Category: ideological culture

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First Amendment rights ideological culture media and media people

Unmasking the Mask Debate

Covid, mask, UV light, disinfectant

Sometimes things are complicated.

Many factors matter when deciding whether it makes sense to wear a mask to fend off infection. Let alone whether it’s okay to compel others to do so.

Now add another question: whether it is ever okay to deliberately suppress discussion of these subjects.

I’ve talked about all this before. But on those occasions I could not yet point you to a lengthy Heartland Institute post by James Agresti on “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Masks, and the Deadly Falsehoods Surrounding Them.”

Once disparaged as ineffectual except maybe for hospital workers, the power of masking up was later drastically oversold by policy makers.

Agresti aggregates evidence indicating that COVID-19 is spread mainly by fine aerosols that can stay aloft a long time and easily penetrate most masks. But the evidence for mostly aerosol rather than big-droplet transmission was ignored or downplayed by the WHO and CDC for over a year.

Agresti also argues that trials of the effectiveness of masks in preventing infection are “inconclusive” with respect to N95 masks in clinical settings. And that these studies show no statistically significant benefits for any masks in “community settings.”

To combat aerosolized COVID-19, he recommends more extensive indoor use of UV disinfection systems.

Lots to talk about. Experts familiar with the research that Agresti canvasses often disagree. How about it, big-tech social-media firms. May we discuss?

Or must we stick to received dogma regardless of observations and logic?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Party Like It’s Versailles

Met Gala, equality, hypocrisy

It was quite the party. All the big names were at the Met Gala, coughing up $30 thousand per ticket. Representative Alexandria “Woman of the People” Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) turned heads with her stunning dress . . . emblazoned with the big red words: “Tax the Rich.”

Other women at the event sported similar ideological markers: “Equal Rights for Women” and . . . excuse me . . . “Peg the Patriarchy.”

The most common comment? The sheer elitist effrontery. 

This was of and for the poshest of the posh: celebrity culture. And couture. 

The stars and politicians and multi-millionaires presented themselves proudly, smiling, unmasked — while waited on by staff all masked up.

It takes a certain amount of gall to parade before the plebes, maskless while they are masked — though we are told the celebs masked up once the red carpet parade was over. To pretend to be “with the people” and somehow against the rich while hobnobbing with the super-wealthy is one thing, but twirling and smiling and showing off while the lowly servants are not even allowed to show their faces . . . undermines that whole “tax the rich” theme.

Meanwhile, the president expressed pent-up anger at those who resist being vaccinated (“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin”) and the vice president tweeted that one way to “end the pandemic” is by “protecting the vaccinated.”

The vaccinated are allegedly protected — by their vaccines.

All this echoes Marie Antoinette — had she ever possessed the temerity to parade about as Jean-Paul Marat.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture subsidy

Slackers, Unite!

work, labor, communism, socialism

International socialists may once have rallied around “workers, unite!” but today’s young “communists” are embracing a Non-Workers movement, demanding free stuff and/or a Universal Basic Income (UBI). 

This came to mind reading a recent New York Times’s op-ed, “Work Is a False Idol,” and an earlier report, “These Chinese Millennials Are ‘Chilling,’ and Beijing Isn’t Happy.” A new movement in China and elsewhere, known as “Lying Flat,” extols indolence.

Instead of a career? Working hard? 

Do nothing!

Sounds like early retirement.

Very early retirement, for this is a young adult malaise.

Cassady Rosenblum, who took the trouble to author the op-ed, quoted a poem that asked “what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?” and answered: “Sit on the porch.”

This “Lying flat” slacker movement reminds me of a novel I haven’t read, but whose theme has stuck with me, nonetheless: Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov. It is about a young nobleman who spends the book recumbent, or so I’m told.

“Oblomovism” was a cultural obsession before the Soviet Revolution and a problem afterward. If no one produces, how could anyone consume?

With the character Oblomov, his lethargy merely drained the capital of his family’s aristocratic past.

With the hero of the new “Lying Flat” movement, Luo Huazhong — author of the mortal classic, “Lying Flat Is Justice” — he lives off odd jobs and his savings. So far, at least, self-sufficient. 

With Ms. Rosenblum, it’s her parents’ porch, and, thereby, their savings.

Think of what would happen were a UBI put in place. More horizontal living and less production (for redistribution). 

Oblomovism triumphs and we all lose.

After all, “Lying flat” is the perfect term for the ultimate in do-nothingism: what you do in a coffin.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture

The Lollapalooza Loophole

Lori Lightfoot, Lallapallooza, Chicago

When the Lollapalooza music festival took place in Chicago, on the hinge of July and August, with oodles of attendees (some masked), a few people cried bloody foul, on account of super-spreader event potential. But Fox News’s Ben Domenech noted that the number of murders in Chicago over July was three times the number of COVID deaths, and the nation’s capital sports a similar ratio.

When Domenech asked guest Tim Pool about the lack of interest in gun violence in gun-controlled Chicago, Mr. Pool expressed bafflement.

