Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, March 14, 2021
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45 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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”underwater roombas” help start cleanup of dumped DDT off California coast
long covid is more common than you think
Wingnut bingo.
@Teve: We could have had a $1400 checks & increased the child tax credit without sending $45,414,000 to Republicans in Congress.
ETA: what a load of unadulterated horseshit him bringing up the “unrelated pension bailout” is, like Republicans haven’t been helping corporations destroy pensions for decades now.
@Teve: centipedes? In my ….? It’s more common than you think.
Pretty cool: One-take drone video of Minnesota bowling alley goes viral – video
A couple of Big Lebowski salutes in it too.
@OzarkHillbilly: wow!
Yo Yo Ma got his 2nd shot, and spent his 15 min in observation entertaining everyone. (click thru to the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th frames for video)
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’ve seen him play at Symphony Hall (Boston). I addition to being a great cellist, he’s a great showman. He was the surprise player that night. The audience went insane.
Republicans Push to Punish Eric Swalwell because He Didn’t Sell Out the Country Like They Did
by emptywheel
Donald Trump, class act:
http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-showed-shiva-photos-of-naked-women-report-2021-3
Sarah Everard
– Believe women
– Believe the LGBTQ community
– Believe religious/ethnic/racial minorities
Your opinions are not equal to their lived experiences. You do not deserve an answer to your questions, educate yourself and ask your questions in a respectful way and you may get an answer. Political Correctness and Cancel Culture are not real, we are asking for courtesy, respect, kindness and accountability, we are asking for the golden rule; treat us as you would like to be treated.
Will some asshole take advantage of your belief? yes
Believe the next person anyway
And the next one
And the next one
And the next one
And the next one
And the next one
And the next one
And the next one
And the next one
And the next one
And the next one
And the next one
And the next one
And the next one
And the next one
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And the next one
And the next one
And the next one
And the next one
And the next one
And the next one
And the next one
And the next one
And the next one
I could go on, because the odds of you finding someone from those communities lying to you about their lived experiences is less than one percent.
Believe us.
There is a very active ret-conning effort going on to claim that Trump’s administration did have a vaccine rollout plan and that Biden should be grateful he inherited it. This is based on the rather (to me) absurd idea that “we will drop the vaccines off at the airport and states and locals come up with their own plans without any help, financial or logistical, from us”, qualifies as a plan. If you accept that, then sure. For my part, I think this is equivalent of the FEMA response to a hurricane being to drop off sheet rock and nails at the airports and walk away patting themselves on the back.
Talking Points Memo had a really well researched article that chronicles the Trumper failures.I think it is included in their outside-the-firewall pandemic coverage. Today Josh Marshall has an opinion piece speculating about why the Trump administration only made one small foray into shots-in-the-arm delivery, the poorly run effort to have CVS and Walgreens personnel go to nursing homes and vaccinate those at risk. (It should be noted that on the administration’s part this “effort” merely consisted of awarding a contract and expecting the pharmacies to handle everything else.) The TL:DR – Trump recognized that shots-in-the-arm was difficult and had a lot of failure points, so he wanted nothing to do with it. He said over and over that he was not responsible and hoped the gullible public would shift the blame to the states.
This is Trump’s modus operandi for his whole career and the reason every tangible business he has started ended in bankruptcy and finger pointing. He doesn’t do the hard parts, instead leaving that to others while taking the credit.
@Loviatar:
Wow
@MarkedMan:
😉
@Loviatar:
The rate of lying on sexual assaults is about the same as the rate of lying on all other crimes. Most people claiming to be a victim of a crime are believed, so the same should be true for people claiming to be a victim of sexual assault.
Courts of course have a higher standard for obvious reasons (its pretty easy to see what would happen if every accusation of any crime automatically results in a conviction), but that’s not what’s under discussion.
If someone says they’re a victim of a crime (any crime), believe them but verify. Its funny how easy this is for conservatives to do for most crimes, but how hard for sexual assault.
