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It’s where you’ll find Trump apologists who think he will willingly give up power rather than have to be forcibly removed.
agree, but that might go against freedom of the press.
FoxNews would not currently be allowed in my country as news on TV (but not newspapers) must attempt to be impartial. However, right wing politicians are trying to change that.
We would say that there is freedom of the press in our country. I think there should be more separation between news (should try to be impartial) and opinion (doesn’t have to be) and one should not be portrayed as the other.
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Welcome. Good to see you.
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Yes, the divide is growing, and becoming more polarized. There’s a survey somewhere out there, I think by Pew, looking at the trends in partisanship over time. It looked at approval of “own party” versus disapproval of “other party”. It showed that over the course of at least the last fifty years, the divide is widening.
Part of this is due to media emphasis on politics, especially in the digital age where any point of view a person holds can be easily found somewhere on the net, so confirmation bias is rampant and hard to avoid. It’s also somewhat due to the integration of identity elements into the political platforms. There’s a book out there titled “Uncivil Agreement” that gets into this some, and how “identity politics” has morphed into “politics as identity”. One of the points made is that there’s a pretty solid chunk of research that demonstrates that people don’t choose their political party based on their existing opinions, but rather they start there and then proceed to alter their opinions and beliefs to better fir the party with which they identify. It’s essentially tribal assimilation at work.
With respect to shared facts… That’s an interesting one. Frequently, the bare objective facts aren’t hugely in dispute (ignoring some of Trump’s idiotic pathological lies, and focusing on the aggregate swaths of humanity). More often, it’s the interpretations of those facts, and what those facts imply about the future that are in disagreement. It’s the inferred motivation behind those facts, the reason for the facts, and the meaning of those facts that is a source of contention.
As a completely run-through-the-wringer example… there’s no dispute about whether Clinton made a comment about the “basket of deplorables”. Everyone knows that she did. The disagreement isn’t about whether or not she said it (the fact), it’s about what she meant by it (the motivation) and the effect the comment had (the implication). Similarly, nobody disputes that a few members of Trump’s team met with Veselnitskaya in a hotel room. The disagreement is about the motivation and the implication of that meeting - whether it was evidence of intentional conspiracy with a foreign agent or whether it was run of the mill discussions about governing.
Again…
Additionally:
Jeez people. Yes, I mentioned that it coincided with protests. I ALSO mentioned that it coincided with restaurant and bar openings in a lot of places. Not everywhere, not every single instance. Just in aggregate. And I further conceded that the protests likely didn’t contribute, and acknowledged that my information was second hand.
What do you want? You want me to invent a time machine and go back and do it over again? Or perhaps we could all try reading the words as they’re written, with an open mind?
HI redprinceton!
Definitely agree with that. The two have become very entangled in the US, unfortunately.
So, you were wrong about it. Admitting is it the first step toward our taking you more seriously in the future.
Hey, here is some stuff I found on this place called “the internet.” If you hadn’t heard of it, I highly recommend checking it out.
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The Forbes one, since it wants payment after a few freebies (not unlike a drug dealer):
TOPLINE
Protests against systemic racism held in 300-plus U.S. cities following the death of George Floyd did not cause a significant increase in coronavirus infections, according to a team of economists who have published their findings in a 60-page paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research; these somewhat surprising results are supported by Covid-19 testing data in many populous cities where demonstrations were held.
Mostly masked protesters barricade the street with bikes and hundreds of people at City Hall, … [+]
IRA L. BLACK/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES
KEY FACTS
In the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s death, health officials expressed great concern that protesters, potentially yelling and shouting in very close proximity, would quickly spread the virus, which might lead to devastating outbreaks.
However, researchers found “no evidence that urban protests reignited Covid-19 case growth during the more than three weeks following protest onset.”
PROMOTED
In fact, they determined that, based on cellphone data, “cities which had protests saw an increase in social distancing behavior for the overall population relative to cities that did not,” leading to “modest evidence of a small longer-run case growth decline.”
