An opinion piece from the @WSJ in their 'main street' section:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lockdown-rebellion-11587400850
—- it’s not a rebellion, it’s a corporate led PR stunt that the @GOP is exploiting. Billionaires are afraid their profits will diminish, they don’t care who dies. This is standard fare in the media ecosystem. You can get what you pay for.
Here we go. I'll quote the opinion piece and point out the fallacies. What's the motivation? Who's gaining advantage? Who's financing this? Does it make sense? Who's dying? —-
There they go again, ordinary Americans denying science and refusing to defer to their betters.
— It starts with the typically sarcastic #FlameAndBlame tactics of the shills of the right. The unwashed masses are great! They can be manipulated into helping my billionaire overlords. So what's really going on? Nobody is deferring to their 'betters', they aren't deferring to those who have spent their lives learning, gaining expertise, putting in the sweat and work that is required to be a fully functioning member of this society. Some people expect that their privilege should get them things instead of their hard work. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. Too bad. —-
In state capitals across the country [No, in a few carefully handpicked states], citizens are protesting the continued coronavirus lockdowns. A CNN critic calls them “Covid-19 deniers,” notwithstanding that the science they allegedly deny still lacks conclusive answers to some of the most fundamental questions about the coronavirus.
—- ‘Protesting’? No. They are holding Death Parties (Notice the Confederate and Nazi flags.) The result will be their deaths and the deaths of others. They’ve been infected by the @GOP #DeathCult conspiracy theories. The billionaires don’t care if they live or die as long as they can juice the news cycle to get favorable PR sowing doubt on the opposition. It’s sad to see how exploited these Covidiots are. We'll talk about the science in a bit —-
In the past week, demonstrations have broken out in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Utah, Virginia and Washington. In Pennsylvania the state legislature got into the act, [Oooooh! That's telling, yes it's an act, a partisan act] sending Gov. Tom Wolf a bill that would order much of the state re-opened more quickly than he would like. More protests are planned for this week.
—- ‘broken out’. One in a hundred thousand people have been convinced to risk their lives and the lives of others to make a political point favoring billionaires and immoral corporations. And the billionaires and corporations are gleeful that their bullshit is working to confuse the serfs on the right. And they’ve sent their press flacks out in droves to support them. Did Andrew Carnegie care that multiple people died in his steel mills every day? Hell no. And neither do your corporate sponsors. —-
So who are these people? Some are folks who fear a permanent expansion of government and worry when they hear leaders such as New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy saying that constitutional considerations about lockdown measures are “above my pay grade.” Others are troubled by the First Amendment implications of politicians shutting down churches.
—- Just No. These people have been agitated into lethal stupidity by billionaires and their corporate shills, like you. Attending any Death Parties soon, William? Or would you recommend sheltering in place? —-
The do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do behavior of those imposing these rules isn’t boosting trust in authorities, either, whether it be Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot going out to get her hair done or New York Mayor Bill de Blasio being driven to his gym even as they were imploring everyone else to stay home. On Monday Mark Zuckerberg told George Stephanopoulos on ABC News that Facebook now classifies “a lot of the stuff” protesters are saying as “harmful misinformation”—and that Facebook will “take that down.”
—- Yes. Even the greatest shill for corporate America and billionaire, Zuckerberg, sees that this is dangerous bullshit and will end up killing people. There you go using #FlameAndBlame tactics again with anecdata (anecdotal data that spins a story but doesn't tell the truth.) What about Trump's rallies? What about Ivanka's private jet flights? What about... you get the idea. Everyone makes mistakes but not all of us hold Death Parties that are going to get a bunch of Americans killed. This is exactly what you are advocating. Stop it. Stop it now. —-
Lost in all this is that the protesters are for the most part simply struggling Americans who have concluded that—at least for them—the cure is turning out to be worse than the disease.
