Monthly Archives: January 2021

We know that there are gaps in vaccine take-up, but public health officials can be curiously vague about why and among whom. And we have turned a blind eye to one group in particular where there is significant anti-vaxx sentiment: my own community of South Asians.

Surgeries around the country have reported South Asian patients refusing the jab. A recent poll by the Royal Society of Public Health found that only 57 per cent of ethnic minority people would be happy to have the vaccine, compared with 79 per cent of white people. Yesterday, Dr Harpreet Sood, from NHS England, said that the spread of false information in the community was part of the problem.

Im unsurprised, given the messages relatives have shown me about vaccines. Some suggest that the jabs contain beef and alcohol (as though Yorkshire grass-fed and Merlot would have been the first ingredients AstraZeneca reached for). Others argue that drinking hot water can somehow cure Covid.

Many an anti-vax swami preys on the sentiment beloved of some South Asians that our mothers spice cupboard can cure a range of ills, but take it to the same extreme as Islington organic food-eating anti-vaxxers, who just dont want anything unnatural in their temple-cum-body.

Other messages feature bog-standard conspiracy theories about vaccines altering human DNA messages that would send many liberals raging if they were raised by a white person. But those same people are rendered speechless when it comes to anti-vax disinformation among South Asians because of political correctness.

As with everything from caste discrimination to sexism, many are happy to drop their most fundamental principles when it comes to ethnic minorities, and treat them as a special case. They sigh phrases such as language difficulties and cultural barriers and turn their backs as if BAME people were wackos on an unreachable isle, beyond salvation.

Yet this is wrong and to be honest, comes across as more racist. Many mosque leaders as well as other religious figures and Asian doctors are working round the clock to correct anti-vax sentiment in their communities. But no one else wants to wade into the debate for fear of being dirtied by accusations of racism.

The irony is that hesitancy around calling out anti-vax sentiment is not as generous-spirited as it seems; it will only harm already-at-risk South Asians living in tight-knit communities everywhere from Leicester to Hounslow, who will not escape Covid as soon as the rest of us if they are unwilling to have the vaccine.

If this year of anxious calibration around R rates and logarithmic scales has taught us anything, it is that every person counts. A 0.1 difference in the R rate can make or break our response to Covid, sending the pandemic soaring rather than shrivelling away.

We cant let misguided sensitivities stop us from saving lives.

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Political correctness is hurting the fight against anti-vaxxers - Telegraph.co.uk

In 1910, long before televisions unveiling at the 1938 Worlds Fair, Belgian information expert, Paul Otlet, and Henri La Fontaine imagined a global repository and distribution point for sharing the worlds knowledge. Their vision evolved into the League of Nations International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (forerunner of UNESCO). In 1934, prescient of the World Wide Web, Otlet wrote about a Radiated Library connecting TV watchers to encyclopedic knowledge via telephone wires. The idea remained dormant until the 1960s, when J.C.R. Licklider, a psychologist and computer scientist, proposed linking the worlds computers into a network for scientific exchange. In the heart of the Cold War, that intrigued U.S. militarists, who sought a communication system that could withstand a nuclear war. In 1969, Leonard Kleinrock, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn gave the Defense Department ARPANET, an Internet forerunner, which first connected computers at UCLA and Stanford, and then the Universities of California and Utah. After transmission control and internet protocols (TCP/IP) were ironed out, Ray Tomlinson sent the first e-mail in 1971.

Throughout its 60-year infancy, the Internets purpose was for scientists and other academicians to share and peer-review empirically tested information. It was never intended a conduit for cultivating lies, promoting distrust, or encouraging sedition and hatred. Nor was it designed for advertising, commercialism or funneling its users algorithmically. Weve allowed the Internet to devolve that way because Americas selective forces have always been political and monetary. Now, with many of our citizens losing the distinction between on-line myth and off-line reality, a single oft-repeated fantasy is all it takes to savage our democracy. After months of unsubstantiated predictions and claims of electoral fraud by Donald Trump and his facilitators, its no surprise the Capitol was stormed by domestic terrorists January 6th. Now, the FBI warns, armed protestors will gather throughout the country from January 16th through January 20th. Trumps march on the Capitol and Guilianis lets have trial by combat will retain some insurrectionary potency provided the departing President stays connected to his followers. And no nation can be a personality cult and function as a republic as well.

Because Trump nurtures and recruits flawed and violent elements of our society, he needs to be marginalized. Isolation via censorship on social media, while treading on his First Amendment rights, is a warranted act of counterterrorism, much like silencing a man who repeatedly shouts Fire in crowded theaters. Another impeachment round will likely go nowhere, as has invocation of the 25th Amendment. Congress would be wise to focus on the 14th Amendment (Section 3) instead, barring Trump from ever holding state or federal office again for inciting insurrection. Congressional leaders supporting his gambit should also be expelled. Because of its Confucian ethic, majorities in Japan often compromise with minorities to reach a consensus. In America, majority rule is undermined by conspiratorial thinking. Compromise and evidence-based decision-making are near-impossible here because ignorance and distortion are so regenerative, and mobs with zip ties and pipe bombs see communism in every act of common good and forethought. Liberty is perverted when freedom and individualism mean ignoring facts and science, opposing political correctness, transmitting diseases, amassing weaponry and destroying the planet. As for exiling Trump from QAnon, Proud Boys and other dangerous radicals, I suggest Saint Helena Island and a bungalow for demagogues unoccupied for 200 years. The sea air will do him good. Salus populi suprema lex esto.

Scott Deshefy is a biologist and two-time Green Party congressional candidate.

