Hi Nate, I want to add the perspective of a foreigner regularly reading the news media in the US and the liberal blogosphere.
I live in Chennai, India. I think the American media is heavily narrative-driven; and creates an echo chamber as bad the ones liberals decry at conservatives. The difference is that it is pretty obvious to see through conservative propaganda, but harder for liberals themselves to see that they are being propagandized.
During the second wave of Covid that hit India (Delta), the American and British media started insinuating that Covid numbers were being fudged by the Indian government under Modi. Many methodologies were used to show that the expected death rate was diverging from the actuals.
However, it was obvious to someone like me reading these news stories that the Western media did not actually directly make the claim that the Indian central government was cooking up the numbers. This is because Indian central government does not count deaths in India (the same as in the US). States and municipalities do, and these are not under the control of the Indian central government.
In order to believe that the Indian central government was doing this, you would have to believe that the thousands of municipalities around India were somehow collaborating with Modi. To anyone who actually lives in India, this kind of collaboration is impossible, given that many of these local bodies are run by political parties in opposition to Modi's BJP.
Once the Western media started these carefully worded articles on the death number conspiracy theory, I could see that the liberal blogosphere jumped in to connect the dots. I could see articles and comments throughout that Modi was spreading "misinformation" on Covid in India.
I live in India and the capability of the central government to spread any such misinformation is very limited.
This two-step of the western media writing essentially a narrative about India; and the liberals following these to their logical conclusion has occured repeatedly, in the coverage of India in the past 4 years. This has become such a din of complete misinformation on the country, that it has managed to convince congressional representatives such as Ilhan Omar into stepping into the conflict between India and Pakistan on Pakistan's side.
I have thought about the motivations here - back in 2016, when Trump was elected, I remember that the western press tried to make it part of a pattern across the world. They identified "right-wing populist" take overs in various parts of the world; and in order to make the case, claimed that Modi was the Indian Trump, a right-wing populist.
However this made no sense, because (unlike Trump) Modi had been a politician throughout his life and came into power in the central govt after serving office in his home state. You have to search hard in his policies for populism.
The terms "right-wing" or "left-wing" do not have the same meaning in India that they do in American politics. Modi's BJP actually has the biggest labor union in India affiliated to it. Some of the worst laws on free speech in India (section 66A of Information technology Act, 2008) which led to arrests of citizens for online speech were actually done BEFORE Modi's party came into power - these were passed by the "left-wing" government in power then (now in opposition).
Most politics in India occurs in the states, and to interpret all policies of the central government solely through these ideas of left-wing and right-wing classification does not make sense in India.
The rot is so deep in this kind of propaganda, that last month I was reading a book on Amazon by author Brad Strong, and the article interpreted Indian small merchants opposition to Amazon as due to "Hindutva politics of Modi". It was clear that he had no idea what he was talking about, but hoped to impress his readers.
With conservatives, I believe it is easy for reasonable people to see that their media is far out; but liberals live in an equally well-propagandized environment in the US, but have no idea themselves.
During the Iraq war, around 2004, a cleric named Mohammed Sadr came into prominence. When I used to read NYT or Washington Post, I noticed that this cleric was always mentioned with an adjective - "the radical cleric Mohammad Sadr". I wondered what made him "radical", but it was clear that he was opposed to the US occupation.
Last year I was reading again about Iraq, when Sadr was mentioned again in the Washington Post. I saw that the newspaper now wrote "The influential cleric" Sadr.
What made him "radical" then and "influential" now is not his actual policies, but the way the reporters in liberal newspapers wanted to represent him in the minds of liberal readers. This is propaganda, of course, but it is hard to detect.
Just coming to this comment, but your central claim is completely unfounded. It is true that there were valid allegations of the governments fudging covid numbers in India. And even though the deaths were tracked by the state government, a lot of these state governments do have BJP in power.
Gujarat naturally was the best example of this. Here is an Indian Express report (not an American newspaper) which cites this very statistic.
"With conservatives, I believe it is easy for reasonable people to see that their media is far out; but liberals live in an equally well-propagandized environment in the US, but have no idea themselves."
This is not exactly a reasonable claim.
Do most conservatives really think Fox News and Breitbart are hyperbolic exaggerations, designed to bolster policy proposals, and discount it appropriately?
Does a liberal like Nate really see through the information that confirm his own biases and motivated reasoning? Especially if it's got the right aesthetics of rationality and individuality, but not enough context to reach conclusion.
Even if there was a completely accurate source of news, would it be beyond scrutiny as "propaganda" by people who'd rather have their own "alternative facts" be the basis for policy?
People have different values, and ascribe different value to news that informs them about the consequences of different policies.
Very few people are going to agree what should be the headline of the New York Times.
Even fewer people are capable of being held to the scrutiny when they get it wrong about value and importance and possible consequences.
The elephant in the room is climate change coverage. The bias and hyperbole on the effects are off the scale. .
The NYT and CNN bias and distortions of the truth - are probably unmatched by any other mainstream outlet on any other subject.
They scan the world for anything occupancies that can be linked to climate change - never giving the long term trends - which often ( nearly always) tell a completely different story.
I won't fully disagree with your view that media sometimes exaggerates or draws links that aren't fully founded. But, I'll accuse you of the same. Your statement that it's off the scale is hyperbole of it's own, and there really is good reasons to believe that recent wildfires and higher global temperatures have a link. The way that's explained is sometimes really poor.
At the same time, your insistence on focusing on deaths declining in the last 100 years is a far more obvious case of distortion. The amount of effort that has been intentionally put into reducing that number is enormous, and to think it has signal quality of the risk created by the actual weather patterns is ridiculous. So, why have you held on to that statistic that obviously has no value to this conversation if not to exaggerate it's importance to the conversation?
Your other points have similar flaws. Wildfires higher 20 years ago.. only data source you linked (https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters#wildfires) shows that yes, 2006-2023 the trend is pretty flat.. but what about a comparison to 1980. 600% of the acreage. That kind of cherry picking is a weird to bring to a discussion about wanting less bias.
I think it's also unfair to throw all of these topics into the same bucket. Media narrative has not been the same for all of them:
Hurricanes: More powerful hurricanes, not more hurricanes. Generally resisting the narrative that any particular hurricane can be linked to climate change. Yes, there's some exceptions to that generality.
Wildfires: Yes, the narrative is that they are made more likely and severe, and that we probably would not have the experiences we're having without climate change. I consider that accurate though.
Flooding and Drought: Yes, this is usually represented as linked. It should be. But it's a hard story to tell properly. What's important here isn't the absolute trend in floods and droughts, but in that the patterns for them are changing and overloading preparations made. If you prepare for a flood in one place, and a drought in another, and the patterns switch such that you now see a flood where you didn't prepare for it, it doesn't matter that the place you prepared for a flood didn't get one.
