Monday, July 13, 2020

another leftist self-contradiction revealed

Dr. John Pepple is always intelligent, but every once in a while, he's witty, too. Regarding leftist pro-lockdown, anti-freedom hysteria about the pandemic, Pepple writes the following (emphasis added):

Yet, leftists in my area are taking [the pandemic] seriously, and some have even gotten quite hysterical about it. Some of these people are in their 30s, and I have to wonder exactly what they are worried about. What percentage of people in their 30s have died? Mighty few. Are they worried about permanent damage from getting ill? That might be reasonable, but no, that doesn’t seem to be their concern. They are worried that they will get it, and that then they will die. Do these people understand statistics at all? They quote facts at me (“the number of cases is going up”), and then ignore the facts about who is most likely to die. Or they quote facts at me and make extrapolations, and when I point out that I made an extrapolation about Sweden that didn’t pan out, they don’t seem to get it because “the scientists have spoken, so that’s that. You don’t want to be anti-science, do you?” Well, actually, since science is a construct of white supremacists, maybe I should be anti-science. Heh.

That's a very good point. The idea of science and rationality as tools of oppression comes right out of postmodernist humanities academe. For PoMo folks, rationality led to huge piles of corpses during the twentieth century, thanks to science's role in developing and honing the technologies of war. Forget the fact that blaming science in this way is as stupid as blaming religion for the sins committed in its name: the root causes of human evil go much deeper than mere systems and institutions, straight to the human heart. But Pepple's post hilariously highlights that the left's own position doesn't stand up to scrutiny: on the one hand, the left (largely thanks to PoMo) derides science as a tool of the white oppressor; on the other hand, the left uses "science" as a cudgel to bash the "anti-science" right. The left has trouble seeing its own hypocrisy in this case, as in many others. Selective alliance with "science" never ends well when it comes to intellectual and moral rigor.



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