy that has fueled much of the unrest.
Lost in the history of the Russian Revolution is all the non-monarchists who got fucked by the Marxists too. Not that the monarchists were uniformly deserving of it, either.
Because it is quite a departure from regular thought. The insight is good enough that, once you explain it to someone, they can recognize it as true, but i think it’s one of those things that is particularly hard to stumble upon without the right priming. Think kind of like Newton vs Aristotle on the motion of objects. Aristotle said “objects want to be at rest”, Newton argued that they would continue until a force acted on them. One is much more natural conclusion to arrive at.
Likewise, i think the conclusion that things have fundamental value is something that comes naturally to people, and so they are primed to think that. Even non-Marxists. I can’t tell you the amount of times i hear “We need to have our money backed by something that has inherent value, like gold”.
I still recall the discussion in law school where I was finally convinced that there isn’t any such thing as inherent economic value. It even just back to me who was teaching the class.
Did you just out yourself as a Harvard-educated lawyer? [draws back with look of dismay]
Not for the first time here. Critical legal theory was just getting started, and the descent into progressive madness had not even been foreshadowed. Due to my training in, of all things, philosophy, I was pretty well immunized against critical legal theory. The analytic philosophers I studied under had little patience for that continental romantic crap.
Charles Kingsfield?
Have you ever taken apart a pack rat’s nest?
I have never tried this but I was told as a child that raccoons are easy to catch. Drill a blind hole in the side of a stump. Place tight fitting shiny object in the end of the hole and then pound a plug in the hole. Drill a smaller hole just big enough for the raccoon to get his arm in through the top of the stump to the first hole so the raccoon can see the shiny object. The raccoon will reach in, grab the object but not be able to remove it. He will not let go and continue to struggle until you arrive.
How about jewelry? You can’t even eat it.
Around ’84 I went to the Tucson Rock and Gem show. Paid a few bucks to get in a hall just off of the U of A campus. No security at all. There were a few dozen vendors there. Most of them had card tables with mason jars full of diamonds, rubys, emeralds and other shiny things of various sizes. I remember the going price for 1 to 2 carat diamonds was around five bucks. Ten for a really good one.
*checks current retail price* Oh look you can buy one in a fancy showroom for only $6000 today.
I wanted to buy a cool geode that was the purplest purple I had ever seen but I was poor in those days. I later discovered that many geodes are artificially colored by irradiating them. Damned….I almost put my hand in that hole.
A fun response to that is to ask if I got into a crowded theater and began shouting the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire could I be prosecuted for the crowds reaction?
So you are saying that Winona Ryder is, in fact, not a witch? ///missingthepoint
Jk. Only had time to skim and I generally agree that most people are assholes that are trying to control other people who are probably also assholes in their own right.
Oh no, she is definitely a witch.
You can tell because…. (cue the music)
she weighs the same as a duck!
It’s a fair cop.
As always, Ozy, a thoughtful and dense (in the good way!) post.
On the hollowing out of Manhattan, (TW: NYT) this gem:
And, indeed, new cases in FL are running at about 300 per million, and in NYS (don’t know for NYC) at about 33 per million. There is this small nod toward sanity at the end:
Gosh, a stringent lockdown and “methodical” (read, slow and irrational) reopening might be bad for business? Who could have seen that coming.
All told, a pretty grim look at the damage inflicted on Manhattan.
where the virus is far worse
While Florida is definitely in the ramp-up phase for deaths while New York has leveled off, Florida has so far had less than 400 deaths per million while New York has had more than 1600 deaths per million. I’m not sure how we measure “far worse” but I think it doesn’t go backwards.
Florida’s overall case fatality rate is also about 1/4 of New York’s, though NY is slowly improving while FL is slowly worsening.
And the “experts” told us early on that some number of people will die from this and we don’t have the capability to stop the virus dead in its tracks, but we can slow down the infection rate with a short lockdown period so that we don’t overwhelm the healthcare system by having all those deaths at once.
Now several governors have insisted that they’re going to stay locked down until there are “no new cases” or until there’s a vaccine (which is a very bad benchmark since the completion time on that is so uncertain).
They should just mount wheels on those goalposts.
FL is not slowly worsening. It is improving.
Scare a population of old people into staying away from the doctor for three months and then you can’t be surprised that you have a backlog of illness to deal with.
A virus doesn’t give a flying fuck about political boundaries. Florida’s first wave happened later than NYS’s. The wave in each locale is following the typical 7-8 week outbreak of nearly every “pandemic” level virus.
Florida’s first wave happened later than NYS’s
Because Cuomo’s lockdown didn’t include keeping people from fleeing to Florida and taking the disease with them.