The ignorance of severity is not limited to someone with a Right leaning bias. When I teach statistics I point out that the increased likelihood of earthquakes because of fracking kind of misses the point because these more frequent earthquakes happen in the middle of nowhere and don't seem to amount to any real increased risk of major danger. Increased risk of "minor damage" is a weak reasoning point to shut the whole thing down as many anti-fracking opponents would want. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/earthquake-hazards/science/hazard-estimation-induced-earthquakes
The damage caused by earthquakes (As referenced in the Signal and the Noise) and I suspect hurricanes are to be found on a power law curve and more severe occurrences is really the only measure of things that will matter in terms of destructive outcomes.
Someone already pointed this out but the fire statistic is misleading. Global surface area burned by fire has declined according to satellite data, but this is also human-caused and has potentially negative environmental repercussions due to the change in ecosystem for those regions experiencing this decline. The decrease in global fires has been near the equator where humans are preventing fires from burning newly settled land. So far, this has outweighed the *increase* in risk of fire posed by man-made climate change (which especially impacts northern climates), but they are two separate trends and combining them actually obfuscated many meaningful trends. Does the NYT care more about the fact that grassland in Africa is being burned less or that New Yorkers need to spend a day inside due to decreased air quality caused by wildfires? One of those things is absolutely more relevant to their reader base, and is also being caused by climate change.
I don't think deaths from natural disasters is the best metric here, I assume we've gotten a lot better at building infrastructure and responding to prevent deaths caused by these events. If you look at economic damages it paints a much different picture. The deaths one is just what this website shows by default.
But I think the issue here is much bigger than this. The entire group of climatologists/meteorologists/etc who have spent their lives studying this topic are telling us about this. You look at one chart and feel comfortable disregarding entire fields of scientific study? Have you read a single paper about the issue?
"The entire group of climatologists/meteorologists/etc who have spent their lives studying this topic are telling us about this. "
Telling us about what? Notably they aren't telling us about storm frequency, that is the punditocracy that has taken off with that one, so firstly, are you sure what you've been hearing is actual scientific opinion or pundits' ignorant takes on same?
More basically: well of course the entire group of climatologists are telling us about climatology. Similarly Oncologists tell us about Cancer (but also probably Climate Change these days but I digress).
Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their attribution to human influence, has strengthened since AR5 (Figure 2.3). It is virtually certain that hot extremes (including heatwaves) have become more frequent and more intense across most land regions since the 1950s (Figure 2.3), while cold extremes (including cold waves) have become less frequent and less severe, with high confidence that human caused climate change is the main driver of these changes. Marine heatwaves have approximately doubled in frequency since the 1980s (high confidence), and human influence has very likely contributed to most of them since at least 2006. The frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation events have increased since the 1950s
over most land areas for which observational data are sufficient for trend analysis (high confidence), and human-caused climate change is likely the main driver (Figure 2.3). Human-caused climate change has contributed to increases in agricultural and ecological droughts in some regions due to increased land evapotranspiration (medium confidence) (Figure 2.3). It is likely that the global proportion of major (Category
3–5) tropical cyclone occurrence has increased over the last four decades. {WGI SPM A.3, WGI SPM A3.1, WGI SPM A3.2; WGI SPM A3.4; SRCCL SPM.A.2.2; SROCC SPM. A.2}
The page is interactive you can put any disaster in and choose the effect.
I don't agree deaths are not an important metric - I thing they are the most important .
You are missing the point anyway . I am not arguing warming is not man made .
This is about media bias - after a bushfire occurrence the left wing media tell us the world is " on fire" - the truth is the trend is down - the omit that , because they want to distort and obscure the truth. The same is true for all the other disasters - they are not increasing -
The scientist don't say what the left wing media says they do - and probably what you think they do,
You are also presumably confusing predictions for the future and actual facts and evidence for things that have occurred.
They don't tell you deaths are down 97% because they don't want you to know that -
It is harder to sell climate change as an existential threat - when deaths are at an all time low and falling.
The media doesn't tell you that deaths are down 97% is because it is wildly misleading as a measure of the rate and severity of natural disasters. Food systems and medicine have come a long way since the 1931 Wuhan flood.
You are just picking this one metric that reinforces your view and claiming you have the real "facts and evidence". You don't think the scientists studying this issue have looked at empirical data about natural disasters in their analysis? Come on.
If you want to do your own research, I'd recommend scholar.google.com, which lets you search through academic papers.
About the media, when you use phrasing like the media "doesn't want us to know" or things like that, I think you are totally off base. It sounds like you are posing some grand conspiracy which is just not how these things work in reality. I'm not saying the media is perfect but If the media is biased towards anything its clicks.
I would encourage you to link a specific article and point to a specific false or misleading claim.
But the point is not whether ACC is an "existential" threat or not. (Any one outcome is highly unlikely.) The issue is what's the cost benefit analysis of any specific measure aiming at slowing down and eventually reversing CO2 accumulation. The typical news item is largely irrelevant to that issue.
Great point. Malcom Gladwell just released a podcast about how the decrease in murders might be hiding a significant consistency in number of gunshot wounds... because we are better at trauma treatment.
The website you cited does not agree with your conclusions:
Over the past 30-35 years we notice three general trends in the charts below (although there is significant year-to-year variability):
on average, the annual number of wildfires has not changed much;
on average, the total acres burned has increased from the 1980s and 1990s into the 21st century;
the combination of these two factors suggest that the average acres burned per wildfire has increased.
If you actually go through those categories, it seems like the storms ARE becoming more severe, on average. The biggest indicator is the cost in terms of % of GDP.
The data seems aligned with the picture that NYT and CNN are painting.
As far as acres burned, I don’t know what you’re looking at to come to such a conclusion. The graph on the site you link has a significant increase since 1983:
I finally found a NASA source for the negative trend of yearly global percentage burned (https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/90493/researchers-detect-a-global-drop-in-fires). It’s good to look at the actual source instead of climate denier Bjorn Lomborg, whose citation links always seem to be his own tweets. There’s a reason he doesn’t link the actual articles. For instance, the link above includes the following quote:
“Climate change has increased fire risk in many regions, but satellite burned area data show that human activity has effectively counterbalanced that climate risk, especially across the global tropics,” Morton said. “We’ve seen a substantial global decline over the satellite record, and the loss of fire has some really important implications for the Earth system.”