The study’s lead author, Dhaval Dave of Bentley University, said, “In many cities, the protests actually seemed to lead to a net increase in social distancing, as more people who did not protest decided to stay off the streets.”
The study used newly collected data from 315 of the largest U.S. cities and documents that protests took place in 281 of those cities.
The authors prereleased the paper last week, and it has not yet been peer-reviewed.
KEY BACKGROUND:
The study’s conclusions are supported by Covid-19 testing data in many of the cities that were home to prevalent protesting. For instance, the Minneapolis Department of Health reported that more than 15,000 people were tested at centers set up in communities affected by the protests, and 1.7% of tests came back positive—below the statewide average of about 3.6%. According to the Washington Post, protest attendees in Minneapolis returned positivity rates of less than 1% and that “officials believe the low infection rates reflect that the protests were outside, that most people wore masks and that people spent most of their time in motion, circulating through the crowd.” NPR reported last week that parties—not protests—are believed to have caused coronavirus spikes in Washington. “We’re finding that the social events and gatherings, these parties where people aren’t wearing masks, are our primary source of infection,” said Erika Lautenbach, a local county Health Department director.
TANGENT:
Earlier this week, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy partly blamed increased coronavirus cases on protesters. “When I looked at that drone view of [Los Angeles], where it was almost a mile-long shoulder-to-shoulder of people, and they’re expressing, they’re vocal . . . and now we’re finding that’s the easiest way to transmit to one another, the long periods of time next to one another,” said McCarthy, a Republican who represents California. In the NBER paper’s abstract, the authors write, “We conclude that predictions of broad negative public health consequences of Black Lives Matter protests were far too narrowly conceived.”
CRITICAL QUOTE:
“When considering the results’ implications for the entire population: public speech and public health did not trade off against each other in this case,” the authors wrote in the NBER paper.
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The protests weren’t nearly the super-spreaders that the Trump rallies were.
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open mind about what? you downplayed our feelings on the election, downplayed our feelings on COVID, downplayed our feelings on 2020 in general, and claimed with no proof what so ever that it’s not Trump’s fault that the virus spread, and instead blamed the protests, even though Trump has basically used all his power to spread the virus.
What fresh Hell is this? I miss AO already. Infinite scroll, boooooh, I want ten posts per page.
Anyways, Trump sucks and is damaging our democracy because his feelings are hurt, and Trump supporters are going along with it because they don’t GAF about reality.
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same
inorite? I keep trying to scroll up to the top to go back to the prior forum level, before remembering I don’t have to.
Oh brother. 
Back to trolling, I see. I was hoping you’d at least pretend to argue in good faith on the new site. I didn’t expect it, mind you, but I did hope.
To be clear to the non-Helena-Lake posters reading this who might not be familiar with her posting style, the post of hers that I was responding to was:
I quoted that so that it would be clear what I was talking about, and I refuted it. Now she is ex post facto claiming that she was talking about restaurants.
Oh baloney, Twig. There’s no trolling involved here, and this selectively quoting only a portion and pretending the rest doesn’t exist is frustrating. I mentioned restaurants BEFORE I mentioned protests, in the very same quote that you’ve mentioned below. So I’m not ex-post-facto claiming anything except that I wrote what I actually wrote, rather than the snippet that you’ve reframed.
FFS, You have “quoted” the last line in there. While you simultaneously ignored the part directly above it which said:
And THEN when you mentioned that you didn’t think the protests made any difference, I even conceded that point by saying:
Hell, I even went so far as to acknowledge that my initial post was unclear when dr_t_non-fan decided that insinuations and dismissals were the way to go.
So yeah, your attack here is uncalled for and unfounded. And accusing me of trolling because you (and others) are busy selectively quoting only the parts of my posts that support your accusations is the height of dishonesty.
You concede just like Trump does.
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