May 20, 2020
Today's GIF
I’m an academic who cares deeply about how lying affects communication processes and social relationships. One of the most important and consistent truths about deception is that we are all mostly honest. Most people tell one or two small lies per day, on average, and there are only a few prolific liars in our social circles.
Rates of interpersonal deception — the lies I tell you and you tell me — have been remarkably stable in deception research over time. But, as others suggested, something is unusual about President Trump. His rate of deception has increased since taking office.
As of early April, Trump has told 23.3 lies per day in 2020, a 0.5-lie increase since 2019. What’s more, Trump has averaged 23.8 lies per day since the first case of COVID-19 was reported in the US — another 0.5-lie increase. Even during a pandemic, when the public needs to trust and rely on him the most, deception remains a core part of the president’s playbook.
The piece goes on to talk about 45*'s patterns of lying, and even though it filters out the "Trump lies all the time about everything" meme, it confirms for me that Cult45 is deeply invested in classic Daddy State gaslighting, in service of an agenda that's anything but "The best for the most".
Money quote:
Trump’s lies are problematic because they force us to question our institutions and the value of information. Their consequences might also bleed into our everyday meaningful relationships. Our trust in government, media, and other institutions remain quite low, but we still tend to trust one another.
What happens when our distrust in government affects our trust in family or friends? When we fail to value truth and instead, prioritize alternative facts or self-serving discourse, the fabric that holds our relationships together begins to fray.
PREAMBLE:
The Daddy State tells us lies as a means of demonstrating its power.
The lies have practically nothing to do with the subject - or the apparent object - of the lies.
Lying about everything is a way to condition us - to make us accept the premise that they can do anything they want ...
… SO THEY CAN DICTATE REALITY TO US.
COVID-19 Update
It's starting to ease up in a big way in NYC - "Like somebody turned off the hose or something"
And President Stoopid will start crowing about this shit pretty soon - "See? I told ya. I said it'd just disappear - like a miracle or something - and there it is - we did a great job ..."
Here’s what you need to know (NYT):
And President Stoopid will start crowing about this shit pretty soon - "See? I told ya. I said it'd just disappear - like a miracle or something - and there it is - we did a great job ..."
So now the waiting. States are starting to ease the restrictions, and some people are rushing out to play. A coupla weeks from now, and we'll probably see some spikes.
The question is, Will enough of us continue to self-restrict, so the next wave is kept at a manageable level? I guess my default applies here:
HOPEFUL BUT NOT OPTIMISTIC
Here’s what you need to know (NYT):
- C.D.C. releases guidance that the White House had shelved.
- Trump threatens to withhold funding from Michigan for expanding mail voting, as floods threaten the state.
- A prototype vaccine has protected monkeys from the virus, researches have found.
- Some states are fully open, but others are moving more slowly.
- Justice Department cautions California on rules restricting religious gatherings.
- The virus is taking a toll on young people’s mental health.
- ‘It’s like someone turned off the hose’: New York hospitals adapt to life beyond the viral peak.
May 19, 2020
Today's Commentary
Imagine the levels (and the various types) of desperation necessary to motivate someone enough to put his life on the line (and the lives of his family and friends) to get back to a 20-dollar-an-hour job that barely gets him by.
Michelle Goldberg (NYT), on how we're getting it upside and backwards:
Lately some commentators have suggested that the coronavirus lockdowns pit an affluent professional class comfortable staying home indefinitely against a working class more willing to take risks to do their jobs.
Writing in The Post, Fareed Zakaria tried to make sense of the partisan split over coronavirus restrictions, describing a “class divide” with pro-lockdown experts on one side and those who work with their hands on the other. On Fox News, Steve Hilton decried a “37 percent work from home elite” punishing “real people” trying to earn a living. In a column titled “Scenes From the Class Struggle in Lockdown,” The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan wrote: “Here’s a generalization based on a lifetime of experience and observation. The working-class people who are pushing back have had harder lives than those now determining their fate.”
The assumptions underlying this generalization, however, are not based on even a cursory look at actual data. In a recent Washington Post/Ipsos survey, 74 percent of respondents agreed that the “U.S. should keep trying to slow the spread of the coronavirus, even if that means keeping many businesses closed.” Agreement was slightly higher — 79 percent — among respondents who’d been laid off or furloughed.
Michelle Goldberg (NYT), on how we're getting it upside and backwards:
Lately some commentators have suggested that the coronavirus lockdowns pit an affluent professional class comfortable staying home indefinitely against a working class more willing to take risks to do their jobs.
Writing in The Post, Fareed Zakaria tried to make sense of the partisan split over coronavirus restrictions, describing a “class divide” with pro-lockdown experts on one side and those who work with their hands on the other. On Fox News, Steve Hilton decried a “37 percent work from home elite” punishing “real people” trying to earn a living. In a column titled “Scenes From the Class Struggle in Lockdown,” The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan wrote: “Here’s a generalization based on a lifetime of experience and observation. The working-class people who are pushing back have had harder lives than those now determining their fate.”
The assumptions underlying this generalization, however, are not based on even a cursory look at actual data. In a recent Washington Post/Ipsos survey, 74 percent of respondents agreed that the “U.S. should keep trying to slow the spread of the coronavirus, even if that means keeping many businesses closed.” Agreement was slightly higher — 79 percent — among respondents who’d been laid off or furloughed.
