RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/10/do-vaccine-resisters-risk-being-wacod/

Because of the natural mutation the clever little RNA strand undergoes, it is clear to anyone with a critical mind that the COVID-19 vaccines will go the way of the flu vaccines: An annual affair if one chooses to make it so.

Choice, alas, is quickly becoming a quaint concept in COVID-compliant America.

Vaccine Passports 

The possibility of a vaccine passport, a “certification of vaccination that reduces public-health restrictions for their carriers,” has been floated. Without finesse, it amounts to, “Your papers, bitte!”

While Fox’s Tucker Carlson did term the idea an Orwellian one—it took civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald, the odd-man-out among the authoritarian Left, to place the concept of a vaccine passport in proper perspective.

The popular TV host (and perhaps the only good thing on Fox News) had asked Greenwald if he felt a vaccine passport “would work to convince more Americans to get vaccinated.”

But judging a policy by its positive outcomes for the collective, rather than by whether it violates individual rights is utilitarianism. It is the rule among politicians and pundits. 

“It doesn’t work”: How often have you heard those words used to describe grave violations of your rights? As if using coercion to decrease “vaccine hesitancy”—is ever a good reason for coercing vaccination! As if employing coercion to decrease “vaccine hesitancy” is ever an appropriate use of state or corporate power!

The Benthamite utilitarian calculus is thus rightly associated with a collectivist, central planner’s impetus.

America’s founders, conversely, held a Blackstonian view of the law as a bulwark against government abuses. Their take has since been supplanted by the notion of the law as an implement of government, to be utilized by all-knowing rulers for the “greater good.”

To his great credit, later in the program, Carlson did advance a rights-based argument against the vaccine-passport outrage: the individual right to privacy.

It fell, however, to Greenwald to take note of the three different ways in which the passports constitute a draconian invasion: 

Number one, coercing citizens to put a substance into their body that they don’t want in their body, a pretty grave invasion of bodily autonomy, one of the most fundamental rights we have. Secondly, gathering a new database that can track people in terms of their health, that can easily be expanded as government programs often do into a whole variety of other uses, and then thirdly, . . . restricting people’s movement. Freedom of movement is one of the most fundamental rights we have. It’s actually guaranteed in the Constitution.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-should-be-done-to-curb-big-tech

Do your eyes gloss over when you see the words “Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act”? Mine do.

Yet the subject of Big Tech’s might — Should Facebook have the power to ban a president? Should Amazon have the power to ban the sale of a controversial book? Should Twitter have the power to permanently bar a user over a single tweet? And if not, what should the government be doing about it? — is both fascinating and incredibly important.

I don’t think there is a group left in America who is happy about the power that companies like Facebook and Twitter and Google have arrogated to themselves. According to a recent poll from Vox and Data for Progress, 59% of Democrats and 70% of Republicans think Big Tech’s economic power is a problem. It’s hard to think of another issue with that kind of bipartisan consensus.

The nature of your anger, of course, depends on where you sit. (Twitter’s decision to ban Trump in January found 87% approval from Democrats and a mere 28% of Republicans in the same poll.) But the point is that this subject touches everyone. 

So why is so much of the writing about tech so confusing? One of the reasons it confuses, I think, is that the loudest “progressive” and “conservative” arguments are the opposite of what you’d imagine.

Progressives are supposed to be against corporate power. And yet on this subject, they are the ones pushing for more of it. They are enraged that these companies don’t crack down harder on “disinformation,” arguing that the Zuckerbergs and Dorseys of the world put profit above principle when they allow groups like QAnon to run wild on their platforms. Sure, President Trump was banned, but only after he lost the election. Why didn’t it happen earlier? Private companies are not hamstrung by the First Amendment, so why do they hesitate to ban dangerous people whose online words lead to real-world violence?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/when_a_jewish_teacher_union_b

Randi Weingarten, leader of the AFT (American Federation of Teachers union) has made a malicious smear against the Jewish community that would normally be characterized as anti-Semitic, but it may get a pass because she happens to be Jewish. 

She was asked a very appropriate question: “Why are the teachers across the nation in major cities still refusing to go back and teach children in the classroom in public schools?”  Instead of acknowledging the problem, she strangely shifted into a tirade against the Jewish community.  She castigated Jews by saying, “American Jews are part of the ownership class … who now want to take that ladder of opportunity away from those who do not have it.”  She took legitimate criticism of her union’s refusal to go back to work as a prompt to demonize the Jewish community.  Historically, this was labeled “scapegoating.”  Scapegoating is the practice of dodging and deflecting a legitimate concern by parlaying each issue against the Jewish people or the hard-work result of Jewish financial success and ownership.

Ms. Weingarten is tragically another example of someone denouncing her own people and inciting others against Jews in order to be the darling of the left, thereby climbing the ladder of political power.  She understands that today, power in leftist and minority circles is achieved by those who blame Jews.  This has become the left-wing formula.

If anything, those from the Jewish community, who have been critical of teachers being the last holdouts to return to work while still drawing their salary and full benefits, are acting as plaintiffs for the students in public school who will fall behind as a consequence of their school activities being shelved.  Indeed, they’ve been acting to keep the rungs of the ladder intact.  Thus, one would think there would be significant blowback from the “race police” against Weingarten’s obvious smear of Jews.

But it has not happened.  That is because the laws of “wokeness” on behalf all minorities do not include Jews.  Jews have been excluded from the victimization monopoly; they are not in the pecking order.  You can say anything you want against Jews, just as with whites and Christians, if the accusations can be parlayed into an indictment against those pre-perceived as oppressors of the intersectional officialdom.