Displaying posts categorized under

P.C.-CULTURE

Declining Med School Standards in a Time of Pandemic written by Steve Salerno

https://quillette.com/2020/04/11/declining-med-school-standards-in-a-time-of-pandemic/

“The world’s current struggles against COVID—19 underscore the vital importance of quality medicine. If you are the best and the brightest, you should be in medical school. You should not be in medical school for reasons other than that.”

In the beginning were the Medical College Admission Tests, or MCATs, a time-honored means of ascertaining worthiness for medical school. Formulated by the Association of American Medical Colleges, the MCATs assessed an applicant’s cognitive heft and baseline acumen in such no-nonsense disciplines as anatomy, biology, kinesiology, chemistry, and other precincts of hard biophysical science.

Then, around the turn of the millennium, early social-equity advocates began insisting, in essence, that the MCATs unfairly limited med school to people who showed significant potential as doctors. Specifically, the pool of physicians being churned out each year was judged insufficiently diverse. A chief concern was that African Americans, 13 percent of the US population, represented barely six percent of medical school enrollees. Efforts were made; the numbers ticked up incrementally.

Then in 2009 the body that accredits medical schools, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), touched off a parity panic across the med school landscape by issuing stern new guidance on diversity. In order to remain accredited, declared LCME, medical schools “must” have policies and practices in place that “achieve appropriate diversity.” Enough airy talk of opportunity; let’s talk outcomes.

Words like “quota” were judiciously avoided but were legible in the reams of bureaucratic gobbledygook produced by newly socially aware medical administrators. Example:

Addressing the structural inequities laden in our system of selection of medical students… begins with ensuring we are using accurate metrics to set goals and track our progress. The representation quotient, one such metric, can be applied at the state and institutional level to ensure efforts align with the intended goal of creating a future workforce reflective of their respective patient populations.

Bill Maher Slammed as ‘Racist’ For Speaking Truth About Chinese Coronavirus By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/trending/predictable-backlash-against-bill-maher-for-saying-we-should-blame-china-for-pandemic/

Bill Maher told his “Politically Incorrect” audience that it frightens him “that there are people out there who would rather die from the virus than call it by the wrong name.” That started a classic Maher rant that gored several liberal oxen, including skewering the PC police for denying reality.

The PC police say it is racist to attack any cultural practice that’s different than our own. I say liberalism lost its way when it started thinking like that and pretended that forcing a woman to wear [a burqa] was just a different way instead of an abhorrent human rights violation.

It’s not racist to point out that eating bats is bats**t crazy! …

So when someone says, “What if people hear ‘Chinese virus’ and blame China?”

The answer is we should blame China, not Chinese-Americans. But we can’t stop telling the truth because racists get the wrong idea. There are always going to be idiots out there who want to indulge their prejudices, but this is an emergency! Don’t we have bigger tainted fish to fry? Jesus, if the sun was exploding, Twitter would pile on the first guy who called it a dwarf star.

Liberals say Trump is a racist because he “enables” racists and white supremacists. Why is Trump responsible for other people being idiots? True, Trump’s lack of racial sensitivity and empathy is a problem, but that doesn’t make him a racist.

Predictability, the left exploded in anger. “Bill Maher Goes on Despicably Racist Rant Against China Over Coronavirus,” screamed the Daily Beast.

Racial warrior offended when the surgeon general tells minorities that behavior affects virus risks By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/racial_warrior_offended_when_the_surgeon_general_tells_minorities_that_behavior_affects_virus_risks.html

✔ @tedcruz

Imagine: you’re a professional NPR reporter, you have an opportunity to ask the US Surgeon General a Q—in the midst of a global pandemic w/ over 100k fatalities—and you ask “‘many people’ are offended by what you call your grandmother.” Seriously, what the hell is wrong w/ MSM?!?

PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor has distinguished herself as one of the media figures most engaged in the “gotcha” game at COVID-19 press conferences, especially when she can work race into the issue.  On Friday, after the surgeon general made a direct plea to minorities about behaviors that can protect them, she went on the attack.

U.S. surgeon general Dr. Jerome Adams spent five minutes during Friday’s press conference talking about the fact that COVID-19 is hitting minority communities especially hard.  His densely packed presentation began with his addressing minorities’ predisposition to diseases that increase the risk from COVID-19, such as asthma, heart disease, and diabetes.

From there, Adams moved to lifestyle factors that increase the risk.  These included the fact that minorities tend to live in more densely packed, urban communities; have multi-generational houses; and are employed in jobs that cannot be done via telecommuting.

Adams then talked about dangerous COVID-19 myths that circulate in minority communities.  He said he and Vice President Pence have spoken to thousands of minorities, including hundreds of community leaders, to discuss minorities’ unique vulnerability to COVID-19.