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No Nation can be a Personality Cult and Function as a Republic as Well - CT Examiner

That might sound like a stylistic critique. After all, Trumps presidency was also marked by a crude ultra-populist politics, as seen in such features as his atavistic America First foreign policy, his determination to halt illegal immigration, including through morally and legally dubious methods, and the surge in overt expressions of racism, like the 2017 Charlottesville rally. But those Trumpian developments are actually connected to the presidents assault on Americas rules and norms. Under a healthy political order, demotic feelings that are ugly, undignified, cruel and violent are kept under control by a whole pyramid of habits, institutions and models of behavior. In both style and substance, Trump took a sledgehammer to that pyramidand survived with a stronger base of support than anyone predicted. His flouting of the laws, institutions and precedents that had made the United States (for the most part, at least) an exemplar of democracy in the eyes of its citizens and abroad was the ground from which so much else about the Trump presidency springs. It will be taking its toll on our politics for some time to come.

Consider: The petty public insults thrown at world leaders, judges and his own Cabinet members. The brazen comfort with nepotism and self-dealing. The casual mendacity. The imperious browbeating of journalists. The shameless solicitation of foreign actors to meddle in U.S. elections. The refusal to concede the 2020 presidential race long after his defeat was apparent. And his role in the event that right now overshadows almost everything else about his tenure in office: his instigation of the seditious riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Trumps signature move through all of this has been the snubbing of his nose at the canons that others would have him follow. Even his physicality expresses his hostility toward basic civility: shoving aside the Montenegrin prime minister at a 2017 NATO meeting, stalking Hillary Clinton in the 2016 debates (and madly interrupting Joe Biden in the 2020 contests), storming out of an unfinished 60 Minutes interview because he didnt like the questions.

Trumps insistence on breaking rules when he wishes clearly has roots in his narcissistic personality. Impulsive like a small child, he has always needed to win every standoff, to convince himself he is in the right. When facts intrude or constraints thwart him, he shouts, pouts and insists hes correct. Feeding Trumps penchant for cutting his own path, too, is the businessmans sense with which he was raised that rules are for suckers. But Trumps readiness to trample on the established ways of doing things, no matter how hardwired in his psychology, was more than a personality tic. It became a political program.

On the left, there has been, an intermittent counter-strain of criticism that rebukes Trumps high-minded detractors for fetishizing norms. After all, doesnt society progress by jettisoning old ways of doing things? Arent norm-revering liberals pining for an old status quo (which gave rise to Trump in the first place)? And havent many of the objections to Trumps breaks from customhis comments about Frederick Douglass despite not knowing who he was; his taste for well-done steaks slathered in ketchupsimply reflected the snobbery of liberal arbiters toward a man who, with much of America, holds different values? Isnt the lionization of norms at bottom an elitist critique of manners?

Trumps defendersor lets call them the critics of his criticsmake some valid points. Fretting about presidential vulgarity can certainly lapse into a frivolous insistence on politesse. But theres also more to it than that. As sociologists have long recognized, manners have more than cosmetic importance. They shape peoples sense of right and wrong; they assimilate heterogeneous citizens into a harmonious society. Manners can be barriers to change and require regular revision. But the wholesale demolition of long-held expectations of behaviorespecially by the very person whom we look to to embody our national values and aspirationsthreatens to tear or shred the democratic fabric. Vulgarity, from the Latin word vulgus, meaning the masses, has always been a tool of the demagogue.

To understand how rule-breaking came to define not just the style but the substance of Trumps presidency, we need to go back and look at all the wayssome still vivid, some already forgotten in the welter of chaosthat Trump broke the machinery he was entrusted to run.

***

At 4:30 in the morning on December 17, 2016, Trump, recently elected president, was doing what he often does in the wee hours: Attacking other people on Twitter. He was angry that China had seized an American dronean act that he called, with his flair for misspelling, unpresidented. (Trumps blithe neglect of spelling, punctuation and capitalization constituted yet another way in which he defied the usual practices.) But if this malapropism highlighted Trumps ignorance of Standard Written English, it also combined, with inadvertent brilliance, two qualities that people had already come to associate with him. It showed his contempt for the accrued wisdom of the past, as enshrined in established practices and the ways in which a political culture operates. And it exhibited a disregard for what we call presidential behaviorthe belief that our head of state comport himself with maturity, dignity and statesmanship. Unpresidential + unprecedented = unpresidented.

Of the many ways in which Trump has injured the body politic, something like the fusion of these two qualities is what sets him apart. Trumps heedlessness of tradition and custom, mixed with his disrespect for the higher callings of his office, disturbed Republicans in Congress (even as they loyally carried his water) almost as much as it did the Democratic opposition. It transcended Trumps right-wing politics; it may transcend politics altogether. It speaks to human qualities of decency and fair play.

On another view, however, Trumps disdain for tradition and precedent is very much related to his politics. If Trumps barstool norm-busting has formed the core of his attackers critiques of his governance, it has also fueled his admirers unflagging fealty. Despite the choruses of alarm triggered by each of Trumps outlandish behaviors these last four yearsmost recently his instruction to a mob of supporters gathered before the White House to march on the Capitol and stop the stealit has been obvious since the launch of his 2016 presidential bid that he would brook no effort to box him into the confines of standard political conduct. During his first, improbable campaign, prognosticators foretold doom each time Trump contravened the ground rules of politics: assailing John McCains prisoner-of-war status, mocking a reporters disability, crowing about his sexual assaults against women, lashing out at the Pope. But each time they underestimated the publics toleranceeven outright supportfor Trumps boorish iconoclasm. Nor did his utter lack of experience in government or the military (also new among our presidents) bother his supporters. Although it deprived him of opportunities to develop a more politic sensibility, it also preserved his freewheeling, spontaneous impudencea valuable token of his status as the ultimate outsider.

