This Week in the Sick Minds of Tikvah Tablet (11/28)
David Shasha
What Tikvah Tablet Did – and is Still Doing – to the Kids!
Bright and early Monday morning, as many of us scurried to find places to get our COVID Booster shots, the Whore of Trump was once again attacking the safety measures put into place to keep all of us safe:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/school-closures-covid-alex-gutentag
As if Norman Doidge was not enough!
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/c_bvEh2_mTk/m/M3298UVwAQAJ
If it is still possible that you not know the vile Trumpscum Lysoler, here are his greatest Tikvah Tablet hits:
https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/norman-doidge
And I literally mean “hits” – a punch to the gut of any sane and decent person.
We have recently seen the Whore of Trump attack COVID vaccinations for children, just as they were rolling out:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/K3mVEmw5YCY
As for Alex Gutentag, he is all Whore of Trump Lysol all the time:
https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/alex-gutentag
This is what The Tikvah Fund echo-chamber looks like, and it is not pretty.
He begins his disgusting article with an amazing reference to Geraldo Rivera – before FOX – and his campaign against corruption in the Mental Health institution industry:
In 1972, future Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera rose to national prominence for his expose of the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island. In his report, Rivera documented an environment of horrifying neglect and abuse. Naked children with severe developmental disabilities were on the floor moaning, some of them smeared with feces. Rivera described the children as “human vegetables in a detention camp.” I first watched the short documentary when I started teaching special education eight years ago. I was surprised to learn that before 1975, only about 1 in 5 children with disabilities in the United States attended public school, and many were in overcrowded state institutions that provided no education or training.
He then uses the mentally ill as human shields to attack the COVID school closures:
When it became clear that California public schools would stay closed despite the paucity of evidence that closures were effective, and the far greater amount of evidence that schools could safely reopen, I tried to volunteer to teach kids with severe disabilities in person. But my district and union would not allow it. I emailed other teachers I knew from my union and cited statements from organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics that were urging schools to reopen. State and local leaders kept referring to rising cases and deaths to justify closures, but later our county would reveal that it had actually overcounted total COVID deaths by 25%. The county dropped hundreds of “incidental” COVID deaths (in the case of car accidents, for example) from its register, meaning the figures that had been used to rationalize school closures in my district were not even accurate.
Gutentag ignores the evidence of how effective the mandatory school closures were, as he continues the reckless Whore of Trump denial of the COVID danger:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0248925
This report provides that much-needed evidence:
The effectiveness of the COVID-SCs will likely be a topic of much research for years to come. While the evidence on the effectiveness of COVID-SCs continues to evolve, some early studies suggest they have led to decreases in incidence and mortality [32, 33], whereas others did not find evidence that COVID-SC were effective in reducing incidence [34, 35]. In a study evaluating the impact of climate factors and NPIs on COVID-19 outbreaks on a global scale, COVID-SCs along with concurrent restrictions on mass gatherings and implementation of physical distancing showed a strong negative association with epidemic growth [36]. However, comprehensively addressing the question of COVID-SC effectiveness on its own and in conjunction with other countermeasures will require much more additional study over the course of this still ongoing pandemic.
Indeed, this CDC-funded report explains that there is still much that we do not know, but that the government measures – when implemented – were an important prophylactic that reinforces the maxim of “better safe than sorry.”
But public safety is not in the Whore of Trump wheelhouse!
Ilana Redstone Does the Whore of Trump Gaslight!
And the hits just keep on coming:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/america-gaslight-ilana-redstone
SHU readers might be aware of Tikvah SAPIR Sociology Professor Redstone form her connection to Bret Jewish Genius Stephens, because that is what Tikvah WOKE Intersectionality is all about:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/4FRto3Kgn80/m/L16QgfDxBQAJ
I was intrigued to see the use of the loaded term “Gaslight” in the article’s title, as the argument is all Trumpist Gaslight and PILPUL:
On Nov. 4, through an order from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), President Joe Biden declared that all organizations with 100 or more employees must require those employees to either get vaccinated or submit to weekly COVID tests. Some Americans saw the order as overstepping, while others saw it as entirely justified. There’s a legal debate to be had about when and under what circumstances such a mandate is permissible, and U.S. courts will surely sort that out in the coming weeks and months.