—- No, struggling Americans are being exploited by cynical billionaires and political flacks, like you. It’s disgusting. you think death for them is better than a skeletal economy for your overlords? —-
“These protesters aren’t rich or privileged,” says Stephen Moore, a Trump economic adviser. “Most are folks living paycheck to paycheck or small-business owners seeing their livelihoods destroyed, and they are the ones who are bearing the crushing burden of the lockdown in their states.” Mr. Moore says he’s formed an organization, Save Our Country, to help them ensure their voices are heard.
—— ‘formed'? I would say led, then exploited. Does Stephen try to channel the Death Parties into relevant protest? No. He eggs them on. Because he knows it’s a small set of Covidiots even willing to chant these stupid things and risk their own lives and other's lives. The blowback is going to be massive. Get ready. We don’t care how much you apologize for these anti-American terrorists, we aren’t changing our minds. Stop shilling for the immoral corporations and think about what is right for Americans, not about what your paycheck depends on. —-
Feeding the sense of grievance is not just the lockdowns but the way they have been imposed. Start with the overkill. This includes sheriff’s deputies arresting a paddle boater alone in the ocean off Malibu, Calif., city officials in San Clemente filling a popular skateboarding park with 37 tons of sand, and various states restricting big-box retailers from selling “nonessential items,” which means that you can get three scoops of chocolate chip from your local ice-cream shop but God forbid Home Depot sell you a bag of mulch.
—- Boo Hoo. Anecdata. This opinion piece is non-essential, actually harmful. Socially distance yourself. People make mistakes. Look at you, shilling for a corporation! Because the rules aren't perfect, burn them down! —-
Though it is common to portray the protesters as putting profits over public health, these are hardly wealthy investors worried about their portfolios. Unlike the roughly one-third of Americans who can work at home and still draw paychecks, for most Americans the lockdowns are more than an inconvenience. And the urgency of reopening looks very different for the 22 million American workers who have just lost their jobs—or the 1 in 4 small-business owners who, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, say they are two months or less away from shutting down permanently.
—- These Death Parties are organized by wealthy investors who are corporate funded and death indifferent. Immoral one might say. Yes, the shutdowns are more than an inconvenience. And government should be making sure we are all equally capable of living through it without harm. It’s immoral to tie healthcare to work. It’s immoral to have jobs with pay that won’t let you live. It’s immoral not to support small businesses with unemployment insurance and paid sick leave. The GOP is an immoral party. ——
Ditto for the charge that they are antiscience. Surely we could all use a little more modesty. Any honest appraisal would have to concede there is much that scientists have gotten wrong (the many models whose estimates of, say, deaths and ventilators needed proved wildly off), and much we still don’t know (the true lethality of Covid-19, the average number an infected person will infect, and so on).
—- Right! We don’t know and our president is trying to stop us from knowing. He's purposely screwing up testing. He never let a fact get in the way of his lying-for-popularity bullshit. The models are fine, the differences are in the assumptions and what they tell us about real life. You are a purposeful idiot here, purposely misunderstanding how science works to mislead your readers. One of the five signs you are a corporate shill. ---
Medical officials haven’t always been right, either. In [early] January, Anthony Fauci, the immunologist who serves as a lead member of the president’s coronavirus task force, assured America that Covid-19 was “not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.”
—- This is unconscionable bullshit. Dr. Fauci expected the US to follow the pandemic guidelines set up by Bush. If we had, we would have been fine, (See South Korea) but we didn’t! @realdonaldtrump so screwed up the response that we are the worst case of death and destruction in the world. Time to throw the #PlannedIncompetents out, not say the models are broken. Our @POTUS has almost always been indefensibly wrong because he depends on his 'gut'. He thinks: 'How can I take credit if it works? How can I assign blame if it fails?" And what do you do, William? You seem to follow scripts from your billionaire handlers. Who should we pay attention to? Corporate shills who are only after a buck or scientists who have methods for determining truth? It's not too hard to figure out, is it? —
This is no slam on Dr. Fauci. To the contrary, this is the way science works, as experts revise and adjust to new information. But it should be a warning not to regard these experts as oracles or science as a source of unequivocal answers beyond dispute. Scientists should have doubts and continue to put their hypotheses to the test.