The rubes are being fooled again. A tiny fraction of well-heeled and well-connected Rube Wranglers have a big double-digit percentage of Americans convinced that it's the "liberal elites" who're fucking them over by keeping them out of work, and not the Rent-Collectors who're fucking them over by goading them into putting their lives on the line in service to a closed-loop Wall Street business universe that they'll never be allowed to participate in at any meaningful level, if at all.
It's the new variation on poor dumb white farm boys getting suckered into fighting and bleeding and dying to support the southern slave-holders' right to own people as property - property those farm boys would never own, and never get the chance to own.
It's the new variation on poor dumb white farm boys getting suckered into fighting and bleeding and dying to support the southern slave-holders' right to own people as property - property those farm boys would never own, and never get the chance to own.
I may get sick - and I may get my mom sick - and we may both die in a gruesome and agonizing way, and if I don't die, I may be saddled with the hospital bills for the rest of my life, and my kids may never get a decent start in life because we can't afford schooling, and there will never be more than an extreme outside chance that I'll be able to retire on anything but an ever-decreasing Social Security benefit - but at least Steve Mnuchin will always have millions of patriots just like me to put a few pennies in his pocket. And that's what's really important to me.
COVID-19 Update
Yesterday, President Stoopid decided we all needed to know that he's been taking hyrodoxychloroquine every day, Neil Cavuto on DumFux News felt compelled to spend a good 5 minutes of air time telling the rubes not to do that.
Rachel pointed out that while the numbers are starting to ease overall, there's plenty of reason to worry, because if you control out for New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, the curve is still in a rather steep upward trend for the rest of the country.
And with the news about Moderna getting good results from a very small preliminary trial of their vaccine, we're sure to see hordes of people rushing to "get back to normal", thinking salvation is right around the corner.
We really have no fucking clue what it's going to take to get a safe and effective vaccine out to 320,000,000 Americans, while competing for the thing with 7,500,000,000 other people.
Rachel pointed out that while the numbers are starting to ease overall, there's plenty of reason to worry, because if you control out for New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, the curve is still in a rather steep upward trend for the rest of the country.
And with the news about Moderna getting good results from a very small preliminary trial of their vaccine, we're sure to see hordes of people rushing to "get back to normal", thinking salvation is right around the corner.
We really have no fucking clue what it's going to take to get a safe and effective vaccine out to 320,000,000 Americans, while competing for the thing with 7,500,000,000 other people.
Top 20 States
May 18, 2020
COVID-19 Update
I get a sense of a long drawn out slog that's probably going to be the way things are for a while.
The overall trend for COVID-19 right now is downward, but that's really only because we've done a fair job of isolating - cutting down on some of the pathways that help the virus spread.
The biggest problem now is that too many people are reacting to a little bit of "good news", and taking it as "we've got this thing beat - let's party".
That bit of "good news' is the fact that we "only have" 800 or 900 dead Americans every day instead of 2500.
This is not a great big WHOOPEE - this is a tiny little Yay.
People are understandably eager to get back to work and to doing all the fun stuff, but we're missing a really important part of it. The clinicians have learned a lot about how to fight the disease, but what they've gotten good at is managing the symptoms. There are no therapeutics - no curatives - and no vaccines. Not yet.
They don't even know the full extent of what the virus does to us once it gets hold of us.
So if we get complacent about this thing, and we charge around insisting that it's over and we can all just go back to the way it was 5 or 6 months ago, we're in for some very rude surprises.
The overall trend for COVID-19 right now is downward, but that's really only because we've done a fair job of isolating - cutting down on some of the pathways that help the virus spread.
The biggest problem now is that too many people are reacting to a little bit of "good news", and taking it as "we've got this thing beat - let's party".
That bit of "good news' is the fact that we "only have" 800 or 900 dead Americans every day instead of 2500.
This is not a great big WHOOPEE - this is a tiny little Yay.
People are understandably eager to get back to work and to doing all the fun stuff, but we're missing a really important part of it. The clinicians have learned a lot about how to fight the disease, but what they've gotten good at is managing the symptoms. There are no therapeutics - no curatives - and no vaccines. Not yet.
They don't even know the full extent of what the virus does to us once it gets hold of us.
So if we get complacent about this thing, and we charge around insisting that it's over and we can all just go back to the way it was 5 or 6 months ago, we're in for some very rude surprises.
Top 20 States
May 17, 2020
Today's COVIDIOT
Karen is upset with the mask policy, and so she makes all the standardly stoopid arguments that Karen's always make.
I keep trying to embed reddit posts and they keep not working for shit.
Click on the the title of the post and it'll take you to reddit.
There's no practicable difference between this kind of COVIDIOT and the goobers who thought they were onto something special with the whole "sovereign citizen" bullshit.
I keep trying to embed reddit posts and they keep not working for shit.
Click on the the title of the post and it'll take you to reddit.
Karen gets upset because she's not allowed to shop without a mask, despite being given other safe options. from r/PublicFreakout
There's no practicable difference between this kind of COVIDIOT and the goobers who thought they were onto something special with the whole "sovereign citizen" bullshit.
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