Glenn Greenwald is a fucking nutcase

It's probably related to Amaris deleting and restoring her account, but I remember her calling for a violent revolution as well.

Yeah, if Joe Biden had *credible* rape accusations, the Republicans would be talking about it 25/8 instead of obsessing over Hunter. And there would be lawsuits and attempts to press any kind of charge that might stick, like there was with Clinton.

And you'd think a Communist would see that if Good Guy Stalin was willing to work with those monsters Churchill and Roosevelt against Hitler, working with whoever had the best chance of stopping Trump should be a no-brainer.

What is and isn't credible clearly depends upon who is accused. As I said, it was Me Too until Joe Biden was in the spotlight, and then it was "he was just being friendly," to the women who said he touched them, and "she can't be trusted" to the woman who said he raped her. Same thing the Republicans did when it came to Trump and to Kavanaugh.

You will believe what you want to believe, I can't change that. For some, they have to believe they didn't vote for a rapist. They have to maintain the illusion because the other option is to realize that they were both rapists, and one was chosen because he was a Democrat, and that his political leanings saved him from accountability, and they were part of that. People don't handle being complicit in someone else's pain very well, not usually.

For the last full month we have numbers, May, in the US 0.8% of the people who died of covid were vaccinated. And only 1.1% of the people who were hospitalized were vaccinated.

It's true that covid can be spread by the vaccinated due to the viral load of delta being 1000x greater than the original, but the vaccine is excellent at ensuring the worst outcomes aren't realized.

We don't shut down for every flu season, either.

If the situation changes, the actual policy experts and epidemiologists will alter their guidance.

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-941fcf43d9731c76c16e7354f5d5e187

Comparing COVID to the Flu?

Sounds pretty Trumpy to me. I'm sure it's different, though.

Isn't it a state-level decision anyway? I seem to remember Biden scolding Texas but not being able to stop their full reopening.

So the overall numbers going down, that's not trying?

Getting them out of the cages and into tents, that's not trying?

Giving them soap and toothbrushes, that's not trying?

We went over this before, just letting unaccompanied kids cross the border and go wherever they want isn't an option. Mall security wouldn't even let a kid wander around indefinitely if they couldn't locate that kids parents or guardians.

40 minutes is the short version.

Why is it a state level decision? Viruses cross borders because borders aren't real. The longer the US fucks around and does less than the bare minimum, the more people will die. The CDC can't decide whether masks are good or bad, or whether they should be enforced or just a suggestion. It's gross incompetence at best, and intentional malevolence at worst. Trump was excoriated for this, and Biden should be, too. It's inexcusable to let this continue as it has.

Locking them in cages is not a viable option. Keeping them in facilities where COVID runs rampant is not an option. That these kids are being separated before they reach the border is criminal. None of this had to happen. None of it, and it happened before Trump, he just made it worse, and Biden's not doing much better, but he's getting an awful lot of leeway by people who should be holding him just as accountable.

Remember, too, the whole reason they're here is because US foreign policy is to bomb the shit out of their homes and leave them with no recourse. They're here because we destroyed their lives.

Don't worry, I'll explain yet another basic principle to you, as so many have done so before.

Viruses with high death rates that people easily catch and there's no developed vaccine for are BAD. Epidemiologists don't like those, because they try to keep people alive.

Viruses with a vaccine that the death rates are very, very low aren't great, but they aren't worth shutting down the entire economy for. Because that ALSO kills people.

Do the least amount of harm.

Understand now?

Not for me. I despise Mike Pence, but if someone accused him of sexual assault I'd be skeptical of that claim as well.

We both grew churchy, we both know a bunch of people that were touchy-feely just like Biden without being malicious or rapey.

I looked at her claims with an open mind, and to me they didn't meet the basic burden of proof. I know there's no one way for a victim to behave, and I know that trauma can mess with a victims memory, but there was a combination of her inconsistent statements, the timing of her accusation, and her very specific idea of justice (drop out and give Bernie the nomination) that undermined her credibility for me.

