Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, August 2, 2020
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79 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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The Florida headline of the day-
Florida man takes 9-mile turnpike ride on hood of a tractor trailer
@Bill:
Bath salts? PCP?
Can’t say as I blame him for freaking out.
Here’s one town that needs to defund the police (chief).
This is good for a laugh, or 3.
The headline of the day-
Tenant decapitated landlord with sword over rent dispute, police say
Georgia camp outbreak shows rapid virus spread among children
This will also give you some chuckles:
Thread.
I just read an article thoroughly examining the “karen” phenomenon, including the history of the term and how it’s gained steam recently. It is also one of the first sources I’ve seen to discuss the misogynistic component, which has gotten surprisingly little attention and is not benign.
@Sleeping Dog:
That’s mindboggling. What does he have on that town?
Gotta love this: Say cheese.
Dogs are being trained to detect Covid-19.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaJAwi8kSLU
In relation to KingDaddy’s post on stupidity the other day…I’ve seen this damn thing on Facebook at least 15 times the last two days.
“The vaccine that is coming…
As many of you heard Moderna is in stage 3 of their vaccine testing. If all goes well it’ll become federal law to get the vaccine. Here’s something many of you don’t know, guess who the first CEO of Moderna was? A Cornell graduate by the name of Anthony Fauci, who was a roommate with none other than Bill Gates. Are you paying attention? It was at Cornell that Bill Gates designed the RFID (Radio-frequency identification) and patened it under US2006257852. Are you awake yet? Now let’s really go down the rabbit hole. Moderna was a pharmaceutical company that started in Germany under the name IG Farben. IG Farben is infamous for it’s mass production of Zyklon-B, the primary gas used to kill millions during the Holocaust. After Germany fell, IG Farben was dissolved and its assets sold off by a Nazi turned American by the name of, you guessed it, George Soros. Soros rebranded the company as Moderna. And who was the primary stockholder of Moderna until his death? Jeffrey Epstein. His role in Moderna is where he made his fortune and established his connections. Let that sink in.
Wake up people! You are being conditioned and controlled.”
How on Earth are we supposed to get these people back to reality after they’ve been immersed in conspiracy theories for so long?!
What the nose knows (and doesn’t).
@Jax: I coulda sworn Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, and also is 15 years younger than Fauci.
@OzarkHillbilly:
That is what every single piece of biographical information I’ve read about Gates says.
@CSK:
No idea. But he comes across as a first rate a hole. If I were the mayor, I’d make him document his hours to ensure that he’s not running his business on town time.
@CSK: I have to admit that I looked it up. I had thought it was Stanford he dropped out of. Don’t ask me why.
@Sleeping Dog:
I suppose it’s especially shocking to me because I live about eight miles from Methuen, or “Lawrence with trees,” as it is oft described.
@OzarkHillbilly:
The notion that Gates was Fauci’s roommate anywhere is even more bizarre.
@Jax:
You may try some quick facts based on very lazy research I did just now:
Bill gates attended Harvard, where he had no roommates in Cornell.
Moderna was founded in 2010, long after Trump’s pal Epstein made his billions.
RFID is real, but was patented by Charles Walton, not Bill Gates.
Curiously, the patent number cited, which has nothing to do with Bill Gates, Charles Walton, Anthony Fauci, or RFID, is related to the SARS outbreak in 2003. That can be the basis of a much more plausible conspiracy theory.
The whole damn thing is made up, but people just….believe it. Snopes has a fact-check up about it, but these guys posting this crap have been brainwashed to not trust any kind of fact-checking. The fact-checkers are in on it, don’tcha know!!!!
Forget the virus….I don’t know how we recover from this level of stupid!
It Was All a Lie review: Trump as symptom not cause of Republican decline
I’m not much for “political” books but I think I might have to make an exception for this one.
Bill Gates had nothing to do with RFID, the referenced “paten” number has to do with COVID microbiology, Moderna has nothing to do with I. G. Farben. I don’t think there’s a single statement in that post that can stand two minutes on WIKI. Is it maybe a parody site?
@Jax:
One of the most fascinating examples I saw was a meme that’s been going around for years, claiming that FactCheck.org in 2009 “exposed” Snopes as a liberal propaganda site. Accompanying the meme were a couple of photos allegedly showing the Snopes CEO shaking hands with George Soros.
Of course, FactCheck.org had said no such thing–in fact they praised Snopes as a thoroughly researched site and revealed that it was run by an apolitical couple one of whom is Canadian. As for the photos, the man in both seen shaking hands with Soros was not the Snopes CEO or anyone connected with the company–in the first picture it was a former Hungarian PM, in the second a prominent Democratic fundraiser.
