Tea at Trianon: Meghan’s Covid Claims

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Meghan’s Covid Claims

From The Spectator:

To start with gender-based violence, this claim has been widely made, and may well be true. It would certainly make sense if unemployment and lockdowns, forcing couples to spend more time under the same roof in stressful circumstances, had led to an increase in domestic violence.
There is not a lot of good data on this, however. The best the UN can do is cite data from France showing a 30 per cent increase in domestic violence since lockdown, and increases of 25 per cent, 30 per cent and 33 per cent in calls to domestic violence helplines in Argentina, Cyprus and Singapore respectively.
It isn’t clear where Meghan sourced her claim that women ‘have seen a generation of economic gain wiped out', nor exactly what she meant by it. Did she mean that women are back to where they were in the early 1990s in terms of absolute wealth, or that the gap between male and female wealth is back to where it was then?
The claim that 47 million women 'are expected' to fall into extreme poverty is, on the other hand, easy to trace: it comes from a study prepared for UN Women and the UN Development Programme by the Pardee Center at the University of Denver last September. (Read more.)