Though Trumps unorthodox background, language and style fueled his rise, his iconoclasm went beyond those elements. Over time, its become fashionable to conflate Trumps policies with the ideology of the Republican Party or the conservative movement as a whole. But to categorize Trump as the culmination of a half-century of Richard Nixon-through-George W. Bush conservative populism is a mistake. When Trump first entered the presidential race in 2015, the entire Republican establishment, including politicians like Mitch McConnell, donors like Sheldon Adelson, and even Fox News, schemed to stop him. On ideological and policy grounds, a murderers row of conservative journalists and intellectuals stood arrayed against him, laying out their substantive differences in a special issue of National Review. On as many as a dozen high-profile policy issues, Trump broke sharply with the GOP establishment: the Iraq War, free trade, Russia and Ukraine, Social Security, the use of eminent domain to appropriate land, transgender bathroom accessibility, aid to Planned Parenthood, financial regulation and many others. And while theres no telling whether Trump would have won the nomination in 2016 had not the field been divided 16 ways, it turned out that GOP voters were yearning for someone who promised radical change from their partys post-Ronald Reagan message. Trumps populist sneering at the way things had been done was precisely what allowed his hostile takeover of the Grand Old Party to succeed. And he delivered his heretical message in his trademark unconventional style: shouting down rivals in the Republican debates; foregoing primary-night victory speeches for hour-long media-hogging telethons; celebrating crowd violence at his rallies; pushing wild conspiracy theories about his rivals that led his followers to chant, Lock her up!all the better to underscore the change he meant to deliver.

By 2016, three developments in particular had weaned Republican voters from their long-held dogmas and primed them for Trumps demagogic appeals. The disaster of the Iraq War occasioned skepticism about the ready resort to military force abroad that had marked both Bush administrations. The catastrophic financial crash of 2008 birthed a Tea Party insurgency, hostile to globalization and Wall Street, that proved to be a forerunner of Trumpism. And the changing demographic complexion of the countryepitomized by the election of Barack Obama as presidentawakened a dormant reactionary and racist impulse. Suddenly, policy positions associated with the discredited paleoconservative or Pat Buchanan wing of the Republican Party enjoyed a new life: protectionism, isolationism, hardline immigration restriction, neo-Confederate stylings. Even white supremacists and right-wing anti-Semites felt emboldened to venture out of the shadows where they had skulked quietly for decades.

It wasnt just the Republican political establishment, moreover, whom Trump voters saw themselves rebelling against. The national news media, since Nixon an object of right-wing ire, came in for especially harsh denunciations by Trump. But where Nixon would fulminate against journalists mainly in private, Trump had no compunctions about doing so in public, rhetorically going beyond where even Hall of Fame press-haters like Nixon had gone. From early in his 2016 campaign, Trump constantly (and publicly) insulted individual journalists and media institutions, sweepingly and baselessly labeled their reporting lies or fake news, and even fomented violence against the press at his mob-like rallies. He took aim, too, at other cultural elites, whether in entertainment (gratuitous tweets about Meryl Streep) or academia (his efforts, as president, to turn Princeton Universitys confessed past racism against it), encouraging his followers to see themselves as aggrieved victims whose culture was being hijacked by the political correctness commissars. In both 2016 and 2020, reporters who interviewed Trump voters found many of them citing Trumps lack of political correctnesshis refusal to accede to those who would make certain words, phrases or attitudes unutterableas their main reason for backing him. This, too, was a variant of the Trumpian iconoclasm: a headstrong refusal to acquiesce in new assumptions by which everyone was supposed to abide.

***

President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, March 12, 2020, in Washington. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo

With a presidential style forged not in politics but in three decades of relentlessly courting celebrity attention, Trump seemed to grasp intuitively the value of the performance and the gesture. When he called Senator Elizabeth Warren Pocahontasan egregiously racist insult that its impossible to imagine any other president hurling at a senatorhe concisely communicated that, despite liberals ostensible concern for minority groups, they might really be ready to exploit such people when it served them. When he said that police shouldnt be too nice to suspects (say by protecting their heads when they were placed in a squad car), he signaled that, unlike other politicians, he was not going to pay lip service to decency when law and order was concerned.

Gestures and rhetoric, in other words, are not merely superficial. Beneath Trumps violations of taboos lay fundamental tenets of his worldview and governing style. The first of those tenets was the conviction that commonsense and popular wisdom were often superior to expert opinion, even on technical matters. This attitude had been germinating in right-wing circles for years; George W. Bushs presidency endured multiple scandalsin its policies on climate change, contraception and teaching creationism, among othersin which political appointees placed ideology over science to harmful public effect. But Trump made the populist Bush look like Bill Nye, the Science Guy. His looking directly at the sun during an eclipse was more than bad form; it was a statement that he knew better than medical experts. Doctoring a hurricane map with a Sharpie to suggest the storm would hit Alabama was not simply an example of immature, unpresidential conduct; it asserted, facts be damned, that he was right and the meteorologists were wrong.

The contempt for expertise made a hash of his foreign policy, too. Trumps decision in late 2018 to acquiesce to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and pull U.S. troops out of Syria led both Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and Brett McGurk, the special envoy dealing with ISIS, to resign. Months later, prompted by a phone call with Erdogan, Trump agreed to forfeit American protection of the beleaguered Kurds altogether. Foreign policy conducted in this way betrays and frustrates allies, emboldens enemies and weakens American influence abroad.

And of course, as many have noted, this vaunting of common wisdom over expertise reached its horrible, tragic conclusion in Trumps handling of the coronavirus pandemic. His knowingly false claims and poor example-settingdirectly contradicting his own medical experts, hosting a super-spreader event on the White House lawnsurely led the United States to suffer a higher death toll than it otherwise would have.