On the other hand, after a decade of countless non-profits and non-partisan media coverage suggesting we need enormous consumption taxes on carbon, Democrats were forced by democracy to take a policy route a lot closer to what Jim Manzi proposed in Cato over a decade ago. The main lesson of Nate's bell curves for conservatives and centrists is that voting Republican, not complaining about media bias or expressing yourself on Twitter, is the strongest thing you can actually do to shape policy choices.
Just feels like this opinion has only sprouted up now because you've been arguing with people about covid orgins, and then you went searching for reasons to back up your current feelings. I guess the question that I would ask is, has the main stream media taken on liberal biases or has the political right in America become so detached from reality that previously uncontroversial facts are now seen as "liberal"?
Nate does desperately want to say "I was right" about something that's inherently unknowable. So much in fact, he'd rather form coalition with other folks who are applying motivated reasoning to propagate policies and narratives Nate should otherwise disagree with.
If Nate wanted to get closer to the truth, he should be badgering the CCP.
It's interesting to understand why he doesn't, and who he directs his ire at instead.
Maybe a little bit of both, but it depends on the topic (as Nate says). The mainstream media, reflecting progressive obsessions, is generally insane on issues relating to race and gender, because the reporters generally share progressives’ insane views on those topics. On other topics, the media is much closer to reality and conservatives are the wierdos.
It depends what you mean by conservative. A majority of conservatives don't support outright abortion bans, but like the ideological capture of the Dems on matters of race and gender, it seems to always be the extremists which manage to push forward their policy agenda.
Then there is Ukraine and America's penchant for Forever Wars. Don't get me wrong- the West was quite right to support Ukraine after Russia invaded, but let's not forget that the invasion was provoked. Let's not forget that it was the NATO assertion that Ukraine and Georgia would inevitably join NATO at the Bucharest summit which caused the Russo-Georgian war back in 2008, and the current conflict could have been easily avoided if the concessions suggested in the Minsk Accords had gone forward.
And Ukraine is a relatively mild example of the Neocon mindset which now infects the Democratic Party. No less than seven US lead coup attempts in Africa, in eighteen months- many against democracies- pushing the whole of Africa towards BRIC, BRI and greater China alignment. https://theintercept.com/2022/03/09/intercepted-podcast-africa-coup/ Practically the first thing which Biden did of which the legacy media was at all critical of was the Afghanistan withdrawal- which was undoubtedly the correct decision, albeit atrociously managed on the ground. Besides which, as China has all too amply demonstrated in the past decade through the realignment of the Global South into its economic and diplomatic influence, the American exercise of hard power, economic bullying and direct subversion of democratically elected government is infinitely inferior to the Chinese approach of winning friends through generosity. YouTube is currently in the process of de-ranking African media sources which pour scorn on the recent American attempt to win back influence in Africa, but here is one such video and fairly typical of the growing animosity many in Africa feel about America's bullyboy tactics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsMZ3uyzd2U
Finally there is climate change. All dissent, of any kind, is now treated as denial. True, climate change is real and long-term serious problem, but the fact that 98% of climate scientists now agree that there is proof of AGW doesn't mean that the majority or even most of them believe that climate change is an existential threat. In many ways, the recent unprecedented Tonga eruption in 2022 (of which the media has been curiously silent, given the huge impact we are already beginning to feel from a sudden 5% to 13% increase in global water vapour), allows us to peer into the future for climate impacts from human activity- probably to somewhere between 2040 and 2060.
The reason why Russia's neighbors want to join NATO is because Russia has a long history of invading its neighbors.
The invasion of Ukraine was not provoked - it was part of Russia's greater policy of conquering and subjugating its neighbors.
The reality is that Russia needed to be destroyed at the end of World War II, and needs to be destroyed today. It's really just the reality of the situation.
Appeasing dictators does not work. The Russians, along with the Germans, were the instigators of World War II in Europe when they conquered Poland and split it between them.
People focus upon Chamberlain too readily for a large portion of their views on 'appeasement'. Hitler only happened because of Versailles. Versailles only happened because the British were worried about the German industrial build-up and 'miscommunicated' their intentions if Germany attacked Russia. The Germans only attacked Russia because von Moltke was worried that Russia would surpass Germany in industrial and military might and wanted to fight a war he saw as inevitable at a time which was more favourable to Germany.
I'm not disputing that Putin wanted to invade Ukraine- my point would be why give him the excuse? His demands in the run up to the invasion were ludicrous, but we could have easily robbed him of his pretext for invasion, by either Britain or America guaranteeing that Ukraine would not join NATO for the foreseeable future. This would have boxed Putin in- my dad, career military, always used to say that a country couldn't go to war unless its leaders succeeded in building a 'hate factor' in the population. A simple assurance at the cost of a little domestic political popularity for either America or Britain could have deprived Putin of his pretext to his own people as to casus belli.
And both sides misjudged the likely fallout from the conflict. Putin believed his generals in thinking that Ukraine would be an easy victory, over within six weeks. The Anglo-American leadership thought it would unite the world in condemnation and collapse Russia, strengthening Western Hegemony.
What did happen? Yes, Europe is finally approaching sane levels of military spending, but that's a silver lining to a very dark cloud. Russia is now a de facto satellite of China. India, Africa, much of Asia and much of South and Central America have all shifted more towards China economically and diplomatically- particularly in Africa where attitudes towards Western diplomats and journalists have become downright hostile, especially towards America. There is fair chance that the dollar will lose its status as the global currency reserve. For the first time in living history, when American diplomats engage with their counterparts they are made to feel as they are no longer setting the agenda- and instead get lectured at.
Here's the thing appeasement is not appeasement when it accomplishes your own military, economic and diplomatic objectives, and frustrates your enemies objectives. The West could have effectively boxed Putin in and frustrated his aims with a simple assurance over NATO- effectively rendering him impotent and apoplectic with rage as America and her allies continued to arm Ukraine, train its military and strengthen its economy.
But we didn't- because to so would have made us look weak to our own electorates after the debacle of Crimea. Craven politicians won out over gritty real world pragmatism and Ukraine is ultimately paying the price. I know Russia is ruined military for a generation, but the same could be said for Western hegemony. We are no longer living in a bipolar world, with America balanced against China, instead the world is now multipolar with an emerging Global South, and the longer Ukraine continues the more the Global South aligns towards China.
Perhaps provoked was too strong a word- but let's not forget that the attitude of America towards Russia has been one of increasing belligerence ever since the US illegally exited the ABM treaty. For those who know their history, it was America's decision to site Jupiter missiles in Turkey which ultimately provoked the Cuban Missile Crisis ( a situation which could have easily escalated to nuclear war had either Castro or Curtis LeMay been the key decision makers)- in this light we can see that any attempt to disrupt the fragile balance of parity of nuclear deterrence is inherently irresponsible, given that rational systems increasingly cease to exist under the friction of fear, suspicion and belligerence, surely tempting Mutually Assured Destruction.