To go one step further - the Trumpy version is "it's not that bad, keep it all open" in a situation where potentially millions would die and even those who recovered would need extensive medical care to do so (that "only" ~500k did die is DUE to them finally listening to advice and locking down). The Biden version is "we now have a vaccine and, whilst there will still be cases and even some deaths, it will be at a level that is manageable".

I'm aware "manageable deaths" has a horrific ring to it but we are simply NOT at the point in human development where we can stop viruses (or other causes of death) 100%. The OF stupid argument was "we accept A level of death from B, so why bother trying to do anything about C level of death from D?", when he refused to see that we HAD reduced A considerably (i.e. automobile deaths due to seatbelts, airbags, etc).

I'm personally not comfortable with the rate we are opening back up, but at least at the moment your government (not sure about mine!) is listening to the science. And accusing Demi of Trumpism (which is "never listen to the experts, my gut or the stock market will tell me what to do!") when he is giving an evidence-based rationale is, frankly, beneath you.

I assume the constitution?

What's your option again? Covid can run rampant in hotels too.

Indeed, it is criminal. If you're safe and sound in Mexico and you choose to break up your family and send your kids across the border by themselves leaving them in the hands of whoever happens to find them, you're a horrible fucking person and you deserve to beaten in the face and genitals.

Good. People. Don't. Abandon. Their. Kids. For. No. Reason.

The article talks about people from "Honduras, Haiti, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, southern Mexican states and other countries."
The US is bombing all those countries?

I despise Mike Pence, too, but if women came forward I would believe them. As for the people who are touchy feely, if it's without consent, it's still wrong, and it's unacceptable. Tara's claims were just as valid as any other woman's, and as for her timing, it was no different than when many other women have come forward with high powered figures. As for wanting Bernie to get the nom instead, would you want your rapist for president?

The US directly bombs mostly middle eastern countries because they dare to live on top of our oil. We back coups in Central and South America because they dare to nationalize their resources instead of sell them to us, and so when those countries buy our weapons and use them on their own people, yeah, we're helping to bomb them, too.

Who drove the Tara Reade story into the mainstream in the first place?

Glenn Greenwald.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/is-glenn-greenwald-the-new-master-of-right-wing-media

Guess the guy needs a gig these days. He is a constant on Fox ever since he quit the Intercept because they wouldn't publish his Hunter Biden hit pieces.

Genuine question.

You would believe a woman who came forward unconditionally?

Any woman giving any version of events?

Yeah, I would be that way too if I was one of the people who voted for a rapist in the last election. But I am not, and you did. Joe and Trump's victims have to live every day seeing the person who raped them as the leader of their country and the most powerful state in the world. That has to tell you something about how the world does not give a fuck about rape victims, and for all your big talk you still look the other way with the rest and really wish you could just ignore that fact.

Poke Poke motherfucker. At least this poke is virtual, imagine if I hads my hand up your skirt and pushed you up against the wall and violated your body with my poking and all you could do was run away, lose your career, and cry. That is what your bro joe did Mr. Biden Bro.

So is your position basically "believe all women, believe every accusation?" Because I'm sure I can get someone to make an accusation against you for the right price. I could even get a Z-list celebrity to record an accusation on Cameo for a few bucks. What happens then?

I agree, and I'm glad society is moving towards recognizing that. But that recognition is a fairly new phenomenon, especially between kids and the well-intentioned elderly.

No, not all criminal accusations are created equal. That's why we have courts.

I'd vote for my rapist over a guy that tried to literally murder me multiple times. A guy that once suckerpunched me when I was 20 wandered into a store I worked at years later, and I was relieved because there was also a creepy looking crackhead hanging around and I knew the punchy guy wouldn't hesitate to help me if the crackhead tried to rob the store. Harm reduction.

