there's not really a younger moderate D bench...beyond Mayor Pete I can't think of anyone.Once Pelosi, Shumer, Hoyer, et all final exit the scene, maybe the face of the Democratic party as it continues to move left.
Woke links
Moderators: Irish Mike, shutout, Jabbroni
evil gator » Mon Feb 15, 2021 4:40 pm
gatorbreeze » Mon Feb 15, 2021 4:43 pm
Guess it's a matter of perspective, but do you consider him a moderate? I don't know that much about him other than he was mayor of South Bend. Didn't follow him during the debates.there's not really a younger moderate D bench...beyond Mayor Pete I can't think of anyone.Once Pelosi, Shumer, Hoyer, et all final exit the scene, maybe the face of the Democratic party as it continues to move left.
" Dark humor is like food, not everybody gets it."...Joseph Stalin
evil gator » Mon Feb 15, 2021 4:46 pm
I know its all relative and the D party has moved left over the past 6 or so years, but he was one of the more moderate on the stage during the primary debates.Guess it's a matter of perspective, but do you consider him a moderate? I don't know that much about him other than he was mayor of South Bend. Didn't follow him during the debates.there's not really a younger moderate D bench...beyond Mayor Pete I can't think of anyone.Once Pelosi, Shumer, Hoyer, et all final exit the scene, maybe the face of the Democratic party as it continues to move left.
gatorbreeze » Mon Feb 15, 2021 4:50 pm
Good to know.I know its all relative and the D party has moved left over the past 6 or so years, but he was one of the more moderate on the stage during the primary debates.Guess it's a matter of perspective, but do you consider him a moderate? I don't know that much about him other than he was mayor of South Bend. Didn't follow him during the debates.
there's not really a younger moderate D bench...beyond Mayor Pete I can't think of anyone.
" Dark humor is like food, not everybody gets it."...Joseph Stalin
evil gator » Mon Feb 15, 2021 6:39 pm
it will be interesting to see if Yang can get elected as NY Mayor, there are 100 candidates. Business guys like Bloomberg have done well there.Not a Congressman (or involved in Biden's administration), but Andrew Yang seemed to have some interesting ideas. And of course, Tulsi Gabbard is popular among conservatives for speaking out against her own party now and again.
DocZaius » Wed Feb 17, 2021 4:48 pm
Long article, but good. A few excerpts:
Viewpoint on sex and gender: Has the New England Journal abandoned science for woke political correctness?
Quote Viewpoint on sex and gender: Has the New England Journal abandoned science for woke political correctness?
Two years ago, “Titania McGrath,” whose satirical Twitter account regularly skewers the ideological excesses of social-justice culture, suggested that “we should remove biological sex from birth certificates altogether to prevent any more mistakes.” The joke (obvious to those who follow the culture wars closely, but perhaps obscure to those who don’t) was directed at gender activists who insist that male and female designations “assigned at birth” are misleading (and even dangerous), since they may misrepresent a person’s true “gender identity”—that internally felt soul-like quality that supposedly transcends such superficial physical indicia as gonads and genitalia.
But the line between satire and sincerity has become blurry on this issue. [December 17], the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), widely considered to be the world’s most prestigious medical journal, published an article entitled Failed Assignments—Rethinking Sex Designations on Birth Certificates, arguing that (in the words of the abstract) “sex designations on birth certificates offer no clinical utility, and they can be harmful for intersex and transgender people.” The resemblance to Titania McGrath’s 2018-era Twitter feed is uncanny. Two of the authors are doctors. The third, Jessica A. Clarke, is a law school professor who seeks to remake our legal system so as to “recognize nonbinary gender identities or eliminate unnecessary legal sex classifications.”
The very idea of “a dichotomous sex-classification system” is dubious, the authors believe. And even if such a system were preserved, they write, it should be based “on self-identification at an older age, rather than on a medical evaluation at birth.” Sex designations on birth certificates, it is argued, “offer no clinical utility; they serve only legal—not medical—goals.”
On social media, where the NEJM article has attracted nearly 6,000 (almost uniformly negative) comments, many readers expressed disbelief that such a piece would appear in the same storied academic journal known historically for definitive, groundbreaking scientific papers on such subjects as general anaesthesia, the discovery of platelets, and the clinical course of AIDS. “I’m a pediatrician,” wrote one Oregon-based doctor. “The growth curves for male and female babies are notably different. Am I to just give up on tracking normal growth and development?”