NATO membership of Ukraine was always going to be a red line for Russia, for the simple reason that missile defence systems can be easily converted to offensive 'first strike' capability within two weeks to a month, given the ranges involved. Of course, both Russia and China have also long been working to develop an edge in this regard, but their approach, quite correctly, has been to do so through technological means.
People think that there is no way Russia will tempt nuclear escalation. People have been wrong about Putin before- myself included. Currently, the chances of a nuclear war in the next five years are somewhere between 2% and 5%. This jumps to 10% to 50% if Putin is removed through violent means or if the regime comes under existential threat.
Why do I draw this conclusion? Because 30 years living underground, stocked with Western luxuries, your progeny to emerge as autocrats to a new Russian empire, governing roughly 10% of the previous population might seem preferable to the alternate situation facing the Putin inner circle- imprisonment in a Russian prison, familial destitution and likely extra-judicial killings against one's family, all likely to ensue in the chaos of a power struggle.
It seems the Biden Admin has finally recognised the danger- otherwise why would they be tacitly allowing peace talks to occur?
The existence of Russia and China in their current form makes nuclear war much more likely. The total destruction of their current forms of government will greatly decrease the odds of nuclear war.
Only if one discounts the very likely probability that nuclear war will ensue if their governments fall. Totalitarian states lack the convenient valve of the opposition party- populations can only blame their leaders, or if convinced otherwise, outsiders. Obviously, its in the leaderships own best interest to assign blame to external factors.
And why is COVID’s origin so important to our body politic in the first place? The more immediate problem, then and now, was Trump’s terrible initial response -- lying that it was totally under control and praising Xi -- followed by the right’s treating vaccinations as a kind of wedge issue that literally got thousands of their supporters killed.
Millions of people have died, plausibly due to sloppy government researchers funded by the US govt inside our biggest geopolitical rival, and you don't understand why people think it's important to know what happened?
1) It is plausible but very unlikely that "sloppy" researchers are the cause for COVID, by culturing wild strains without the proper containment procedures that allowed wild strains isolated from the wild to get habituatlly exposed to human cells or the researchers themselves.
2) Even in this unlikely case US funding would have had ZERO impact on the outcome. The Wuhan institute would be fully funded by the Chinese even if the US govt didn't give them one cent and routine isolation of wild virus requires zero US knowhow.
Who should do what differently now (should have done then) if we had know that COVID definitely resulted from a lab leak? Faster or slower development am roll out of vaccines? Different messaging about effectiveness vs "safety" of vaccines? Massive screening of asymptomatic people? Different NPI's? Fewer/shorter school closings?
I think there were errors in all these decisions, but I don't see how knowing the origin of the virus would have or should have affected them.
Who is saying that there should have been a difference in diagnosing or treating COVID? It seems disingenuous to focus on that rather than such an outcome adding ample evidence of the enormous risk such labs present to society. It would bring into question whether or not procedures such as gain of function are ethical, what biosafety level minimums should be applied to certain types of research, if detailed logging (including telemetry data) should be required to be kept in independent escrow for future outbreak analysis, if such research should be required to be done aboard ships or in highly isolated areas with strict quarantine procedures, etc. Sure, I would argue that much of this should be done regardless of the origin of COVID, but it's hardly a stretch to think that the cost and pain of implementing such measures would be more palatable if we had a good reason to believe the lack of such measures resulted in the deaths of millions.
So to be clear, we can only discuss one thing? So long as Trump exists and speaks publicly, COVID origins and the fraud by government-paid scientists around the topic cannot and should not be discussed?
Yep, that’s it Mike. You’ve cracked the code. Good work!
The “lane leak theory” in 2020 was not a theory. It was an exercise in political misdirection, an attempt by Trump and others to make someone else the villain and him the victim. It’s the same discourse, from some of the same people, that brought us “the Chi-na virus” and the “kung flu” and Brett Weinstein and hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and talk radio hosts dying because they refused to get vaccinated.
By all means, keep investigating the origins, but GTFO with blaming “the media” instead of the people right here in the USA who sought to muddy the waters, and continue to do so to this day.
> The “lane leak theory” in 2020 was not a theory. It was an exercise in political misdirection, an attempt by Trump and others to make someone else the villain and him the victim
Which is why in Feb/Mar 2020, prominent liberal govt scientists said it was plausible and the most likely option. They were covering for Trump! You're a real genius DJ.
Two reasons. First it would have shown us that the current regime in place was incompetent and two it demonstrated how officials were willing to lie when it suited their political or collective agenda. Pretty important and I don’t see how you can really think otherwise.
I would argue both are true, and they feel related to me. As the media has absorbed more far left progressives, it's become easier for far right media to point and say, "Look, this is what everyone in the mainstream media believes, aren't they crazy?" This allows the right wing media to cut off more and more right wing viewers from other news outlets, which in turn allows them to go further to the right.
Just anecdotally - when I talk to my (very conservative) extended family about the mainstream media, they often bring up talking points I can imagine being raised in some Huffington Post op ed which don't actually reflect the views of most democrats. For example: we should stop farming cows because they release too much methane, we should legally recognize people who identify as animals. Most dems don't believe these things, but when left wing publications print more fringe-y progressive takes, it gives the right wing media cover to dismiss the entire "Indigo Blob" as radical leftists and move further to the right.
Hi Nate, this is really well written and interesting. And I see where you're coming from, and why you want something like this to make sense.
I really think it doesn't make sense, at all. It rests on the claim that liberal-vs-conservative can be reduced to numbers ... and that those numbers can be rated objectively ... and that those numbers balance out, more or less. I think all of those claims are false. I think that when people accuse you of faux-centrism, this is what they have in mind: you have this idea that there's a deep truth to politics, that centrists are the only ones who can see that truth, and that the true position is itself centrist.
I imagine that you're going to reject this out of hand. I wonder what I could say to help you see what is radically questionable (and, indeed, necessarily false) about your position of centrism-uber-alles.
Maybe I can put it this way. In poker there's a correct play no matter what. It's possible to play too aggressively and it's possible to play too passively. The correct way to play is a mean between these extremes. The correct way to play can be mathematically modelled and rationally understood based on criteria that are accepted by all people of good will. In all of these respects, politics is simply not like poker! I feel like you're trying to use statistical models that work for poker, but simply have no purchase at all on the reality of the political world.
