Media Cheering Against Florida

Wednesday, March 31, 2021

Over at The American Spectator is commentary on how Florida is doing relative to other states in the pandemic. As a Floridian, I would have to say that it is pretty accurate regarding things "on the ground" as they like to say:

Image by Denys Kostyuchenko, via Unsplash, license.
Recently I did something in a medium-sized Central Florida city that remains illegal in the cultural meccas of Los Angeles and New York City. I attended a concert by a Bee Gees tribute band, albeit with a somewhat masked-up audience and socially distanced seating. If it had been up to the "follow-the-science" types, there would still be zero concerts, no theme park visits, no sports on any level, and of course no Super Bowl -- no fun diversions from the sadness and fear of the past year.

Yet even though the dire predictions of death in Florida never came to pass, the ignorant shrieking of "DeathSantis!" continues unabated. Objective measurements of success won't assuage the Left's mask-based moral superiority. In any case, people in Florida, or at least the sliver I see every day, are quite mask-compliant, which makes it odd to read horrified accounts from people who don't live here that claim otherwise. [bold added]
Recall that Florida never imposed a statewide mask mandate.

Ron DeSantis has had a relatively sane response to the pandemic for an American governor, leaving precautions to individuals -- who seem oddly reluctant to catch the crud, and businesses, who apparently don't want the bad publicity that would come from spreading it.

On that last score, see Disney: I have, with my family, three times now. None of us has gotten sick. (I am hardly claiming DeSantis has been perfect: I strongly disagree with the Great Barrington Declaration to which he adheres, for starters.)

Aside from the fact that DeSantis is a left-wing target because he would be a viable Presidential contender, there is an element of ghoulishness about these incessant predictions of doom that we saw in Europe early on, and which the article cites:
Florida has avoided the dark imaginings of the Left, controlling the pandemic while not wrecking the lives of its citizens and allowing a semblance of normal life to continue. Even the DeSantis foes at the New York Times were forced to acknowledge on a recent Sunday front page, with a healthy dose of petulance, that in Florida "Much of life seems normal ... "

Perhaps worried it had been too fair, the Times followed up with this snark from reporter Apoorva Mandavilli: "Scientists view Florida -- the state furthest along in lifting restrictions, reopening society and welcoming tourists -- as a bellwether for the nation. If recent trends there are any indication, the rest of the country may be in trouble."

Yes, it's that gruesome wishful thinking of "wait two weeks" again -- predicting a rise in Florida's case and death rate that never actually arrives. Expect the Left, locked into defending their year-long lockdown policy, to never forgive Gov. DeSantis for being right.
Just as blue states have endured a year of "fifteen days to flatten the curve," so have Floridians heard, "see what happens in two weeks" for a year. The fact that our news media or the left (but I repeat myself) have a shred of credibility at this point is a mystery to me.

It is worth asking why so many in our cultural establishment have so much emotionally invested in seeing Florida fail, convincing everyone that individuals are incompetent to take care of themselves, or both.

-- CAV

6 comments:

Dinwar said...

I have had a similar experience in Alabama. We are under more restrictions than Florida, but not as many as the “follow the science” types wish us to be under. Certain venues still allow activities—for example, we attended a ballet at a zoo, with most wearing masks and keeping their distance (many of us were picnicking, which made a bit of distance normal). In every store I have gone to people were mostly wearing masks and distancing as well. Yet all you hear on the news is constant attacks against the state for being backwards and anti-science. Ironic, because Alabama is home to many, many rocket scientists! As a scientist myself I hate the phrase “follow the science” with a burning passion. Science tells you how the universe works; it does not and cannot tell you which political agendas to follow. I have found that almost all who use that phrase have deep and fundamental misunderstandings of what science is, and are worse than open enemies to science. They are doing more damage to the credibility of science than anti-Vader’s and Creationists combined.

Gus Van Horn said...

Dinwar,

"I hate the phrase 'follow the science' with a burning passion."

You and me both! And Alex Epstein is 100% correct when he points out that lots of what people virtue-signal about in the name of "the science" they actually hold, epistemologically speaking, the same way the hold religious views. That is, they take them on blind faith.

Or, as I would put it, after Pauli, they are not even wrong.

I sometimes have to deal with someone who insults non-AGW catastrophoists (like me and including me) as "science deniers" even though he knows damned well I am a scientist. My anger isn't directed so much at this guy: It's at the negligent or dishonest intellectuals who enable and reward such poor mental discipline.

