The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Ignorance of Professor Paul Campos

Posted on | March 24, 2023 | Comments Off on The Ignorance of Professor Paul Campos

Excuse the poor quality of that screencap, but Professor Campos was Skyping into his interview with Bloomberg, and apparently didn’t have a lot of bandwidth. He is a tenured law professor in Colorado, and writes at the left-wing blog Lawyers, Guns & Money, where this week he cranked out a doozy. The headline asks, “Are Drivers Getting Worse Because Americans Are Getting Worse?” When I saw that headline, I kind of half-expected a commentary on declining intelligence — dysgenesis, the end of the “Flynn Effect,” the sort of thing Steve Sailer might write for VDare — but alas, no. Reacting to a news item about a deadly car crash, Campos unleashed this sadly predictable rant:

This is purely impressionistic, but I’ve been struck by what seems — again, no data — to be a marked deterioration in driving habits, especially since the beginning of the pandemic, when traffic enforcement fell to practically nothing for many months. I see people driving 100+ mph on the highway regularly; people running red lights three seconds after they’ve changed; drivers conducting elaborate text conversations on their phones while purportedly navigating their vehicles at the same time; and wildly aggressive driving of all kinds, etc. etc.
I wonder about the extent to which these changes, to extent they’re actually happening, may be a product of a more general sense of a collapse of social mores of various kinds — basically the MAGA let your fascist freak flag fly effect spilling over into lots of areas of social life.
What’s the difference after all between nobody can tell me to wear a mask and nobody can tell me to not drive 30 miles over the speed limit? They’re both symptoms of oppositional defiance disorder raised to the level of ideology, I suppose.

Oh, so Trump is to blame? The bad drivers causing accidents on our nation’s highways are letting their “fascist freak flag fly”? Is that really your argument, Professor Campos?

Because, you see, although I am merely a journalist, and not a tenured law professor, I’m capable of something we call “research,” and am also possessed of a sufficient amount of geographical knowledge to notice the dateline on the news item about the car crash that inspired your rant:

BALTIMORE – Six people died when a car crashed into a work zone Wednesday afternoon on the inner loop of I-695 in Baltimore County.
According to Maryland State Police, around 12:40 p.m., a car drove in between temporary placed jersey walls and struck multiple construction workers before overturning.

Baltimore? MAGA voters with “oppositional defiance disorder” are letting their “fascist freak flag fly” in Baltimore? What part of you’ve got to be fucking kidding me do I need to explain here? But first the facts:

Maryland State Police identified the six contracted highway workers who were killed Wednesday when two cars collided on Interstate 695, causing one vehicle to flip into a construction area.
The construction workers were identified as Rolando Ruiz, 46, of Laurel; Carlos Orlando Villatoro Escobar, 43, of Frederick; Jose Armando Escobar, 52, of Frederick; Mahlon Simmons III, 31, of Union Bridge; Mahlon Simmons II, 52, of Union Bridge and Sybil Lee Dimaggio, 46, of Glen Burnie.
The six highway workers were in a construction zone on I-695, north of the beltway exits onto I-70 and Security Boulevard, at about 12:40 p.m. Wednesday when they were struck by a gray Acura operated by Lisa Adrienne Lea, 54, of Randallstown. Police said she was attempting to change into the leftmost travel lane when she struck a Volkswagen operated by Melachi Brown, 20, of Windsor Mill, causing the Acura to lose control and flip into the work zone.

While the accident is still being investigated, it appears from the video that both Brown (in the far-left lane) and Lee (in the center lane) were speeding. As they approached the work zone, there was a slower vehicle in the center lane which Lee wanted to pass. She attempted to change lanes to her left, but apparently didn’t check her blind spot, so that the left rear bumper of her car hit the front right bumper of Brown’s car — she “self-PITted,” as my brother said when I told him about it.

A simple bit of Google searching will tell you that the population of Randallstown is 80% black and Windsor Mill is part of the Milford Mill community, which is 83% black, and while we don’t have mug shots of these two drivers, they’re probably not Trump voters, IYKWIMAITYD. Joe Biden got 62% of the vote in Baltimore County and 88% of the vote in the city of Baltimore, so if you’re looking for fascist MAGA drivers running amok, you probably need to look elsewhere.



 

 

Category: Education

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