They keep moving the goalposts. Ever since it became apparent that the deaths in their Favorite Governors States were going to be sky high, they have changed it to cases. If and when the Red States get their death counts up to the NY/NJ/CT levels, then deaths will be important again.
At the moment, Florida has more of pretty much everything per million than NYS. Of course, they also peaked months later than NYS, and that’s the way bell curves work. I think the article was referring to now, not the total historical experience of the two states.
Its funny, I just got off the phone with somebody in FL. She was talking about how hard hit they have been, and was surprised to learn that their experience mirrors ours in AZ, just delayed by a week. She mentioned something about how people weren’t sure who to point fingers at. I suggested New Yorkers, and she laughed and had the number flights from NY to FL in March at her fingertips.
I wouldn’t be too surprised when its all said and done the cases and deaths wind up being a nearly identical in scale to the states respective populations. Which makes me happy AZ got the hard part out of the way.
The different timing on when it ran in various states means we’ll be waiting awhile, but I think you’re right.
I am absolutely confident, though, that when the pandemic is over and we look at how effective (not very) and how damaging (very much indeed) the lockdowns were, nobody who matters will draw the lesson that they were a mistake.
Despite all the claims that this is about science and data, it is ultimately about politics and belief. Politics in that “something must be done, this is something, so we shall do it” and belief in that sunk costs, while a fallacious justification logically, are very resonant emotionally.
I am cynical enough to believe this ends on Nov 4, 2020.
Me too. I’m planning on selling off some bio-science stocks, which are killing it right now, before the election.
I am cynical enough to believe that Our Masters, having discovered what an apt tool “public health” is for exerting power in a country that has become extraordinarily risk averse and has proven absurdly easy to panic, will never put it down.
I am cynical enough to believe this ends on Nov 4, 2020 if the proper party wins.
Agreed. The short-run case fatality rates are more tightly clustered than before and that is likely due to more widespread testing. In the end, NY will not look so different from FL, and vice versa, apart from outlier events like the early spread in nursing homes.
If that is the case, is it Ironic that the states that more effectively drew down “the curve” are now being hammered for not handling the CV correctly? Or just politically predictable?
somebody should superimpose the “flatten the curve” charts on top of the mask/no mask charts. That would be a hoot.
I wouldn’t be too surprised when its all said and done the cases and deaths wind up being a nearly identical in scale to the states respective populations.
I don’t. I think there will be large variations that will be baffling for a while, that will resolve itself when sars-cov-2 is no longer mistakenly viewed as a binary state.
Could you expand on that?
Seconded…
I’m with Gustave, but maybe not for his reasons.
I’m a simple guy and just think that Arizona is not NYC. We don’t have public transportation, for example, like NY does. Why does this matter?
It seems to me that, like most viruses, COVID transmission depends upon total viral load. In other words, suppose you only get exposed to “a little” COVID – a small dose. I believe that just like a vaccine, your immune system may develop resistance that allows you to “avoid” catching it, even though you’ve now “had it” (sort of).
NYC did nothing about their trains until months after it was running rampant. Cuomo also did the whole “send elderly folks with COVID back into nursing homes” thing.
And then there are confounding things like co-morbidities among the various state populations, average ages of state populations, etc.
IOW, if people ever look at this in a complete sense (or as complete as we can imagine), you’d have to conclude that we just don’t know anywhere near what we think we do and comparing “curves” may lead us to some completely incorrect conclusions about what really happened with this virus.
We will never have really good data on this, so despite Farr’s law of epidemics, the modeling will always be bad.
Just as one example – DeWine tested positive, then negative twice. How exactly does that show up in the statistics? How SHOULD it show up in the statistics? There is a room for plenty of disagreement about how to score that.
Ozy, I’d love to find data on NYC (or better, the metro area) that I could compare to what is on DIVOC. The things you list “should have” resulted in a worse outbreak (measured by cases) in NY, but it just doesn’t show in the statewide data.
Of course, as juris notes, the data is crap, so that might be the issue.
It may be that the things you list didn’t change the number of people who got infected, but it meant they got the viral overload, and that’s why the NYS mortality data looks so much worse than in other states that had similar numbers of infected people.
Caveat again on “the data is crap”.
Another is changes in therapeutics. I think you’d see lower mortality rates in NY/NYC if those same cases had been treated now rather than back in April.
The data is crap, but the least crappy data is the hospitalization data.
That is almost exactly my thinking. Add to that severity is probably also linked to the viral load at exposure and previous exposure to sars-cov-2 or certain other coronaviruses, among other factors.