Let's imagine a society that was politically divided, most saliently, over religion: say the two big blocs are Christians and Buddhists. Our poker-playing-centrist then goes around assigning numbers to every media outlet, from -10 (maximally Christian) to +10 (maximally Buddhist). Can you see how incoherent this would be? For several reasons: (a) the meaning of "Christian" and "Buddhist" varies over time; (b) there are many different ways of being both Christian and Buddhist at any given time; (c) some Christians will share more in common with some Buddhists than they will with other Christians (and vice-versa); (d) trying to be "centrist" between the two belief sets is not inherently a sensible or reasonable way to be; (e) there are real moral issues at stake, and it's possible (likely!) that the Christians or the Buddhists at any given time will have a better, more sensible, more human take on them, which the centrist (by self-definition) will not be able to think about.
I know you think you're being rational and sensible. But there are some aspects of reality where actually being rational and sensible requires engaging with the content of what is being argued. Politics, like religion, is an arena in which human beings make claims about whether certain things are true and good (and beautiful, to complete the classical trifecta). Taking these sorts of claims, assigning them numbers, and then adding up the numbers ... is simply not a sensible, rational way of interacting with them.
There actually are correct answers about politics. A lot of people get upset over them because they don't want to believe they are correct.
BLM is a scam. The person who ran BLM did it to buy a mansion for herself. Said scam was promoted by Russia. Black people are no more likely than white people to be shot by police under the same circumstances according to studies.
Donald Trump's campaign was promoted by Russia. So was Bernie Sanders. This was done to weaken the US.
Bernie Sanders lies constantly.
Wage stagnation is a myth.
The reason why unions became unpopular is because of their associations with organized crime and the Soviet Union.
Socialism is based on 19th century antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Donald Trump tried to overthrow the government of the United States.
Cutting taxes does not, generally speaking, lead to better economic outcomes.
Raising taxes also does not, generally speaking, lead to better economic outcomes.
A lot of government spending is wasted.
There's no evidence that gender affirming therapy works; it has never undergone the standard clinical trials necessary to prove it would be safe and effective in the treatment of gender dysphoria.
Global warming is real, but not apocalyptic. It is more of a long term expensive problem.
Regulations are not inherently good or inherently bad; it depends on the regulation on whether it is good or bad.
Incarcerating criminals lowers crime rates by preventing criminals from committing more crimes.
There is substantial evidence of corruption within the Republican party, and for all they claim to be pro-police, they are very much against law enforcement actually enforcing laws against members of their own tribe, as evinced by their attacks on the FBI and IRS auditors.
Some of the above probably upset you, but all of it is verifiable.
I think you should direct your comment at Nate, not me. I 100% agree with you that some things are just true! I don't agree with all of your claims, but they don't upset me much and they're not a bad place to start!
all models are wrong, some are useful. I hear the same arguments for "race is a social construct", "words have no inherent meaning" and so on.
Mathematicizing what isn't mathematical can be a rhetorical trick of false certainty, true. But we can make true enough statements about the distribution of ideology. I'd say: argue _exactly_ why this model fails to do what it's meant for, rather than the truism that models are models.
I think YOUR mistake is to assume that the "poles are real and essential. I think they are labels for collections of positions on a multitude of issues -- optimal tax on CO2 emissions, criteria for admitting immigrants, whether to have a VAT or not and what rate, how to regulate trade and investment with China, etc..
I think we might agree with each other....? I certainly agree with you that the poles are not real or essential. "Left" and "right" are often used as labels for collections of positions --yes, agreed.
But I don't believe that we learn anything if we assign numbers to people's answers to these various questions (questions that can cross-cut against each other in any number of dimensions) -- let alone that adding up the various numbers tells us anything.
Let's make up two people and call them me and you: obviously I'm not me and you're not you. These are just people. So anyway. Say I'm pro-VAT and you're anti-VAT ... and so our poker player adder-upper person codes me as "left" and you as "right." But actually I'm pro-VAT for reasons of efficiency, while you're anti-VAT because you think it will be enforced unfairly against poor people. So now I'm "right" and you're "left." But my reasons of efficiency ultimately come down to a belief what matters is equality among persons of all colors and races, and that undercutting efficiency will destroy the possibility of a post-racial state, so now I'm "left" again. And your worry about a VAT being enforced unfairly against poor people really comes down to a concern about poor appalachian white people, who you believe will be a critical factor in achieving your dream of a cleansed white racial state ... so now you're "right" again.
People are complicated! Maybe not often as complicated as my example ... but things like this do happen. I just think it's foolish to try to convert people's beliefs to numbers on a single axis -- whether you label that axis left vs right or Christian vs Buddhist or anything else.
Again, none of it is like poker. Poker really does have "too aggressive" and "too passive" and a sweet spot called optimal play which is located somewhere in the middle. It's sensible to reason about poker based on that single axis. Politics, like religion, not so much.
Most of this made sense to me, but not this: "For example, if public health officials would strongly prioritize “equity” when coming up with a plan to distribute vaccines but the general public would not, they should defer to the public."
Why? Public health policy should be based on smart principles (and also other factors like legal requirements), not poll results. Using "equity" for vaccine distribution means making an effort to make vaccinations broadly available to everyone -- including lower-income groups, racial minorities, and disabled people who can't leave their homes. Even if the general public doesn't want the housebound to get vaccinations, for example, that doesn't matter. They still should. The same goes for people who don't own their own cars and would either need transit to get to the vaccination site or vaccinations brought to their neighborhoods. Your approach of favoring some groups over others is not only immoral (surely killing people for being disabled is understood to be immoral, right?) but it's illogical. It's like mimicking the early COVID cruise ships, where the passengers can quarantine, but the crew rooms together and gets COVID--which it then transmits to the rich people. It doesn't contain the disease.
Using "equity" for vaccine distribution meant a set of policies that prioritized giving vaccines to the right racial mix over those most at risk. This meant choosing to have more people die.
Not just white people, either. An "old and at risk people first" strategy would have saved both black and Hispanic lives. In other words you're defending a policy that chose to let more blacks die, in the name of delivering a fair share of vaccines to blacks. This is beyond absurd.
Even worse, we had a confusing set of rules that resulted in many vaccines not getting used on anyone at all early on. For example in California in mid Jan 2021, 73% of vaccines got to nobody. See https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-story-of-vaccinateca for how that got fixed. (Hint: By volunteers who focused on shots in arms over silly rhetoric about equity.)
This is what people don't understand. "Equity" based decision-making frequently leads to outcomes that are worse for all groups. But these decisions improve the reputation and self-image of leaders in progressive spaces, because they optimize for the metric that progressives care about more than any other: group disparities.