Second, Trumps pleasure in defying expectations also validated the values of his right-wing supporters who feel stifled by the moralistic messages they perceive to be emanating from the entertainment industry, the news media, academia and other bastions of the liberal culture. The rage for shaming, punishing and firing people for politically incorrect slipups or insufficiently woke opinions found its scourge in the bluster of a self-styled bermensch whose pre-presidential tagline was Youre fired! Trumps own knee-jerk political incorrectness gave many Americans a gratifying feeling of thumbing their noses at all that. His insistence on a July Fourth military parade in peacetime, for examplethough at variance with the long-held American principle of a strict military-civilian dividegave his voters a chance to both flaunt their nationalism and own the libs. Many of Trumps remarks, of course, went far beyond jingoistic posturing or rebukes to the excesses of woke culture. Whether labeling Haiti and African nations shithole countries or routinely calling African American reporters and politicians stupid, his denigration of Black people, along with other most minorities, fed the cultures ugliest sentiments and gave succor to the merchants of hate.

Third, Trumps incorrigibility reflected an impatience with and rejection of the pace and negotiations of democracy. In a large and ideologically diverse country such as ours, making policy takes time and often results in half-measures. Democracy also requires a good dose of hypocrisy and ambiguity, which contributes to its perceived phoniness. Politicians need freedom to deviate from their public positions when behind closed doors, in order to strike needed compromises. They also need to speak in ways that are not so specific that they will shatter the consensus theyre trying to forge. Proclaiming I alone can fix it, Trump has fancied himself the human whirlwind who can explode the gridlock, strip away the posturing and deliver results.

This last form of rule-breakingnothing less than a severing of the sinews of democracys musculaturehas taken an especially dire toll. When Trump declared a fake emergency so he could shift more funds toward building his wall on the Mexican border, in explicit contradiction of Congresss stated intentions, he chipped away at the checks and balances on which our system rests. In attacking judges and justices or speaking about them as his personal handmaids, he cast the judiciarys independence into doubt. Two of the biggest scandals of his presidencyhis welcoming of election interference from Russia in the 2016 race and his solicitation of Ukrainian involvement in the 2020 raceboth undermined the integrity of the foundation of democracy: free and fair elections. So, too, has his most recent, greatest norm violation: his desperate if doomed effort to reverse Joe Bidens victory at the polls. Early on, stunts like flying Michigan lawmakers to the White House to try to get them to interfere with their states vote certification, seemed horrifying; but in contrast to having his legions storm of the Capitol to disrupt the constitutional process of vote counting, those early, unsuccessful meddling efforts appeared almost harmless. In fact, the final two weeks of Trumps termthe insurrection, followed by Congress impeaching the president a second timeerased any lingering doubt that his was an unprecedented presidency.

Trumps contempt for standard presidential behavior has also damaged American democracy by reducing the transparency that the public expects in the conduct of government business. In discontinuing the news conferences by either the president or his press secretarya century-long staple of White House-media relationsTrump shrank access to information by reporters, and, by extension, the public. His previously unheard-of policy of meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin without any staff or note-takersand in one case, when a note-taker was present, seizing the records afterwardleft not just the public but his own aides in the dark about what he said to Americas most resolute nemesis. And Trumps spurning of a more recent but still important conventiondisclosing ones tax returnshas worsened the miasma of financial corruption that has long swirled about him.

A final, related category of Trumpian transgression lies in his disrespect for the professionalism of civil servants and, notwithstanding their affiliation with the executive branch, for their independence from his personal agendas.

If Trumps motives for disregarding the experts in some casesforeign policy, the pandemicreflected simply his stubborn willfulness, in other cases it arose from a corrupt instinct for self-preservation, compromising the very integrity of our justice system. In the 2016 campaign, when chants of lock her up reverberated through the arenas where he delighted his fans with taunts at Hillary Clinton, it became evident that he held no respect for the line between official justice and personal vengeance. One of the most commonly recurring fears throughout his presidency is that he would abuse the power of his office to protect himself from the law. And he did so repeatedly, firing FBI director James Comey, threatening to fire special prosecutor Robert Mueller and taking revenge on FBI officials who investigated him, while delivering pardons and commutations to pretty everyone ensnared in Muellers dragnet. Other pardons, cockily tossed like rolls of paper towels to friendly Republican congressmen Chris Collins and Duncan Hunter, reaffirmed his willingness to erase the time-honored distinction between justice and personal reward. And the flip side of misusing the pardon power was debasing the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a special honor hitherto reserved for men and women of extraordinary valor and distinction; Trump doled them out to Rush Limbaugh and, more appallingly still, congressional abettors Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan.

***

To people in New York or Washington or Americas comfortable bubbles of credentialed achievement, or to anyone who has thrived by diligently following the rules, it seems nearly impossible to imagine how his presidency survived all this deliberate recklessness. To review these four years of lawlessness and recklessnessand we havent even gotten to the rape allegations or hush money paid to porn stars, both of which dwarfed all other presidential sex scandals in severityis to wonder anew how Trump survived four years, let alone came close to earning another four.

One answer, often forgotten, is that Trumps iconoclasm was fully on display from the day he declared his presidential candidacy in 2015. If you voted for him in 2016, you probably knew what you were getting. You therefore were unlikely to be appalled by the shithole countries remark, or the 4 a.m. tweeting, or the porn star scandals, or the Ukraine debacle, or any of the rest of it. Either you found a way to rationalize all that stuff away, or you simply cared more about tax cuts, getting right-wing judges appointed, deregulation or other parts of the conservative agenda to which Trump remained true.

But much more importantly, for many Americansespecially in Trumps basethis rule-breaking was the whole point. Trump famously said in 2016 that his admirers would stick with him if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, and its true that his patina of scandal-repellent Teflon would make even Ronald Reagan envious. Certainly, the polarized partisanship of Washington today explains the unwillingness of so many of his fellow Republicans to cross their own voters and break with Trump; had he come to power in 1974, he probably would have been sent packing as Nixon was. But beneath it all was, for many, a true loyalty to the man, an admiration of his style, and, ultimately, a good deal of contempt for civility and decency, transparency and expertise, constitutionality and democracy. Trump may now be headed for Mar-a-Lagono small thingbut that contempt remains. Nearly two-thirds of Republican voters, even after January 6, say Trump acted responsibly after losing the election to Biden.

