Trump has fired yet another inspector general and replaced him with a partisan loyalist. Inspectors general are positions that are supposed to be non-partisan, that monitor the conduct of an institution to see that people are behaving ethically and acting according to the norms of the institution. So of course, they cannot survive in this highly corrupt administration.
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When I talk to my friends and relatives all over the world, I find that every single country in which they live has a government that is dealing with the pandemic rationally and based on the best expert knowledge even though the strategies have differed in details during to the local context and the resources available. One common reaction is that they marvel at what an idiot Trump is and feel sorry for me that we have to live with someone as incompetent as him at the helm of combating a dangerous and difficult situation. That view of how the rest of the world views us is not purely anecdotal
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America is a fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories and Trump is a fervent promoter of many of them. It appears that medical conspiracy theories are more likely to be believed.
Professor Eric Oliver, author of a book about conspiracy theories and the spread of false information, Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics, said those about medical issues are the most widely circulated and believed.
“When we’ve done surveys we’ve consistently asked a question: do you think the Food Drug Administration has been deliberately withholding natural cures for cancer because of secret pressure from the pharmaceutical industry? Typically we get about 40% of people in our surveys who agree with that, and that is by far and a way the most commonly held conspiracy theory,” he said.
“Medical and health conspiracy theories do well because oftentimes they’re not explicitly ideological in the way that other conspiracy theories are. They tend to cross ideological domains. The FDA conspiracy theory is endorsed as much by conservatives as it is by liberals.”
…A study of millions of Facebook users in the journal Nature released this week found that groups opposed to vaccinations were much more effective at penetrating discussion among those who were undecided than those who support the science. It said growing distrust in scientific expertise “could amplify outbreaks” of coronavirus.
In the wake of the killing of Armaud Arbery, who was black, as he was jogging through a suburban community in Georgia, Richard Demsick, who is white, decided to make a point about how being white makes all the difference in how running men are perceived, as he jogged for over two miles through the streets carrying a TV. Nobody mistook him for a thief. Nobody pulled a gun on him. Nobody even challenged him at all. Instead, they waved at him. Others have done similar runs as well.
If you’ve ever wondered what white privilege looks like: props to Richard Demsick for providing the world with Exhibit A #JusticeForAhmaud pic.twitter.com/xCqJ6WFrKL
— Jared Christopher (@JaredLChris) May 9, 2020
Some time ago I wrote about Facebook moderators whose job was to monitor video postings and remove those that were violent or otherwise disturbing. The problem was that they had to view so many such videos so quickly that they started suffering from the symptoms of PTSD and Facebook executives did not seem concerned and did not take steps to mitigate the mental stress they were under, both from repeated viewing of graphic violent imagery and from pressure to make decisions quickly even as the guidelines kept changing. Some of them sued the company and yesterday a judge awarded them damages.
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The specter of fascism in the US has been raised with the presidency of Donald Trump. While he has openly flirted with neo-Nazis and white supremacists, his defenders have said that his behavior does not imply fascist sympathies.
The problem is that fascism does not take a single form. In an article in the April/May 2020 issue of The Progressive, John Nichols looks back at the warnings that Henry Wallace, a progressive who in 1944 was vice-president to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, gave about the danger of fascism emerging in the US then and what were some of its signs
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This one single graphic about the representation of wealth in government tells us a lot about how decisions about public money is disbursed get made as to who gets what.
"Instead of worrying abt who you will vote for in Nov, let's take a few days to ponder how little power you have over the elites & how there is no Democracy & it is merely a spectacle at this point." @eshaLegal
Thread on NO representation in congress⬇️https://t.co/LQ6VriIwqw
— 🍀⏳Plucille⏳🍀 (@Plucille54) May 12, 2020
American businesses keep looking for ways to keep wages low. One way they have been able to do that is because since most people’s health insurance is obtained through their employment, that makes it difficult for people to leave since that would require them to find new health care providers, assuming the new employer does provide health insurance. And during the period between jobs, you would not have insurance. For many people, the least troublesome option is to stay with the same employer until it becomes intolerable.
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John Oliver has another excellent show, this time explaining clearly why the postal service is in financial trouble because of burdensome restrictions imposed on it, Trump’s lies about it, and why it must be saved.