politicnewsbusterinsiderpostreview: Daily Digest

Saturday, 2 January 2021

Daily Digest

A Case Study in Media Bias
Back In the U.S.S.R.?
COVID Bed Check
How to read a society
The Week in Pictures: Happy 2021 Edition

Posted: 02 Jan 2021 01:21 PM PST

(Steven Hayward)

Guess which state has been more successful fighting back COVID-19—Florida or New York? According to the media, the answer is obvious: New York, on account of its totally awesome Gov. Andrew Cuomo. In fact the death rate per 100,000 people in Florida is about half that of New York (96 per 100K for Florida, versus 188 per 100K in New York).

Over on Twitter, DC communications pro Drew Holden has put together a terrific thread showing the appalling press favoritism for Cuomo alongside the obvious media hostility for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Here are a few of the samples he has juxtaposed:

Nice work by Mr. Holden. There’s a great book or two to be written, along the lines of Peter Braestrup’s The Big Story about media misreporting of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968, about both the media coverage of COVID and the politicization of our public health bureaucracy on every level of government.

Back In the U.S.S.R.?

Posted: 02 Jan 2021 12:55 PM PST

(John Hinderaker)

Guest hosting the Dan Proft Show on Wednesday, one of my guests was New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz. Our topic was the stultifying reign of cancel culture that threatens to make free speech obsolete. (See also Scott’s post this morning, How to Read a Society.) During our conversation, I learned that Karol was born in the U.S.S.R. and came to America as a young girl. What she sees today in the U.S. is, she thinks, troublingly similar to the oppression that her parents fled in Russia.

Here is the interview:

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

COVID Bed Check

Posted: 02 Jan 2021 10:54 AM PST

(Steven Hayward)

California has passed the 25,000 mark for COVID deaths:

LOS ANGELES (AP) — California surpassed 25,000 coronavirus deaths since the start of the pandemic and officials disclosed Thursday that three more cases involving a mutant variant of the virus have been confirmed in San Diego County.

The grim developments came as an ongoing surge swamps hospitals and pushes nurses and doctors to the breaking point as they brace for another likely increase after the holidays.

Politico noted a few days ago that California, which has tried to impose some of the most stringent lockdowns in the nation, is not doing so well. This paragraph especially jumps out:

America’s most populous state has become one of the nation’s worst epicenters for the disease, setting new records for cases, hospitalizations and deaths almost every day. Things are so bad in Southern California that some patients are being treated in hospital tents, while doctors have begun discussing whether they need to ration care.

I don’t doubt that hospitals are badly strained at the moment. But is this really unprecedented? Check out this Los Angeles Times story from January 2018:

California hospitals face a 'war zone' of flu patients — and are setting up tents to treat them

. . . The huge numbers of sick people are also straining hospital staff who are confronting what could become California's worst flu season in a decade.

Hospitals across the state are sending away ambulances, flying in nurses from out of state and not letting children visit their loved ones for fear they'll spread the flu. Others are canceling surgeries and erecting tents in their parking lots so they can triage the hordes of flu patients. . . Many hospitals also say they're too full to accept any more patients or ambulances.

Or have a look at the situation in Britain over the last decade, as compiled from Guardian headlines:

Of course, in Britain’s nationalized health care (ditto Canada) rationing of scare resources is par for the course. And American hospitals don’t like to devote too much of their space and resources for expensive ICU beds that would sit mostly empty in ordinary times if we built them out for peak capacity of flu season or any other cause.

Perhaps in addition to a different strategy for fighting the spread of the virus, we ought to think about how we manage surge capacity in our hospitals. A pandemic is only one reason we might need more resilient capabilities. The experience with COVID is not reassuring for our ability to deal with a mass casualty terrorist attack.

How to read a society

Posted: 02 Jan 2021 06:22 AM PST

(Scott Johnson)

The original source of this quote from Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels) appears to date to a 2005 Frontpage article or interview that is no longer accessible online:

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

Looking around for the source of the quote, I came upon Dalrymple’s 2000 City Journal essay “How to read a society.” The essay is collected in Dalrymple’s Our Culture, What’s Left of It, published by Ivan Dee in 2005 and still in print. The essay takes an extended look at the Marquis de Custine’s Russia in 1839 (also still in print in various forms and editions). In this essay Dalrymple observes:

If Custine were among us now, he would recognize the evil of political correctness at once, because of the violence that it does to people’s souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe but must not question. Custine would demonstrate to us that, without an external despot to explain our pusillanimity, we have willingly adopted the mental habits of people who live under a totalitarian dictatorship.

The situation described by Dalrymple in his 2000 City Journal essay has deteriorated considerably in the 20 years since he wrote it. Now the phenomenon of political correctness has been absorbed, enhanced, and spread in the tyrannical cancel culture that permeates our institutions with a ruthlessness beyond the powers of the Tsars of old. Leaving no crack or crevice of our public life unfilled, it has metastasized with the speed and lethality of a virulent cancer.

Presenting as case studies in my inbox this morning are Douglas Murray’s June Spectator USA column “The new inequality” and Alana Mastrangelo’s Breitbart story on the prospective rule to be adopted next week by the House of Representatives under the leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the 117th Congress. With Mastrangelo’s story in mind I would like to repurpose the Barbarians’ classic number as the question that must not be asked under the Pelosi regime (video below).

The Week in Pictures: Happy 2021 Edition

Posted: 02 Jan 2021 03:02 AM PST

(Steven Hayward)

Well, 2o20 is finally behind us. You don’t need to be a soothsayer to predict that there will be plenty of controversy about social media, racism, and above all Donald Trump. The greatest achievement of Trump is that he is going to live rent-free inside the heads of liberals forever. He really is the End of History: all you’ll need to do from now until Judgment Day to trigger a liberal is just say, “Trump,” and sit back and watch the fun. Even better than the ghost of Joe McCarthy.