And here we get to what has changed in recent years. Historically, scientific journalists and publishers worked within a professional milieu in which, with few exceptions, the judgments that mattered most were those rendered by other experts. But that’s now changed, thanks to social media. While the editors at such publications as Nature and NEJM may be excellent scientists, they also have the same appetite for praise and acceptance as everyone else. And if social media is telling them that a certain kind of article will mark them as enlightened, surely that will affect their choice of what to publish.
Not to mention, their choice of what to unpublish. On November 17th, Nature Communications published an article titled The Association Between Early Career Informal Mentorship in Academic Collaborations and Junior Author Performance, whose peer-reviewed results challenged the fashionable idea that same-sex mentoring arrangements help younger women. Needless to say, Twitter erupted in fury, leading to a slew of revisions that editors hoped would mollify critics. But that didn’t keep critics at bay. And so this week the article was retracted entirely, with the editors abjectly pledging to now “reflect on our editorial processes and strength[en] our determination in supporting diversity, equity and inclusion in research.” It’s hard not to read this as an admission that the publication will no longer even pretend to ignore ideological fashion in rendering its editorial judgments.
As for individuals who identify as transgender, their biological sex is typically not in any way ambiguous. A trans person is someone who is male or female, but who self-identifies as someone of the opposite sex—which, of course, they’re free to do, but which does nothing in and of itself to change their underlying biology.
In regard to trans individuals, the NEJM authors write:While I have no reason to dispute the statistics cited here, it is stunning that this kind of logic would be featured in a scientific journal. “Identity”—including “gender identity”—is a socially constructed phenomenon that says nothing about one’s biological sex. And while it has always been known that some individuals are affected by gender dysphoria, the idea that biology shall be superseded by self-conceived gender identity—not only in the social and legal spheres, but also in some quasi-scientific sense—is a novel claim that would have seemed bizarre to everyone (including trans activists themselves) just a few years ago. Twitter and Tumblr are full of people who insist on the truth of this claim, of course. But they generally do so as activists and moralists—not as scientists.Assigning sex at birth also doesn’t capture the diversity of people’s experiences. About 6 in 1,000 people identify as transgender, meaning that their gender identity doesn’t match the sex they were assigned at birth. Others are nonbinary, meaning they don’t exclusively identify as a man or a woman, or gender nonconforming, meaning their behavior or appearance doesn’t align with social expectations for their assigned sex.
evil gator » Wed Feb 17, 2021 5:07 pm
Yes, unfortunately science has become secondary - if you look at some of the March for science stuff it was anything but.
Quote
Panamag8or » Wed Feb 17, 2021 5:30 pm
When Titania is predicting the future, we're all screwed.
Quote
gatorbreeze » Wed Feb 17, 2021 5:55 pm
A long article from the science writer at Commentary Magazine on trusting science vs. the opinion of experts:
But when people admonish me to Trust the Science, what I hear sounds less like science and more like faith. All too often, the people appealing to science aren’t asking me to accept a certain scientific conclusion about how the world works. They’re asking me to accept their preferred policy prescription for how to change it. That’s because science can only describe the universe. It can tell us how the spike protein on the SARS-CoV-2 virus enables it to invade human cells. And it can help us design an mRNA vaccine that will teach our immune system to sniff out that protein. It can even tell us which groups are at greatest risk of dying from COVID-19. But it can’t tell us who deserves to be first in line for a vaccine. When health agencies employ complicated “social justice” yardsticks to decide whom to vaccinate, they are making a policy decision based on certain values. Telling people they should Trust the Science doesn’t make that policy any more scientific.
Right now, teachers in Oregon are insisting they won’t return to classrooms until in-person teaching can be justified by “science and data.” They’re right that major decisions should be informed by science. (And, in fact, studies show that classrooms are surprisingly safe.) But no study can tell us how much risk we should ask teachers to take on. Or how long we should keep children socially and educationally deprived. Those, too, are debates over values. “Science” alone can’t make those decisions—sooner or later, leaders have to make tough calls.
