Trotskyite Thinking, Trotskyite Facts

It's called fraud

An interesting bit of history, the founding fathers of the Neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Daniel Bell, etc. started as anti-Stalinist Trotskyits.

It's better than being a Stalinist, but that is damning with faint praise.

The thing is, that, and their intellectual descendants, remained firmly in the intellectual tradition of the followers of Trotsky, and one of the core tenets of that intellectual tradition is to redefine the facts to match the desired ideological outcomes.

This has permeated movement conservatism since before the days of Ronald Reagan's apocryphal stories, and the latest example is (of course) Florida, where Governor Ron DeSnatis has changed its reporting to conceal Covid deaths:

As the delta variant spreads through Florida, data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest this could be the most serious and deadly surge in COVID-19 infections since the beginning of the pandemic.

As cases ballooned in August, however, the Florida Department of Health changed the way it reported death data to the CDC, giving the appearance of a pandemic in decline, an analysis of Florida data by the Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald found.

On Monday, Florida death data would have shown an average of 262 daily deaths reported to the CDC over the previous week had the health department used its former reporting system, the Herald analysis showed. Instead, the Monday update from Florida showed just 46 “new deaths” per day over the previous seven days.

The dramatic difference is due to a small change in the fine print. Until three weeks ago, data collected by DOH and published on the CDC website counted deaths by the date they were recorded — a common method for producing daily stats used by most states. On Aug. 10, Florida switched its methodology and, along with just a handful of other states, began to tally new deaths by the date the person died.

If you chart deaths by Florida’s new method, based on date of death, it will generally appear — even during a spike like the present — that deaths are on a recent downslope. That’s because it takes time for deaths to be evaluated and death certificates processed. When those deaths finally are tallied, they are assigned to the actual date of death — creating a spike where there once existed a downslope and moving the downslope forward in time.

Shivani Patel, a social epidemiologist and assistant professor at Emory University called the move “extremely problematic,” especially since it came without warning or explanation during a rise in cases.

Patel said Florida death data now show an “artificial decline” in recent deaths and without an explanation or context, and “it would look like we are doing better than we are.”

………

The Herald also found that during the last two surges the trend lines using date of death showed peaks 25% and 8% higher respectively than the corresponding peaks by report date.

I don't know how a civil society can function when a significant portion of the body politic are so willing and so shameless about their lying.