So the meme was actually citing a credible fact-checking organization, but claiming it said the opposite of what it actually said, in order to discredit another fact-checking organization.
@Jax: I think this patent was picked as the nucleus of this conspiracy theory because a) it deals with “SARS” in the name and b) it has a ridiculous number of pages to go through not to mention sequences and diagrams and nobody’s going to bother to in fact look up the claims and find out what they actually say. (You can pull it up on pat2pdf.org; make sure you take off the “US” at the front of the publication number and add a “0” after the year.)
….also, I am now very very happy that nucleopeptides aren’t my area of expertise.
@Sleeping Dog: he is running a private security business on town time. The article discusses it.
@Jax:
The holes in that BS conspiracy theory are depressing.
1. Bill Gates never went to Cornell. Had he gone at the same time as Fauci, he would have been 7 years old. I only know that because I know how old Fauci is, and I know Bill Gate is four years older than I am.
2. Bill Gates didn’t invent RFID.
3. Moderna, the company, wasn’t founded until 2010. I know this because I’ve been reading about the company due to their lead in the vaccine race.
4. George Soros was a teenager in 1945, so he had nothing to do with the company IG Farben, which wasn’t “dissolved”. It was seized by the Allies, and it’s assets distributed to various other pharma companies. There are some great books out there on the aftermath of WWII.
5. Epstein was already a billionaire before Moderna was founded in 2010, and he had zero investments in Moderna.
I know that much without looking it up. It’s sad that something so easily debunked, and so obviously false, finds an audience of f**king morons who not only believe it, but pass it on to other idiots.
@gVOR08:
It does sound like a parody, doesn’t it? A lot of these crazed conspiracy “theories” do.
@CSK:
Ha, Lawrence with trees and the Searles Estate.
@Monala:
But to fire him and not payoff the contract you need the documentation. He can be fired only for just cause.
@CSK:
You have to consider the fact that it’s also an outright hoax. Most conspiracy theories arise from people who are more or less sincere in their beliefs, even if there may be hoaxes along the way (such as Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate). This particular one, though, was concocted by someone who was consciously and intentionally distorting facts. So there’s a distinct possibility that it was some kind of cynical prank (something I’ve long suspected about QAnon).
I also wonder about the role that mental illness plays in some of these theories. That “demon sex” doctor sounds to me like she might be actually schizophrenic. I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone else raise that possibility. Her beliefs go beyond being simply deranged, and seem bizarre and nonsensical, and do resemble some of the ramblings I’ve heard from people known to have had schizophrenia (such as John Nash).
Last week when Trump said he’d ban/shut down Tik Tok in the U.S. “as soon as Saturday,” he clearly didn’t mean yesterday, did he? Tik Tok is still accessible in this country, right? So what’s he waiting for?
@CSK: Maybe there are negotiations regarding an apology from Sarah Cooper? 😉 I wouldn’t doubt for a second that it has more to do with how badly she roasts him with her parodies than TikTok being a national security risk.
@Kylopod:
Oh, there’s no doubt in my mind that QAnon is a prank.
If the Gates/Fauci business is a hoax–and it could well be–it’s a very clever one because it has all the spelling and grammatical mistakes the legit (if that’s the word I want) conspiracists tend to make.
As for Stella Immanuel, she could well be schizophrenic, but if she is, she’s remarkably high-functioning. A belief in demons appears to be a component of Traditionalist religion as it is practiced in Cameroon, which could have influenced her. when she was growing up.
@Jax: You’re expecting that we’ll recover from stupid? Waaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy more optimistic than I am. 😉
@Jax:
I’d say it’s a safe bet Trump would love to see the last of Sarah Cooper. She’s his worst nightmare: a young, very attractive woman of color making hilarious fun of him. Everyone adores her. And, as Trump himself said, “Nobody likes me.” Right you are, Lardass. Nobody does like you.
@Kylopod: good article. In the amusing video Ozark linked in the fourth comment above, an Australian kid creates different personas from English-speaking nations + Russia, all giving updates about coronavirus in their countries, with decent accents for each. The only female persona is the American, wearing a stereotypical lopsided “Karen” haircut, protesting that she has rights!
DAMN LIBERAL STORE! -what an idiot old white man just shouted when we told him he had to wear a mask to come in.
Didn’t Trump say two weeks ago that he’d release a “comprehensive health care plan” today? What’s up with that?
@teve:
Serves ya right, ya dirty Commie.