No, Maine is the oldest age population state and it has a relatively low Covid death rate. Age is only a big factor at the population level on the low end like Utah and Austin and DC. So Utah doesn’t have a great vaccination rate but it has a very low Covid death rate.
Nice job completely missing Ben's point. An 80 year old is 4,000x more likely to die from a covid infection. Now let's think about how much lower that ratio is in the case of race or socioeconomic status...
I’m talking about the biggest factor for a population in America…America is old and unhealthy and so when comparing different populations in America factoring in old age doesn’t tell you anything while factoring in young age explains why Utah has a very low Covid death rate.
There's a bit more nuance than that. There's two ways of doing equity based policy. One is as you describe, and I agree it is suspect.
The other way is to use known inequities to more efficiently target resource distribution to produce an aggregate outcome that is better overall even when the outcome is measured in a way that is blind to inequity. In this model, discrimination in policy exists, but the goal being aimed for is not a discriminatory one. When policies should reference inequities then becomes an empirical question. This model is much harder to argue against, I think.
Distinguishing between these two models is important.
By definition, equity is the attempt to create equal outcomes. Redistributing resources to what more efficiently provides opportunity may result in more equality, but it won't be equity.
Our desire to create equality of opportunity may result in an inefficient distribution of resources. I support actually doing that. But, even though that goes beyond your "better model", it still does not give equity.
The only thing that I've seen create equity is denying opportunities to those who are doing well. And that tends to go nowhere that I would consider good.
You can easily combine an equity strategy with a science-based approach. Yes, the elderly are most at risk of severe COVID. Additionally - historically marginalized communities are even higher at risk, and have a more difficult time accessing traditional routes of vaccine administration (doctor's offices, as many do not have a dedicated PCP).
An equity approach would be dedicating resources to ensure that, among the high-risk population, distribution resources are targeted at reaching those who are more unlikely to easily have access to the vaccine.
It's difficult to differentiate between people who would take your approach and the usual gaggle of DEI crusaders who use the exact same terminology to describe an approach that, as stated by others, is effectively willing to accept a higher number of total deaths in return for having a better racial distribution of COVID death.
Thanks to universities and corporations, too, a lot of people have experienced the latter category of person and seen them wield institutional power.
I would add that the person you responded to is extremely credulous of the intentions of the "equity" proponents, which is a huge problem. Those people are crusaders who don't have a victory condition, and so should be taken with a whole Lot's wife of salt, because they will never stop crusading.
I think everyone commenting on this (including, perhaps, Nate Silver) have misunderstood the meaning of the term "equity" here, seeing the word and assuming it has some racial or class connotation. This is incorrect.
The hyperlink leads to a set of slides in which the word "equity" appears four times, all of them in a section marked "Balancing Goals." The issue at hand was balancing two different priorities: "Prevention of Morbidity and Mortality" and "Preservation of Social Function." In plain language, who gets the vaccines first - those at the highest risk of death, or those who are most needed by society? The sick and the elderly, or frontline health workers? That's the context in which the term equity is used.
I don't really blame anyone for making that mistake, as Silver put it in a pretty misleading context. It's not up to me to decide if he did this on purpose.
Utah had a vaccination point system where being a minority counted for twice as much as a co-morbidity - like diabetes or a heart condition. This was done for equity purposes according to their slideware.
Regardless of what we linked, we know for a fact that there were attempts to allocate vaccines by race (giving the 'good' races preferential access). This is what he and others are referring to.
It’s for illustrative purposes only, but attaching numbers to it makes it seem more rigorous than it actually is. I think that piece could have been presented better.
Yeah this is a useful illustration, but if it is just Nate’s perception and isn’t backed up by some analysis or data it’s value is limited. I’m hoping each of those segments is a real media outlet and the -10 to -10 scale based on some arguable measure...
Yeah this is a useful illustration, but if it is just Nate’s perception and isn’t backed up by some analysis or data it’s value is limited. I’m hoping each of those segments is a real media outlet and the -10 to -10 scale based on some arguable measure...
In the post-Trump term era I don't get how there is a scale that could possibly make sense. Is +10 liberal "full communal ownership of everything" (and what outlet actually promoted something like that?). And is +10 conservative "Vaccines aren't real, windmills give you cancer, Obama was born in Kenya, and we need a king?" How do you even begin to compare those things? And what do you do when the leader and majority of the Republican party is in +9 conservative territory and the Democratic president is +3 left.
The core problem with this article is it makes perfect sense that the 70% of left leaning (or previously conservative) people are freaked the heck out by the fact that the other 30% are playing semi-automatic Russian roulette with our system of government and the environment. If your problem is that dissent from the 70% gets punished unduly harshly, maybe the solution is for the conservative side of any debate to earn back some credibility it gave over to the insane right.
I question the calibration of the scale in Nate's first figure. I'd say "maximal left-wing bias" would be articles advocating for some form of genuine socialism: government ownership of all means of production, etc., with the benefits distributed equally and some form of democratic government, while "maximal right-wing bias" would be articles advocating extreme oligarchic control of production and benefits, and autocratic government. In that formulation, while I think we see +10 in some right-wing outlets, I'd be surprised to see a -10 or anything close in any main-stream media outlet.
I agree with your doubts, but think your examples are too kind to the very dubious premise (that this even lends itself to a 1 to 10 scale). Your examples don’t do justice to “maximal” (certainly not on the left), which would by definition have to be even more extreme. They would have to be the most extreme possible. That’s “maximal.”
Then there’s the matter of “bias”, which in almost every definition is pejorative. We have to see not just an editorial approach but actual “bias” (bad faith, prejudice, dishonesty, sins of omission or the like) in the presentation.
I have no doubt bias exists. We need to see how it can be defined, quantified, filtered through a left/right either/or dichotomy and then put on on a 1 to 10 scale.
I could go on and on. Why are we weighing solely on the extent of political sentiment, irrespective of how egregious (and possibly dishonest) the bias is? Are major stories weighted more? Can one sentence push an article to a 10? Or are we judging not by the most extreme sentiment possible but by the limits of the current Overton Window? If so, how is that determined?
The whole notion of the two (one for the left, one for the right right) 1 to 10 scales (10 is “maximal”!) of “bias” is just silly. It’s not serious.
I mean, the vaccine thing is cherry picking and overall this statement is beyond the pale: " I think institutions like the media — and certainly science and medicine — provide substantial, non-zero-sum benefits to society and that this mission has been somewhat compromised in recent years by left-leaning partisanship."
OK, I agree on the schools thing. But the non-left leaning partisans are literally full of people who deny climate change and want to defund whole departments of the government dedicated to science. Trump famously put a bunch of yahoos in such departments and they promptly shutdown the science and data-driven things. They literally shutdown the science.