Every infection, even mild ones in vaccinated people, is another chance for the virus to mutate a trait that causes vaccine escape. NBD if it’s got mortality and morbidity numbers like the flu, but a pretty fucking huge deal if it has them like, well, COVID. The remasking guidance is late, but not wrong. Delta don’t care if you’ve been virtuous about public health and deserve a break. You’re not getting one. No one is.

There’s not much the fedgov can legally do except issue guidance and use the bully pulpit, but they’re doing the latter not at all, and the former too slowly and doing so, it really feels like, based on media coverage, which seems to be a few weeks behind the science, at least on Delta.

Delta is only flu-like for vaccinated people. But since vaccinated people can get and spread delta (contra WT and all the other current and former variants of concern), they’re just as much potential sources of a potential Mu or Nu or Xi variant which escapes the existing vaccines entirely. We’ve lost our chance at herd immunity through vaccines, at least until there’s a delta booster. We’ve mitigated the worst effects in the vaccinated, but we’ve lost this battle to contain it. Now we’re in a race between delta boosters that need to be EUAed and distributed worldwide, and the emergence of a Mu. If we lose that race, and Mu isn’t less damaging and lethal (which is a possibility, but not a reliable one), we’re back to March 2020, but with a populace totally unwilling to lock down, and probably not even to mask or social distance.

And yeah, this one (here) is on the Biden administration, not even the antivaxers. They should have blocked all travel from India as soon as delta was identified as a VoC (and any other country for any other VoC), and everywhere else it appeared. The state department is capable of issuing and retracting travel advisories for Americans on a day by day basis. No reason they can’t do the same for inbound travelers based on the latest science. Yet there’s travel restrictions from countries in Europe with 5x lower delta levels than Malaysia, which has no travel restrictions. They’re fucking up and dropping the ball to this day.

Yes, believe all women. You can believe that a woman is telling the truth and still wait for the evidence to support it. In the meantime, you don't give the accused more power and influence.

As for rest, I just cannot agree with your conclusions. That's pretty much how it will usually go here, which is why I don't like getting too far into it. It's all the same arguments ad nauseam. I know I'm not the only one who gets tired of that. @Diacanu does, and for good reason. What I believe is what I believe because I do dig deeper than just the surface level when it comes to politics, people, and community, and I believe that the current administration is still causing great harm, but now he has the blessing of the people who make the news.

So basically the same as trump, or perhaps worse?

You think you're Frank N. Furter, but you're Clayface.

To an extent. How long do you wait for evidence to be presented? Reade hasn't put out anything credible.

If a student accuses me of rape and says the evidence is forthcoming, it would be reasonable to suspend me from my job (and block any promotion applications) for 6 months, perhaps a year. If she still hasn't come up with anything after 2 years? Three?

How long is a person's life on hold while you wait to find out if the accuser was genuine or full of shit?

Can this lead to situations like Epstein, where accusers had to wait years before the evidence presented itself? Absolutely. But we also have a responsibility to ensure the accused is not punished pre-emptively. Innocent until PROVED guilty.

You would put a person's career aspirations on hold for what could be a malicious claim. If the guy IS a rapist, I wouldn't shed tears. But if he ISN'T, you've done him a grave injustice.

Working with women who have accused someone of rape should involve understanding and an indication that their claims are not being dismissed, but it should never trick women into thinking that - sans evidence or supporting claims - they will necessarily see the accused jailed or punished. Certainly not that the mere accusation will result in the accused being fired or prohibited from going about their life. That's not the way our justice system works or SHOULD work.

Not necessarily the case, as the research on a 3rd dose of Pfizer so far is very promising. Initial reports indicate that on average it quintuples the immune response of antigens from two, and they are testing how impactful that is on the delta variant already. There's supposed to be more information released on tomorrow's earning call.

And if that is the case then we will see public health officials and virologists respond to that situation, as opposed to denying such a situation exists. As to the 'totally unwilling to lock down', that's never been the case. Some areas won't, just as some groups won't get vaccinated.

At some point we have to continue on without them.

