2020 Elections

[writingprof]

You would have a better argument  if:

1.  The GOP actually did anything about abortion.

2.  The GOP demonstrated that it was more pro-life than pro-birth.  Even before the pandemic, thousands of Americans have died owing to bad GOP policies wrt health care, living wages vs trickle down economics,  wealth inequality,  3d world conditions, etc.  Really, it would.

With regard to number one, what could they do that they haven't done? Many states have passed laws limiting the number of abortions, only to see those laws tossed out by the Supreme Court. Thus, conservatives and their political representatives in the GOP have embarked on a decades-long project to remake the judiciary. It is hard work. It is hit-or-miss given the vagaries of the selection and confirmation processes. It will probably amount to nothing. But the idea that they haven't "actually done anything" is ridiculous.

With regard to number two, blah, blah, blah, shut up. One needn't embrace soft-Marxist policy proposals to be pro-life. Surely you know  that's progressive propaganda, right?

[pgher]

You would have a better argument  if:

1.  The GOP actually did anything about abortion.

2.  The GOP demonstrated that it was more pro-life than pro-birth.  Even before the pandemic, thousands of Americans have died owing to bad GOP policies wrt health care, living wages vs trickle down economics,  wealth inequality,  3d world conditions, etc.  Really, it would.

With regard to number one, what could they do that they haven't done? Many states have passed laws limiting the number of abortions, only to see those laws tossed out by the Supreme Court. Thus, conservatives and their political representatives in the GOP have embarked on a decades-long project to remake the judiciary. It is hard work. It is hit-or-miss given the vagaries of the selection and confirmation processes. It will probably amount to nothing. But the idea that they haven't "actually done anything" is ridiculous.

With regard to number two, blah, blah, blah, shut up. One needn't embrace soft-Marxist policy proposals to be pro-life. Surely you know  that's progressive propaganda, right?

On item 1, what SHOULD be done is to treat abortion as an unfortunate health outcome to be avoided at almost any cost. Prevent unwanted pregnancies and you won't have as many abortions. Unfortunately, the same politicians who oppose abortion also oppose birth control of any sort: pills, condoms, education.

[mahagonny]

here are a couple of observations:

Professors Robert Sampson and
Stephen Raudenbush combined objective neighborhood video footage with
survey data to identify the predictors of perceived danger and disorder. Their
results showed that as the concentration of minority groups increased within a neighborhood, local residents of any race or ethnicity perceived greater disorder,
even after controlling for the actual level of disorder shown in carefully analyzed
video observations.

Interesting that residents, regardless of ethnicity, perceived greater disorder based on the same factors.

Concentrated patrol activity in high crime neighborhoods reinforces the message that these are dangerous places
simply by the repetition of that label. And that label provides convenient
shorthand not only to carry out patrols but also to use police discretion to take
actions in those places—especially stops and misdemeanor arrests.

This is puzzling, because it's not clear what the alternative is. More frequent patrols in high-crime neighborhoods are intended to deter crime and to allow quicker response when it occurs. Does this comment suggest that by having fewer patrols in high crime areas  that crime would be reduced?

I can't understand the mathematic formulas. I give up on that. I'll take my whips for being a limited-education forumite. I'm damn good at my job though.

Unless I missed it, the study doesn't seem to delve much into the interaction between the civilian and the policeman in the encounters except to say police should know more about mental illness and where possible, know ahead of time when a 911 involves a mentally ill person. Sure, makes sense. How people act when they are apprehended is a factor in how things play out. If people say 'he had his hands up and said please don't shoot' and the media reports it when in fact it didn't happen that way, it doesn't persuade me to talk about implicit bias and race. Then too some are not mentally ill, but drunk or high, and maybe belligerent. Some are both.
When the police apprehend you and you're doing something wrong, you're going to see them as the enemy, because they are. Doesn't matter what color you are. Intelligent parenting would mean telling your kids 'don't let this happen to you.' Not 'the cops hate you because of the color of your skin.'
And again, not that the study doesn't uncover something, but the breakdown of the family is the worse culprit.
Perhaps police could meet more with these neighborhood folks, off duty, make friends, and develop a feeling of working together. Fund the police, but differently.