In terms of deserving answers, no one is owed an answer to any question on an Internet forum. Its always just a courtesy. It is funny though when people demand courtesy from others but don’t give it out themselves — and very common, people being people.
@Northerner:
When you add in the unreported assaults, no the rate of lying is not equal.
Sexual assault is one of the most under reported crimes. Every woman has a story. Every woman. And as many of them feel they won’t be believed anyway, they won’t report the assault, why do so and bring unwanted drama and attention to oneself. Grit your teeth and move on is one of the most persistent mantras within the above mentioned communities.
—–
P.S.
Surprisingly or not, quite a few men have also been subjected to sexual assaults, but it is even more under reported among men (not macho).
Despite the hype, Fla plows on…..and why didn’t this thing destroy the homeless crowd?
I briefly hoped that when all the predictions expired, the QAnoners would come to their senses, but then I remembered the Millerites, and how they’re still around 190 years later.
@Bill: they’re like textbook cases of Social Distancing. You’re welcome.
@MarkedMan: people are really bad at understanding statistical data.
(This example is entirely made up as an illustration, I don’t know any bad thing about Methodists)
Person 1: “huh, turns out methodists are 12% more likely to be serial killers.”
Person 2 “that’s not true, my cousin Timmy is a methodist and he’s not a serial killer.”
We’re wired to survive, we’re not necessarily wired to be smart. There’s a correlation, but not a certainty.
@Teve:
Apparently the inauguration date for Trump has been moved to March 20, 2021.
@Teve: Sometimes I am astounded by how many people never developed past, “I did it once, and nothing bad happened. I did it twice , and nothing bad happened. I did it three times, and nothing bad happened. Therefore it is perfectly safe.”
@Teve:
I like this piece better. Talks about shallow breathing affecting the CO2 blood concentration producing knock-on effects.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/unlocking-the-mysteries-of-long-covid/618076/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20210308&silverid-ref=NTU1NTY3ODY3ODY2S0
When Putrino looked at the data, he saw the same symptoms that Chen saw. To Putrino, they looked like those of patients who suffer from a poorly understood and often misdiagnosed condition, one that he happens to know a lot about because his wife lives with it: dysautonomia, or impairment of the usual functioning of the autonomic nervous system, which controls blood pressure, temperature regulation, and digestion. Dysautonomia is itself an umbrella term for a host of different conditions, many of whose causes have yet to be fully pinned down. In common manifestations of it, a patient’s autonomic nervous system has trouble regulating the heart’s response to exertion, changes in posture, or variations in temperature, sending the body into an inappropriate fight-or-flight response. Some patients’ systems have trouble adjusting blood pressure or constricting blood vessels to send blood to the brain. Blood can pool in the legs and peripheries of the body; the heart might compensate by increasing its rate, while the body releases surges of adrenaline in a fruitless attempt to correct the problem. As a result, patients can experience some blend of fatigue, headaches, digestive problems, heart palpitations, difficulty breathing, and cognitive issues such as brain fog.
…
A missing piece of the puzzle, the Mount Sinai teams soon found, was right in front of them: breathing. Everyone knew, of course, about severely sick COVID‑19 patients on ventilators. What the researchers and doctors at Mount Sinai hadn’t realized was that even mild cases might be affecting respiration after the acute phase of the disease. Evidence began to accrue that long-COVID patients were breathing shallowly through their mouths and into their upper chest. By contrast, a proper breath happens in the nose and goes deep into the diaphragm; it stimulates the vagus nerve along the way, helping regulate heart rate and the nervous system. Many of us breathe through our mouths, slightly compromising our respiration, but in patients with post-acute COVID syndrome, lung inflammation or another trigger appeared to have profoundly affected the process. In these cases, patients’ breathing “is just completely off,” McCarthy told me.