Considering vaccine breakthrough is only now beginning to be fully understood, that seems pretty judgemental. Even now, the vast majority of vaccine breakthrough is asymptomatic. The problem is the conclusion that just came out last weekk that the viral load is so high that it is still transmissable. That wasn't fully understood until literally two days ago.

As of April 30th 2021, per the CDC there were ~10,000 known breakthroughs of vaccinated people. That's out of a population of 101 million fully vaccinated at that time.

The problem is still one of vaccination.

And as the federal government doesn't have the ability to shut down individual states that refuse to adopt mass vaccination, that problem will continue.

This is a problem of too little federal power, not too much, as the morons on the right think.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7021e3.htm

You are acting like there wasn't a bunch of other options to vote for. We are not talking about throwing joe into prison, we are talking about electing him in the primaries. Let us not move the goal posts. Then after that it was voting for him for president which I still could not do. I could not vote for Trump either, but this still is not about throwing joe in jail for the accusations. We have better alternatives and they ran that shitbag because he wrangled that nominbation out of the DNC hands harder than Hillary ever did. At least Hillary didn't have people running around saying she raped them. Then again, neither did warren, Bernie, Harris, Buttgag, and everyone else. The dems tried to run Bloomberg for christ's sake. That dude competes with epstein and weinstein for rapey scumbag and they tried to pretend he was the only choice because they wanted a corporate puppet.


The Biden Bros equate not voting for him as president because we see he raped a woman, and convicting him in a court of law of rape. There is a reason courts require a lot more evidence, and there is a reason we should expect better from our presidential candidates.

People say my claims about what i have done are not reliable. If so, then I am not as bad a person as I claim to be and you should vote for me as president because you don't know I have ever been actually convicted of any crime. You are giving that same benefit to joe to forget about his entire past and any other history around the event so you feel better about electing a rapist to the presidency. But shit don't worry about it because the reality is we have probably had many rapist presidents. We just happen to know about Joe, Trump, and Bill.

You are the buzzing of flies to me. Perhaps I should call myself Vigo.

People knew of the accusations prior to said vote.

The fact that they disregarded them as unfounded and proceeded to give him the primary anyway, and then voted him into office, is not something you get to unilaterally overturn.

If you believe in democracy, that is.

And yes, I voted for Sanders in the primary.

But only idiots sat out this vote when the alternative was Trump.

Which was why Sanders campaigned and advocated for Biden.

I got double vaxxed, there's always hand sanitizer in my pocket, my keychain has one of those contact minimizing multitools on it, I'm still carrying a mask for public transit, indoor spaces, and anywhere outside that's too full of people for my liking. But I can't handle another lockdown. I'm declaring bankruptcy next week thanks to the first three.

I absolutely agree about travel bans, it's ridiculous how sloppy both Canada and the US have been about restricting travel from hotspots with variants. Canada had mandatory hotel quarantined for air travellers for a while, but it turned out Americans were taking Ubers across the border to get around them, and Alberta never signed on to the agreement that let the authorities impose fines for breaking those rules.

I voted Warren in the primaries.
What can I say? Nova convinced me.
But, Biden's policies are practically written by Warren anyway, so....

I wait until the evidence is presented. There's no rush, it's not like they even stopped momentarily to see whether Biden should continue or not, the same happened with Kavanaugh. The bastard just plowed right on through, and it was a done deal. Biden's president, so now we have a lot of time to go back and look, right? Oh, doesn't seem to be happening for some reason. As for Reade herself, women always have the onus put heaviest on them, they are dismissed almost immediately by people who like or sympathize with the accuser, and that is because our system is so intransigently patriarchal that it's easier for even a black man to be believed and actually *gain* power and influence than it is for any kind of woman to get the justice she would so richly deserve, so when you have a white man who already has a modicum of power, it becomes nigh on impossible to do anything other than watch as he ignores the accusations and the media helps him into office anyway.

That sounds exactly like the cartoonish "a single false accusation can destroy a man's life" scenarios that predatory men describe to justify refusing to take sexual assault and harrassment seriously in the first place.