I think if there’s a better understanding of why there are a large number of symptomatic/minimally symptomatic and be able to shift cases in that direction, it will be a better outcome than vaccine development or therapeutic advances. However the problem with research is that it doesn’t necessarily work on desired timeframes.
I linked before, but Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline blog has had some interesting posts (and the comments section too) such as
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/07/07/more-on-t-cells-antibody-levels-and-our-ignorance
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/07/15/new-data-on-t-cells-and-the-coronavirus
My other perception is that research into coronaviruses (and possibly common respiratory illness) right now is far far beyond what has been done for years. Some of that will be junk, but there will probably be a knock on effect for common colds and ILI illnesses that were seen as minor and not worth the money or effort when there’s sexier diseases to fight.
Yeah, we’re going to spend untold man-hours on a virus that is about as fatal as the flu.
While activities like going to the gym – that would reduce mortality for the things that kill HUGE chunks of people in the US – are being worse than neglected: they’re being actively prohibited.
So yeah, much public health, many sciences.
That’s a lot of pharma and disease research. Weight loss, better diet, and exercise would fix a lot of things at lower cost than maintenance prescriptions, office visits, etc etc.
I’d argue that this is absolutely unfounded. They want to believe that the US is just one singularity, where what happens in New York, simultaneously is happening accross the nation. They experienced the wave earlier than the rest of the states.
My new thing is going to divoc and looking at the population adjusted chart. You see very similar curves for new cases for most places, just with different timing.
FL, NY and AZ are almost mirror images on the run up (NY ran up fastest), with AZ having a somewhat faster drop off. If you could superimpose the curves, they would be almost indistinguishable.
South Dakota is an anomaly – two peaks of new cases of almost equal heights, followed by a plateau which is slowly increasing. Their death rate is well below NY, FL, and AZ.
“case” data is shit.
I have just had a SEVENTH different (Illinois) person tell me they got a notice of a positive test in the mail despite the fact that they never actually got tested because they refused to put up with the FOUR HOUR wait.
You know what words don’t appear in that article?
“Crime” “loot” “riot”
I haven’t really heard about much of that in Manhattan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B79fn6Fmj0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_V1dsgRWEA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ByWerY9Duc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B79fn6Fmj0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_V1dsgRWEA
brought the virus to heel
There you have it – the glorious control that government can achieve, if only we all bend to the collective will. But one person, just ONE PERSON, without faith, and our prayers will not be answered.
That insane little throw-away phrase stopped me too.
Unlike dogs and progs, viruses can’t be taught to heel. They do their thing and spread themselves around regardless of your executive orders. This version of a corona virus will be with us forever. In future generations, kids will get exposed early and it will probably never affect their health. The idea that it can be eliminated or even prevented is ludicrous. The cost of trying far outweighs the benefits.
I am fairly certain I know when we will reopen.
In September they will say ‘Covid who?’
I’ve often argued that the Puritans never went away, they just substituted the State for God. Martha Coakley made her bones throwing day care owners in jail for absolutely ludicrous charges of sexual abuse that were lurid and fantastical in their details, and I don’t think I’m squinting very hard when comparing them to the Salem Witch Trials.
The Bible thumpers down here in my neck of the woods always seemed more focused on the action of sinning. They rage against drink, not the thirst. Against fornication more than lust. They cry to the sinner “repent, and be washed in the blood of the lamb”. They will lay on hands on you to lower you in the water of Jordan, and bring you up again cleaned of sin. Not my cup of tea, but no one is dragging anyone to the water against their will. Their doors are open, and the water is always flowing, always there to wash your sins clean.
I find the colder, more implacable granite Northern religiosity that gives worship and adulation to the State far more frightening. Everyone remembers when Clinton called half the country “deplorables” but very few remember the second bit: “they are irredeemable”. Mrs. Clinton is a religious woman, steeped in the Methodist Social Gospel tradition, going all the way back to her college days. I think she said exactly what she meant, and I think it’s enlightening not only to what she thinks but what the wider beliefs of those who worship the God-State believe. When they stripped God from Christianity, they also stripped away God’s grace. Then whole fucking point of Christianity is that there are no irredeemable ones, that all of us can be saved by the grace of God. That no one, be he ever so vile, is consigned to the pit. That all the sinner must do is repent, cast himself on the mercy of the Lord, and turn his steps toward the righteous path. Well, Mrs Clinton says, that might be good enough for God, but it’s not good enough for me.
The community of faith will be happy to baptize you to cleanse you of sin. The community of government will waterboard you until you repent.