@Loviatar:
Most crimes against poor people (including everyday assault and robbery) are unreported because everyone knows the police won’t do anything about it. People are held up at knife point, beaten up in parking lots, have their wallets and phones stolen, and never bother saying anything to the police, because if you’re not at least middle class the police simply won’t care even if they believe you. Unless there’s a corpse they’ve got better things to do if you’re poor.
Middle class and above people report crimes (except as you say, sexual assault). Poor people only report crimes that can be proven (ie if someone steals your car, or if your attacker was filmed). Its a middle class myth that most crimes are reported.
@Teve:
And they also don’t understand that 12% more of a very small number (say 1 in 1,000) is still a very small number. Absolute percentages tend to be much more useful for many things. For instance, if one bolt has a failure rate of .001% and another a failure rate of .002% the second one has double the failure rate, but both are likely to be safe for most applications.
The tendency of news articles to use relative percentages instead of absolute percentages drives a lot of the fear people have today. Including the fear of vaccines.
Karen gets arrested.
Shocked that rules apply to her.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/13/terry-wright-galveston-bank-mask/
There is no systemic racism…. /snark
So it wasn’t enough to beat this guy. They had to brag about it to each other. This is 2021, not 1955. Yet here we are…
@CSK: Yeah, I saw that yesterday. He’s like the Marianas Trench of sleaze. It’s probably why he and Vince McMahon got along so well during the “Attitude Era” of WWE.
@EddieInCA:
Definitely systematic racism. Also systematic police violence against any poor person — here’s one of them killing a poor white man crawling down a hallway begging for his life. Funny how the police never seem to kill any rich people. You’d think statistically at least a few guys worth a 100 million or more would have been killed by police by now.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/11/opinions/daniel-shaver-shooting-opinion-gagliano/index.html
@Northerner: Yes, but it is a 100% higher failure rate. I used to tell my students that they could shape the way that the audience reacts to the data. IIRC, in rare events, percentage differences were usually stronger unless the order of magnitude was pretty large 10 or 20 times, say. A rare event happening twice as often is heard as “2 times not likely is still not likely,” but a 100% increase seems significant.
@Northerner:
Also, white collar crime is under reported. I forget which President decades ago formed a commission to study crime. In the intro to their report they said they were charged with studying crime in America and had failed because as best they could estimate the bulk of crime is white collar crime which is almost never reported.
@Liberal Capitalist: I’m sure she will be portrayed as a victim on Fox News, but it’s all very cynical. Jim Crow governance is about keeping the poors in their place, and she is tool of the regime and can safely be criminalized once her use is fulfilled. Fox News and the Republican Crazy train winds her up and sends her out where she acts out in what she has been taught is a heroic way. It serves their purposes that she made a scene and was arrested, because what they really need is the threat of disorder to make the populace anxious and seeking a firm hand.
@MarkedMan:
Driving drunk fits this bill.
@CSK:
Do we have a date for the Kraken yet?
Caitlin Flanagan on private schools.
One of the many funny moments:
Unfortunately for her, this was not Flanagan’s last interaction with these people.
@Kathy:
Sidney Powell dropped her Georgia lawsuit on Jan. 19, 2021, so the Kraken appears to have swum back to its undersea fastness.
I walked to a little store near me. Some dude in a baseball cap and sunglasses just walked by me carrying a giant wooden cross over his shoulder.
@Kurtz: I have no other comment than to say I love anecdotes like these. Little morsels from “a day in the life”….to be savored.
@Kurtz: Reminded me of this song. It’s pretty old.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82WIU51ARw0
It’s people that are evil.
@Kurtz: These types of conversations happen with public school children, too. I had an administrator who was amazed at how well I could mollify angry parents in conferences. No, it didn’t stop him from terminating me at the end of the year.
@Teve:
That just means Timmy hasn’t been caught yet.
@Jax:
Haha Rehab! A buddy of mine really likes them.
I know their hometown well.
@Kurtz: They’ve been a top favorite of mine for 20 years or so.