Wednesday, February 02, 2022



Why America is dangerously polarised — and Europe is not

I think this article outlines a genuine difference -- but the author mainly describes it rather than explaining it.

And I think it is rather clear why Europe is different: Leftists have won there. In America conservatives are still fighting


Contrast two leaders. Donald Trump’s approval ratings barely budged during his presidency, and his supporters dismissed every scandal as “fake news”. But when Boris Johnson turned out to have doubled as a party host during lockdown, his supporters fled: his net favourability rating went from +29 per cent in April 2020 to -52 per cent last week, according to pollsters YouGov.

Here, in microcosm, is the uniqueness of American polarisation. People often discuss polarisation as a global problem, but in fact, in most western European and even Latin American democracies, rival camps aren’t deeply entrenched or always entirely serious.

Western polarisation peaked between 2016 and 2018, with the victories of Brexit, Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, the violent clashes over Catalan independence, and the entry of the anti-system Five Star and nativist League into Italy’s government.

Today the US remains dangerously polarised — more like Turkey or India than western Europe. Among Republicans in particular, ethnic, religious and ideological identities are often perfectly aligned. Many believe God supports their party. Egged on by Trump, they fear their tribe is under existential threat. In a survey by George Washington University, most Republicans said, “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast we may have to use force to save it”. They have enough firearms.

The US is also handicapped by its constitution, which among other things has made the Supreme Court — arguably the country’s mightiest political institution, given congressional gridlock — a past-winner-takes-all prize. (Poland has a similar problem.) The step back from democracy is short in the US, since southern states impeded many black people from voting until the late 1960s.

But western Europe is tamer. Divides are deep, but most of its citizens just aren’t very interested in political issues and cannot stay angry about them for years on end. Europe’s history is about forgetting past polarisation, or else Finland would still be brooding over its 1918 civil war and the heads of Protestants would be hanging from the gates of French towns.

Today’s British depolarisation is a case in point. Most Leavers celebrated victory in the Brexit referendum less as a revolution than as a sort of football match: “You lost, get over it!” They don’t believe God wants Brexit. Nor do Leavers lie awake at night afraid that Remainer hordes will slaughter them in their beds. Indeed, these labels are peeling off as Brexit loses salience and drifts into impenetrable negotiations over something called Article 16. Last year, Britons conducted more Google searches for Aston Villa Football Club than for Brexit.

Helpfully too, most elected leaders other than Trump seek to reduce tension. Democracy is a conflict-management system that usually tends towards tedium. Chile’s new leader, Gabriel Boric, promises to be “president of all Chileans”. In Spain, prime minister Pedro Sánchez has lowered temperatures over Catalan independence by pardoning nine jailed separatist leaders. In Barcelona recently, I noticed far fewer Catalan flags than before hanging from apartment balconies.

Sánchez had another motive for his pardons. He wanted Catalan parties to back his other policies. The need to build coalitions is a force for unity in many European democracies. In Italy, the League and Five Star now sit in Mario Draghi’s technocratic government. Some polarising parties such as Eric Zemmour’s in France or Vox in Spain still try to identify society’s faultlines and then sit on top of them, but they attract few followers — many of whom understand that there’s no risk of these outfits ever taking power, and just want a bit of excitement. Mathieu Lefevre, director of the anti-polarisation NGO More in Common, warns that there’s more danger of certain societies sliding into apathy than of electing extremists.

One thing holding European societies together is that most people still get their news from state broadcasters. In Britain, nearly 100 per cent of adults use the BBC every month. People moan about BBC news, but most of them trust it. When scandals broke around Johnson, hardly anybody said it was all just “fake news”. Even in Brazil, many of Bolsonaro’s supporters see him clearly: his poll ratings collapsed after he mishandled Covid-19. Anti-system politicians outside the US generally pay a price for misrule.

There’s a broader lesson here. Pundits often extrapolate from the US case, whereas in fact it’s an outlier among western democracies. Its polarisation, filter bubbles and economic inequality are unusually bad. Yet because international debate is disproportionately driven by anglophone media and academics at US universities, we sometimes end up discussing American problems as if they afflicted the whole developed world.

