JoBo

@JoBo@feddit.uk

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Biden is dramatically out of touch with voters on Gaza. He may lose because of it | Moira Donegan (www.theguardian.com)

Many voters believe, with good reason, that none of this would have happened without Biden’s assent. Biden has continued to speak of Israel’s attack on Palestinian civilians using the absurd language of “self-defense”. He has insulted Jewish Americans and the memory of the Holocaust by invoking them to justify the...

JoBo,

The Democrats do not have a realistic chance of winning against Trump because the Democrats are entirely incapable of challenging power. It’s the fundamental contradiction of liberalism. They won’t do anything for the people they need to vote for them because if they do the people who fund them will stop funding them.

Obama and Sanders both excelled at small-dollar donations, of course. Sadly, Obama was a silver-tongued coward and the Clinton Democrats made sure she didn’t repeat the mistakes of 2008 in 2016 by not bothering to sign up voters in case they killed her in the primaries again.

They dig their own grave and they do so willingly because it makes them exceedingly rich.

JoBo,

I thought Uncommitted was a smart use of the primaries.

More generally, obviously much more critical than in the election itself. But getting the right candidates in the primary, and pushing all candidates to be better in all the usual ways. They’re never going to chase us to the left like they chase to the right, so we have to do the work and set the boundaries.

JoBo, (edited )

Demanding that people vote for the least worst option without any content other than sneering at them for apparently not realising that one of the options is worse, is doing exactly that.

It’s straw-manning the arguments of people who want (and desperately need) the Democrats to be better and are putting serious thought, time and energy into how that is possible in a world controlled by billionaires who unleash fascism the moment their power is threatened.

And they’re doing it with a lazy, cynical, Bill Maher-wannabe take because apparently they think this is a good look?

They’ll be the death of us all.

JoBo,

Alienating the people you need to hold their nose and vote for Biden is exactly what you claim you don’t want.

Is Biden winning less important to you than posting like a smug cunt who is in no danger from fascism and looks forward to being able say “I told you so.”

Muppet.

JoBo,

Obediently voting for the least worst option means you eventually run out of good options. <- we are here

The conundrum is working out how you force those options to get better without accelerationists getting to test out their theories for real (again).

I would respectifully suggest that “shut the fuck up and vote” does not cut it.

JoBo,

Yeah, if you’re going to comment you would, ideally:

  1. read the article
  2. comprehend what it is saying
  3. respond to it

Knee-jerk hand-waving is not useful. It’s worse than just a waste of your time and ours, you are actively alienating everyone you desperately need to hold their nose and vote for Biden.

What are you trying to achieve here?

JoBo,

Learn to read, comprehend what you read, think about what you read, and then avoid saying stuff that gets you the exact opposite of what you want. FFS

JoBo,

You know the article has words in it that aren’t in the headline?

And that if you actually care about Biden winning, you need to engage with these arguments or at least have the good sense to STFU for fear of alienating people even further?

JoBo,

Choosing to treat anyone who thinks otherwise as too stupid to realise this is exactly why Trump might win. Please stop.

JoBo,

Statutory rape does not exist as an offence in English law. The offence is sexual contact with a minor.

The age of consent is 16 but 18 if the older party is in a position of responsibility (like a teacher). So whether or not she had unlawful sexual contact with the second boy would depend on how that law was interpreted, as well as when the first contact took place.

JoBo, (edited )

They get away with it if the people they attack are less powerful than they are, yeah. Power is a thing.

JoBo,

I was thinking of Miliband, really. Got the same treatment as Corbyn but it never reached a crescendo because he caved.

And Labour in general, of course. Since Thatcher, at least, they always end up defaulting to this please-Murdoch-at-any-cost nonsense. Not that they were great before Thatcher (1945-51 excepted) but the media was much less extreme back then.

JoBo,

Not just children. The Tories need a kind of generalised hate to keep them in power. “Look! Over there! The poor people have all your money!”. Not because a plurality of the electorate actually fall for it but because the billionaires who own the media keep the noise deafening to make sure no one pays any attention to their grift. Which means that the Labour party is too spineless to oppose it, keeping turnout nice and low while the Tories chase the fash to the right.

JoBo,

Indeed. Fascism is power protecting itself. And, even if the specifics vary worldwide, power has needed a great deal of protection since it fucked up and crashed the global economy. Again.

JoBo,

That does rather beg the question of whether boys or girls are encouraged to be loud.

But maybe they’re just picking up on teachers’ biases? Teachers Give Lower Math Scores to Girls

JoBo,

The fact of higher protein content appears to be true (without going back to find and critique all the original studies). Explanations are much harder to ‘prove’ for questions like this.