—- You should have doubts about your ethics, William. Doubt is the seed immoral corporations sow to hide their death dealing ways. Smoking cigarettes don’t cause cancer. Burning fossil fuels doesn’t cause global warming. Fluorocarbons don't cause holes in the ozone. Belching sulfur from power plants doesn't cause acid rain... I’m very tired of this corporate shilling passing for conservative opinion. Who’s paying you?—-
The protests remain relatively small [tiny, 0.00001 % of Americans]. But they do expose the elite disconnect with ordinary America. A recent New York magazine article captured the condescension and lack of empathy when it declared the protests are probably “going to spread nearly as rapidly as the coronavirus itself in the rich soil of anti-government subcultures where it’s widely accepted that ‘tyrants’ are exploiting the emergency to impose their godless socialist views on freedom-loving but fearful Americans.”
—- Yes, this is being pushed by the media and their billionaire donors. Where was the publicity and support for modern day society when a million times as many people marched for women's right and the support of science? We heard and saw nothing but the conservative press making fun of the majority of Americans. Opinion pieces in the @WSJ supporting the greatest mass movement by Americans in the last century: zero. This piece is manufactured bullshit to support billionaires. There’s no two ways around it. It’s a manufactured PR stunt supported by immoral corporations using a bunch of angry dissatisfied Covidiots. ——
A better sense of this subculture might be the words chanted by Kentucky protesters outside their governor’s office last week. Their outrageous message? “We want to work.”
— Go to work. Do something reasonable. Protest responsibly, like the millions of Israelis who all wore masks and stood six feet apart to protest the Trump clone, Netanyahu. No, the message of these Covidiots is "we want to die and take others with us." It’s totally irresponsible and you're pushing it, William —-
Write to mcgurn@wsj.com.
Thanks for reading. I’m just one person, so can’t keep up with all the bullshit the @wsj and its billionaire owners and supporters spew out every day. Anybody want to help me counteract this immoral corporate PR blather that causes America harm? Drop me a line.
-DrMike
The Lockdown Rebellion
Ordinary Americans protesting to reopen the economy face only contempt from elites.
—- it’s not a rebellion, it’s a corporate led PR stunt that the @GOP is exploiting. Billionaires are afraid their profits will diminish, they don’t care who dies. This is standard fare in the media ecosystem. You can get what you pay for.
Here we go. I'll quote the opinion piece and point out the fallacies. What's the motivation? Who's gaining advantage? Who's financing this? Does it make sense? Who's dying? —-
There they go again, ordinary Americans denying science and refusing to defer to their betters.
— It starts with the typically sarcastic #FlameAndBlame tactics of the shills of the right. The unwashed masses are great! They can be manipulated into helping my billionaire overlords. So what's really going on? Nobody is deferring to their 'betters', they aren't deferring to those who have spent their lives learning, gaining expertise, putting in the sweat and work that is required to be a fully functioning member of this society. Some people expect that their privilege should get them things instead of their hard work. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. Too bad. —-
In state capitals across the country [No, in a few carefully handpicked states], citizens are protesting the continued coronavirus lockdowns. A CNN critic calls them “Covid-19 deniers,” notwithstanding that the science they allegedly deny still lacks conclusive answers to some of the most fundamental questions about the coronavirus.
—- ‘Protesting’? No. They are holding Death Parties (Notice the Confederate and Nazi flags.) The result will be their deaths and the deaths of others. They’ve been infected by the @GOP #DeathCult conspiracy theories. The billionaires don’t care if they live or die as long as they can juice the news cycle to get favorable PR sowing doubt on the opposition. It’s sad to see how exploited these Covidiots are. We'll talk about the science in a bit —-
In the past week, demonstrations have broken out in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Utah, Virginia and Washington. In Pennsylvania the state legislature got into the act, [Oooooh! That's telling, yes it's an act, a partisan act] sending Gov. Tom Wolf a bill that would order much of the state re-opened more quickly than he would like. More protests are planned for this week.