But the controversy raises a broader question about coercion—the use of power to compel someone to do something they don’t want to do. Coercion can take the form of a mandate, or it can be more subtle, like intense social pressure. Compulsion in this manner, particularly in the workplace—given that people rely on their jobs for their livelihoods—should require a high level of confidence or certainty that what is being compelled is defensible. Sometimes this level of confidence is warranted. And sometimes it isn’t.
When a question has a clear and definitive answer, we feel justified implementing policies and procedures based on that answer. To take an obvious example, we can be highly confident that stealing is wrong. And because of this knowledge and understanding, we have laws that impose consequences on those who are caught stealing.
The imposition of consequences works well when the issue at hand is largely uncontroversial or the answer is universally accepted (like the idea that stealing shouldn’t be tolerated). However, basing policies or procedures on the false treatment of a contested answer as definitive—or committing the “settled-question fallacy”—can have serious negative consequences.
We commit the settled-question fallacy when we behave as if there is broad-based consensus on answers to important and controversial questions that aren’t actually settled.
We commit the settled-question fallacy when we behave as if there is broad-based consensus on answers to important and controversial questions that aren’t actually settled. Often this comes up when there is evidence available to support competing answers to a question, or when a claim is nearly impossible to prove or disprove. A particularly pernicious form of the settled-question fallacy appears when one side of the political spectrum asserts that a question is no longer up for debate.
Although the problem of combining coercion with the settled-question fallacy extends far beyond things like vaccine mandates, the example is instructive. Some find Biden’s mandate objectionable because it pressures people to undergo a medical procedure they don’t want. Others object because they see the mandate as based on assertions that one might reasonably question, citing evidence that the vaccine’s effects wane quickly or that vaccinated people can still spread the disease.
It’s important to recognize that some people see the issue of COVID vaccine mandates as a simple dichotomy: If you care about others’ well-being, you’re in favor, and if you don’t, then you’re opposed. This equation is indeed powerful. But without nesting it in a broader conversation about the breakdown in public trust, it makes itself more vulnerable to skepticism and distrust than is perhaps necessary. Indeed, this is why we need more, not less, open and honest discourse that is willing to acknowledge the limitations of our knowledge.
It is, of course a deeply disingenuous PILPUL because it pretends to present both sides of an argument that it has no actual intention of debating.
You will want to compare it to Bari Weiss’ disgusting praise for the FOX News Lysol Trumpism of Marty Makary:
The idea is to attack the current president, while implicitly supporting to the previous president, all wrapped in Social Science nonsense, a la David Brooks – but to be fair to Brooks, even he would never seek to endanger the American public in this disgusting Tikvah way:
The link between coercion and resentment is something psychologists have recognized for decades. In a 1959 paper titled “The Bases of Social Power,” psychologists John French and Bertram Raven wrote that coercive power “stems from the expectation on the part of P that he will be punished by O if he fails to conform to the influence attempt,” where O is the person with power and P is the person being influenced. French and Raven pointed to an important contrast between coercive power and reward power, which is another type discussed in their paper. They wrote: “Reward power will tend to increase the attraction of P toward O; coercive power will decrease this attraction.” Resentment is often the manifestation of this decrease in attraction. Other research has shown that, because the probability of resentment under coercion is so high, authority figures will often opt to leverage reward power instead.
In a sense, it is the Trump COVID denialism analogue to Ross Douthat’s QAnon threats on the repeal of Roe:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/bzD4FL8-73k
We have learned that it is the Tikvah way never to utter the sacred name of “Trump” while continuing to attack the current president for a coercion that is not his.
Projection is a good way to Gaslight people.
David Shasha