Remarkable. Judge Bruce Schroeder is doing a fine job demonstrating the power of systemic bias.
The judge in Kyle Rittenhouse's trial says lawyers cannot call the 2 people he killed "victims."
Rittenhouse killed 2 people and wounded another with an AR-15 style weapon. The judge says "victim" is too "loaded" but will let lawyers call them "rioters, looters or arsonists." pic.twitter.com/KqK73Z3ytN
— AJ+ (@ajplus) October 26, 2021
That trial is going to be a real shitshow, isn’t it?
Editors seem to love to publish waffling centrist apologists for journalistic weaseling, and I hate it. Here’s some opinion columnist saying The media slant on Joe Rogan and covid has been wrong. Journalists must do better.
He thinks journalism has been too hard on that hack.
In my experience, a journalist who admits uncertainty and owns up to mistakes is ultimately more trusted, not less so. (Even opinion writers should be accountable to facts and alive to the unknowable.)
I agree. So what misstatement of the facts did CNN make?
For this reason, CNN is wrong to double down on its smug reports that vaccine-skeptic podcaster Joe Rogan treated his coronavirus with “horse dewormer.” He did not, as nearly as I can determine. Rogan’s covid-19 was treated, he said, with a number of medicines, including the anti-parasite drug ivermectin — the same medication that former president Jimmy Carter’s foundation has used to fight the scourge of river blindness in Africa and Latin America. Like many drugs, ivermectin also has veterinary applications.
CNN reported that Rogan had treated his infection with a cocktail of glop — antibodies and ivermectin and vitamins, and who knows what else. That is accurate. That’s what Rogan himself announced. He was dosing himself with an anti-parasitic drug to treat a virus. This is a problem, because it spreads the word that maybe taking random drugs is an effective way to handle a specific disease, and maybe this columnist hasn’t noticed, but there are people refusing to take the effective treatment because they’re doping themselves with horse dewormer or betadine. We did not mock Rogan enough.
Further, talking about river blindness is a dishonest distraction. It’s irrelevant. Did Joe Rogan have onchocerciasis? He had COVID-19.
So far, there isn’t a lot of evidence that ivermectin is a good anti-covid therapy, and federal agencies have warned people who hear about the drug not to consume a paste intended for livestock. But that doesn’t mean Rogan ate horse dewormer. You don’t fight disinformation with disinformation. Not if you’re a good reporter.
A good reporter would explain that Rogan was misleading his audience by taking horse dewormer seriously as a treatment for a virus. They’d also mention that the evidence is in: ivermectin is not a good anti-COVID-19 therapy.
All we have here is a hack writing dodgy crap to sow doubt. Here he is talking about how the vaccines are “new” and might have “unforeseen effects”.
CNN’s pundits might not have sneered at Rogan if he had toed the line on coronavirus vaccines — even if it is a line that is underinformed and overconfident. I yield to no one in my enthusiasm for these vaccines. They are wonderfully effective, and the speed of their development was a scientific triumph. However: The vaccines are new. There are unanswered questions about long-term effectiveness and potentially unforeseen effects. And even vaccinated people keep dying — albeit at much lower rates. It’s understandable that some — such as Rogan — will air doubts. CNN shouldn’t be stigmatizing their natural skepticism.
What I learned from this is that David Von Drehle, the author, is a marginal crank and not a reasonable source (he got his start as a sports writer, and evolved into a political pundit — he has zero qualifications in science or medicine). I’ll remember that name.
The squid were avoiding me in elevators.
Was it my breath? Body odor? Creepy staring?
Those fervent conservative Free Speech Warriors have hit on a new strategy to protect our sacred right to say anything we want to anyone we want to: banning the bad words. Wisconsin Republicans have proposed sweeping censorship of words and concepts from the public schools there.
Curiously, they forgot to ban “irony”. Maybe they didn’t know the word exists.
Fortunately, the bill is just posturing by sanctimonious Republicans, and has virtually no chance of passing. If it did, I suppose I’d have to gallop across the border to rescue my granddaughter once she hit school age.
It’s such a strangely blatant defiance of the principles these people usually hide behind, but there’s a reason for it. We can’t make our white children conscious of racism.
The Wisconsin Assembly passed legislation on a party-line vote Tuesday that would bar public schools from teaching critical race theory, the latest Republican-controlled legislative chamber to take action on a culture war issue that erupted in school board meetings around the country this summer.
The measure mirrors efforts in other states to block teachers from instructing students on concepts of racial injustice or inherent bias.
But in testimony before a Wisconsin Assembly committee considering the bill in August, one of the measure’s lead authors went farther than in other states, spelling out specific words that would be barred from the classroom.