The scariest moment of the assault on Capitol may have been not the bludgeoning of a police officer with a fire extinguisher, or a security agents bullet killing an insurrectionist, or any other act of wretched violence. It may have come after the riot was put down, when more than a hundred Republican congressmen and senators returned to the building and decided there was nothing untoward with continuing the mischief that Trump had earlier begun. Some ranted and raved as if they were appearing on Alex Joness Infowars. To persist in demanding that their harrowed colleagues and a dumbstruck nation indulge their delusions and lies, even after all that had just happened, was a monstrous affront not just to democracy and the Constitution, but to simple human decency. Trump, it was clear, was finished. But these scoundrels, who had honed their politics under his wayward rule, werent going anywhere.

More than most departing presidents, Trump faces an uncertain future. One way lies an acceleration of his social ostracism in the wake of the Capitol riot, and perhaps prosecution on multiple fronts. The other way lies a political comebackan outcome that strikes many as unlikely or preposterous, but perhaps no more than his winning the White House seemed in 2015. What may determine his fate will not be just the strength of the movement he nurtured but also the remaining strength of the democratic norms and rules to which he sought to lay waste. Many of those norms, once broken, arent so easy to rebuild; whether Trump continues as a potent force or recedes as a bundle of bad memories, American politics is likely going to look very different in his wake.

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What Will Trumps Presidency Mean to History? - POLITICO

By Ben Nichols, former Senior Media Relations Manager for WADAIt was during my morning commute to Montreals Stock Exchange Tower on the second day of my WADA tenure in June 2013 when I first truly heard of Dick Pounds name, that is if you ignore the reams of anti-doping-crash-course-reading Id scanned in the months leading up to my new job heading Media Relations for the global regulator in what was a post Lance-Armstrong-mea-culpa-to-Oprah-Winfrey, pre-Russian-doping-scandal era.It was standing room only on the Number 80 bus that oppressively humid Thursday morning, and with the impressively dominant Mont Royal to the right of me, the hipster Franco-Anglo Le Plateau neighborhood to the left, and the mini Manhattan Montreal downtown ahead of me, I felt a finger jab me in the left arm. As I glanced over my left shoulder, and before I could summon the words to speak, this assertive fellow commuter - who had been peering at my commuter reading which adorned the unmistakable WADA logo - said two abrupt words to me: Dick Pound he said, firmly, swiftly followed by two more: good man, he added. And yet, before I had the chance to engage in conversation, and put two and two together, this Quebecer was darting for the opening bus doors, exiting stage left to get on with his Montreal day. And it is poignant that this brief encounter with a local Montrealer and signed-up-for-life member of the Dick Pound fan club was to stay with me for so many years and, comical even, that following this initial in hindsight humorous encounter on a Montreal bus, I was to come to work closely with Dick on much more serious matters just a couple of years later when running media relations for the eponymous Pound Report into systematic doping in Russian athletics; trips to world-watched Press Conferences, landmark media interviews and all.

Now, Im sure Dick himself would be the first to admit that his name is not one that is easily forgotten. Thats something that stuck with me from the moment of that Number 80 bus finger jab to my conversations with Montrealers over the four years I spent in the Canadian city to the international reputation that Dick commanded on the anti-doping stage. In Montreal, aside from his tumultuous, and much needed, tenure as Founding President of the World Anti-Doping Agency, however, he was widely known as Chancellor of McGill University during the same decade. Though long-finished as President of WADA during my own tenure, I had the privilege of working for Dick during what was the seminal moment for how anti-doping is known today: the start of the Russian doping crisis, AKA The Pound Report. This period working for Dick involved two red-eye-trans-Atlantic trips to Europe - the first Press Conference at a central Geneva Hotel for Part One in which Dick, Gunter Younger and Richard McLaren unveiled their devastating findings to the worlds media, and the head-scratching location that was a roadside hotel in no mans land somewhere equidistant between Munich and Munich International Airport for Part Two of the damning findings in state-sponsored doping in Russian athletics.

There were not only these two trips to Europe in which I supported Dicks media commitments for his Independent Commissions findings, there were the numerous WADA Board Meetings, from Colorado Springs to Glasgow, and from Montreal to Johannesburg, at which Dicks honest appraisal of the state of anti-doping - addressing the elephant in the room that so many others were thinking but not saying - would be heard, and recorded by the far-travelled journalists. And it is this, frank, honest, candid personality of Dicks that I gauged from my brief four-year foray during his long and distinguished career that stands head and shoulders above other attributes.

His staring down of the political correctness agenda and, quite frankly, his no nonsense, get-on-and-call-a-spade-a-spade ability to say what most people are thinking when it comes to anti-doping; not least in recent years on the IOCs reluctance to side with athlete and public opinion and failure to ban Russia at Rio 2016 following the worst doping scandal in history.

Indeed, it is ironic, that as Dick officially calls time on his decades long anti-doping career - though there will be no riding off into the clean sport sunset yet, of that Im sure - political correctness is starting to go out of fashion, at least in western societies such as the UK. As Dick calls time on his anti-doping career, the tide is, in the UK at least, turning against the illiberal liberalism with a cultural war on wokeism gaining traction after years of Orwellian-like thoughtcrime imposed on anyone that may cross its path and accidentally, or purportedly, offend someone.

At the start of 2021, it is clear that in many western societies, the penny is starting to drop that after a couple of decades of one way traffic, the right not to be offended is indeed not a right at all; at least not if free speech is held of higher importance. And if there is a legacy indeed, aside from the confrontational and often transformational clean sport crusading work that Dick pioneered, it is perhaps that because we have the likes of Dick Pound and others in society who stand up for, cherish and promote free speech, that true free speech exists at all today. And for that, anti-doping in sport should be thankful.

