Trade-Offs

Silverfiddle Rant!

I didn't want to go there, but an article written by snarky lefty John Harris in Politico has pushed me over the edge:

Admit it.  You are willing to let people die to end the shutdown


We are dealing in trade-offs:  How much economic destruction to save how many lives?  And even that is not accurate.  We are not saving lives--we are deferring deaths.

As Democrats continue to take a hammer and sickle to our economy* we are in an age of Cheap Tricks, Cheap Attacks, and Cheap Racist Rants. Please bear with me, its all related.

Cheap Tricks

Harris resorts to cheap tricks. After reminding us how conservatives rail against moral relativism, he unleashes this:

It’s worth noting the shift in worldviews. During the pandemic, conservatives are much more likely to be relativists—everyone dies of something eventually so let’s keep this disease in perspective—while liberals generally are quicker to assume the absolutist stance—let’s stay shut down for as long as health experts tell us we need to save lives.

Did you catch the trick:  He dropped 'moral relativist' and replaced it with simply 'relativist.'  Two different things.  That is the heap of pot metal trinkets and shiny glass beads Democrat argumentation has been reduced to.

Cheap Attacks

Harris attacks my governor, Gerald Polis (a Democrat) who I believe had done a pretty fair job balancing public health and our God-given rights. Jake Crapper asked Polis a gotcha question about the looseness of his Coronavirus policies (a typical Maoist attack, since Polis is not toeing the Democrat line and looks suspiciously closer to Trump than to Pelosi on this), and Polis gave a standard politician's answer, which touched off Harris' attack:

The murkiness of Polis’ reply requires translation. To my ear, he was saying something like this:

Yes, some people are going to die of Covid-19 who wouldn’t if I keep a full lockdown in place. I hope not too many or too fast. But keeping the risk of death as low as possible imposes other costs that are too high, and my job is to balance competing goals.

Life is full of tradeoffs and nothing is pristine.  Clean drinking water is allowed to have a certain amount of fecal coliform and harmful chemicals below a mandated threshold.  The world is full of non-malicious human activity that indirectly leads to the death of others.

Let's take Harris's statement and play "fill in the blank."  Please share your answers in the comments:

Yes, some people are going to die of [fill in the blank] who wouldn’t if we had a full ban on [fill in the blank]. 

Example Answers:  car accidents – automobiles

Cheap Racist Rants

Related to this is one more example of how the Age of Corona is empowering the partisan loonies, angry racists and raging propagandists.  This is a real headline on Vox, the leftwing 'splainer website posing as responsible journalism:

The whiteness of anti-lockdown protests
How ignorance, privilege, and anti-black racism is driving white protesters to risk their lives.

Extraordinary events cause ordure like this to bob to the surface, and such rants are always revealing. I doubt this article speaks for “people of color.” Based on my limited experience, I don't think most “people of color” look at the world through such hate-distorted lenses, but it speaks loud and clear for the revenge raging neo-Maoists who are exploiting racial differences to stoke tribalism and heap mob scorn on white people.

What say you?

* - Originally stated by a commenter at William M. Briggs - Statistician to the Stars

See also:  Covid-19: Three Futures