[jimbogumbo]

here are a couple of observations:

Professors Robert Sampson and
Stephen Raudenbush combined objective neighborhood video footage with
survey data to identify the predictors of perceived danger and disorder. Their
results showed that as the concentration of minority groups increased within a neighborhood, local residents of any race or ethnicity perceived greater disorder,
even after controlling for the actual level of disorder shown in carefully analyzed
video observations.

Interesting that residents, regardless of ethnicity, perceived greater disorder based on the same factors.

Concentrated patrol activity in high crime neighborhoods reinforces the message that these are dangerous places
simply by the repetition of that label. And that label provides convenient
shorthand not only to carry out patrols but also to use police discretion to take
actions in those places—especially stops and misdemeanor arrests.

This is puzzling, because it's not clear what the alternative is. More frequent patrols in high-crime neighborhoods are intended to deter crime and to allow quicker response when it occurs. Does this comment suggest that by having fewer patrols in high crime areas  that crime would be reduced?

I can't understand the mathematic formulas. I give up on that. I'll take my whips for being a limited-education forumite. I'm damn good at my job though.

Unless I missed it, the study doesn't seem to delve much into the interaction between the civilian and the policeman in the encounters except to say police should know more about mental illness and where possible, know ahead of time when a 911 involves a mentally ill person. Sure, makes sense. How people act when they are apprehended is a factor in how things play out. If people say 'he had his hands up and said please don't shoot' and the media reports it when in fact it didn't happen that way, it doesn't persuade me to talk about implicit bias and race. Then too some are not mentally ill, but drunk or high, and maybe belligerent. Some are both.
When the police apprehend you and you're doing something wrong, you're going to see them as the enemy, because they are. Doesn't matter what color you are. Intelligent parenting would mean telling your kids 'don't let this happen to you.' Not 'the cops hate you because of the color of your skin.'
And again, not that the study doesn't uncover something, but the breakdown of the family is the worse culprit.
Perhaps police could meet more with these neighborhood folks, off duty, make friends, and develop a feeling of working together. Fund the police, but differently.

I assume every forumite is educated, but in very different things. I'm confident I'd suck at whatever you teach.

I don't have any answers to the questions you an marshwiggle pose. I've just watched enough cities burn after truly awful events that I know something has to change. The Watts riots (multiple times) did not happen in a vacuum. Nor did Detroit, LA after Rodney King, Memphis, Tulsa and on and on and on. We can't continue to do a Vonnegut and go on with "and so it goes".

I think any rationale human would agree with your concluding statement.

[Nightshade]

Washington Post publishes audio and transcript of Trump's call to Georgia officials in which he tries to get them to subvert the election results:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-raffensperger-call-transcript-georgia-vote/2021/01/03/2768e0cc-4ddd-11eb-83e3-322644d82356_story.html?.

Highlights (I'm leaving out chunks of the discussion):

"Well Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong."

"I won this election by hundreds of thousands of votes. There's no way I lost Georgia. There's no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes."

"Mr. President, the problem you have with social media, they — people can say anything."

"Oh this isn't social media. This is Trump media . . . So what are we going to do here folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break."

Have just listened to ALL of this disturbing audio. All should listen/read. I'm going to read the transcript now.

[writingprof]

You would have a better argument  if:

1.  The GOP actually did anything about abortion.

2.  The GOP demonstrated that it was more pro-life than pro-birth.  Even before the pandemic, thousands of Americans have died owing to bad GOP policies wrt health care, living wages vs trickle down economics,  wealth inequality,  3d world conditions, etc.  Really, it would.