I'm a long time fan of Nate's. And by any rational standard, I'm a left-leaning Centrist.
But this whole thing is so convoluted and contrarian, and it just misses the fundamental thing here.
And that fundamental thing is the 30% of yahoos who think the world is flat, don't believe in climate science, or are racists or homophobes, or think we should have a king, or think Mexicans are to blame for their rural white issues, should probably not be contributing or influencing any conversation. Nate makes the mistake here of not really explaining what contributions these people are making overall. What are they adding that is so great to have around?
And then more broadly, I think we can confidently say that the US was alot better politically before social media and Fox, when yahoos were basically de platformed in their caves because they couldn't say Yahoo stuff IRL.
And now with social media and Fox, yahoo stuff has now come out IRL too.
But here's Nate saying... What is Nate even saying.
Gender affirming care has never undergone RCTs. There's no clinical evidence of efficacy of these treatments.
The attack on standardized testing is driven by people not liking what standardized tests tell us.
The same is true of the attack on IQs.
The same is true of the attack on genetic-linked behavioral studies.
The same is true of criminological studies - the people who pointed out that black people were no more likely to be shot than white people under the same circumstances were roundly attacked.
The right does not have a monopoly on anti-science. The idea that the left is pro-science is simply false.
There's a huge amount of really gross things going on in academia driven by the far left.
Gender Affirming care seems to have a fair bit of evidence (studies) affirming its efficacy. If you have alternate evidence, maybe you’d consider updating the Wikipedia page and citing your sources there.
Also, it seems like RCT is methodologically inappropriate for transgender healthcare in adolescents.
“Gender-affirming interventions have physiologically evident effects and are highly desired by participants, giving rise to concerns over adherence, drop-out, response bias, and generalizability. Complementary and well-designed observational studies can instead be used to ground reliable recommendations for clinical practice and policymaking in adolescent trans healthcare, without the need for RCTs.”
There is no evidence that these treatments actually help people. The "studies" done are all of poor quality and lack randomized control groups, which means that they have zero ability to demonstrate whether or not they actually benefit anyone. Long-term studies suggest that people who undergo these treatments commit suicides at a much higher rate than the general population, so obviously these treatments do not resolve the issue.
That's why the UK has restricted access to several of these treatments to experimental settings and why Norway's medical advisory board has recommended the same - because these treatments were applied without ever demonstrating the benefits.
Not doing RCTs is a violation of the Nuremburg code.
The anti-RCT rhetoric comes from people who are both civilly and criminally liable for malpractice should these treatments be demonstrated to be ineffective, as it means they've been giving people ineffective or even harmful "treatments" with zero scientific basis.
The idea that RCTs are "inappropriate" is simply false; it is a desperate attempt to prevent these treatments from being tested. They never should have been applied en masse to people without them in the first place.
What reason is there to believe that these treatments would be effective? The origin of the justification for genital alteration comes from folks like John Money, who was, it later turned out, a child molester who had fabricated his research.
The reality is that there's no scientific or medical basis for current "gender affirming care" practices; there's no reason to believe that they would be helpful, and indeed, no other psychological disorder is treated in this way.
There is not actually any such body of research claimed; all of the studies are completely lacking in things like control groups and randomization and are severely prone to response bias.
Studies that eliminate response bias (such as studies of whether or not people discontinue use of hormones) have found vastly higher rates of cessation than the studies that are prone to response bias (on the scale of an order of magnitude of difference).
Furthermore, the studies are beginning to show that the old saw of "denying these people medical transition leads to them offing themselves at drastically higher rates" is total bunk.
Neither this nor anything Titanium Dragon says are remotely true. The theory that gender affirming care improves lives and decreases suicide simply encompasses more evidence - and requires less explanation for discarding opposing evidence - than the alternative you're proposing. This is why TD here needs to lie about the 2020 NICE report - which pointed to potential issues with methodology (these issues themselves being reasonably understandable given the possible ethics violations involved) but did not, as TD claims, say anything about their accuracy - and why they need to cite a 2020 study about methodology in the first place, rather than more recent, more direct studies like this one https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2789423.
It's also why they have to outright lie about the studies they do cite, which do not argue that medical intervention is *harmful* or *neutral* but that it is *insufficient*.
There's a total insufficiency of evidence, while people have been applying these treatments which have permanent effects to people. Following standard guidelines, none of these treatment regimens would have even been greenlit in the first place for adolescents - indeed, even doing these studies on adults would have run into very serious ethical issues right off the bat, because there's no mechanism of action , no other mental disorder is treated in this way, and the effects are permanent and irreversible.
Also, because of the generally poor scientific methodology we've seen for a very long time, generally speaking, if there's something that's full of bad experimental procedures, there's a good chance that whatever they're doing is probably deeply flawed.
If this treatment lowered suicidality, we would expect that we would see a decline in suicide in states with better access to this care. This is not the case; suicide rates are in fact higher in such states.
There are additional issues as well, such as the fact that several journals have outright stated they refuse to publish papers that could "harm" people undergoing these treatments - which they include as defining evidence that these treatments do not work or that the condition isn't actually intrinsic (hence the controversy and hatemail over the lateral spread study).
You are heavily influenced by the things that the media chooses to spend time on. Go ask a nice liberal lady on the Upper West Side what she thinks of nuclear power and prepare yourself for an anti-science whirlwind of crap.
Furthermore, the idea that one can "believe in" science is antithetical to science. Replication crisis, anyone?
About the ideological positioning of institutions, I want to again recall Covid times in India.
Back in April-May 2021, during the Delta wave in India, the Indian central government, decided to let the states negotiate directly with vaccine providers.
This decision was met with contempt and fury from the Lancet magazine, which blasted Modi for washing his hands off Covid management, and trying to pass the blame to the states.
However, I live in India, and in April-May 2021, it was the states which were clamoring for the ability to directly negotiate with vaccine providers! My own state (run by a party in opposition to Modi) was slamming the central govt for slowness in getting the vaccines; and wanted to get the vaccines directly.
It was clear that Lancet had no idea what was going in India, and was simply lashing out what the editor saw as a "Trump-like right-wing-populist" as Modi had been projected in the media coverage.
Nate, I appreciate your first footnote about distinguishing liberal from progressive or left. Including them together obscures more than it illuminates. And that is not just a European way of using the term (although parliamentary governments obviously have parties more directly aligned with beliefs than the two major American parties do, at least away from primaries, where those preferences get hashed out). At any rate, I'm looking forward to your article explaining your thinking on this point.