I always thought Hillary’s reference to “irredeemable” was the most chilling. It completely wrote those people off as members of society, the kind of thing you say about people you have a mass grave for.
Their view of democracy has been reduced to them winning and everyone else losing. Losers get punished, winners get to make the rules. Ultimately that needs some sort of moralistic justification, if only to deflect blame.
And it’s fucking bizarre because most of the “deplorables” are just impoverished rural people who have very little power at all. Some of them may have some stupid collectivist views about race, but they rarely harm anyone. Meanwhile, Hillary spends her entire career pushing for wars of aggression that get thousands of people killed, and she somehow elevates herself to a godlike position of granting or withholding redemption from others. I try to be a forgiving person, but if there were one thing I would classify as unforgivable, I would say it’s making a decision that causes death and suffering on that scale.
The job of the poors is to vote for their betters and then graciously accept the handouts they give. Anything else would be “against their own interests”, after all.
“I always thought Hillary’s reference to “irredeemable” was the most chilling. It completely wrote those people off as members of society, the kind of thing you say about people you have a mass grave for.”
Bingo. I thought the same.
Average American a few years ago – “Nah. It can never happen here.”
Hillary Clinton – ” It can and it will.”
I can’t add anything, Viking, because I agree with every word you wrote here.
The Progressive worship of the State has meant there is no redemption. Cancel culture is just the Twitter-equivalent of this.
Sorry for going OT.
DNR tells employees to wear masks during Zoom calls, even when they are alone at home
magic juju will stop the virus.
It is all about being seen
Catching a virus on the internet is a thing, you know.
A little too fucking late to set examples. It’s not going to change anything at this point. Four months ago when governors were lecturing people to wear masks while delivering said lectures without was that time.
OBEY
I recall my history teacher informing us of the interesting factoid the first synagogue in the US was established in Rhode Island.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touro_Synagogue
I learn so much here. Thanks, Ozy.
And thanks UCS and Tundra for the redbubble info. I ordered the “Freedom is Slavery” mask to alternate with my current digicam. /sld that I only wear them to respect the wishes of those on whose private property I choose to tread.
https://twitter.com/SistahScholar/status/1292990330392981510
OT: Putting in the final push to get Kamala Over the Line!
Though some seem to be ready for her to accept the consolation prize as AG. Heaven Help us if that happens.
“Heresy is the ultimate sin.”
This is why we call you “Ozy.”
https://nypost.com/2020/08/11/john-mcafee-apparently-arrested-for-wearing-thong-instead-of-face-mask/
Probably not the greatest idea to antagonize your host country when you’re on the run from whoever he thinks he’s on the run from.
OZY, you just want keep me awake at night, wondering, worrying, waiting and wishing.
As always, another article that makes me question why some believe or “know” things that have been consistent in one aspect, as in their failure. Given the choices we see “None of the above” ever is listed. Thanks for another great article.
Looks like someone got to Ghislaine’s attorneys…
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/11/ghislaine-maxwell-lawyers-say-jeffrey-epstein-suicide-affects-jail-conditions.html
Maxwell is accused of helping Jeffrey Epstein, a former friend of Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, obtain young girls to be sexually abused.
TMITE. One of them has been identified by multiple sources as having visited an island whose primary purpose was to have orgies with teenage girls. The other ran in the same social circles and has a couple pictures snapped with the guy from the 80s. Yet Epstein was “a friend of Trump and Bill Clinton”
And Trump supposedly banned Epstein from Mar al Lago.
Complete with video of how Trump and Epstein partied it up. Clearly Bad Orange Man is a pedophile.
Yep, what a crock of horseshit.
Reading about her treatment, it does sound like a form of torture.
Since that treatment hasn’t resulted in a constructive termination, so to speak, they’re taking a more direct approach.
A big chunk of the settlement of the early American colonies took the form of “religious utopianism” and the desire to build communities that could properly worship God. Of course, what properly meant was the subject of such intense debate – and the Puritans such… well, puritanical a-holes that they even spawned new colonies… of religious utopians. One notable exception to all of this, however, was Roger Williams.
William Penn and his experiment in religious liberty haz a sad.
Yeah, but he came later. He didn’t even get to the States until 1681-82 AND Pennsylvania was given to him by the King. That’s not the same thing as Roger Williams, but please don’t think ill of me for not adding more words to this essay or eschewing Penn. The trial of Willliam Penn and William Mead is among the most important events in history, as far as I’m concerned.
