The medical community realized early in the pandemic that blood clotting was an “extremely rare” side effect of Covid vaccines. Nobody tried to hide that. Also, monoclonal antibody treatments were limited because 99% of Covid infections were of the Omicron variant and it was clinically demonstrated that monoclonal antibodies were entirely ineffective against that variant.
I hate to be the one to point this out, but Republicans have been aggressively gerrymandering districts for multiple decades. While the goal of doing so may have not been to have a dictator, as it appears to be now, I can assure you that their intent in doing so was not to promote representative democracy.
I’m already aware of that. I don’t love gerrymandering, but it’s categorically different IMHO. Gerrymandering is an abuse of the system, but it is still working within the system.
That’s in stark contrast to the current, mainstream Republican ideology which dictates that if Republicans lose, then the election must have been “rigged,” which is more like burning the whole system to the ground.
Once you’re comfortable openly and actively disenfranchising voters, and you get away with it, it is a small step to start whining all the time about how the system is rigged against you to try to ramp up your efforts to further disenfranchise voters. Burning the system down doesn’t just happen overnight. It happens slowly and starts with ‘working within the system.’
I disagree with your analysis for a variety of conceptual reasons, but the proof is in the pudding: we’ve been gerrymandering districts for a couple hundred years and I don’t think it ever threatened a peaceful transition of power. So what, it’s like a hundred years per “small step?”
It's not at all astonishing, since those who write the laws benefit from the gerrymandering. Even if a legislature passed a law forbidding gerrymandering, future legislatures could reverse it. If the party in control of the legislature is corrupt, then that is exactly what we should expect.
Gerrymandering should be prohibited by the courts, but the current SCOTUS in its great wisdom ruled that courts must remain silent on the subject.
Well it’s easy to understand why legislatures elected by a Gerrymandered map are not motivated to fix it.
Also not trivial to design a law against it. Most common solution seems to be use of independent commissions, but commissions can also be “independent” in name only.
Are State elections also badly affected by gerrymandering?
I have only ever seen examples of it at the Federal Election level, so wondering if your first point is actually completely accurate. (I believe the States themselves control the "maps" but forgive my ignorance if not)
The states control both maps, the district map which determines the population eligible to elect the US Rep for a given district, and a separate district map (with more and smaller districts) that determines the population eligible to elect the State Rep for a given district.
Both are a problem. The latter just means that the State Congress can be artificially heavily tilted vs one party or the other.
an independent and officially non-partisan commission is imperfect, but will at least have constraints on it in that it needs to appear independent, unlike the brazenly partisan way things work now.
One of my favorite classes, Honors Government, actually worked like this - at the beginning of the term we were assigned 15 short essay prompts that were “due” in batches of 3 at equal intervals during the term. But, if we completed the essays early, we got (something like) +5 points out of a 25 possible points on each of the essays. You could also turn the essays in late and would get -5 points. Then there was a final exam with a total possible 50 points. I did all the essays the first 2 weeks of school, scored well, and didn’t have to take the final.
I will note that this was not a common grading scheme when I was in high-school; I graduated in 2000.
> We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have enough trouble keeping our own sane.
Assessing other peoples’ beliefs and ideas is, in my experience, one of the best ways to stay sane and learn. Ideas are ultimately independent of the people that hold them. I feel like it is people with unfounded ideas (religions, historically) that try mightily to stop other people from critically assessing them.
> Ideas are ultimately independent of the people that hold them
That's a nice thing to believe. I disagree.
The difference between good people and bad people literally is the things they believe. Nazis aren't born evil, they are made evil by naziism. Its not only OK, it's necessary to your survival to judge them by that metric.
Liberals I know are very aware that political affiliation doesn’t change your sexual preferences. We are just amused and saddened that the side that is continuously attempting to overturn gay marriage and openly believes that anything other than heterosexual relationships are immoral and an affront to god has so many practitioners of beautiful, homosexual love.
For years and years, I've seen Democrats wonder and/or speculate about how gay Republicans can be okay with all the people in the Republican camp expressing the views they do about homosexuality.
But I can't recall ever seeing anything like an attempt to ask them.
Feels like the perfect thread to re-link to my favorite card-trick movie - Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants. Not only is he a deft card manipulator, but he is a great story teller with a vast knowledge of magic history.
Ricky Jay was legendary, on the level of Houdini, and a gift to Hollywood as an adviser and occasional (but good) character actor. As good as he was at cards, he admitted others were better - but none beat him at throwing cards into targets. The man could probably have assassinated with a poison-laced deck, no lie.
He took on a young "partner" (mentored a student, but without admitting it), and presumably taught him much in his last years. Hopefully nearly all.
I think of ‘mass’ in the context of defining groups of things as just ‘a lot under the circumstances’. A mass gathering for an NFL game is 100,000 people; a mass crowd for a high-school JV basketball game is probably 100; a mass crowd for a 1 year old’s birthday is maybe 50. It’s relative to what is expected under normal circumstances. 4 people being shot or injured is a lot because nobody should be shot or injured.
this is again loaded language. the intent is to make things seem more severe than they were. the bombing of Nagasaki was a mass killing, shooting 4 people is a shooting with 4 victims, not a mass shooting.
Why are you so intent on the definition of "mass?" whether "mass" means 4 or 400, one "mass shooting" is one too many. Arguing about how many people are allowed to die in an incident before we do something about it does nothing to prevent this from happening.
I’d encourage you to do a bit more research. An entire state banned ghost guns and bump stocks following the CEO’s murder, just 9 days after it happened… and it was Democrats, as it always has been, that passed the law over majority Republican objection. You can find loads of articles about Democrats continuing to push for gun reform. https://bridgemi.com/michigan-government/gun-reforms-among-m...
Michigan has been trying to ban 3D printed guns for years before UnitedHealth CEO was murdered. That was just during the session and a coincidence, not cause.
Those same bulletproof thermostats are still sold everywhere. And are dirt cheap. I blame the consumer more than the producer for the proliferation of these products. This is one area where your options were never limited and you’d have to be a dunce and/or been paying zero attention to how tech companies have operated for decades to think these devices were not going to be made useless at a regular rate.
https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/2022/09/blood-clottin...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39354108/