David Frum is on a tear.
The President of the United States is up past midnight, not doing any useful work for the nation, but retweeting third-hard accusations that the author of the classic histories of the Soviet Gulag and the Ukrainian famine is soft on communism. pic.twitter.com/io8PKvpUzv
— David Frum (@davidfrum) March 17, 2020
The author in question is Anne Applebaum.
That this president who lavishly praised Kim Jong Un and turned his back on Hong Kong's democracy protesters now positions himself as foe of communism is too ludicrous even to be dishonest. But …
— David Frum (@davidfrum) March 17, 2020
It was not the Chinese Communist Party that crammed thousands of American air travelers into high-exposure holding pens because their son-in-law didn't have the brains to wonder, "Hey what happens after the planes land?"
— David Frum (@davidfrum) March 17, 2020
It was not the Chinese Communist Party that organized press conferences that jammed together a dozen people who all handled the same single microphone – or who irresponsibly urged savers to risk their savings in futile efforts to prop up the stock market to preserve Trump's image
— David Frum (@davidfrum) March 17, 2020
Modern scientists describe viruses by what they do, not by the people who happen first to suffer from them. They do that to focus attention on indicators useful to caregivers and researchers.
— David Frum (@davidfrum) March 17, 2020
That's not "political correctness."
That's "not living in the Middle Ages any more."
Comments
7 responses to “Up past midnight”
I agree with almost all of what David Frum says, but I don’t think it’s correct to say nobody says “Spanish flu” anymore:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
It seemed to have been called that through the whole Wikipedia article without controversy, but if you look at the edit history you can see there have been an explosion of edits of people changing it back and forth in recent days. There’s now a proposal to change the article title and the article is locked.
So rather than “the Spanish flu” being considered an obsolete term indicating we shouldn’t use a location-based name for SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19, it looks more like the controversy over that is retroactively making “Spanish flu” seem offensive.
I agree with Frum that we have proper names for the current virus and sickness, so using obsolete “Wuhan” names is pointless and coming up with stupid “China” names as Trump is doing is offensive.
Also pointless and offensive (to my sensibilities): Calling it the generic “coronavirus”. Ugh. And, yes, I’ve seen this:
https://xkcd.com/2275/
Nice try, Randall, but I’m not buying it.
Hmm. “Spanish flu” feels very unfamiliar to me. It’s called the 1918 flu now, I think. I think if I’d heard or read “the Spanish flu” a few months ago I would have wondered what was meant. I don’t know that that has anything to do with offensiveness; it could be for other reasons.
I think the 1918 flu started in a crowded US army barracks, didn’t it? In Kansas?
Answering self: No, not the flu as a whole, the US part of it.
My husband doesn’t think that we should be calling it ‘the Chinese virus’. He thinks that we should be calling it ‘Trump Disease’.
Or ‘BoJo Disease’ in the UK.
1918 has several possible origin spots. The Kansas barracks is one, a huge Royal Army depot in France, which included a large pig farm, is another.
That is was called ‘Spanish’ is very significant. The major powers at war suppressed reporting on the disease, it could have given the enemy an advantage to know how ill the opposing forces were. Spain was neutral, and the Spanish press was the first to report on the new epidemic. Thus the illusion/impression that Spain was the point of origin.
Definitely agree on this. My brother-in-law is telling my son “Know what you get when you get corona virus? A cold!” My son listens to the medical experts, not his uncle, thankfully. But I’m worried about my elderly father, who does tend to listen to my brother-in-law, who is considered the “scientist in the family”. He has a one-year vo-tech certificate in respiratory therapy, which includes anatomy and physiology, so they listen to him over doctors – and consider him the scientist in the family over the person with a Ph.D. in science who has done original research and published in the field. Yeah.
Oh, and my dad’s other source of information tends to be — Trump.
Up until this conversation, I’d always called it the Spanish Flu (of 1918), and had no idea that terminology was deprecated. It never occurred to me. Thanks. Learn something new every day (well, many days).