With regard to number one, what could they do that they haven't done? Many states have passed laws limiting the number of abortions, only to see those laws tossed out by the Supreme Court. Thus, conservatives and their political representatives in the GOP have embarked on a decades-long project to remake the judiciary. It is hard work. It is hit-or-miss given the vagaries of the selection and confirmation processes. It will probably amount to nothing. But the idea that they haven't "actually done anything" is ridiculous.

With regard to number two, blah, blah, blah, shut up. One needn't embrace soft-Marxist policy proposals to be pro-life. Surely you know  that's progressive propaganda, right?

On item 1, what SHOULD be done is to treat abortion as an unfortunate health outcome to be avoided at almost any cost. Prevent unwanted pregnancies and you won't have as many abortions. Unfortunately, the same politicians who oppose abortion also oppose birth control of any sort: pills, condoms, education.

Please identify the congressional Republicans who oppose birth control--not, mind you, those who merely oppose the government paying for everyone's birth control.

[kaysixteen]

Random thoughts:

The GOP has been telling us for years, just vote for us and we'll get rid of abortion.   Long before Trump,  SCOTUS regularly had conservative majorities appointed by GOP presidents, and for a goodly percentage of the 21st century,  both houses of congress were in GOP hands during Repub  administrations.  And yet Roe remains.   A few easy votes taken in red states by conservative politicians,  to pass abortion restrictions that never are going to get upheld by SCOTUS, which BTW those politicians know, and also BTW most of these laws are never even accepted for review by SCOTUS, won't change that.  Fool me once, shame on you.   Fool me repeatedly over 40 years,  shame on me.

2.  Rick Santorum opposes birth control.  Mesuspects he ain't the only one, some of whom are likely still in office.  Such opposition, after all, remains the official position of the RC church.

3.  Cut the crap wrt meaningless and baseless accusations  of my supposedly being a 'Marxist ', neo or otherwise.  (And of course this term, especially in its 'neo 'guise, is one of the most ill- and wrongly-used conservative canard of the Age of Trump).  If you say you are 'pro-life' but support taking food stamps away from children,  allowing the Walmart of the world to foist off the wages of their employees onto the taxpayers  by virtue of paying them so little that they qualify for welfare,  showing blithe disregard for proper responses to deadly  pandemics, etc etc etc, I don't want to hear this self-satisfying smug lie.  Really, I don't,  and not wanting that doesn't make me a Marxist.

[mahagonny]

3.  Cut the crap wrt meaningless and baseless accusations  of my supposedly being a 'Marxist ', neo or otherwise.  (And of course this term, especially in its 'neo 'guise, is one of the most ill- and wrongly-used conservative canard of the Age of Trump). If you say you are 'pro-life' but support taking food stamps away from children,  allowing the Walmart of the world to foist off the wages of their employees onto the taxpayers  by virtue of paying them so little that they qualify for welfare, showing blithe disregard for proper responses to deadly  pandemics, etc etc etc, I don't want to hear this self-satisfying smug lie.  Really, I don't,  and not wanting that doesn't make me a Marxist.

Of course, at the same time, if the self-identified pro-life conservative academic chooses to he can point out that the nerve center of the liberal democratic-voting world, higher education, also wants to foist off the problem of underpaid 'temporary' faculty by sending them to food stamps & medicaid, while the tenure track and administration hoard job security, promotions, money and health insurance for themselves. Nobody who is in a position to change things is fighting over that. Throw some good money around, and the liberal bleeding hearts and the callous right wing nut jobs will be shaking hands and pouring champagne.

Unvarnished truth, everyone is pro-life. Here and there.

[mahagonny]

Jimbogumbo,

I have one answer. Tenured faculty are not worried about new improved anti-racist teaching mania because they won't lose their job over it. If it becomes a serious enough thing, requiring actual change of classroom technique, assignments, etc. they'll go along with it, because they will be making a lot of money in trade for their principles.