Instead, in a new version of American exceptionalism, we should recognise the US as a special case, and make plans to cope should its democracy collapse.

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What’s Driving the Witch Hunt Against Joe Rogan

If you were to conjure an archnemesis for leftists, you probably wouldn’t think it would be Joe Rogan.

After all, Rogan, who hosts an insanely popular podcast, is hardly some Ronald Reagan or Rush Limbaugh clone. He endorsed Bernie Sanders for president in 2020. He openly talks about using marijuana.

And while he seems to think it’s a little unfair for biological women to have to compete against biological males in women’s sports, Rogan otherwise appears to hold the usual liberal pro-LGBT views.

The comedian also has a long track record in Hollywood—not exactly a safe space for conservatives—due to his career as a “Fear Factor” host, among other gigs.

But apparently none of that is enough to offset his fatal flaw: Rogan is interested in finding out what’s true.

How dare he.

Now, for the crime of talking to those who don’t endorse “right think” on COVID-19, Rogan, whose podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience” reportedly averages around 11 million listeners, is apparently unfit for polite society.

Singer-songwriter Neil Young, who apparently missed the memo that rock ’n’ roll is about fighting The Man and not helping The Man squash others, said either Rogan’s podcast was kicked off Spotify, the platform that exclusively hosts Rogan, or he wanted his music off.

Rogan’s crime? Spreading “misinformation” on COVID-19. Spotify, to its credit, took down Young’s solo music.

But others, seeking to prove their leftist bona fides, jumped on Young’s bandwagon. Fellow singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell also demanded her songs be removed, and Brene Brown, a popular researcher and author who has two exclusive podcasts with Spotify, announced she wouldn’t be releasing new episodes “until further notice.”

Prince Harry and Meghan, duchess of Sussex, who have a Spotify deal that thus far has resulted in one podcast episode in 2020, also wrung their hands, with a spokesperson for their foundation agonizing over the “all too real consequences of COVID-19 misinformation on [the Spotify] platform.”

So what, you ask, is Rogan doing? Is he saying that taking a COVID-19 vaccine will reduce your lifespan by 10 years? Is he claiming that COVID-19 hasn’t killed anyone? Is he advocating COVID-19 patients be sent to nursing homes to infect other elderly people? (Oh whoops, sorry, that last one was former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.)

No, here’s Rogan’s real crime: He’s listening to people besides the sainted Dr. Anthony Fauci.

In recent weeks, Rogan has hosted doctors Peter McCullough and Robert Malone on his podcast. But as Rogan notes in a video he posted to Instagram on Sunday, both men, while perhaps wrong on certain matters, are hardly random idiots ranting about something they can’t comprehend.

“Dr. Peter McCullough is a cardiologist, and he is the most published physician in his field in history,” Rogan says. “Dr. Robert Malone owns nine patents on the creation of mRNA vaccine technology, and is at least partially responsible for the creation of the technology that led to mRNA vaccines.”

Furthermore, if we’ve learned anything in the past two years, it’s that the science is so not settled when it comes to COVID-19. As my colleague Mary Margaret Olohan ably documented, plenty of claims made by the “right people” about COVID-19 ended up being untrue in the long run:

Or as Rogan himself says in his Instagram video: “The problem I have with the term misinformation, especially today, is that many of the things that we thought of as misinformation just a short while ago are now accepted as fact.”

He continues:

Like, for instance, eight months ago, if you said, ‘If you get vaccinated, you can still catch COVID and you can still spread COVID,’ you’d be removed from social media—they would, they would ban you from certain platforms. Now, that’s accepted as fact.

If you said, ‘I don’t think cloth masks work,’ you would be banned from social media. Now that’s openly and repeatedly stated on CNN.

If you said, ‘I think it’s possible that COVID-19 came from a lab,’ you’d be banned from many social media platforms. Now that’s on the cover of Newsweek.

Preach it.

Spotify and Rogan have agreed to start slapping a disclaimer on certain COVID-19 episodes he does, telling the listener to talk to their own doctor and advising if the interviewee holds controversial views.