@CSK: the global corporation I work for has given millions to Republicans. But elderly white men who live on government checks and watch FoxNews all day become retarded. I’ve had customers who wouldn’t stop attacking Nancy Pelosi while I’m trying to sell them a Samsung Galaxy.
Me: so with this plan an iPhone XR is free.
Customer: oh free huh? You sound like Nancy Pelosi! She always wants to give the inner city ones free stuff. But it ain’t free! My tax dollars are paying for all that free stuff! Socialist Bitch!
Customer’s Wife: Don stop it.
Customer: what? She IS a socialist Bitch!
@CSK:
Well, he just said the other day:
@Kylopod:
Well, that clears things up nicely. Not.
I have a friend whose dad retired about five years ago and started watching Fox News all day. His wife is very close to leaving him because he’s turned into an angry asshole.
@CSK:
He did, it is one word DIE
@Teve:
This is interesting, because to a true Trump cultist, Fox, except for Hannity, Ingraham, and Carlson, I suppose, has proven itself a) disloyal to Donald, and b) extremely left wing. (Yeah, yeah, I know.) The culties were huffing and puffing on Lucianne.com the other day about how Obama is so out of touch that he still thinks they watch Fox.
They don’t watch Fox. They watch OANN and read The Gateway Pundit, the Conservative Treehouse, The American Thinker, et al.
@CSK: my store sells TV packages. The most commonly requested channel is the hallmark channel. The second most commonly requested channel is OANN.
Right-wing media makes people shittier.
@CSK: A lot of the culties do watch OANN, but Nielsen says 4 million people watch Fox News now, up from 2 million in 2016.
@Teve:
I don’t know how anyone can watch OANN and not realize immediately what a crackpot operation it is.
@Teve:
Maybe that’s because it’s gotten so…left-wing. 😀
@CSK: I have a relative who started out smart and then was married to a conspiracy theorist for 50 years. Now she says things like hospitals are making up covid cases to get paid.
@Teve:
Well even conservatives have to glance at the left-wing station from time to time, just to make sure they don’t fall into an echo chamber. /s
On a different note, the idiot creationists at Uncommon Descent are praising Trump for promoting that quack doctor because incubi and succubi are REAL.
@Teve:
Do they have anything to say about our reptilian overlords? Or alien DNA in our meds?
Space-X Dragon Endeavour carrying astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley has returned from orbit and splashed down safely. All went without problems, now they’re just waiting for the recovery boats.
It’s the first time an American spacecraft has actually splashed down in the ocean since the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.
@OzarkHillbilly:
This makes me crazy. Democrats are not “drifting left”. Indeed, they have been drifting (or indeed lurching) rightward during my entire life. Barack Obama was to the right of Ronald Reagan on everything except race and trickle-down. Bill Clinton was to the right of Richard Nixon on everything but race.
This notion that the Democratic Party is wandering leftward is just more gaslighting. Demand evidence.
(And no, James, statements made by unsuccessful candidates for the party nomination don’t count, unless you can come up with actual evidence that they are now to the left of statements made by candidates in the past. Good luck with that.)
@Jax And @EddieInCA:
On what planet can these three “facts” coexist?
Wake up people! (who perpetuate this crap) Take the 2 seconds to realize that, without knowing anything other than the dates of WWII and the current age of Anthony Fauci, none of this makes a lick of sense.
@Teve: Don’t pick on the Hallmark Channel. I watch shows on it sometimes. Of course, I can’t watch very much because I’m prediabetic…
[…]
“lopsided “Karen” haircut,”–I believe the term is “asymmetric.”
@EddieInCA:
You really have to wonder why Anthony Fauci kept a 7 year old boy in his dorm room.
@Gustopher:
Well, clearly he was the predecessor of the Pizzagate pedophiles. I mean, what could be more obvious?
@Teve: so Fox is a sort of “gateway drug.”
@Gustopher:
@CSK:
Durn CSK, you beat me to it.
And did you know that Jeffrey Epstein knew them all.
Florida, California, and Texas have now each surpassed New York in total number of Covid cases, and Louisiana and Arizona have surpassed New York in total cases per million.
@Sleeping Dog:
Jeffrey Epstein was Anthony Fauci’s math teacher at Dalton.
@Monala:
Nothing to be concerned about, it’s just a hoax designed to defeat the sainted one. Rambo in a Brioni
@CSK: Beat me to the joke.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Apparently it’s less of a joke than I thought. I did some poking around, and found that on March 25 Buzzfeed did a piece on the various QAnon conspiracies involving Fauci, and how 4chan has decided that Fauci is part of a global pedophile ring.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/us/schools-reopening-indiana-coronavirus.html
At least they had a plan.
