A Win for the Good Guys

Silverfiddle Rant!

Its a depressing reality:  Someone makes a sincere comment regarding race, gender or some controversial subject, and the person is dogpiled and cancelled for her irresponsible outburst of WrongSpeak.  Reasonable people who value their jobs and their social standing lapse into repeating approved phrases from the Little Red Book, or more depressingly, self-censor or completely remove themselves from the increasingly unhinged "dialog."

Fortunately, there are good people out there fighting against this neo-Maoist crap, and some of them are winning!

Britian's Royal Academy of Arts featured the works of German-born textile artist Jess de Wahls, until the digital Red Guard dug up an old post of hers...

 "in which de Wahls wrote that “a woman is an adult human female (not an identity or feeling),” and that trans women are “biological males [who] choose to live as a woman, or believe they actually are women.”

The Royal Academy removed her items and fired off an Instagram repudiation of the German ogre. Sometime after that, the Royal Academy pulled a 180:

“We have apologised to Jess de Wahls for the way we have treated her and do so again publicly now,” read the RA communiqué. “We had no right to judge her views … This betrayed our most important core value—the protection of free speech.”

You can read the whole story here:  Quillette - Standing up to the Gender Ideologues

After reading this, it occurs to me the band Mumford and Sons missed a golden opportunity.  If the whole band had stood up for the right of one man to comment on a book, they could have dealt a major blow to the Outrage Tyranny gripping the west.  

What say you?

Safe Spaces?

Silverfiddle Rant!

Where are we most likely to become infected by Coronavirus?  Least likely?

Quillette editor Jonathan Kay put some analytical thought into COVID-19 Super Spreader Events (SSE), and wrote an essay that has now started a project by a group of scientists who took over where he left off.

COVID-19 Superspreader Events in 28 Countries: Critical Patterns and Lessons

The article is an interesting analysis of what types of activities do and do not cause SSEs.  He caveats his work: Although he holds a scientific degree and has hands-on experience with mathematic modeling, he is not an epidemiologist and he is using anecdotal data that is not a proper statistical sample.

Here is the bottom line of his analysis:

When do COVID-19 SSEs happen? Based on the list I’ve assembled, the short answer is: Wherever and whenever people are up in each other’s faces, laughing, shouting, cheering, sobbing, singing, greeting, and praying. You don’t have to be a 19th-century German bacteriologist or MIT expert in mucosalivary ballistics to understand what this tells us about the most likely mode of transmission.

And when COVID-19 SSE's do not happen... 

It’s worth scanning all the myriad forms of common human activity that aren’t represented among these listed SSEs: watching movies in a theater, being on a train or bus, attending theater, opera, or symphony [...] These are activities where people often find themselves surrounded by strangers in densely packed rooms—as with all those above-described SSEs—but, crucially, where attendees also are expected to sit still and talk in hushed tones.

It makes sense to me, although if this bears out, church services and live music concerts are potential hot zones.  What say you?

See Also:

People ‘shed’ high levels of coronavirus early in the infection

London Coronavirus Protests

Fury in Germany