Thanks to Trump, the world now looks at the US with pity

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
[Read more…]

Conspiratorial obsessions in the US

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.

[Read more…]

Breaking news! White guy runs on street carrying a TV – and nothing happens

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.

Facebook moderators win PTSD case

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.
[Read more…]

The different forms of fascism

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
[Read more…]

The fascinating life of mussels

This short video looks at the life cycle of the California floater mussel and how in its infancy it hitches rides on fish to get around.

Growing up in Sri Lanka, I had never encountered these creatures. My only knowledge of them was that sweet Molly Malone would sing out “cockles and mussels, alive, a live–o” as she wheeled a barrow of them through the streets of Dublin, home of pretty girls. Now I know what mussels are, I looked up what ‘cockles’ are too and they seem very similar to mussels.

The elites are always first in line to get government handouts

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.


[Read more…]

Modern forms of wage slavery

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.
[Read more…]

Trump is really losing it

Trump lies shamelessly during his press conferences and also make racist allusions. Reporters have mostly left it to commentators to later deconstruct these statements but by then the damage has been done. But increasingly it looks like reporters at the press conferences are challenging him in real time to explain and back up his statements and he clearly does not like it. A week or so ago Jonathan Karl of ABC News kept asking for examples when Trump made one of his baseless, fact-free, sweeping assertions and Trump of course could offer none and just got peevish. Yesterday, Trump abruptly ended the conference and left when two such pushbacks occurred. Watch.


[Read more…]