“It has come to our attention, and to some of the people who traveled here to Madison today, that a growing number of school districts are teaching material that attempts to redress the injustice of racism and sexism by employing racism and sexism, as well as promoting psychological distress in students based on these immutable characteristics,” state Rep. Chuck Wichgers (R) said of his bill. “No one should have to undergo the humiliation of being told that they are inferior to someone else. We are all members of the human race.”
Nothing in Critical Race Theory is about telling anyone they are inferior — quite the opposite. You can tell what really concerns him, though: the idea that white people might be told they’re inferior. When it was just discrimination against brown people, then it was OK to talk about their imaginary inferiority.
Wichgers, who represents Muskego in the legislature, attached an addendum to his legislation that included a list of “terms and concepts” that would violate the bill if it became law.
Among those words: “Woke,” “whiteness,” “White supremacy,” “structural bias,” “structural racism,” “systemic bias” and “systemic racism.” The bill would also bar “abolitionist teaching,” in a state that sent more than 91,000 soldiers to fight with the Union Army in the Civil War.
The list of barred words or concepts includes “equity,” “inclusivity education,” “multiculturalism” and “patriarchy,” as well as “social justice” and “cultural awareness.”
Whoops, there goes social studies and history.
I was interviewed by the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie. Hey, that’s a terrible acronym.
(Also available as a podcast).
Breakthrough discovery!
Give her a raise!
Oh, right.
<never mind me, I’m over here crying after a bad night’s sleep>
Nice image to illustrate a basic cladistic principle. I still get whines from creationists complaining that I said we humans are fish — but that’s just a bigger circle enclosing everyone in this image.
For the Lisowicia book, number 4 of the Extinct series, we wanted to show the reader how we mammals are related to Lisowicia and other synapsids. It was important for us that the reader understood, in a visual way, that once you are in a group, you never leave the group. pic.twitter.com/6uwMXNGxav
— Gabriel N. U. (@SerpenIllus) October 22, 2021
I have no illusions that this will ever sink into the brains of the people who deny it.
There’s nothing here I didn’t already know, but if you want an up-to-date summary of Hovind’s criminality, here’s a video. In addition to committing spousal abuse, he’s been hanging out with and making excuses for convicted pedophiles. Would you believe that he thinks one of his associates being found guilty of the crime is that, sure, he was playing strip poker with an 11 year old, but they only got down to his underwear before he stopped.
Only watch on an empty stomach.
I could have predicted he’d be taking this route 30 years ago. He’s a skeevy, creepy liar who found a profitable grift in religion.
We had a good time at DUNE (or, as the poster calls it, DUNC) last night. It was excellent! It’s true to the original story for the most part, and the special effects were impressive. It’s a movie where you can just sit back and enjoy the slow build with occasional bursts of action, and the plot overall is not stupid.
One matter of taste: this is not a superhero movie. No slam-bam non-stop overpowered people smashing buildings and chins. It really is all slow imagery: space ships don’t swoop with blasters blazing, immense geometric shapes float down to the planet and drift onto plains of sand. It’s a thing. If you don’t appreciate the idea of taking your time in a movie, you may not have a good time. I was in the mood for it, so I found it pleasant and thoughtful.
On the other hand, it didn’t get very far into the plot before just…ending. It only got as far as Jessica and Paul fleeing the invasion of the Harkonnens to end up in Stilgar’s sietch. It’s been decades since I read the book, and what is that? About a third of the way in? I was just getting on a roll here when I had to go home. And it ends on such a downer moment! There has to be at least one more movie, maybe two, to bring it to its complex conclusion. It looks like an expensive movie, too, with a star-power cast and lots of fancy computer work (ooh, the ornithopters were amazing), so I’m going to have to tell you all that you’re required to go so it makes lots of money and bankrolls and brings me some resolution.
One minor complaint that isn’t so much about Dune as it is about this kind of drama in general. I attended with my wife, who has some hearing impairments, and in those quiet moments where they were talking, everyone tends to whisper at each other. It was annoying. Jessica and Paul are hiding in a tent deep in the desert, alone, talking about their situation and advancing a little exposition, and they are whispering for dramatic effect. You’re in the desert! Alone! Talk normally, as people do. I will say this for super-hero movies: they are very shouty. People emote loudly. It’s just that whenever a plot has some subtlety and thoughtful tension to it, the way they express it in Dune is by having the actors drop their voices into a low raspy register.
Don’t let that stop you, though! You must go see it so there’s a chance they’ll make the next episode in the story just for me!
