Decent article.
Newsweek first major publisher admitting COVID was major fuck-up of scientific community, doctors, etc. Even sez Trump was right, somewhat.
It's Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID and It Cost Lives | Opinion
https://www.newsweek.com/its-time-scientific-community-admit-we-were-wrong-about-coivd-it-cost-lives-opinion-1776630
Dubai Paid Beyoncé $24M. She Gave Them Her Integrity.
By Tanya Gold
January 28, 2023
(excerpts)
Last week, at the grand opening of Atlantis The Royal, Dubai’s newest luxury hotel, Beyoncé gave her first live performance in five years. This gig featured a 48-person all-female orchestra—how feminist—a Lebanese dance troupe, and her daughter. She was reportedly paid $24 million for the occasion. Her latest album, Renaissance, is, among other things, an homage to black queer culture. She performed no songs from it; how could she in a country where homosexuality is punishable by death? So she sang her back catalog for the equivalent of ten Bugatti Chirons. Oil-rich tyrannies have generous marketing budgets; they’re selling tyranny itself. What Beyoncé does or doesn’t do for money wouldn’t matter but for the trend of celebrity activism, which insinuates that morality travels with a star like her wardrobe. Beyoncé acolytes say that just by arriving in Dubai she made the city gayer, a kind of subtle protest. Perhaps so subtle that even Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid—accused of abducting two of his daughters for noncompliance with his wishes, one from England, and another from a ship as she tried to flee Dubai—wouldn’t notice. Did his enforcers reconsider their stance on gayness as they sang along to “Drunk in Love”? Or are they laughing themselves stupid at the PR coup of persuading an until-now gay ally to perform at the opening of a hotel in a country that hates gays? This collusion between Western celebrities and Middle Eastern despots is enabled by idiotic elements on the left: People who don’t seem to know what fascism, Stalinism, or Nazism is, since they insist upon confusing it with things they don’t much like. They hate their own rotting democracies so much, they cannot accept that other places are worse. Call a democracy tyranny and you won’t recognize tyranny when it hands you a check.
This logic says that, given our own ills, what do we have to teach Saudi Arabia? And if we have nothing to teach Saudi Arabia or Qatar or the UAE, why shouldn’t we go on holiday there and enjoy the luxury that indentured slavery creates? Who are we to judge, we ask, between mimosas and dermabrasion facials.
Tyranny’s defenders—that is, its contracted employees—will say that feasting in authoritarian states brings incremental reform and teaches us to be less racist toward an over-overlooked and vulnerable minority: authoritarian rulers. I think the opposite. It normalizes tyranny, using what we love best to seduce us: leisure.
https://www.thefp.com/p/dubai-paid-beyonce-24m-she-gave-them