Glenn Greenwald is a fucking nutcase

It's nothing like that at all, because I took the time to add nuance.

Loved Liz, I would have been thrilled to get her. She was definitely my 1A to Bernie's 1.

Biden was about my 6th choice in the primaries, but I appreciate the fact he has a talented staff and lots of institutional knowledge. So far I've been pretty happy.

But then, I didn't expect magic faerie dust to descend on everything. Hell, they are still trying to pry away some of Trump's people in protected positions.

I'm up against a coworker for a promotion. The day before the announcement is made his work spouse goes to management and says "Ray got handsy with me at the 2014 or 2015 charity pub night, I don't have any evidence or witnesses and I'm not gonna go to the cops, but he's a creep and doesn't deserve a promotion. Maybe it was 2016, possibly at [Redacted]'s birthday party at a different pub."

If you're the HR manager, do I lose out on that promotion? Am I out of the running for any promotions until the laws of this reality change and I'm able to clear my name by proving a negative?

If I'm the HR manager, I'm going to send it out for investigation, and no one gets the promotion until further information comes along. Unfortunately, I'm not the HR manager, and what happened was the CEO called down to HR and said that it was baseless, despite Ray having touched other women inappropriately, and having become handsy with children on camera to their discomfort. Ray's just an affable guy who grew up in a different era.

No further information is ever coming along.

By your own standards you're not allowed to consider if the timing of the accusations suggests my accuser might be lying to help their work spouse.

By your own standards you're not allowed to consider if any vagueness or inconsistency in my accusers testimony undermines her credibility.

The position remains unfilled forever? Ray's career is stalled for the rest of his life?

I think you Yanks better have your Civil War Part II now, while Biden still has access to the nuclear codes.

No, the position does not remain unfulfilled, I pick someone who has no accusations against them. Sounds messy, but then to accept your scenario, I'd have to believe that women just step forward and accuse men as if their lives aren't going to be destroyed by it. The person who really pays for all of this? Your co-worker's wife, who will be seen as a whore, and if you're rich and important enough, an attention seeking one who just wanted to become famous and take down someone she didn't like.

You'll still win because another company saw you, liked your moxy (and doesn't care about sexual harassment), and will hire you anyway. It worked for all the people I mentioned earlier.

Great, so my career is derailed indefinitely! Everybody wins!

If you're going to believe that a woman would never make a false accusation because it might negatively affect her life, then why doesn't it logically follow that no one would ever commit any crime for that same reason?

Let's pare it down - it's precisely because this is an emotive subject that folk feel differently.

If someone falsely accuses me of embezzlement without evidence, I wouldn't be having my entire life put on hold. And embezzlement can ruin the victims' lives just as badly.

We absolutely have to address the culture that stops women coming forward because they won't be believed, but we CANNOT do that by wrecking the lives of the accused prior to any trial. That is presumption of guilt, and it CANNOT fly.

On that particular aspect, a bit better. I don’t imagine Biden is pressuring the CDC directly, just letting it be pressured by the media. But as far as outreach to the people directly, Biden is light-years ahead of the Trump admin. Light-years.

You work from the erroneous assumption that I believe without question, when what I said was that I can believe she's telling the truth, while also waiting for evidence to support it. Seriously, your position is "she might lie to keep me from getting the job," and so I have to wonder what would be in it for her, because it's for her husband, not herself, and because she will be ostracized, dragged out into the open, and it will create a mess and for what? So you don't get a promotion at work? Your scenario is fraught with so many issues, namely that you work from the position that she has the advantage of lying, when in truth it will hurt her severely whether you get the job or not.

Tara Reade came forward, she had come forward before he was running for President, and was ignored. She came forward when he was running for President and was dismissed by the very same people who railed at Trump for saying Christine Blasey Ford was lying. As I said, there was more history on Biden than there was on Kavanaugh, and yet Tara is the one who is dismissed.

The problem is that presumption of guilt usually falls on the woman, because she was either asking for it, she just wants attention, or some other ulterior motive. Our system rewards men who behave badly, and punishes the women who come forward. I know you're saying that, I'm just explaining why I will accept what a woman says as the truth, and then I will wait for the evidence. @14thDoctor takes that as an interminable amount of time, but that requires living in a vacuum, and that simply isn't plausible, because women who come forward and present no evidence of any kind are eventually sussed out. In Tara's case, she presented her information, and corroborated it. She was still dismissed, despite there being smoke around Biden's past behavior with women, as I indicated above, and despite the head of the Time's Up legal defense fund being in Biden's employ, which should have raised a number of eyebrows and didn't seem to garner much problem.