It’s a disappointing concession. Where is the pressure for CNN to have disclaimers? What about advisories before Fauci interviews? (Plus: If the real goal here is to persuade more people to get a COVID-19 vaccine, you’re more likely to achieve that by engaging in open debate, not by silencing alternative views.)

But it’s certainly better than Spotify deplatforming Rogan. There are already too many examples of Big Tech censorship, whether it’s Twitter and Facebook banning President Donald Trump or Amazon refusing to sell Ryan T. Anderson’s book on transgenderism.

I’ve dabbled in listening to Rogan’s podcast over the past couple years or so. It’s not without its irritations: I could do without ever hearing Rogan talk about the theory of comedy again, and it’s clear his live-and-let-live notions of morality don’t really jibe with my own views.

But here’s what I do appreciate about the podcast: Rogan is a true journalist. He’s skeptical, he’s questioning. In his long episodes, he’s clearly thinking out loud at points.

He asks his producer, who he refers to as “Young Jamie,” to fact-check certain claims in real time. And in a world where everyone, from the politicians to the person who needs a job to support his family, is terrified of being canceled, Rogan is hosting long, wide-ranging interviews where people are talking seriously, frankly, and honestly.

That’s a real risk to take, for both Rogan and his guests.

It’s an act of courage—and it’s something that threatens leftists everywhere. Because if people are allowed to think freely, they won’t embrace leftism.

“I’m just a person who sits down and talks to people and has conversations with them,” Rogan says on Instagram, adding: “Whenever I get something wrong, I try to correct it because I’m interested in telling the truth.”

“I’m interested in finding out what the truth is,” he continues. “And I’m interested in having interesting conversations with people that have differing opinions.”

The fact that those views make Rogan an archvillain doesn’t say anything new about the left. But it does say something very troubling about the state of our country in 2022.

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Covid restrictions and other overreach bring America toward a libertarian moment

The rising fear among American conservatives since the early days of the Covid pandemic has been that the nation would emerge from the crisis significantly less free.

It’s an unease rooted in the historic reality of one of the most powerful laws of human governance: the ratchet effect. Once introduced, rules almost always get more expansive, seldom more limited. Taxes levied for a temporary exigency become perpetual obligations. Government agencies built to administer some specific function are absorbed into the permanent bureaucracy.

When a crisis is over, authorities may relinquish some of the powers they assumed during the emergency, but you can be sure that the government’s writ will run permanently larger than before. Wars, depressions, public-health emergencies lead to bigger government, more rules, more-onerous regulations.

You can see the pattern again as we approach the second anniversary of the pandemic: officials musing publicly about permanent mask mandates, blue-state leaders who evidently have no intention of lifting restrictions, public-health professionals seeking to extend their ambit even as the crisis wanes. Leading Democratic politicians continue to insist on their “Build Back Better” proposition — that what we have learned these past two years has been the essential role of new trillion-dollar government programs to cushion society from its ills.

Worst of all, the authoritarian instinct this time has reached deeper into the once-sacred field of free speech, and we have the marginalizing and even outright ostracizing of heretics who dare challenge the authorities’ narrative. When elderly rockers who once thought of themselves as rebels believe it’s their responsibility to banish “misinformation” from major entertainment platforms, you know the controlling impulse has burrowed its way deeply — perhaps permanently — into the culture.

But let’s indulge a radical thought for a moment. What if the opposite is true this time? What if the ratchet slips, and rising popular hostility to arbitrary, petty, overbearing and ineffective rules induces a popular backlash? Isn’t it possible that the inconsistency, arrogance and mendacity of the people attempting to order our lives will produce the opposite of their desired outcome?

It’s too soon to call this a libertarian moment. Some conservatives of a populist bent are themselves embracing the supposed opportunities of bigger government. But we seem at least to have reached a point where doubts about the wisdom of growing state control are salient.