Homepage photo: ATR

By Ben Nichols, former Senior Media Relations Manager for WADAFor general comments or questions,click here.

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OpEd - Taking a Pounding: A Stellar Clean Sport Careerist Who Said What People Thought - Around the Rings

CLEVELAND, Ohio Russia never meddled. Coronavirus is a hoax. The sound from windmills causes cancer. The election was stolen.

All of the above are lies uttered by Republican President Donald Trump. All of them provably so. Yet most people in the United States know somebody maybe a friend or acquaintance who believes the narrative Trump pushed over the past five years.

At one point or another, the question of how people buy into these lies so easily may have come up. After all, the evidence is readily available and far from secret. So how did Trump construct this alternate reality thats drawn millions of Americans into its orbit?

A new study titled The Art of the Spiel: Analyzing Donald Trumps Tweets As Gonzo Storytelling aims to explain, at least in part, how that alternate reality was crafted using social media during the time leading up to Trumps election. The study, which has been accepted for publication in Symbolic Interaction, a peer-reviewed journal, was co-authored by Baldwin Wallace University sociology and criminal justice professor Brian Monahan and R.J. Maratea, visiting professor of sociology, criminal justice and criminology at George Washington University.

The study focused on Trumps use of Twitter and how it was used to create a reality that didnt rely on empirical evidence. But it went beyond that, looking at how Trump used the platform as a storyteller to launch his rise to the highest office in the land.

The study analyzed all of Trumps tweets available on the Trump Twitter Archive a database of Trumps tweets from June 16, 2015, the day he announced his candidacy, to July 22, 2016, the day after he secured the nomination at the Republican National Convention. They only studied tweets that included commentary from Trump, filtering out those that were only inactive weblinks or retweets from a news source or follower.

The final sample size was 3,876 of Trumps tweets.

The numbers alone showed just how much Trump relied on Twitter for communication, with about 276 tweets per month. The most active 10% of users on Twitter, which account for 80% of the total content, had a median of 138 tweets per month.

Monahan and Maratea posit that Trump whether intentionally or not used gonzo storytelling to this end. Gonzo is a type of first-person storytelling, most commonly associated with Hunter S. Thompson, that makes the storyteller a part of the story with no claims or goals of objectivity.

Monahan said they wanted to look at Trumps preferred communication method Twitter with more complexity instead of simply viewing them as individual tweets.

Like so many, we saw how Twitter became such a prominent part of his voice, Monahan said. When you look back, this is a political novice with no experience in politics, no agenda you can draw from to see where things have been to get a glean for where theyre going. Twitter really took an outsized role. As we were watching, we started to notice, Maybe theres more than just random rants or outrage. A lot of people were focusing on the all-caps or the seemingly disconnected elements of it.

Monahan and Maratea used a method called ethnographic content analysis to look for patterns and meanings not only in the text of the tweets, but in how the audience might interpret them.

When youre talking about patterns and meanings, theres what was intended to be said and what it might mean at large, Monahan said.

The tweets were then separated into rhetorical frameworks outlining how Trump created his false reality that propelled him to political success and amassed supporters who take his word as dogma.

Our analysis of thousands of Trumps tweets indicates that much of Trumps communications are in service of a story he is crafting that is primarily about himself, and it is littered with grievances (many of which share broad themes with the grievances of his supporters), self-praise, and an unrelenting litany of constructed threats and dangers, Monahan and Maratea wrote in the study. With this, we suggest that the prominence of his adherents deep stories in his self-serving mediated storytelling serves as fodder for the larger spiel that he is unfurling, one that depicts a world needlessly imperiled by all sorts of nefarious others whose ill intent, incompetence, and intractable weaknesses can no longer go unchallenged. In this constructed world, Trump is self-appointed as a savior figure, the only one with the temerity to call attention to all that is wrong as well as the fortitude, intellect, and skill to put things right.

In Trumps storytelling approach, he is not telling his story, but that of his supporters. This despite having little in common with them as a wealthy New York real estate developer and television personality.

Threats

This April 26, 2017, file photo shows the Twitter app on a mobile phone in Philadelphia. Twitter was consistently Republican President Donald Trump's preferred platform during both the 2016 campaign and his four years in office. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)AP

Trumps tweets were littered with exaggerated or crafted threats that stretch back to the opening days of his campaign. Immigration, terrorism and crime were among the most frequent threats cited by Trump, but could also include things as simple as polling procedures or political correctness.

You construct a threat and you identify some other that is responsible for it, Monahan said. I think a point to make with that is no, what we would call, empirical evidence supports any of these threats.

To build up these threats, Trump latched on to anecdotal evidence as proof. He opined that drug cartel leader Joaquin El Chapo Guzmans escape from a Mexican prison or the death of Kate Steinle, who was accidentally shot by an undocumented migrant that Trump billed as a murder, was proof of the dangers of Mexican immigration.

The story builds on falsehoods and exaggerations, Monahan said. It becomes foundational to the more exaggerated statement and the policies and positions can flow from it.

Perceived failings

After building the threat, Trump then presented the perceived failings of those in charge as further evidence his followers should place trust in him.

When Trump tweeted repeatedly about the death of Kate Steinle, he was not just crafting a fear-laden tale of the imminent threats posed by illegal immigration, he was also assigning culpability to the Obama Administration and other political opponents for failing to protect the border, being weak on crime, and generally being all talk and no action, Monahan and Maratea said in the study. By routinely interlocking danger claims with notions of endemic political weakness, Trump is able to rhetorically bind cited dangers and the institution of politics as core parts of the problems that need to be solved, thus creating a context in which the storytellers own proffered solutions can be positioned as necessary moral imperatives, to be enacted without equivocation.