And Penn was no piker – he spent a bunch of time in the Tower of London, endured the calumny of English society for being a Quaker, and was all but cast out by his own father (an Admiral) for his writings and advocacy that undermined the supremacy of the Crown.
please don’t think ill of me for not adding more words to this essay or eschewing Penn
Not at all. I like the piece.
I was just being a little… provincial.
I like it. Hard to find a better man of principle to hold up than Penn.
if there was one thing the various Protestant denominations in the New World could agree upon, it was the absolute need to repress the “papists” and keep them from having any kind of control of government or even strong influence on the people.
Quakers too.
Errr…. repress the Quakers too.
“I’m not a Quaker”
/Dick Winters
I only mentioned it briefly, but yes, the Quakers and Catholics took a beating. As I noted, the senior-most Hathorne was known for his persecution of Quakers.
So… Popular neck gaiters aren’t effective against coronavirus, Duke study finds.
So when do non clinical trials count and when do they not?
Do they further the narrative?
If they go to “you have to wear a face covering but not a neck gaiter” mandate, my shit will be lost. You’re going to force me at gunpoint to participate in your stupid theater but now are going to instruct me on the finer points of my performance?
Those are the only things that are tolerable.
Yes. Yes, they are.
You can’t have my useless neck gaiter. It’s keeps people off my ass while not irritating me too much.
No shit.
Covid 19….. 0.125 microns
Put on an N95 mask and have someone light up a a cigar….can you smell it?
*smoke particles ~ 0.3 microns
The whole mask charade is a charade.
Note they only say the N95 mask (worn properly) worked, and the gaiter didn’t. They left out the stats for the other 12 types of masks they tested.
And this:
“while a breathable neck gaiter ranked worse than the no-mask control group“
Yeah, bullshit. What, they cause people to give off more spittle when talking. That’s nonsense.
the mechanism I hear bandied about was that they took your big droplets and aerosolized them, making more small droplets.
Those droplets evaporate quickly. The viral particles left behind and not glued down with dried snot are going to start working into the mask, ‘saturate’ it and then start blowing out.
I would guess in half an hour those masks are useless. Want to carry a box of them all day and change every 30 minutes?
Unless the mask is rated to filter below 0.125 microns it is useless. One rated for that size (probably using diatomaceous earth) is either prohibitively expensive for general use or difficult to breath through.
Next it will be full hazmat suits. This has nothing to do with public health and everything to do with OBEY. They should just skip over all of this intermediary nonsense and go straight to requiring burkhas for everyone. With your underwear worn on the outside, of course.
This has nothing to do with public health and everything to do with OBEY.
Yep. Look at the ad I linked to.
But it stops droplets. Droplets! Is there proof that the virus is spread mostly through droplets? Well… no.
I need a peer reviewed double blind study or it didn’t happen. Try again Duke and get me some hydroxychloroquine while you’re at it.
You know who else could use some HCl?
Poor Samantha…
Wrong result, so that’s not real science.
Also, this ad from the WHO was shown right in the middle of the article: https://i.imgflip.com/4b50jc.jpg
I have a post in waiting on masking effectiveness. It is quite devoid of links, and I’m hoping it sets the framework for an informed discussion.
One thing that I am worried about, though, is my confirmation bias. I’m absolutely willing to believe that good PPE and (as or more important) good discipline can help you avoid catching or spreading the disease. I am highly skeptical that masking, as a public health measure, does much to protect against catching or spreading the disease. I notice that when I read stories on how masking helps (or doesn’t), I approach them differently, flyspecking the pro-mask articles and more nodding along with the anti-mask articles (whose authors, since they agree with me, must be highly intelligent and likely quite good-looking).
Looking forward to it! And biases are both advantageous and albatrosses.
And there was no joy in Mudville.
Makes it easier to wean myself off televised sports.
Nice piece, Ozy. My family arrived on the Mayflower as part of the “others” contingent .
For what that’s worth.
I am highly skeptical that masking, as a public health measure, does much to protect against catching or spreading the disease. I notice that when I read stories on how masking helps (or doesn’t), I approach them differently, flyspecking the pro-mask articles and more nodding along with the anti-mask articles (whose authors, since they agree with me, must be highly intelligent and likely quite good-looking).
I consider the Great Mask Kabuki to be nothing more than pigeon superstition, so I am pretty much utterly impervious to any mask propaganda.
And it’s really interesting to see the studies which have been referenced here saying the evidence that masks actually help in an operating theater is spotty, at best.
Most of said studies showed a statistically insignificant increase in infections in the surgical teams that _wore_ masks. It’s an awfully damning indictment of their effectiveness; you’d have to argue that even though they don’t work for the specific purpose for which they were designed, they work in preventing infections at the Costco.