It was absolutely essential that any criticism against Joe Biden be quashed quickly, even though those same media outlets had talked about it a year before his run. Some of you bought into it, others never gave it much consideration. The truth is that Tara Reade deserved at least as much credibility as Christine Blasey Ford, and yet she was summarily dismissed. Some of you (general you) are okay with this, and clearly some of you can live with it. That's your prerogative, but I don't have to pretend any of it is at all fair to Reade, or that Joe Biden's history indicates that he is above sexually assaulting a woman. Tara Reade had everything to lose, just as Monica Lewinsky had everything to lose. Lewinsky's only now recovering, and people still joke and why? Because Bill Clinton was a Democrat, and for some reason that's just a little bit different when the accusations start flying.

This implies that women come forward to get men. While I do realize that happens, I do not accept it as a basis for all women and all situations. It simply does not work.

You say you don't believe without question, but you also say you're willing to believe while waiting for evidence. What happens when that evidence never comes? At what point to you stop believing, if any? I don't recall Reade producing any evidence beyond her own inconsistent testimony and a recording of her mother calling in to Larry King to vaguely refer to "issues" that Reade had previously claimed didn't go as far as actual assault, but you claim to still believe her.

I actually had a coworker in the past that was demoted from a supervisor position after one of his team members accused him of inappropriate behavior. He had a meeting with her about her poor performance and was in the process of giving her a written warning, she turned around and claimed he propositioned her without providing any evidence. There was no way to prove or disprove it, but his career suffered anyway. And conveniently that written warning was taken off her record, despite him having more than enough documentation to justify it.

But no, women would never lie. Only men are foolish or evil enough to do crimes.



And I'm honestly on the fence about CBF, I feel like Kavanagh's own insane, overly partisan, and weirdly emotional testimony should have been enough to disqualify him in and of itself. "Drinking game" my ass, Brett.

You don’t stop believing, hold on to that feeling.

You have anecdotal evidence as to how it can be used as a weapon, and yes, that is a problem.

What I'm saying is that I will believe the claim until shown otherwise, whether it come in evidence against the accused, or recanted by the accuser.

As for Tara, all of that information is out there, and I sure as hell am not going to rehash it, but yes, I believe her having read her case, read up on the evidence, and then watched as the political machine railroaded the fuck out of her, I didn't miss that one, either.

As for CBF, I believe her. A man who can and did get blackout drunk has no reliable testimony when around alcohol, and yes, his behavior alone should have been enough to disqualify him from the highest court in the land.

Can we split off the "Biden is a rapist!" shit, and merge it with the last "Biden is a rapist!" thread?

You don't have to, I'm done. It's just a rehash anyway.

And if you're willing to act according to that presumption of guilt, you've eliminated any need for a trial. It's guilty until proven innocent. That's completely unacceptable.

Don't worry about it, we're doing 1/6 in the hate crime thread.

No, I don't assume he's guilty, I just don't assume she's lying, and that's all I'm going to say on it.


(Sorry, @Diacanu, promise last one.)

That was today: https://s21.q4cdn.com/317678438/files/doc_financials/2021/q2/Q2-2021-Earnings-Charts-FINAL.pdf

There won't be an EUA before late August, and then it's probably 3 months of 65+ or 60+ recipients only. And they still haven't tested its efficacy in preventing spread by vaccinated people, just in vitro antibody levels. The race is still on as long as unvaccinated people can spread it, even (maybe especially) if they don't get sick at all.

They haven't done any clinical studies on the delta-specific booster yet, so that's even further off unless they can convince the FDA that it's similar enough to the existing vaccine. Given they're not touting that in the earnings report, I think that's unlikely at this point.

San Francisco had the best county-wide compliance nationwide. Even my super-cautious, vaccinated-ASAP friends are so fatigued that that they're back to dining indoors. Compliance with indoor masking requirements in businesses is low and dropping. Employees don't care, despite SF still having an indoor mask mandate, and a 1254% increase in daily new cases over the last month (6/19-7/20 7-day "rolling averages" that are really trailing averages. The following 3 days are 50% higher on top of that, and if the numbers don't change -- they pretty much only go up if they do -- 7/23's trailing average will be 1433% above 6/23's), already higher than last summer's peak. I'm really pessimistic that another lockdown will be obeyed even here. And that's in, again, the county with the best lockdown compliance.

Maybe a little judgmental. But it was always a possibility and far from unheard of. Natural selection certainly favors that kind of evolution.