But — really? Politicians seem bent on focusing on regulating us with masks and jabs rather than regulating criminals. And for a reason. . . .

More striking was Anthony Fauci’s public worrying about the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, while ignoring the Lollapalooza event — as well as Barack Obama’s 60th Birthday Party, which revealed/reveled in plenty of celebs unmasked.

A familiar double standard: how the elites get to behave vs. how they say we “must” behave!

The concept of “Anarcho-tyranny” may explain much of this. Politicians of a certain sort prefer to regulate peaceful people (tyranny) while letting real criminals go free (anarchy). It is easier to police the peaceful and law-abiding, while criminals on the loose reinforce the need for a more powerful state.

The Lollapaloozans are on the “right side” (the left side?) of the cultural divide, while the Sturgis rally is on the “wrong side.”

And make a good target. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people

Objectivity’s So Passé

media, bias, objectivity

“Will More Media Bias Save Democracy?” James Bovard headlined his latest column. 

At issue? Yet another call for journalists to abandon objectivity, and, as Bovard puts it, “take sides on the barricades.” This time it comes from Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, who suggests reporters use a “‘pro-democracy’ frame.” 

But as Mr. Bovard explains: “Most Washington journalists reflexively presume that being pro-government is the same as being pro-democracy.” 

And even worse, when differentiated, “most Washington press poohbahs show more affection for Leviathan than democracy.”

For instance, “The Washington Post devotes far more newshole to publishing leaks from FBI officials,” he points out, “than to exposing FBI abuses.”

Of course, activist journalists might frame “democracy” in their own way or choose to advance another cause.

“Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice,” argued Stanford Communications Professor Ted Glasser during last year’s presidential contest, “and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”

Howard University Communications Professor Nikole Hannah-Jones of New York Times’ 1619 Project infamy advocates that “all journalism is activism,” and condemns “even-handedness, both sideism.”

Five years ago this month, during the Trump vs. Clinton presidential campaign, The New York Times offered readers a front-page commentary wherein former media columnist Jim Rutenberg argued that America’s news hounds must “throw out the textbook American journalism has been using” and become “oppositional” to candidate Trump.

Though Mr. Trump triggered massive media partisanship, which continues to worsen, it is not new. Indeed, at this point, with the public’s trust in media flushing into the toilet bowl of history, objectivity would seem almost transformational.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Missing Fathers

father, father's day

Remembering my dad and father-in-law, who both passed away several years ago; being with my adult children, and two grandchildren, who were all pretty nice to me; and seeing friends and relatives celebrate their dads — Father’s Day was wonderful.

In the real world, folks know how precious and important fathers are. 

But yesterday morning, I was instead torturing myself with The Washington Post. Adorning the top half and more of the front-page of the Sunday “Outlook” section was a drawing of a kids’ party with a man delivering the birthday cake while a woman looks on from outside. 

Beneath the artwork, the headline reads: “Fatherhood reimagined.”

Why “reimagined”? 

Well, the paper offered two opinion columns under that banner. One, entitled, “Genetic testing is changing our understanding of who fathers are,” noted that “40 million at-home DNA tests have been sold, and hundreds of thousands of people . . . have gotten the news that the man they thought of as Dad is not their genetic father.”

I moved on to the second essay. “I wanted to be a better husband. So I planned my kid’s birthday party,” read the headline, the bad news in the sub-title: “As a psychologist, I knew men did less ‘mental labor,’ but I didn’t see my own shortcomings.”

I suppose fathers have ample room for improvement, but cannot we celebrate, or merely discuss, even for a day, the positive side of fatherhood? The relentless carping suggests not a penchant for improvement but something approaching an anti-fatherhood narrative.

Searching The Post for more on “fatherhood reimagined,” the second item is Mychal Denzel Smith’s “The dangerous myth of the ‘missing black father.’” Back in 2017, I addressed Smith’s misguided argument that, essentially, in a super-charged government-welfare state, absent dads would not really be missed.

I miss my dad. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Thankfully, late in the day, The Post reported, “D.C. motorcade celebrates role of Black fathers on Father’s Day.” Hope!

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Day Off, Absurdity On

In the days of his on-air reign, Bill O’Reilly would make much hay of the so-called “war on Christmas.” One common retort among O’Reilly’s detractors was to scoff: “there is no ‘war on Christmas’; the old grump is just over-reacting to a rising tide of inclusive good manners” — the idea being that wishing a more vague but all-inclusive “Happy Holidays,” instead of a specific “Merry Christmas,” was being kind to Jews, Muslims, atheists, those who do not celebrate the ancient Christian holiday.

However much sense this strategy may have once made, nowadays it seems an absurd ploy: political correctness being so widespread, even domineering, that it extends deep into the minutia of life.

How deep? Just as the Confederate monument iconoclasm extended from General Lee back to Presidents Washington and Jefferson, now the spurning of traditional holidays reaches out beyond Christmas.

“The school board of Randolph Township in Morris County, New Jersey has decided to do away with named holidays on the academic calendar,” writes Samuel Chamberlain at The New York Post. “Now holidays like Thanksgiving and Memorial Day, as well as Jewish holy days like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, will simply be listed as ‘day off.’”

