Does it represent both sides of the controversy equally or is it only nitpicked facts?
I hate the guy as much as anyone. My wife was crying. It was a shock.
The DNC could have examined why they lost the key swing states by the thin margins they did in a deep, meaningful way. But that would have required acknowledging mistakes made by their highly paid political consultants and their own power brokers. But who wants to be the person to admit they screwed up and lost to a tangerine/chicken strip/cheetoh?
"Nah, let's just blame the Russians. They hacked our emails, they put out ridiculous lies on social media..... yeah, that's it.... the Russians and dumb morons who believed them."
At that moment, the party that has always defended civil liberties, always fought censorship by the right wing theocrats, suddenly decided it was just too dangerous to have uncensored speech. They pointed the finger at Twitter and Facebook, and threatened them. They whipped up the tech employees, making them feel responsible for the tangerine, when it was their own horror show of a primary process that doomed them.
What's really weird is that if you think about it, the people who they think need curated, safe, censored information are the people who voted for Obama in 2012, but voted for Trump in 2016, or stayed home. They think their own voters in 2012 are too dumb to weed out misinformation themselves.
We will find out soon, since these protests were vastly larger than the ones against the lockdown (you remember how the media talked about how dangerous those ones were due to covid19, but immediately ignored that when the protest was something that they personally support). Yeah, the virus doesn't care whether your protest is journalist approved.
I know you know that, and I'm wondering if you think the protests are going to cause a large spike in infections?
I don't expect anyone will be able to definitively identify the effect of protests in the context of imminent or continuing reopening of much of the country.
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
The one admittedly lagging indicator that I'm watching is hospitalized cases.
So far that's ok, and ideally you could possibly have an increase in positive cases throughout a population without more hospitalizations if high risk people isolate themselves. But yeah, hope it doesn't go sideways.
Here's something to think about - total cases for the world were up about 2% yesterday. US cases were up a little over 20K. If US cases were increasing at the average rate of the whole world, it would have been closer to 40K. Similar story in Europe, but more so; there more than half of the new cases are in Russia. So considering Western Europe, the epidemic has been greatly reduced and is growing elsewhere.
What's happening very quickly is that Asia and South America are now having a disproportionate amount of the new cases, even with China, Japan and S. Korea reporting almost none. And the spread is happening in countries where the testing capacity is relatively low.
If the lockdowns had had no effect, I can't see how to explain the dramatic shift over the last month in where the new cases are.
The general reaction of authorities to the epidemic seems to me very similar to an immune reaction. You have a strong initial reaction to an infection, and then it moderates. Earlier is better, but either too much or too little can kill you. Once it is slowed, you can go back to a relatively normal metabolism.
And yes, I think it helps Trump. I think the rioting will help him, and the extreme viewpoint of defunding police that BLM is pushing will help him.
If I see Biden get above 50%, I will rest easier, but not seeing it.