—- ‘broken out’. One in a hundred thousand people have been convinced to risk their lives and the lives of others to make a political point favoring billionaires and immoral corporations. And the billionaires and corporations are gleeful that their bullshit is working to confuse the serfs on the right. And they’ve sent their press flacks out in droves to support them. Did Andrew Carnegie care that multiple people died in his steel mills every day? Hell no. And neither do your corporate sponsors. —-
So who are these people? Some are folks who fear a permanent expansion of government and worry when they hear leaders such as New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy saying that constitutional considerations about lockdown measures are “above my pay grade.” Others are troubled by the First Amendment implications of politicians shutting down churches.
—- Just No. These people have been agitated into lethal stupidity by billionaires and their corporate shills, like you. Attending any Death Parties soon, William? Or would you recommend sheltering in place? —-
The do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do behavior of those imposing these rules isn’t boosting trust in authorities, either, whether it be Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot going out to get her hair done or New York Mayor Bill de Blasio being driven to his gym even as they were imploring everyone else to stay home. On Monday Mark Zuckerberg told George Stephanopoulos on ABC News that Facebook now classifies “a lot of the stuff” protesters are saying as “harmful misinformation”—and that Facebook will “take that down.”
—- Yes. Even the greatest shill for corporate America and billionaire, Zuckerberg, sees that this is dangerous bullshit and will end up killing people. There you go using #FlameAndBlame tactics again with anecdata (anecdotal data that spins a story but doesn't tell the truth.) What about Trump's rallies? What about Ivanka's private jet flights? What about... you get the idea. Everyone makes mistakes but not all of us hold Death Parties that are going to get a bunch of Americans killed. This is exactly what you are advocating. Stop it. Stop it now. —-
Lost in all this is that the protesters are for the most part simply struggling Americans who have concluded that—at least for them—the cure is turning out to be worse than the disease.
—- No, struggling Americans are being exploited by cynical billionaires and political flacks, like you. It’s disgusting. you think death for them is better than a skeletal economy for your overlords? —-
“These protesters aren’t rich or privileged,” says Stephen Moore, a Trump economic adviser. “Most are folks living paycheck to paycheck or small-business owners seeing their livelihoods destroyed, and they are the ones who are bearing the crushing burden of the lockdown in their states.” Mr. Moore says he’s formed an organization, Save Our Country, to help them ensure their voices are heard.
—— ‘formed'? I would say led, then exploited. Does Stephen try to channel the Death Parties into relevant protest? No. He eggs them on. Because he knows it’s a small set of Covidiots even willing to chant these stupid things and risk their own lives and other's lives. The blowback is going to be massive. Get ready. We don’t care how much you apologize for these anti-American terrorists, we aren’t changing our minds. Stop shilling for the immoral corporations and think about what is right for Americans, not about what your paycheck depends on. —-
Feeding the sense of grievance is not just the lockdowns but the way they have been imposed. Start with the overkill. This includes sheriff’s deputies arresting a paddle boater alone in the ocean off Malibu, Calif., city officials in San Clemente filling a popular skateboarding park with 37 tons of sand, and various states restricting big-box retailers from selling “nonessential items,” which means that you can get three scoops of chocolate chip from your local ice-cream shop but God forbid Home Depot sell you a bag of mulch.
—- Boo Hoo. Anecdata. This opinion piece is non-essential, actually harmful. Socially distance yourself. People make mistakes. Look at you, shilling for a corporation! Because the rules aren't perfect, burn them down! —-
Though it is common to portray the protesters as putting profits over public health, these are hardly wealthy investors worried about their portfolios. Unlike the roughly one-third of Americans who can work at home and still draw paychecks, for most Americans the lockdowns are more than an inconvenience. And the urgency of reopening looks very different for the 22 million American workers who have just lost their jobs—or the 1 in 4 small-business owners who, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, say they are two months or less away from shutting down permanently.