Behind this? The notion that the posited discomfort and possible offense taken by any person of a “marginal group” should completely override the conventions of a community’s traditional in-group. 

But where does it end? With less knowledge of others’ traditions, less understanding, and therefore less harmony among groups . . . including marginalized groups.

That couldn’t be the plan, could it? 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

The A-word in Our Schools

Banning “Critical Race Theory” in public schools and other government institutions seems like such a good idea that when you read Scott Shackford’s headline at Reason, “Don’t Ban Critical Race Theory in Education. Embrace School Choice Instead,” you may balk. 

“Conservatives in Florida, Idaho, and the nation’s capitol are attempting to block public schools from teaching Critical Race Theory,” Shackford writes, describing CRT as “an ideology that holds that racism is historically fundamental to how America’s political, legal, and cultural institutions are structured.” His problem with this political move is that it is “an authoritarian proposal that would cut off classroom debate about hot-button political issues.”

My issues really begin with the a-word.

From what I can tell, CRT is itself authoritarian, and groupthink-oriented, class-based and generally racist. The program looks designed to implement a sort of Cultural Revolution indoctrination-and-social control system into American institutions, definitely not to encourage “classroom debate.” 

While Shackford makes the obvious point that America’s past institutional make-up was indeed racist and structurally so, and that learning this is important for a decent education, CRT did not add this to “the debate.” This has been widely acknowledged for years.

Besides, CRT activists go much further, calling “whiteness” a disease and white people ineluctably, “systemically” racist.

Though Shackford’s main point — that we should take the occasion to offer the best way out, “school choice” — is indeed a great one, letting socialist radicals and weak-minded educrats enshrine a racist theory about racism into public institutions amounts to a kind of brinksmanship, a “collapsitarian” approach.

Couldn’t we put government education’s allotted doom on the back burner, stop teaching CRT or other woke indoctrination, and also empower parents and students with freedom of choice?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Asian Privilege?

Seventy-three.

That’s the number that stood out to me in George Will’s Sunday column, “Anti-Asian racism disguises itself as ‘diversity.’”

Seventy-three percent of the smart students at Thomas Jefferson High School happen to be Asian. TJHS is a highly-rated STEM magnet school in Virginia’s Washington, D.C. suburbs, where entry had, until recently, been based on an admissions exam. 

That’s more than three times the percentage of Asian Americans among Fairfax County, Virginia, public school students. 

European-American students make up the largest racial block at 38 percent, but account for only 18 percent of attendees at this elite high school. Hispanics represent 27 percent of all students and African Americans 10 percent, but garnered, respectively, 3 and 1 percent of the coveted slots.

Are educators specifically advantaging Asian kids? 

Well, more than 80 percent of Fairfax County teachers are white, 7 percent black and only 5 percent Asian, says a separate Post report. Asian privilege seems unlikely.

So . . . what are Asian American students doing differently?

Studying? 

Will recounts complaints by the county superintendent about Asian American parents spending too much on test preparation and the Virginia Secretary of Education compared such studying to using “performance enhancing drugs” in sports.

Another factor in having “crazy” parents who obsess about their children doing well in school could be doubling the odds by having not one, but two parents — not to mention an extended family structure. Among blacks, Hispanics and whites, out-of-wedlock births account for 69, 52 and 28 percent of all births, respectively. But for Asian Americans, out-of-wedlock births are under 12 percent.

One can jigger the rules for getting into TJ High. Sure. 

Jiggering the rules for getting ahead in life? Much harder.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Discord Meets Democracy

San Francisco, schools

When it comes to public schools, “no city has experienced the level of discord as that in San Francisco,” reports The Washington Post. 

That’s because, as The Post posits, “the San Francisco school board has been operating” with “a heavy focus on controversial, difficult racial issues, and slow progress on school reopening.”

A sampling:

  • “In January, the school board voted to rename 44 schools” with purported “connections to slavery, oppression and racism” — though The Post notes “the alleged ties were thin or, in some cases, historically questionable or inaccurate.”*
  • One of the most controversial moves by the board was “[c]hanging the admissions process for the elite Lowell High School — eliminating grades and test scores and admitting students by a ranked-choice lottery.” As The Post explains, “the change means that students with the best grades and scores may not be admitted.”
  • The school board removed Commissioner Alison Collins as Vice President in March, after her anti-Asian tweets from 2016 came to light. She called Asian Americans (who happen to disproportionally earn entry to Lowell) “house n****rs” who employed “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”**

“Through all this, the city’s school buildings remained closed,” notes The Post, “even as private schools in the area and public schools elsewhere in the region operated in person.”

Thankfully, San Franciscans have launched a recall campaign against three members of the seven-member school board: President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison M. Collins. 

The best thing for public education in Frisco will be to school these “first” recall targets in the power of the citizenry.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

* Facing a lawsuit, the board voted unanimously to rescind their renaming of those “‘injustice-linked’ schools” — just a few months after the original vote.

** In response, Collins is suing the board for $87 million.

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