Joe Biden and the End of Tolerance By John Hirschauer

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/joe-biden-lgbt-agenda-end-of-tolerance/

Joe Biden’s ‘Plan to Advance LGBTQ+ Equality’ signals the end of tolerance and the beginning of something else.

Joe Biden’s recently released “Plan to Advance LGBTQ+ Equality” is a collection of ideas, gestures, and slogans that the former vice president (or his handlers) hopes will “advance” the amorphous cause of “equality” for the “LGBTQ+ community.” The plan talks a lot about “equality” — Biden promises, variously, to “resume the march for equality,” support “equality and inclusion,” and “champion global equality” — without once defining what he means by “equality,” or how society at large is supposed to know when we have achieved it.

One of the highlighted sections in the Biden proposal is the former vice president’s pledge to ensure that “the discriminatory lifetime ban on blood donation” for gay men — a ban he claims is “based on stigma” — remains lifted, and promises to implement “regulations [that] are based on science.” The Obama administration first moved to lift the lifetime ban on homosexual blood donation in 2015, and the Trump administration loosened regulations even further, recently dispensing with guidelines that required men to abstain from homosexual sex for at least one year in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Biden never engages with the facts that begot the ban in the first place, namely, that gay men, despite comprising roughly two percent of the American population, make up nearly 70 percent of the national HIV caseload. Since post-donation blood tests occasionally fail to detect the presence of HIV, disqualifying would-be donors who have engaged in homosexual sex was a prudential measure designed to protect the recipients of donated blood.

CDC Battles Biology Instead of Coronavirus By Jennifer S. Bryson

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/08/cdc-battles-biology-instead-of-coronavirus/

“The question I would like to ask President Trump at one of his coronavirus briefings is: “Mr. President, why is the CDC prioritizing gender ideology over science, especially at a moment when Americans are suffering and many dying from the Coronavirus?” 

Why are the Centers for Disease Control prioritizing gender ideology over science, especially in the midst of a pandemic? 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) online tool for Coronavirus symptom assessment, the “Coronavirus Self-Checker,” asks about “gender,” with options of “female,” “male” and “other.” This is strange. The coronavirus attacks the human body. The coronavirus does not attack gender identity.

In protecting Americans from the coronavirus, sex matters. Humans, like other mammals, have two sexes: male and female. In disease research and treatment, accurate information about the sex of a person is important for researchers and health professionals to know. The novel coronavirus, for example, discriminates on the basis of sex.

Whither Woke Culture in an Era of Pandemic? What effect might this plague have on the Left’s pampered soy boys and pussy-hat feminists? Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/whither-woke-culture-era-pandemic-bruce-bawer/

Last week, in the New York Post, Kyle Smith made a thoughtful argument that, in the COVID-19 era, “the woke virus,” too, “is spreading faster than ever.” He quoted a statement on Twitter by actress Fran Drescher that the Chinese virus is a product of capitalism; he noted the “vomitatious ‘Imagine’ video praising open borders, socialism and atheism” that was posted online by Gal Gadot and other C-list celebrities in response to the pandemic; and he cited inane claims by various activists that the coronavirus disproportionately disadvantages women or people of color. “Next year,” Smith concluded, “there will probably be a vaccine for coronavirus. But there will never be an inoculation for woke stupidity.”

He may be right. But during these strange weeks when all the world has been united in being apart, I’ve kept nourishing the hope that woke culture may turn out to be one of the casualties of this plague. In fact I’ve pretty much talked myself into believing that it will be. After all, what could more effectively expose the absurdity of the concept of microaggressions than a macroaggression on the scale of the coronavirus? When an increasing number of Americans are infected by a very real and malignant corporeal contagion, how many people are going to keep buying the leftist fiction that no country on earth is more riddled with the contagion of prejudice than the United States? In a time when we’re all “social distancing” to save our skins, who will dare to carry on about the need for “safe spaces” as protection from mere words? 

Elton John discovers that even coronavirus won’t stop the pronoun wars By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/elton_john_discovers_that_even_coronavirus_wont_stop_the_pronoun_wars.html

One of the constants in social media posts from or emails between conservatives is the hope that the coronavirus pandemic will knock the underpinnings from gender madness. The reasoning behind this hope is that the “gender is a social construct” theory was the luxury of a safe, affluent society. With people feeling insecure about both their physical safety and their economic security, “wokeness” will be exposed for the frivolous nonsense it really is and quickly recede.