—- These Death Parties are organized by wealthy investors who are corporate funded and death indifferent. Immoral one might say. Yes, the shutdowns are more than an inconvenience. And government should be making sure we are all equally capable of living through it without harm. It’s immoral to tie healthcare to work. It’s immoral to have jobs with pay that won’t let you live. It’s immoral not to support small businesses with unemployment insurance and paid sick leave. The GOP is an immoral party. ——
Ditto for the charge that they are antiscience. Surely we could all use a little more modesty. Any honest appraisal would have to concede there is much that scientists have gotten wrong (the many models whose estimates of, say, deaths and ventilators needed proved wildly off), and much we still don’t know (the true lethality of Covid-19, the average number an infected person will infect, and so on).
—- Right! We don’t know and our president is trying to stop us from knowing. He's purposely screwing up testing. He never let a fact get in the way of his lying-for-popularity bullshit. The models are fine, the differences are in the assumptions and what they tell us about real life. You are a purposeful idiot here, purposely misunderstanding how science works to mislead your readers. One of the five signs you are a corporate shill. ---
Medical officials haven’t always been right, either. In [early] January, Anthony Fauci, the immunologist who serves as a lead member of the president’s coronavirus task force, assured America that Covid-19 was “not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.”
—- This is unconscionable bullshit. Dr. Fauci expected the US to follow the pandemic guidelines set up by Bush. If we had, we would have been fine, (See South Korea) but we didn’t! @realdonaldtrump so screwed up the response that we are the worst case of death and destruction in the world. Time to throw the #PlannedIncompetents out, not say the models are broken. Our @POTUS has almost always been indefensibly wrong because he depends on his 'gut'. He thinks: 'How can I take credit if it works? How can I assign blame if it fails?" And what do you do, William? You seem to follow scripts from your billionaire handlers. Who should we pay attention to? Corporate shills who are only after a buck or scientists who have methods for determining truth? It's not too hard to figure out, is it? —
This is no slam on Dr. Fauci. To the contrary, this is the way science works, as experts revise and adjust to new information. But it should be a warning not to regard these experts as oracles or science as a source of unequivocal answers beyond dispute. Scientists should have doubts and continue to put their hypotheses to the test.
—- You should have doubts about your ethics, William. Doubt is the seed immoral corporations sow to hide their death dealing ways. Smoking cigarettes don’t cause cancer. Burning fossil fuels doesn’t cause global warming. Fluorocarbons don't cause holes in the ozone. Belching sulfur from power plants doesn't cause acid rain... I’m very tired of this corporate shilling passing for conservative opinion. Who’s paying you?—-
The protests remain relatively small [tiny, 0.00001 % of Americans]. But they do expose the elite disconnect with ordinary America. A recent New York magazine article captured the condescension and lack of empathy when it declared the protests are probably “going to spread nearly as rapidly as the coronavirus itself in the rich soil of anti-government subcultures where it’s widely accepted that ‘tyrants’ are exploiting the emergency to impose their godless socialist views on freedom-loving but fearful Americans.”
—- Yes, this is being pushed by the media and their billionaire donors. Where was the publicity and support for modern day society when a million times as many people marched for women's right and the support of science? We heard and saw nothing but the conservative press making fun of the majority of Americans. Opinion pieces in the @WSJ supporting the greatest mass movement by Americans in the last century: zero. This piece is manufactured bullshit to support billionaires. There’s no two ways around it. It’s a manufactured PR stunt supported by immoral corporations using a bunch of angry dissatisfied Covidiots. ——
A better sense of this subculture might be the words chanted by Kentucky protesters outside their governor’s office last week. Their outrageous message? “We want to work.”
— Go to work. Do something reasonable. Protest responsibly, like the millions of Israelis who all wore masks and stood six feet apart to protest the Trump clone, Netanyahu. No, the message of these Covidiots is "we want to die and take others with us." It’s totally irresponsible and you're pushing it, William —-
Write to mcgurn@wsj.com.
Thanks for reading. I’m just one person, so can’t keep up with all the bullshit the @wsj and its billionaire owners and supporters spew out every day. Anybody want to help me counteract this immoral corporate PR blather that causes America harm? Drop me a line.
-DrMike
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