Pre-delta. It was 0.1% of cases in early April, 1.3% of cases in early May. Starting May 1 CDC stopped tracking breakthrough infections unless they resulted in hospitalization or death (again with the media pressure to create a nice vaccination-virtue narrative). And there have been several times as many breakthrough hospitalizations for COVID and deaths from COVID since 5/1 as 1/1-4/30, 4072 vs 706 for hospitalizations, and 849 vs 132 for deaths. We know delta is around 60% more infectious than what was spreading before (actually somewhat higher, but we can cancel out the non-alpha spread then with the non-delta spread now, so we'll stick with 60%). We can't just cross-multiply; there's a large time-series bias. Instead we'll look at approximate vaccinated person-months. To simplify, we'll assume that 101 million people got their shots linearly over 1/1-4/30, and 60 million got them linearly from 5/1 to 7/19. So there were 202 million vaccinated-person months ((101 million*4)/2) in which there were 10,262 breakthrough infections. Since then we've had 349.77 million vaccinated person-months (101M*2.67 + (60M*2.67)/2), which means we should expect only 73% more breakthrough hospitalizations and deaths. Instead we have 476% more breakthrough hospitalizations and 543% more breakthrough deaths. Even if vaccinated people weren't more susceptible to delta than previous variants, that'd extrapolate to ~83,500 breakthrough cases since May 1, vs the 10,262 reported 1/1-4/30. Granted, that's still got a few assumptions, but they're largely reasonably and some of them cancel, so it still tells us the direction we're going in and about how fast. And that doesn't even consider asymptomatic vaccinated people who never get tested but still spread and potentially mutate the virus, a non-factor pre-delta.

If Pfizer-3 is super effective in vivo or if Pfizer-delta gets approved soon. But those haven't come to pass yet, so no, right now it's the race between the next vaccine and the next mutation. We're going full tilt towards the former (good!) (assuming states would mandate it), but we've only just today started taking measures again to slow down the latter (real bad), measures which while necessary, will really piss people off, especially vaccinated people, and they probably won't be followed nearly as well as before.

EDIT: figured out the ambiguous math.

You've not really answered my question.

Would you unconditionally accept the word of any woman making any accusation under any circumstances, no matter how unrealistic?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_without_a_difference

Per WebMD:

In the United Kingdom, which is collecting the best information on infections caused by variants, the estimated effectiveness of the vaccines to prevent an illness that causes symptoms dropped by about 10 points against Delta compared with Alpha (or B.1.1.7).

After two doses, vaccines prevent symptomatic infection about 79% of the time against Delta, according to data compiled by Public Health England. They are still highly effective at preventing hospitalization, 96% after two doses.

Out of 229,218 COVID infections in the United Kingdom between February and July 19, 28,773 — or about 12.5% — were in fully vaccinated people. Of those breakthrough infections, 1,101, or 3.8%, required a visit to an emergency room, according to Public Health England. Just 474, or 2.9%, of fully vaccinated people required hospital admission, and 229, or less than 1%, died. (Did the math, that's 0.7%)

Source: https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210726/breakthrough-cases-rising-with-delta-heres-what-that-means

So this is specifically on Delta, and those numbers really back up what the CDC is saying right now. Mask, vaccinate, but we don't need to shut down. Mortality rate overall in the US is 1.8% right now, breakthrough Delta is 0.7%. In the UK, mortality is at 2.2%, so being vaccinated is 1/3rd less likely to die, and much less likely to get infected in the first place. So that's a significant drop.

If those numbers change, I fully expect their guidance to, because the current POTUS isn't a sociopath and won't interfere.

We do need to do a better job of tracking Delta here, but we are dealing with 50 systems, not 1, like a nation with centralized universal health care is.

That really should change.

As to how we'll handle another lockdown if needed, no clue. It may be that different places suffer different levels of lockdown fatigue. There is a certain reason to think that people who have been on lockdown longer are the ones most wanting to go forward without it if possible. In my area, people are resigned, but LOTS of folks would prefer to not be in the office. The big issue here is schools. And while I want an overabundance of caution, there's data out of several European school systems that indicated that they weren't large scale transmission vectors.

Anyone with the same two initials is usually a cunt of some sort or another.

Glenn Greenwald.

Lex Luthor.

Federal Farmer.

Anyone who uses the phrase "liberal orthodoxy" is automatically dismissed. Anything said after that is bullshit propaganda and I aint listening to it.

Peter Parker?

Spiderman is a whiney little shit teenager. Except in the comic books.