Substitute approaches

Monahan and Maratea said the threats, once accepted, allowed his supporters to accept Trumps proposed punitive measures as the only way to counteract the threat.

Monahan and Maratea noted that the solutions Trump provided were often very simplistic building a wall along the border, for instance despite the inherent root problems being very complex.

This may be in part a function of the limited character count inherent to Twitter communications, but surely such evidence could be provided through links to relevant research findings, government reports, or policy papers, they said in the study. More than anything, the absence of supportive data in the tweets underscores just how superfluous empirical evidence is within the scaffolding of gonzo storytelling.

Self-adulation

In this Thursday, June 18, 2020 file photo, President Donald Trump looks at his phone during a roundtable with governors on the reopening of America's small businesses, in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington. Though stripped of his Twitter account for inciting rebellion, President Donald Trump does have alternative options of much smaller reach. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)AP

Monahan and Maratea said the policy proposals in Trumps tweets were less about the policies themselves and more about inserting himself into the supposed solution.

The substitute approaches advocated by Trump tend to place him in the foreground, with ideas lauded not because they have support in empirical evidence or policymaking practices, but because they are his ideas and rely on his self-proclaimed singular skills and toughness, they said in the study. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Trumps tweets feature a patterned collection of self-praising talk, which we coded as self-adulation.

Trump is no stranger to self-adulation, but Monahan and Maratea noted that the tweets that fit the self-adulation framework were less about the I alone can fix it narrative he pushed and more about self-congratulatory statements, such as describing himself as the healthiest candidate ever, touting his ability to make deals or even bragging about his ability on the golf course.

These positioned Trump as an authority on all matters, whether he had any expertise in the field or not, lending credibility to his adherents.

As we see it, tweets reflecting the self-adulation frame are more focused on building up the storyteller than the story, they said in the study. In other words, they are all about self-praise.

Popular appeal

Without any evidence to rely on for the threats or his proposed solutions, Trump relied on amplifying praise he received from others. This included popular figures in politics, entertainment and the media the study notes tweets about Fox News personalities Piers Morgan and Chris Wallace as examples and even traditional methods such as polling, lending legitimacy to Trumps crafted narrative, making it easier for others to believe that it was, in fact, the truth, Monahan and Maratea said.

The importance of so frequently injecting positive punditry into his Twitter narrative may lie in the fact that such testimonials provide external reinforcement for the very things he is also routinely promoting via self-praise, they said in the study. Moreover, as the media coverage of Trump grew more negative during the campaign, the curated collection of public affirmation from well-known others helped to bolster the idea that Trump was leading a movement with an ever-growing groundswell of support.

Delegitimization

Trumps Twitter and often outlandish claims were a significant focus of criticism and scorn, lending itself to the final framework identified by Monahan and Maratea: delegitimization.

Delegitimization, the sixth and final frame in this analysis, adopts a different, more indirect, means of promoting the viability of both the narrative and its author, they said in the study. Delegitimization is a discounting tactic intended to invalidate critical viewpoints by calling into question the legitimacy of those who author or spread such viewpoints.

Trump used this framework in multiple ways. The tweets Monahan and Maratea studied actually came before the widespread use of fake news but attacking critical media stories was common. Anyone who attacked Trump was labeled dumb, dopey or any other epithet while others, like his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, were bestowed with monikers like Crooked Hillary.

But Monahan and Maratea said it didnt stop at simply his political opponents. After Trump called Mexican immigrants druggies, drug dealers, rapists and killers, Macys pulled all Trump brand merchandise from their stores.

Trump targeted the retailer in his tweets for what he perceived as their own misgivings. The act became reliant on whataboutisms and condemning the condemners, essentially distracting from his own controversies by saying his critics were no better. This helped solidify Trumps status as a reliable narrator to his followers.

Once again, we can see the narratives core frames interwoven in support of one another in Trumps tweets, Monahan and Maratea said in the study. For instance, the very fact that Trump is so willing to violate longstanding norms of political discourse with the use of derogatory nicknames and personal insults accentuates his outsider status.

How an alternate reality becomes real

In this Jan. 6, 2021, file photo, a Trump supporter participates in a rally in Washington. Online supporters of Trump are scattering to smaller social media platforms, fleeing what they say is unfair treatment by Facebook, Twitter and other big tech firms looking to squelch misinformation and threats of violence. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez, File)AP

Trump did not operate in a vacuum, and his tweets alone likely werent enough to solidify his elevation from storyteller to arbiter of the truth as he and his followers saw fit.

The news media reported relentlessly on Trumps 2016 campaign, down to almost every minute detail. Being featured in mainstream media sources at all helped legitimize Trumps story, especially when some stories focused on breaking news alerts repeating what Trump said instead of examining what he said more critically.

The cycle of Trump tweeting and the press reporting made the claims real enough for some to believe Trumps alternate reality, even when provided with evidence to the contrary, Maratea said.

Whether you call it cognitive dissonance or whatever, the more coverage he got, the more ardent his support became amongst the true believers, which we now see there are a lot of, he said. When an act was pointed out, it just became more evidence that the gonzo leader was being attacked.

The future of gonzo politics

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, checks his phone as he walks to the Senate chamber prior to the start of the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump at the U.S. Capitol, Thursday, Jan. 23, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)AP

While Monahan and Marateas study did not cover any of Trumps recent tweets, they both felt it was applicable to the months since Trump lost the election to Democratic former Vice President Joe Biden.

Trump routinely said he had won the election, a demonstrable lie, and that there was widespread voter fraud, another claim for which there is no evidence.

Politics may be built on lies but those lies have to at least construct a reality that people think is truthful, Maratea said. There are at least 74 million people in this country that believe that truth exists in what he says. Theres a real divergence in how people perceive reality.