@CSK: That’s what’s been bugging me so much. I mean, WE all know better, we are comfortable in our forum, knowing where the line is between truth and fiction and fully capable of recognizing it. If we’re unsure, we research it.
There’s a large portion of the electorate who believe this crap, feel no curiosity or desire to know “facts”, and they vote. With their votes, they’re making decisions for all of us, and it’s literally killing people. There’s not a damn thing we can do about it legislatively, because “Free Speech” and all that. I can report that post as false news to Facebook hundreds of times, every time I see it, and they’ll eventually attach a tag to it when somebody shares it that says it’s false, but that’s just “proof” that the right is being censored to the politicians taking advantage of it. So then they get offended and feel aggrieved that their “right” to believe stupid shit is being trampled on….
There is no legislative way to fix this that I can see. We need one, but we are literally hampered by our own Constitution. We can’t even get people to wear masks, let alone get them all to take a class on “how to recognize actual fake news”. The line is so blurred between “fact” and “opinion” that we can’t save ourselves.
Sorry to vent, it’s just been bugging the crap out of me since Kingdaddy’s post the other day. We’re hosed, because we’re collectively dumb. The plane is crashing and a good percentage of my fellow passengers refuse to believe we’re even on a plane, this is a ship, damn it, can’t you see the pictures of the ocean taped over the windows?! 😉
@CSK: I know you know this, but in case anyone reading takes you seriously:
(per Wikipedia. Bill Barr’s dad hired Jeffrey Epstein to teach math at Dalton, despite the fact that he was a 21-yo college dropout).
@Monala:
We thought alike about that. I got an uneasy feeling as I was typing that that some humorless moron would read it and start a new Reddit about it, despite the fact that Epstein is/was 13 years younger than Fauci. I don’t know how many Trump-loving lurkers OTB has. I remember back in the days of Sarah Palin they’d leap out of the woodwork in order to defend their goddess if anyone here criticized her.
And…has anyone ever explained why Barr the Elder hired someone without a college degree to teach at a prestigious private high school?
@Just nutha ignint cracker: nobody was picking on Hallmark. Nobody was picking on Hallmark, I would happily sell the Hallmark channel to 1000 people, but I get OANN people. There was a guy today, this afternoon, who told my black assistant manager that he bought a phone three months ago, and my assistant manager asked him if he remembered who sold him the phone, and he said “A Colored lady.”
The Qanon idea that kids are being tortured by billionaires for Adrenochrome, is the fucking stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Chemists have been synthesizing adrenaline for 116 years. You take phenylalanine, a natural amino acid, and do some stuff to it and you’ve got adrenaline. You oxidize adrenaline and you got Adrenochrome. You could call up Dow Chemical or Bristol Myers Squibb and you could order Adrenochrome by the fucking 50 gallon drum.
You can buy it from Sigma-Aldrich RIGHT FUCKING NOW
Adrenochrome
@CSK: Actually, I read an article that addressed the question either in Wikipedia about the Dalton School or somewhere else. From what I recall it amounted to “because… reasons, that’s why!” (There was a rationale, but it didn’t seem to make any sense in my jaded anti-intellectual world view.)
@Teve: Actually, I was, but maybe I was too oblique. It happens sometimes.
ETA: And I don’t understand what torturing kids has to do with adrenochrome or why billionaires want any. Then again, I don’t read QAnon either.
@Teve:
Well, I love watching the Hallmark channel films (I think I have seen every single original film from the past 15 years or more no…seriously), but I would not touch most of the folks on Fox “News” with a 50 ft pole (I never watch the channel), and the other cuckoo bananas right wing sites I do not even like to check out even in a good to know what the other side is thinking capacity because the hate/bile/ignorance on sites like Gateway Pundit would just make me angry and sad at the same time.
I can appreciate it if you loathe the Hallmark Channel (and similar channels like UP) but quite a few liberals share an affection for watching the guilty pleasure movies/shows from channels like Hallmark and UP TV.
On the other hand, I sincerely suspect some folks who keep the Hallmark Channel humming would cringe that quite a few of their viewers also love the OAN network…Hallmark does not traffic in hate, rather their bread and butter is sappy films involving only in the movies scenarios where two people meet and fall in love.
Just proving once again that you can’t fix stupid.
@OzarkHillbilly: it does not mention at all that kids were actually ILL! First the tests are notoriously inaccurate. Second one can test positive AFTER BEING CURED. Cases really mean nothing but a lot of testing was done. Were there hospitalizations?? Or deaths?? If not then its panikr porn.