Stuck Thinking

I saw an article the other day that really shows why our political world is such a mess. Tryanmax pointed out the same article in the comments as well. The article didn't involve politicians, but it was pure politics of the worst kind. The article involved the Los Angeles Times suddenly discovering what I told you a long time ago, that Coronavirus began among the glitterati but of course they spun it. And the comments were no better.

As I pointed out some weeks ago, a lot of evidence made me think that Coronavirus started as a celebrity disease. First, there were the hugely disproportionate number of celebrities who had it. At a time when almost no one had it -- and probably no one you knew -- it seemed that massive numbers of celebrities and journalists had it. Huge numbers of actors, singers, and journalists seemed to have it. High profile lawyers. Heads of companies. But few common people. In fact, let's assume that 3 million Americans have it today. That equates to less than 1% of the population... 1 in 100. Yet, I can name dozens upon dozens of celebrities who have it. I would guess that maybe 10-20% of the celebrities and journalists I know have it. That's impossible if this was random sample.

I also showed how the infection rate in Aspen, a town of celebrities, was over 100 times higher than other towns. I pointed out that it was spreading among rich skiers and other wealthy travelers, that New York City was the epicenter and that much of it seemed to be passing from coast to coast without stopping in flyover country. Recently, I've seen articles which suggest that it was running wild around the Sundance Festival, which might be where this thing really hit the celebrity world in the first place. There are studies too now claiming that 60% of the infected people were directly infected by traveling New Yorkers. So everything I saw is slowly starting to be seen as true.

The Los Angeles Times is finally on the case. Hence, the article in question.

But here's the thing. The LA Times spun the article. Rather than putting together what I did, and discussing how Covid spread among celebrities, who spread it to their various home areas and friends, it has lumped them all together as "rich." There was no mention of celebrities or journalists. It did mention the skiing thing but that was about it. All it did was call them "rich travelers."

Why do this?

Notice that this avoids the unpleasantness of identifying the true carriers, which were elite liberal celebrities. Instead, it shifts the blame to "the rich," which is dog whistle code to the left for "evil conservative white businessmen who want to kill innocent brown people." In fact, the article doesn't even explore how this worked in the US because that might lead to uncomfortable questions. Instead, it jumps to poor brown countries (Mexico specifically) and it blames rich international travelers for the spread. In other words, the problem was rich, white American businessmen spreading this stuff to poor, hardworking brown people in ghettos.

If you want to stop the spread of something, you need to know how it started, how it spread, and where it could have been stopped. Knowing that a bunch of leftist a-holes got it being smug at Sundance and then spread it around to their friends would help. That lets you trace a lot of things which help explain the disease's evolution and toxicity and everything. Yet, the good leftists at the Times can't put their politics aside. They needed to spin this interesting discovery into a race/class war issue and did so by misidentifying the key facts. This is the left refusing to see facts as they are and being doubly blinded by ideology.

Unfortunately, the comments were no better. Rather than pointing out the inaccuracies, half the comments were conspiracy theories... 5G is under my bed!!... and the other half were reflexive defenses of "the rich." Thus, they all dismissed the few interesting facts of the article as propaganda. Ironically, if the writers had called them "Hollywood" instead of the rich, then the commenters would have taken all of this as true, but then the article writers would have been dismissed as right wing kooks.

This is the problem with our political system today. There's nobody rational or truthful in it. It's all about lies and dogma, enemies, and idiots shouting idiocy and myth at each other, and that makes our current system uniquely unfit to meet any challenge where information is important.