We have seen it most powerfully at the political level in Virginia, which holds statewide elections the year after the presidential vote. Voters explicitly rejected the attempt to make their children wards of the state, and the new Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, is in a classic struggle with overweening bureaucrats desperate to maintain their reign of pointless mask-mandate authority.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis appears to be cruising to re-election on a record of actively resisting the authoritarian demands of experts, Democrats and the media.

The judicial system offers reason to be optimistic that the efforts to extend control over our lives may be losing. A solid conservative majority on the Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s legally baseless mandates requiring private employers to compel employee vaccinations and landlords to let tenants live rent-free.

There are even encouraging signs in popular culture. Bill Maher, who has spent a career lampooning conservatives, is probably the most influential comic in the country. It was striking that last week his audience applauded raucously as he made fun of, among other things, new safety regulations in the bipartisan infrastructure legislation that require alarms in case car interiors get too hot, and California rules warning people about the dangers of inhaling wood dust.

Perhaps the biggest cause for optimism is that this time people don’t have much cause for faith in the omnipotence of the state.

You may not have approved of the massive expansion of the state under the New Deal, but it was at least achieved with almost brutal efficiency, and it could at least plausibly be claimed to have had a significant and positive economic impact. Big government was seen to work most effectively in World War II, when the state mobilized the entire country to defeat an unprecedented menace.

It’s hard to see how the current crop of government leaders can make similar claims. Instead of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur, we have Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky. If people of this caliber had been in charge in 1942, we might all be speaking German.

“I have seen the future; and it works” was journalist Lincoln Steffens’s notorious verdict on the Soviet Union in 1919. With luck, this time it won’t take 70 years to prove that the forward march of an ever larger state is not so inevitable after all.

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Wikipedia corruption

I have myself found wrong information on Wikipedia -- JR

You’re sitting at your computer, or searching across your mobile device, for information about someone or something. Logically, you’ll navigate to the world’s most popular research tool. Wikipedia is almost everyone’s go-to site for information. It’s a massive online encyclopedia.

With over 18 billion viewers each month, you’d probably feel confident in the authenticity and accuracy of what you find, right? But what if you found out otherwise? What if the information you uncover is purposefully manipulated to push an underlying agenda?

That’s exactly what Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger says is happening at the giant research portal. Sanger sat down for an interview with Lockdown TV. He clearly thinks that much of the information presented on Wikipedia is manipulated.

Sanger says, “Wikipedia gives a huge incentive to wealthy and powerful people to seize control of things like Wikipedia in order to shore up their power.” Steven Crowder and Dave Landau orchestrated some experiments to test for bias within Wikipedia’s pages.

What they found was a perfect setup to allow internal restrictions to control how Wikipedia pages could be edited. For example, certain pages require a preset number of acceptable edits by the editor to make changes.

“Ten successful edits” is not an uncommon guideline for many pages. However, other pages have suspiciously rigid restrictions. If you want to correct inaccurate information on Joe Biden’s Wikipedia page, you must have a 30-day minimum active account and 500 successful edits.

Now let’s look at a really suspicious Wikipedia editing parameter. The COVID-19 Wikipedia page can only be edited by administratively approved accounts. Crowder says that there are only 1,000 such accounts worldwide.

Now, these so-called Wikipedia editors are required to be neutral. Some investigation proves this theory to be untrue. If you search for Mao Zedong, the infamous Chinese tyrant, you will find some very strange omissions.

A Wikipedia quiz to determine “editor neutrality” insists that the mention of Zedong as a barbarian, devoid of compassion for human life, cannot be stated on Wikipedia as fact. However, the facts indicate that Zedong starved over 40 million people to death.

That would meet most people’s definition of barbaric. However, Wikipedia won’t allow such an accurate portrait of the communist tyrant. The researchers produced an hour-long YouTube video exposing the truth about Zedong’s torture chambers and other Wikipedia manipulations.

Wealthy elites are growing increasingly more brazen. Attempts to manipulate the minds of the masses are gaining traction every day. It’s happening in the mainstream media and across a wide range of public interactions.

However, most people would hope that researching something through an encyclopedia would produce unbiased and honest information. Think again. Even the world’s most popular research portal is part of this manipulative scheme. Using Wikipedia today? Better check your facts first.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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