You’ll notice that most of the people telling us to Trust the Science aren’t scientists themselves. And what they call “science” typically isn’t a rigorous review of facts; rather, it’s an appeal to authority. They are telling us to trust the experts, experts who they want us to believe are all on their side. Now, trusting experts is generally a smart policy. I want expert researchers assuring me a vaccine is safe, and I want trained engineers to design the bridges I drive over. But science is not just the combined wisdom of experts. It is a process for discovering the truth through rigorous skepticism. In fact, the scientific method is specifically designed to challenge the authority of supposed experts. The brave early scientists of the Enlightenment knew that their discoveries—even the intellectual tools they used to make their discoveries—were a threat to authority. They were daring to contradict the church, the king, and the received wisdom of the ages.
Even in our era, scientists often find themselves going up against some hardened consensus. In the 1980s, Australian medical researcher Barry Marshall believed ulcers were caused by a bacterial infection, an idea most experts found laughable. Unable to get his research published, Marshall finally drank a broth containing the suspect bacteria, developed a raging case of gastritis, and proved his point. Marshall and his partner received the Nobel Prize, and since then millions of ulcer sufferers have found relief through antibiotics.
The story of Marshall’s stomachache shows that it is not expert opinion that matters most in science; it is evidence. Scientific consensus is not based on the prestige of the scientists who hold a certain opinion, but on the facts that convinced them. These days, when advocates for certain policies instruct you to Trust the Science, they aren’t usually thinking about outsiders like Marshall challenging the conventional wisdom. They are telling you to accept their version of consensus. They want you to believe that “the science is settled.”
But science is never completely settled. During this pandemic, some researchers presented evidence about alternative treatments for the disease, or doubts about China’s claims concerning its source. Almost immediately, the overseers of our digital platforms began affixing labels to those posts, warning readers that such inquiries might be “misinformation.” Of course, today we know that some of the most dangerous misinformation about COVID-19 (especially concerning how easily it spreads) initially came from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control.
Often it is the people supporting the most controversial—and counterfactual—policies who most vociferously insist they have science on their side. The ACLU recently weighed in on the issue of transgender girls competing against biological females in high school sports. During puberty males grow taller and develop stronger bones and bigger muscles. No amount of later hormone therapy can erase those advantages. But the ACLU insists that concerns about former males competing against girls are “discriminatory, harmful, and unscientific.” With slapdash disregard for both grammar and logic, the group pronounced: “There are no set of hormone ranges, body parts, or chromosomes that all people of a particular sex or gender have.” In other words, since defining male or female can be tricky in rare outlier cases (such as intersex people) there is no meaningful difference between the sexes. Girls have nothing to fear from bigger, stronger former boys competing on their track teams. It’s science!
But the people promoting transgender athletes aren’t really basing their views on science. They are expressing a value—that transgender people should be fully accepted—and then recruiting “science” to give that moral sentiment some extra weight. Values like tolerance are wonderful things, but they aren’t science. Science describes the world as it is, not as someone thinks it should be. Lately, some transgender advocates have gone beyond simply claiming science is on their side and have tried to bully scientists into agreement. Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage reveals how activists have worked to silence and banish medical experts whose research doesn’t support the latest transgender orthodoxy..
Read the rest here: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/arti ... e-science/
Quote But when people admonish me to Trust the Science, what I hear sounds less like science and more like faith. All too often, the people appealing to science aren’t asking me to accept a certain scientific conclusion about how the world works. They’re asking me to accept their preferred policy prescription for how to change it. That’s because science can only describe the universe. It can tell us how the spike protein on the SARS-CoV-2 virus enables it to invade human cells. And it can help us design an mRNA vaccine that will teach our immune system to sniff out that protein. It can even tell us which groups are at greatest risk of dying from COVID-19. But it can’t tell us who deserves to be first in line for a vaccine. When health agencies employ complicated “social justice” yardsticks to decide whom to vaccinate, they are making a policy decision based on certain values. Telling people they should Trust the Science doesn’t make that policy any more scientific.
Right now, teachers in Oregon are insisting they won’t return to classrooms until in-person teaching can be justified by “science and data.” They’re right that major decisions should be informed by science. (And, in fact, studies show that classrooms are surprisingly safe.) But no study can tell us how much risk we should ask teachers to take on. Or how long we should keep children socially and educationally deprived. Those, too, are debates over values. “Science” alone can’t make those decisions—sooner or later, leaders have to make tough calls.