Gus

Anonymous said...

Dinwar,

I must admit that although I found Vader a worthy antagonist in the first two Star Wars movies - chronologically, not narratively - I too must align myself with the Anti-Vader ranks, whatever the effect on science may be. He was a bad dude!

Gus,

I think that identifying the Left's epistemology as being as Faith-based as those of overt religionists is spot-on. But I think that they have other manifestations of the panoply of religion; sin (including original sin) heresy, heretics, devils, hypocrisy, problematical 'redemption, a version of Hell, and their very own edition of the Spanish Inquisition. Not burning people at the stake yet, but perfectly willing to stack up a body count in their pursuit of the anti-human 'good'. Any organization that posits that a 90% reduction in the number of living humans as a good and necessary thing cannot be white-washed away as 'good intentions'.

All things being equal, I think that "That Olde Tyme Religion" may be the lesser of the two evils.

BTW, I have a baseball cap that has Stonehenge on the front with the label, "Gimme That Old Time Religion". Most of the people I meet don't get it.

c andrew

Gus Van Horn said...

C.,

A lexicon of terms as used by today's egalitarian left, inspired by your reply:

original sin -- "whiteness" be it by birth and skin color or simply by failing to renounce reason (framed as "white"/Western thinking)
heresy -- anything not in line with current environmentalist/egalitarian/"woke" doctrine (which can change at any moment)
heretics -- "deniers" of whatever non-sequitur political program is being foisted on us at the moment as a remedy to whatever the left sees as (or imagines to be) a problem
devils -- anyone who has something of value that someone else does not have
hypocrisy -- a charge used to demonize someone who shares one's basic moral premises, but whom someone dislikes, usually because that person is frustrating a power grab
redemption -- total capitulation rewarded with a momentary flood of good publicity and fame that can come to an end (or be entirely revoked) at any moment at the whim of any current tastemaker
Hell -- (1) the alleged consequences of failing to believe the most fashionable "Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom ;" (2) the social/political pressure and raw physical threats faced by "heretics" and "hypocrites"

As far as the left's version of an inquisition goes, pretty much any conversation you have with one of their true believers qualifies, and any word at any time can be yanked out of context and its meaning twisted out of all recognition to serve as a basis for the ultimate sin: "offending."

Gus

Dinwar said...

Anon: My apologies for the mix-up. I typed anti-Vaxers, but was using my tablet and apparently it auto-corrected without me noticing. I agree that Vader, in the original trilogy, was worthy opponent. Certainly better than anything in the other two trilogies.

Regarding the epistemological structure the Left is using, I'm not sure blind faith is correct. At least someone who has blind faith believes something themselves--right or wrong, they are at least willing to say "I believe X" and suffer the consequences of it, good and bad. The "Follow the science!" crowd doesn't even have that. The ones I have met aren't concerned with what THEY believe, they are primarily focused on what OTHER PEOPLE believe. This leads to a constantly shifting set of beliefs, where the criteria isn't "What do I think is true?" but rather "What have I been told to think is true?" I have met far too many people who were passionately against masks when we were told (falsely) that they were ineffective or unnecessary, and became passionately pro-masks the instant they were told masks are required. The issue isn't either belief; it's the fact that these people in reality don't have any beliefs, and are merely drifting wherever they are directed.

This same thing can be seen in other aspects of the Left. Look at Rowling. On the issue of transgendered women she took the side of the feminist community (trans women aren't women for the purpose of Victimhood Bingo) instead of the trans community (they are). People supported or opposed her at first, as they saw fit, but as soon as it was decided (by whom? No answer is available) that the trans community has more Victimhood Points and therefore was right, Rowling was unpersoned. People who once supported her now consider it immoral to even read her books.

The Left isn't religious. They are proto-religious. They aren't at the epistemological level where they are capable of religion--they have no convictions, no creed, no beliefs, just a fear that someone, somewhere is going to be more Woke than them.

Gus Van Horn said...

Dinwar,

The Left isn't religious. They are proto-religious.

Good point, although I just saw an argument on HBL that you could call lots of them nature-worshippers.

If I recall and apply Leonard Peikoff's Dim Hypothesis correctly: The left are D2. When they are tired of being blown around by the winds of fashion, they will turn to a religion as a means of (mis)integrating things so they have a constant frame of reference.

Gus