Why Trump Blames the Chinese for Creating Coronavirus

Why would Donald Trump and many of his acolytes want to blame Chinese people for creating COVID-19? Why make this claim where there is no evidence to support the claim and where the U.S. national intelligence director's office said it had determined Covid-19 "was not manmade or genetically modified." I would suggest the following three reasons:

1. Because Trump and Mike Pence are proudly ignorant of science. . Relatedly, Trump has expressed skepticism about the use of vaccines.  Pence is hostile to the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection. And see here.

2. Due to their hostility to science, Trump and Pence are not likely entertain the possibility that the coronavirus could have evolved naturally, despite the fact that viruses do evolve and coronavirus did, in fact, naturally evolve.

3. Because Trump and Pence have established themselves as xenophobes, they would be inclined to blame “outsiders,” i.e., the Chinese, for the coronavirus. .

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Axiomatic Civic Responsibility

I’m looking at the “protesters” in Michigan and ruminating on the nature of civil disobedience versus civic aphasia. By that latter term I mean a condition wherein a blank space exists within the psyché where one would expect an appropriate recognition of responsible behavior ought to live.  A condition which seems to allow certain people to feel empowered to simply ignore—or fail to recognize—the point at which a reflexive rejection of authority should yield to a recognition of community responsibility.  That moment when the impulse to challenge, dismiss, or simply ignore what one is being told enlarges to the point of defiance and what ordinarily would be a responsible acceptance of correct behavior in the face of a public duty. It could be about anything from recycling to voting regularly to paying taxes to obeying directives meant to protect entire populations.

Fairly basic exercises in logic should suffice to define the difference between legitimate civil disobedience and civic aphasia. Questions like: “Who does this serve?” And if the answer is anything other than the community at large, discussion should occur to determine the next step.  The protesters in Michigan probably asked, if they asked at all, a related question that falls short of useful answer:  “How does this serve me?”  Depending on how much information they have in the first place, the answer to that question will be of limited utility, especially in cases of public health.

Another way to look at the difference is this:  is the action taken to defend privilege or to extend it? And to whom?

One factor involved in the current expression of misplaced disobedience has to do with weighing consequences. The governor of the state issues a lockdown in order to stem the rate of infection, person to person. It will last a limited time. When the emergency is over (and it will be over), what rights have been lost except a presumed right to be free of any restraint on personal whim?

There is no right to be free of inconvenience.  At best, we have a right to try to avoid it, diminish it, work around it.  Certainly be angry at it.  But there is no law, no agency, no institution that can enforce a freedom from inconvenience.  For one, it could never be made universal.  For another, “inconvenience” is a rather vague definition which is dependent on context.

And then there is the fact that some inconveniences simply have to be accepted and managed.

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Race is not real, but racism is alive and well

From The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea by Robert Wald Sussman, from an long excerpt published in Newsweek:

For the past 500 years, people have been taught how to interpret and understand racism. We have been told that there are very specific things that relate to race, such as intelligence, sexual behavior, birth rates, infant care, work ethics and abilities, personal restraint, lifespan, law-abidingness, aggression, altruism, economic and business practices, family cohesion, and even brain size. We have learned that races are structured in a hierarchical order and that some races are better than others. Even if you are not a racist, your life is affected by this ordered structure. We are born into a racist society. What many people do not realize is that this racial structure is not based on reality. Anthropologists have shown for many years now that there is no biological reality to human race. There are no major complex behaviors that directly correlate with what might be considered human “racial” characteristics.

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About people who are “Anti-Science”

Good article in Scientific American reminding us that those who are science-adverse or science-ignorant in some ways embrace science in other ways.  That should be obvious, in that creationists are willing to fly in airplanes and those who reject vaccines love to use their smart phones.  But this article goes further, and warns us that slapping people with with a general anti-science label risks driving them further into scientific ignorance.

People’s relationship with science is much more complex and nuanced than "pro-science" or "anti-science." We need to correct some of the misconceptions we have and show that what is often labeled as "anti-science" or “science denial” is often better understood as isolated incidents of motivated bias. In general, trust in science is much higher than we often realize, in part because it includes a lot of people we might often consider “anti-science.”

The conclusions of this article:
  • There is a deep respect for scientists and the scientific process.
  • People often use what they believe to be credible scientific findings to argue against actual, credible scientific findings.
  • It is often the implied solutions of scientific findings that motivate denial.
  • People often deny the relevance of facts, not just their correctness.

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