In interviews, Monahan and Maratea said it was important to note that the study didnt focus on Trump to be solely critical of Trump, or even Republicans as a whole.

The politicians who have really dove head-first into Trumpism seem to be the ones that are attempting to co-opt the Trump way. Right now, that seems to be politicians on the right, Maratea said. But its important to remember this is not something and we didnt mean this article to be a statement on politicians on the right because it can happen on both sides.

Already, Maratea said politicians such as Rep. Jim Jordan, a Champaign County Republican, were attempting to emulate Trumps methods, whether intentionally or not.

When you see politicians doing this on both sides, it doesnt necessarily reflect a belief structure, Maratea said. These things that Jim Jordan is yelling or saying about arent necessarily things he believes. This is about power. How can I get on powerful committees, go from Congress to Senate, become president.

Monahan and Maratea said they didnt know what effect Trumps recent banishment from Twitter would have on his status as a political storyteller, though both agreed his strategy wasnt going away any time soon.

They said they hoped the study would provide a framework for anyone academics, journalists or the public to become more aware of how to spot the markers for politicians using social media to build political worlds not based on facts.

How many years have we been laughing at his statements? Monahan said. By themselves, theyre laughable to many. With this framework, looking at one another, we can see new dynamics in structure and content. One of the questions going forward for social scientists is why is this working?

Link:

New study examines how Donald Trump used Twitter to craft an alternate reality for his followers - cleveland.com

The Issue: Delays in New Yorks distribution of the COVID vaccine that caused doses to be thrown out.

Only in New York would bureaucratic red tape hamper the distribution of the badly needed COVID vaccine (Rx for Vax Disaster, Editorial, Jan. 13).

I work for a city-run agency so Im not surprised. Vaccines going to waste because not enough of the selected group can receive the shot and fining health-care providers for administering vaccines to people out of order on the priority list only illustrate how bureaucracy and unnecessary paperwork slow down badly needed services in the city.

This reminds me of when Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and the government didnt want New Orleans residents to use their private boats to save people from the flood waters until they received approval from FEMA.

Since when has government approval been a requirement to save lives?

James Johnson

Brooklyn

At the beginning of the pandemic, people waited for Gov. Cuomos daily reports to give us updates and reassure us.

Now, despot Cuomo is holding the vaccine hostage if his protocols are not met. He would rather they be discarded than have them put into our arms if its not approved by him.

His idiotic feuding with the mayor is ridiculous. I cant believe Im saying this, but for once Mayor de Blasio has become the voice of reason.

S. Kane

Brooklyn

Doses of life-saving vaccine have been thrown away because they were about to expire, and New Yorks Democratic monolith mandates threatened the providers with dire penalties if any were used outside of the politically correct guidelines.

Grim-Reaper Andys actions resulting in thousands of nursing-home deaths havent even been fully documented, and as more people die because he values political appearance over rational performance, all you gotta vote Democratic idiots should realize you share the bloody hands Andy cant ever clean. Shame on you all.

Richard J. Ceonzo

Highland

The vaccine has been out since December 2020, and there seem to be problems getting the needle into the arms of people who so desperately want our society to be healed of COVID.

Cuomo has complicated the distribution of it so much that it has problems reaching the general public. Lets simplify the process so that we can expedite everyone to get a dose.

One possible solution: Have the centers that test for COVID also have a supply of the vaccine.

For example, here in Co-Op City, theres a place for the testing of the virus that constantly has long lines of those waiting to be tested.

If wed started giving those at this facility the vaccine since last month, we would be further down the road to getting this virus behind us. It sounds like common sense to me.

Tom Tortorella

The Bronx

New York City has lagged way behind in giving vaccines, despite a stockpile of medical equipment.

Critics charge that state rules are too restrictive. In one day, Israel immunized more people than New York City has since Dec. 14, and they have similar populations. Furthermore, New York City vaccinated 6 million against smallpox in one month in 1947.

Cuomos incompetence and stupidity is costing lives every day.

Manny Martin

Manhattan

Is it any surprise that our dynamic duo of Cuomo and de Blasio have failed us again?

Cuomo is more concerned with political correctness than with speed and efficiency, hence his micromanagement and the bottleneck of distribution.

The quicker the distribution, the quicker the herd immunity, the quicker everyone will benefit. Political correctness and the fear of offending someone or a particular group is literally killing us.

Vaccines remain unadministered, doses have to be thrown away for fear of being fined for vaccinating out of turn, and Cuomo only cares about his political career.

What sheer idiocy and foolishness.

Karl Olsen

Watervliet

Read this article:

Letters to the editor Jan. 14, 2021 - New York Post

To the Times:

Political correctness is destroying the Democratic Party. The same vision has been playing in my head over and over again for the last four years.

Michelle Obama, standing at the podium, delivering her speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. "When they go low, we go high!" Never before or since have I heard a respected national Democratic figure describe in one sentence the failing strategy that the Democrats continue to employ year after year, from one election to the next. Their fear of offending anyone, raising their voices, showing some backbone, is in and of itself offensive to this Democrat.They say that the best defense is a good offense. What happens when you have neither?

Donald Trump and his allies can directly attribute their unthinkably remarkable success to an (offensive) offense that the Democrats have had no defense for. Obnoxious, insulting, cruel, ignorant, criminal; these are just few of the many adjectives that can be used to describe Trump's behavior. His pathological lying and lack of integrity, dignity and above all else, empathy, defies any and all logic of the characteristics that one would expect of their President. Yet the Democrats, predictably, remained polite, their dignity and integrity on full display. When will they learn that there is only one way to beat an obnoxious, lying, low-life con man that so skillfully manipulates half of the country into pleading their loyalty to him. And that is to play his game. If you can't beat em, join em.

Daniel Corcoran, Swarthmore

Here is the original post:

Letter to the Editor: Dems have to play hardball to win - The Delaware County Daily Times