Justin Trudeau is right, but why?

Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is being correctly labeled un psychopathe fasciste for his recent comments about the unpecked. (Original video here, in French with English subtitles.)

Yes, we will emerge from this birdemic through pecking. We know people who are still making up their minds, and we will try to convince them, but there are also people who are vehemently opposed to pecking. These are extremists who do not believe in The Science, who are often misogynists, often racists, too; it is a sect, a small group, but who are taking up space, and here we have to make a choice, as a leader, as a country. Do we tolerate these people? Or do we say, let's see, because most people, 80% of Quebecers did the right thing, that is, they got pecked, we want to get back to the things we like doing, and these people are not going to block us now.

Superficially, the part I have bolded seems outrageous -- what do racism and misogyny have to do with personal medical decisions? -- but he is observably correct. People who are skeptical of The Science -- defined as the consensus of all credentialed experts except those who have had their expert cards revoked for not agreeing with that consensus -- have a strong tendency to be equally skeptical of feminism, the sexual revolution, and "anti" racism. That is, to translate into Trudeau's native language of Newspeak, they "are often misogynists, often racists, too." (They are also often black, something that the fascist psychopaths conveniently overlook.) He could have thrown in "climate deniers" for good measure, the fourth of Bruce Charlton's litmus test issues.

In some old post by Scott Alexander, which I can't be bothered to look up at the moment, he discusses this sort of correlation among seemingly unrelated beliefs -- the fact that, for example, knowing a person's position on abortion would make it much easier to correctly guess his position on immigration, gun control, and many other issues -- and sees it as evidence that most people don't really think out each of their opinions but rather mentally "join a club" (such as "conservative" or "liberal") and accept that club's characteristic beliefs wholesale. Is that what's going on with Trudeau's "extremists," whose position on the pecks correlates with other positions which are objectively unrelated? Are they, as he calls them, "a sect"?

No. In fact, the phenomenon noted by Alexander is not always a symmetrical one.

Do you believe there's nothing wrong with celebrating birthdays? Then I can with a considerable degree of confidence guess that you also believe that blood transfusions are morally acceptable and that Jesus was executed on a cross rather than a stake. But why should any such correlation exist? What do modern medical procedures have to do with historical methods of execution? Do these beliefs appear together because they are the articles of faith of some ideological "club" (implied: cult) you have mentally joined? No, quite the opposite. They are all just normal things that people would naturally believe, and the majority of those who believe otherwise do so because they accept the authority of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Association, a.k.a. Jehovah's Witnesses. In this case, your correlated beliefs are not evidence that you belong to any particular sect but rather that you do not belong to one.

Jehovah's Witnesses are a small sect, and the Great and Abominable Church with which Trudeau is aligned is a large one, but the dynamics are the same. "These are infidels who do not believe in Muhammad," Trudeau is effectively saying, and -- quelle coïncidence! -- "many of them also ignore the Quran and fail to fast during Ramadan." 

I do not by these analogies mean to imply that the System is "a religion," which it very obviously is not. It is not even really a coherent ideology. Nevertheless, it is the System -- Their beliefs, not ours -- which creates the artificial correlation among the litmus tests. Why would you swallow the fake birdemic or accept the fake pecks unless you trusted the System? Why would you be a feminist or a sexual revolutionary unless you trusted the System? Why would the topsy-turvy morality of "anti" racism even enter your mind unless you trusted the System? Passing the litmus tests simply indicates that you are a normal, healthy person who rejects the System. And that is why it makes you intolerable to Trudeau and all the other psychopathic apostles of Inclusion.

But why would anyone reject the System? It takes a very strong spiritual motive. And that is why the litmus tests are such a reliable indicator of Christianity.

Don't you know what "ther" means?

Accepting the enemy's assumptions "for the sake of argument" is almost always a bad strategy.

"Liberals are the real racists" implies that "racism" is a coherent concept, and is bad.

"Maskies are the real science deniers" implies that the peer-reviewed "findings" of careerist researchers are the standard of truth.

"It takes way more faith to be an atheist than a Christian" implies that "faith" is something irrational and undesirable.

(On the other side, an atheist saying, "The Bible doesn't say anything about abortion," implies that the Bible is the source of moral standards.)

I know such statements are often an attempt to "meet people where they're at," or to prove something by argumentum a fortiori ("Even if I accept your assumptions, you're still wrong!"), but I think the actual effect of such rhetoric is almost always to further entrench assumptions that ought to be challenged directly.

No, there weren't more excess deaths in 2017 than in 2020.

Perhaps you've seen Samuel H. Preston and Yana C. Vierboom's paper, "Excess mortality in the United States in the 21st century," published this April in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

It was linked on the Junior Ganymede with the comment, "2020 is the deadliest year on record since . . . 2017." Vox Day, referencing the same paper, said, "Got that? Fewer people died in 2020 than in 2017." I more or less trust the JG and VD, but I clicked through to the original paper and read the abstract, which seemed to confirm their summaries:

In 2017, excess deaths and years of life lost in the United States represent a larger annual loss of life than that associated with the [birdemic] in 2020.

There's no excuse for my letting this slip past my BS detector -- I knew it completely contradicted the statistics W. M. Briggs faithfully reports every week -- or for failing to read the whole paper, which turns out to be really short. I'm ashamed to say I just saw it as ammo I could use with friends and family members who trust The Science and accepted it without asking too many questions. In fact, it turns out that the abstract is misleading, and the paper is garbage, publish-or-perish busywork that contributes nothing to human knowledge.

"Excess deaths in the United States" means, in this paper, not deaths in excess of what would be expected in a "normal" year in the United States, but rather the degree to which death rates in the U.S. in a given year exceed those of five selected European countries in the same year. The paper's meaningless and useless "finding" is that the difference between American and European death rates in 2017 (with American rates being higher) was larger than the difference between American and European death rates in 2020.

This has nothing to do with whether more people died in 2017 or in 2020, or with how serious the birdemic was. In fact, it has nothing to do with anything, and it's not entirely clear why anyone thought it worth publishing.

Thanks to my father for reading the whole thing and informing me that it doesn't actually say what it says on the tin.