The problem with this hope is that it doesn’t consider that wokeness is not always frivolous nonsense. Indeed, it seldom is. Instead, there are two primary drivers behind gender madness. The first is a concerted effort to break down traditional Judeo-Christian Western civilization so that it can be rebuilt from the ground up. The second is genuine insanity emanating from those poor souls driven mad by people in that first category (the power-hungry woke activists).

And now, finally, we can explain how Elton John fits into all of this. Sir Elton does not fall into either of the two gender war categories. He’s a nice 73-year-old, middle-class bloke from England who happens to be one of modern music’s premier geniuses. In his early years, he cultivated a flamboyant performance style that meant no one was surprised when he came out of the closet.

2020 Census Asks For Your Racial Identity, But Not If You’re A Citizen Ben Weingarten

https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/27/2020-census-asks-for-your-racial-identity-but-n

How can we square the government’s willingness to ask us about race and origin with its unwillingness to ask about something as fundamental as citizenship?

Your government cares about how you “identify,” but not whether you are a citizen. This asinine fact is illustrated by a single question in the 2020 U.S. census, just another sign of the administrative state run amok. As fellow Federalist contributor Kyle Sammin highlights in a recent article, question No. 9 of the census asks for respondents’ race and origin.

That a society that has at least strived for color-blindness abides the federal government asking about race is in and of itself troubling. It amounts to the enshrining and legitimizing of identity politics in our political system — not that it wasn’t already baked into the government cake in myriad ways.

But the identity-obsessed bureaucrats in the administrative state, buoyed by like-minded interest groups, go even further when they request “origin” in conjunction with race, in the sense of how respondents “identify,” — “Irish, English, Italian, Lebanese,” and so on, in the Census Bureau’s words.

A Pandemic of Political Correctness By Peter Kirsanow

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/coronavirus-political-correctness-concern-racism-misguided/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=first

During today’s meeting of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the liberal majority voted to issue a statement expressing “grave concern” regarding “growing anti-Asian racism and xenophobia” related to the coronavirus pandemic.

Of course, my conservative colleague Gail Heriot and I oppose expressions of racism, if any, related to the pandemic or otherwise. But we voted against the statement for several reasons. Our biggest objection related to the Commission’s suggestion that referring to COVID-19 with terms like “Chinese Coronavirus or Wuhan flu” is somehow fueling “[t]his latest wave of xenophobic animosity toward Asian-Americans.” This suggestion is consistent with those recently voiced by Democrats and mainstream media (but I repeat myself).

It’s common to refer to infectious diseases by their geographic origin. Examples include Asian flu, Bolivian hemorrhagic fever, Ebola, German measles, Japanese encephalitis, Lyme disease, Marburg virus, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Pontiac fever, Rift Valley fever, Spanish flu, Venezuelan hemorrhagic fever, and West Nile virus. Spanish flu was probably a misnomer. It may have originated in Kansas. But calling it Spanish flu was never an indication that people hated Spaniards. Nor is there any evidence that the names of any of the other diseases inspired “racism or xenophobia” toward races or ethnicities commonly identified with such regions.

I Am Woman, Hear Me Whine Why do the luckiest, most privileged women ever to exist keep on whining about “patriarchy” and “sexism”? Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/i-am-woman-hear-me-whine-bruce-thornton/

After Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the primary race, the predictable whining commenced from all those supposedly independent, anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better feminists. The stock clichés filled their complaints: “misogyny,” “patriarchy,” “sexism,” all the usual suspects rounded up to excuse the glaring electoral incompetence of a terrible candidate. As is the case with Hillary Clinton, criticism of a political persona dripping with schoolmarm condescension, self-righteousness, and arrogant disdain is redeemed by transforming these flaws into question-begging slurs like “shrill” and “strident,” and dismissing them as an “irrational prejudice,” a neurotic failure on the part of men to acknowledge her superior talents and  “competence.”

Once again, we see how a movement that started as the removal of barriers to equal opportunity and women’s agency, has degenerated into an identity-politics weapon that strangely reinforces what equity feminism tried to eliminate: The notion that women who are supposedly equal to men are in fact victims still needing protection from men and their stubborn sexist prejudices and “toxic masculinity.” Half a century after feminists started to “roar,” as Helen Reddy sang, they’ve regressed to the whining of the weak.

One manifestation of this incoherence is the return of the once demonized “double standard,” with feminists now employing it to serve their interests. So a Clinton or a Warren should not be criticized by men, at the same time women can be as vicious as they want to their ideological rivals. Just ask any conservative Christian woman like Sarah Palin. An accomplished politician and hunter who raised a Downs child instead of killing him for her own convenience, was viciously demonized and slandered with impunity by her progressive feminist “sisters.” And who can forget what Hillary and her minions did to Bill’s sexual assault victims like Juanita Broaddrick?