Washington Post publishes audio and transcript of Trump's call to Georgia officials in which he tries to get them to subvert the election results:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-raffensperger-call-transcript-georgia-vote/2021/01/03/2768e0cc-4ddd-11eb-83e3-322644d82356_story.html?.

Highlights (I'm leaving out chunks of the discussion):

"Well Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong."

"I won this election by hundreds of thousands of votes. There's no way I lost Georgia. There's no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes."

"Mr. President, the problem you have with social media, they — people can say anything."

"Oh this isn't social media. This is Trump media . . . So what are we going to do here folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break."

Have just listened to ALL of this disturbing audio. All should listen/read. I'm going to read the transcript now.

BUMP

Intimidation is hard to prove, but we know it when we see it.

[writingprof]

If you say you are 'pro-life' but support taking food stamps away from children,  allowing the Walmart of the world to foist off the wages of their employees onto the taxpayers  by virtue of paying them so little that they qualify for welfare,  showing blithe disregard for proper responses to deadly  pandemics, etc etc etc, I don't want to hear this self-satisfying smug lie.  Really, I don't,  and not wanting that doesn't make me a Marxist.

Ah, yes. You can't oppose abortion unless you adopt the appropriate anti-Walmart posture. Also, you couldn't be against the Holocaust unless you supported a full-employment program for European Jews.

[marshwiggle]

Concentrated patrol activity in high crime neighborhoods reinforces the message that these are dangerous places
simply by the repetition of that label. And that label provides convenient
shorthand not only to carry out patrols but also to use police discretion to take
actions in those places—especially stops and misdemeanor arrests.

This is puzzling, because it's not clear what the alternative is. More frequent patrols in high-crime neighborhoods are intended to deter crime and to allow quicker response when it occurs. Does this comment suggest that by having fewer patrols in high crime areas  that crime would be reduced?

I can't understand the mathematic formulas. I give up on that. I'll take my whips for being a limited-education forumite. I'm damn good at my job though.

Unless I missed it, the study doesn't seem to delve much into the interaction between the civilian and the policeman in the encounters except to say police should know more about mental illness and where possible, know ahead of time when a 911 involves a mentally ill person. Sure, makes sense. How people act when they are apprehended is a factor in how things play out. If people say 'he had his hands up and said please don't shoot' and the media reports it when in fact it didn't happen that way, it doesn't persuade me to talk about implicit bias and race. Then too some are not mentally ill, but drunk or high, and maybe belligerent. Some are both.
When the police apprehend you and you're doing something wrong, you're going to see them as the enemy, because they are. Doesn't matter what color you are. Intelligent parenting would mean telling your kids 'don't let this happen to you.' Not 'the cops hate you because of the color of your skin.'
And again, not that the study doesn't uncover something, but the breakdown of the family is the worse culprit.
Perhaps police could meet more with these neighborhood folks, off duty, make friends, and develop a feeling of working together. Fund the police, but differently.

I assume every forumite is educated, but in very different things. I'm confident I'd suck at whatever you teach.

I don't have any answers to the questions you an marshwiggle pose. I've just watched enough cities burn after truly awful events that I know something has to change. The Watts riots (multiple times) did not happen in a vacuum. Nor did Detroit, LA after Rodney King, Memphis, Tulsa and on and on and on. We can't continue to do a Vonnegut and go on with "and so it goes".

I think any rationale human would agree with your concluding statement.

Here'a another quotation from the report about the methodology:

While the Washington Post database reports the race of the decedent, some decedents were missing a racial identifier. To determine the race or ethnicity of those decedents, we applied a verified and commonly used method that assigns the probability of a person being a particular race or ethnicity using census data. The U.S. Census Bureau used self-reported race or ethnicity data to compile a list of over 160,000 surnames occurring 100 or more times from the 2010 Census. Combining these names with the self-reports of race and ethnicity, the Census Bureau computed the probability of a person living in the United States with that name being white, Asian, Black, Latinx, or Native American or Pacific Islander. For each of these racial or ethnic groups, we coded the classifications at three levels of probability: 60%, 75%, and 90%. Persons whose names did not meet the 60% threshold for any of the population groups were coded as missing on the race or ethnicity variable. Accordingly, our main estimates of race and ethnicity effects for decedents used the 60% classification threshold.