We can’t do experiments on the evolution of tears, so all we can do is come up with plausible theories and look at how they fit with the body of evidence. With enough evidence, from enough different angles, we might one day be able to say which proposed explanations fit the facts (and which don’t). It’s how we (eventually) proved smoking was killing people (another question we cannot do experiments on human beings to prove one way or the other) but not all questions are as important as smoking was and there isn’t necessarily a neat, single factor explanation to find even if someone was willing to fund all the necessary research.

Not my area but, for example, I recently saw a study claim that sniffing women’s tears makes men less aggressive. That’s an angle that might help build some support for, or knock down, the theory that emotional tears are useful for social communication (ie help get women killed slightly less often). Did those studies use sad stories or onions? Did any study compare sad stories to onions? If we’re seeing hints of differences between sad stories and onions, that would tend to support the social communication element of the explanation. Unless we think there’s a difference between sad tears and frightened tears, which there probably is, so we should check that too. And the rest of the literature on tears, if it’s considered important enough to get the theory right. And we need to remember that sticky tears are not the same thing as smelly tears, so can we do experiments where non-emotional tears are made sticky, and non-sticky tears made to smell frightened?

Etc etc.

Explaining things we observe but cannot directly experiment on is a process, a process which typically takes many years and dozens of research groups. And a lot of funding. And decades of exhausting battles, if there is a lot riding on the answer (as it did with Big Tobacco vs Public Health).

JoBo,

Cigarettes were marketed as actively healthy and good for the lungs. They used doctors to sell them. And wanted everyone to know that the only reason that smokers kept dying of lung diseases is because cigarettes are good for lungs so of course people with bad lungs were smokers. Duh.

When Cigarette Companies Used Doctors to Push Smoking

The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel (www.nytimes.com)

This story is told in three parts. The first documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second shows how extremists targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The third explores how this movement gained control of the state...

JoBo,

I agree with a lot of this but this bit is a non-sequitur:

One thing many people don’t realize is that the Zionist colonial project was in motion long before WWII, as far back as the late 1800s.

Political zionism did get started in the late 1800s, as a proposed solution to the centuries of pogroms, expulsions and discrimination against Jews in Europe. Prior to the horrors of WWII, most Jews considered it literal heresy. It was the Holocaust that convinced many that Zionism was their only option, not least because most of the free world closed its borders to Jews fleeing the Holocaust and its aftermath. There was nowhere else to go.

This is a very useful short piece by a Jewish anti-zionist, pleading with the pro-Palestinian movement to take more care with their understanding of history: Zionism, Antisemitism and the Left Today

The Palestinians are paying the price for Europe’s crimes. The problem cannot be solved by denying that those crimes ever happened.

JoBo, (edited )

I didn’t say you denied the Holocaust. I said you implied that it is the first example of European antisemitism.

JoBo,

No it doesn’t. The dean who made this decision, as with most people in stable positions of power, does not need telling what to do because he will do it anyway.

Rutledge clerked for Clarence Thomas, and is featured in a painting included in ProPublica’s reporting on Republican donor Harlan Crow’s gifts to the Supreme Court Justice.

JoBo,

The why is a much harder question.

You’re right about it probably being true, this is not the first study to find something similar, there’s two others reported on here: Patients have better outcomes with female surgeons, studies find

It’s interesting that this study looked at the proportion of women on the surgical team (not the composition of the surgical team for any specific operation):

Overall, female surgeons performed 47,874 (6.7%) of the operations. Female anaesthesiologists treated patients in 192,144 (27%) of operations.

Hospitals with teams comprising more than 35% female surgeons and anaesthesiologists had better postoperative outcomes, the study found. Operations in such hospitals were associated with a 3% reduction in the odds of 90-day postoperative major morbidity in patients.

There’s some speculation in that first link about differences in aggression and risk-taking. But, given the relative rarity of female surgeons, it could just be a competency effect. If women are a small minority for reasons not related to competency, and 93.3% of surgeons are men, it suggests that almost half the men are in the job because a more competent women didn’t get it. Groups with more women do better simply because they didn’t discount half the talent pool quite so heavily.

JoBo,

Obviously, people want that (the actual question asked was about an “urgent” need to see a doctor).

But this proposal is just a repeat of one of Blair’s worst policy failures, without acknowledging how or why it failed.

When New Labour introduced the 48 hour target to see a GP, the vast majority of GPs ‘met’ the target by closing down their phonelines as soon as they ran out of appointments. In the process, they turned the 48 hour target into a 24 hour target because otherwise they’d only have been able to open the phoneline every other day.

It was very bad back then. It’s much worse now because the NHS was at least relatively well-funded under Blair.

Not that they’re announcing this because they think the policy will work, obv. Just doing their best to make sure the voters blame everyone but them.

[The link is to a video of an election Question Time audience haranguing Blair about the foolishness of this target.]

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