You’ll notice that most of the people telling us to Trust the Science aren’t scientists themselves. And what they call “science” typically isn’t a rigorous review of facts; rather, it’s an appeal to authority. They are telling us to trust the experts, experts who they want us to believe are all on their side. Now, trusting experts is generally a smart policy. I want expert researchers assuring me a vaccine is safe, and I want trained engineers to design the bridges I drive over. But science is not just the combined wisdom of experts. It is a process for discovering the truth through rigorous skepticism. In fact, the scientific method is specifically designed to challenge the authority of supposed experts. The brave early scientists of the Enlightenment knew that their discoveries—even the intellectual tools they used to make their discoveries—were a threat to authority. They were daring to contradict the church, the king, and the received wisdom of the ages.
Even in our era, scientists often find themselves going up against some hardened consensus. In the 1980s, Australian medical researcher Barry Marshall believed ulcers were caused by a bacterial infection, an idea most experts found laughable. Unable to get his research published, Marshall finally drank a broth containing the suspect bacteria, developed a raging case of gastritis, and proved his point. Marshall and his partner received the Nobel Prize, and since then millions of ulcer sufferers have found relief through antibiotics.
The story of Marshall’s stomachache shows that it is not expert opinion that matters most in science; it is evidence. Scientific consensus is not based on the prestige of the scientists who hold a certain opinion, but on the facts that convinced them. These days, when advocates for certain policies instruct you to Trust the Science, they aren’t usually thinking about outsiders like Marshall challenging the conventional wisdom. They are telling you to accept their version of consensus. They want you to believe that “the science is settled.”
But science is never completely settled. During this pandemic, some researchers presented evidence about alternative treatments for the disease, or doubts about China’s claims concerning its source. Almost immediately, the overseers of our digital platforms began affixing labels to those posts, warning readers that such inquiries might be “misinformation.” Of course, today we know that some of the most dangerous misinformation about COVID-19 (especially concerning how easily it spreads) initially came from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control.
Often it is the people supporting the most controversial—and counterfactual—policies who most vociferously insist they have science on their side. The ACLU recently weighed in on the issue of transgender girls competing against biological females in high school sports. During puberty males grow taller and develop stronger bones and bigger muscles. No amount of later hormone therapy can erase those advantages. But the ACLU insists that concerns about former males competing against girls are “discriminatory, harmful, and unscientific.” With slapdash disregard for both grammar and logic, the group pronounced: “There are no set of hormone ranges, body parts, or chromosomes that all people of a particular sex or gender have.” In other words, since defining male or female can be tricky in rare outlier cases (such as intersex people) there is no meaningful difference between the sexes. Girls have nothing to fear from bigger, stronger former boys competing on their track teams. It’s science!
But the people promoting transgender athletes aren’t really basing their views on science. They are expressing a value—that transgender people should be fully accepted—and then recruiting “science” to give that moral sentiment some extra weight. Values like tolerance are wonderful things, but they aren’t science. Science describes the world as it is, not as someone thinks it should be. Lately, some transgender advocates have gone beyond simply claiming science is on their side and have tried to bully scientists into agreement. Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage reveals how activists have worked to silence and banish medical experts whose research doesn’t support the latest transgender orthodoxy..
Read the rest here: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/arti ... e-science/
" Dark humor is like food, not everybody gets it."...Joseph Stalin
evil gator » Wed Feb 17, 2021 6:24 pm
Yeah good article. A number of people say they love science but so many times are the worst when confronted with facts that contradict their biases.
Also scientists tend to be extremely specialized in a very narrow area, and don’t understand how their small piece fits into the real world and how policy works. When they dabble it’s generally a disaster. I say this as someone with a ms in science who did science for a long time and now does policy. Policy is complicated and difficult
Quote Also scientists tend to be extremely specialized in a very narrow area, and don’t understand how their small piece fits into the real world and how policy works. When they dabble it’s generally a disaster. I say this as someone with a ms in science who did science for a long time and now does policy. Policy is complicated and difficult
DocZaius » Thu Feb 18, 2021 5:45 pm
Slavery reparations could have reduced Covid infections and deaths, Harvard study says
Quote A Harvard study has claimed that slavery reparations could have reduced the Covid-19 death toll of Black Americans, who have been disproportionally affected by the virus.
The study, a collaboration between researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice, looked at how reparation payments would have affected coronavirus transmission in Louisiana.
The state was chosen as it was one of a few areas in the US that reported coronavirus cases by race from the start of the pandemic in March 2020, and because the population is still “highly segregated” between Black and non-Black residents, according to the study.
The researchers compared the start of the pandemic in Louisiana to the same period in South Korea, which the study said was chosen because it does not have a “large, segregated subgroup of the population composed of the descendants of enslaved persons.”