Unfortunately they don't say (or I couldn't find) any indication of how much of the sample had their race identified this way. A 60% threshhold means that the identification of race for some portion of the sample was slightly more reliable than a coin toss.  Assuming the identification was unbiased, then since white people make up a much bigger proportion of the population, there are going to be many more white victims identifed as black than the other way around. So comparing the number of apparently black victims to the proportion of the population that is black is going to overerestimate  them, and comparing the number of apparently white victims to the proportion of the population that is white is going to underestimate  them.

Without knowing how much of the sample this applies to makes the error margins completely unknown. It would be very helpful if they did a re-analysis using ONLY the people whose race was clearly identified in the data.

[histchick]

Washington Post publishes audio and transcript of Trump's call to Georgia officials in which he tries to get them to subvert the election results:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-raffensperger-call-transcript-georgia-vote/2021/01/03/2768e0cc-4ddd-11eb-83e3-322644d82356_story.html?.

Highlights (I'm leaving out chunks of the discussion):

"Well Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong."

"I won this election by hundreds of thousands of votes. There's no way I lost Georgia. There's no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes."

"Mr. President, the problem you have with social media, they — people can say anything."

"Oh this isn't social media. This is Trump media . . . So what are we going to do here folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break."

Have just listened to ALL of this disturbing audio. All should listen/read. I'm going to read the transcript now.

If you haven't seen it yet, you should also take a look at Gabriel Sterling's point-by-point rebuttal to all of the liar-liar-pants-on-fire disinformation that's out there about this election.  I'm in Georgia, and very proud of the way the Secretary of State's office is handling all of this.  Hope these folks get a much-deserved vacation very soon. 

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/04/953321408/georgia-election-official-dont-let-misinformation-suppress-your-own-vote

[Sun_Worshiper]

Glad to say that it looks like Dems will win the Senate, as the red mirage in favor of Perdue continues to evaporate. Republicans deserve to lose for their Trump-era embrace of hatefulness in many forms, authoritarianism, and dishonesty. This should be a hell of a wake up call.

[mahagonny]

Glad to say that it looks like Dems will win the Senate, as the red mirage in favor of Perdue continues to evaporate. Republicans deserve to lose for their Trump-era embrace of hatefulness in many forms, authoritarianism, and dishonesty. This should be a hell of a wake up call.

I'd say both parties deserve to lose, but I'm satisfied enough to see the less shitty of the two get a break this time.

Black Americans who think they are going to be rolling in clover once we figure out how to get a handle on controlling racism in all its forms are in for a surprise; whereas, some of the ones who've already figured out they have way more significant problems that can/must be worked on by they themselves (read: opportunity knocks) or in fact never really thought much of how the system is holding them down, have been increasingly voting republican, and still more will, and the democratic party will deserve that. My prediction.
Trump has got to go, no question. He's walking chaos. But he wasn't wrong about everything, and his influence will be felt. Hopefully the better parts of it.

[writingprof]

I'm pretty dispirited, which should be a good sign for most of you. The problem is not the losses but that conservatives can't agree on the cause. Half the party blames Trump; the other half blames the GOP for "betraying" Trump. (How, exactly?) I suppose every party does this after every lost election, and of course the Democrats had their own too-progressive-not-progressive-enough argument after losing a few House seats. But the current Republican chaos is of a more lasting kind.

My only consolation is that the filibuster will not be nuked, new states will not be added, the Court will not be packed, and Biden will govern mostly by executive order, Senate "control" notwithstanding. Am I wrong?

Finally, now that he's won, can't we just concede that Raphael Warnock is a terrible, racist, anti-American bozo?