Researchers studied the figures for the average amount of people a person spread Covid-19 to in both areas, while accounting for social structures, behaviour and other risks.
They made their comparison by using a model that would pay $250,000 (£180,278) in reparations per person and $800,000 (£576,948) per household and compared the first two months of the pandemic in both areas.
The model found that Louisiana fared much worse in tackling the pandemic, and claimed that if reparations had been introduced in the state before the virus hit the US then the coronavirus transmission rate would have been reduced.
The study found that reparations would have lessened the equity gap between white and Black people in Louisiana, causing the Covid-19 transmission rate to be reduced from 68 per cent to 31 per cent for residents of all races.
Research from the Centres of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has found that Black communities, alongside Native American and Hispanic people, are four times as likely to be hospitalised than white Americans from Covid-19.
Dr Eugene Richardson, an assistant professor of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School, explained to CNN in an email that the reason for the higher proportion of Black people contracting coronavirus is because of structural racism.
Black Americans are overrepresented in jobs that carry more risk during the pandemic as they are customer-facing, such as health care and food service.
The study claimed that reparations would have narrowed the wealth divide between White and Black Americans, which would have caused greater similarities in figures of racial groups working in front-line roles.
“These risks are structural - that is, not determined by personal choice or rational assessment,” Dr Richardson wrote about contracting Covid-19.
“Our study simply gives yet another example of how racism gets into people’s bodies and makes them sick, which can be added to this litany (of evidence for reparations),” Dr Richardson added.
Civil Rights advocates have long argued that reparations should be paid to descendants of slaves to help tackle the inequalities faced by Black people in America.
On Wednesday, the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties will host a hearing to discuss the creation of a commission that would explore reparations for Black Americans.
The subcommittee will discuss HR 40, also known as the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, which was first introduced in 1989.
If it is passed, the commission would “examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies.”
Since the start of the pandemic, Louisiana has recorded more than 420,000 coronavirus cases and at least 9,325 deaths.
According to Johns Hopkins University, there are now more than 27.7 million people who have tested positive for the coronavirus in the US. The death toll has reached 488,081.
evil gator » Thu Feb 18, 2021 6:10 pm
I guess you could come up w other things that would help- like less draconian lockdowns and economic opportunity which would improve access to healthcare
Quote
evil gator » Fri Feb 19, 2021 6:04 pm
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.refine ... size-women
Articles like this show up in my feed because I like to look at clothes but there is so much in this, yeesh
Quote Articles like this show up in my feed because I like to look at clothes but there is so much in this, yeesh
Irish Mike » Tue Feb 23, 2021 4:17 pm
Cisgender, toxic boy!Jesus, wtf is that. I have gotten really shitty looks from women when I've taken my son to target and he loudly says that those toys aren't for him when passing the girl section. Sorry, my son identifies as a boy.
evil gator » Tue Feb 23, 2021 7:29 pm
https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/illin ... arjackings
Increases in carjackings aren’t due to people who have lost their jobs due to Covid shut downs - it’s because of a game
Quote Increases in carjackings aren’t due to people who have lost their jobs due to Covid shut downs - it’s because of a game
Juggs » Tue Feb 23, 2021 7:57 pm
And my daughter wants nothing to do with the boy aisle.Jesus, wtf is that. I have gotten really shitty looks from women when I've taken my son to target and he loudly says that those toys aren't for him when passing the girl section. Sorry, my son identifies as a boy.
That this nonsense even gets attention shows fucked we are. Instead of woke bitches trying to change policy, we should just let the children make it.
MoralityULack » Tue Feb 23, 2021 8:45 pm
Both contribute actually.https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/illin ... arjackings
Increases in carjackings aren’t due to people who have lost their jobs due to Covid shut downs - it’s because of a game
evil gator » Tue Feb 23, 2021 8:52 pm
The game has been around for a long time; it’s gone up lately because people are out of work
Quote
DocZaius » Thu Feb 25, 2021 11:15 am
Biden’s DOJ withdraws support for suit against Connecticut’s transgender athlete policy:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... eting.html
Quote https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... eting.html
DocZaius » Thu Feb 25, 2021 6:51 pm
Mr. Potato Head now identifies as non-binary:
https://apnews.com/article/mr-potato-he ... 57be41a9d8
Quote https://apnews.com/article/mr-potato-he ... 57be41a9d8