This is all well and good. So, there's liberal bias in the mass media, but what about the political system as a whole? What about the CONSERVATIVE BIAS of the massive influence of corporate lobbyists and large dollar donors on state legislatures, the presidency, Congress and even the Supreme Court? What about the CONSERVATIVE BIAS of massive gerrymandering of state legislatures? What about the CONSERVATIVE BIAS of the Electoral College, where a vote in a sparsely populated state can be worth as much as 3 1/2 times more than in a large densely populated state? What about the CONSERVATIVE BIAS of the Senate, where the same factors as in the Electoral College hold sway? It would be well to start and finish an essay such as this with the observation that media bias is only one part of a much bigger picture.
> the CONSERVATIVE BIAS of the massive influence of corporate lobbyists
Yes, when I think about large Fortune 500 corporations, I definitely think about MAGA conservatives and not the Indigo Blob. Companies that illegally use de facto and de jure racial quotas in their hiring are definitely MAGA conservative.
Fortune 500 companies are going to donate across the political spectrum as their interests are served. But the original comment also referenced “large dollar donors.” If we look at the political biases of individual mega wealthy donors, it’s not even close. Conservatives have the clear advantage by far.
Conservative bias - probably. MAGA bias? No. I don’t see large corporate interests aligned with right wing populism except as necessary to serve their own interests.
Corporations are classic liberals, not conservatives. Corporations are generally in favor of gay rights and abortions, but also in favor of low taxes and lower levels of government regulation on them.
Also, FYI, the electoral college favors low population states; states like Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Hawaii all benefit from the electoral college.
The point is that the elite system (political, media, & ecoomic) is to the right of the American supermajority. That is severely problematic for a citizenry aspiring to actual democracy, as opposed to resigning ourselves to the status of a banana republic.
This: "For instance, by publishing misinformation that downplayed the possibility of a COVID lab leak in Nature Medicine to avoid causing trouble with China, giving credence to Trump, or drawing criticism of virological research. Or on a more routine level, by playing motte-and-bailey games between science and advocacy."
Is patently false sorry and it points to a key flaw in this article. Finding Alex Washbourne's argument credible is like believing heuristics suggesting that its night, when the sun is shinning outside.
What is being touted as "misinformation" here is the typical "cherry pick quotes without context to manufacture a fake controversy strategy".
The idea that COVID is manufactured is simply not credible. It never was. Everyone who has ever worked with a Virus has a pretty clear idea of what a gain-of-function experiment looks like. You do not take an unknown, unpublished and never studied virus backbone, slap on an unknown unpublished and never studied envelope gene and then modify the Furin cleavage site to something no one could have predicted and call that an experiment.
A lab leak is still possible, but it would be a natural strain isolated, but not yet characterised that escaped. The idea of a bioweapon or a gain-of-function experiment is simply not credible, no matter what bull-**** argument some contrarian on twitter makes.
The idea for example that a lab leak was "invonvenient" and therefore had to be "suppressed".
That is just not how science works. Standing up for the status quo has zero benefits in science. Zero. It does not help you get grants. It does not help you make a name for yourself. It does not get you high impact papers. You make a name and a reputation by bucking the status quo and proving it wrong. That is why it is very rare for people to try and "suppress" contrary views. The moment you try that you create an incentive for every other person in the field to make a name for themselves by proving you wrong, while at the same time gaining nothing in the process.
Therein lies the fatal flaw with your argument. You think that the "purple blob" exerts political influence on experts and institutions, because your contrarian views were "shat on" by Twitter. What actually happens is you swallowed misinformation from Twitter hook, line and sinker, because it agreed with your personal predjudices and biases and then you got the treatment that every contrarian and conspiracy theorist gets. Since you don't view yourself as a conspiracy theorist (because no one ever does) you see this not as evidence that you should maybe re-examine your priors, but as evidence of political biase by experts. That is the anti-vaxxer argument. Its also the flat-earther argument too.
Twitter is not a place to contribute to a public health discussion. It is not the place to contribute to a scientific inquiry on the origin of COVID. Twitter however does grant contrarians and fantasists who imagine themselves expert a route to communicate with actual experts and fancy that they can be part of the argument without the necessary expertise and knowledge. That is what happened to you.
Experts didn't dismiss your views because they are political. Public health experts didn't see COVID as an excuse to push their own political agenda. The twitter Zeitgeist has never been an important factor in the scientific consensus on any subject and it is not part of the conversation when it comes to non-partisan or expert institutions.
You continued refusal to accept the simple fact that COVID being engineered or being the result of a gain-of-function experiment is just not credible. That is not what experts are talking about when they say "lab leak", is just you doubling down on stupid. Alex Washbourne is a contrarian, who saw a chance to make a name for himself by taking a long-shot punt but he has nothing to lose. People on the other side of the argument however are putting their reputations on the lines if they are wrong and they have very little to gain by debunking the engineered virus theory. The fact that the majority of scientists in the field are all saying that its bull**** is the only heuristic you need. You are lumping the people taking a long-shot punt, together with people putting their career on the line and you call it 50-50. That is why you got "shat on" on twitter. The right thing to do is not to double down on stupid, but to stop and actually have an honest conversation with someone who understands this stuff and can explain to you, how gain-of-function experiments are designed, why they are ALWAYS done only one well studied and published strains, why it is clear that no one had the biological knowledge to design covid and what the actual credible lab-leak related possibilities are.
The same thing goes with the public health decisions on COVID. The arguments you made on twitter were things that people had already argued internally and considered in light of what was known at the time and you don't consider the counterfactual of what might have happened if schools were kept open. Your counterfactual is a different country with an entirely different set of parameters, because you don't have the capacity to model the actual situation on the ground and don't understand how noisy the data you relied on is. For example consider this: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01571-8 and a more recent meta-analysis: https://ebm.bmj.com/content/28/3/164.
The public health experts were right that this was not as simple decision. Closing schools did have the negative effects some social scientists predicted, but that has to be weighed against the effects of reduced spread. Is some learning loss for many children a bigger problem than 1% of children losing a parent? What about 0.1% of children? What about 0.01% of children? It will take a very long time for us to find out, but the vast majority of public health experts will say someone dying is not in the same ballpark as loss of schooling. After all you can do something about the latter, but you can't bring people back from the dead. Maybe it will emerge that school closures were not the right policy after all. Even if it does your picking that policy and defending it on twitter because it agreed with your intuition, contributed nothing to the discussion. Even if it turns out school closures were the wrong approach, when faced with a similar choice in the future public health experts will still put the risk of someone dying first. You didn't get that then and that is why you got dismissed by experts on twitter.
Experts do not form the views based on politics. Public health experts don't make decisions that affect people's lives and livelihood based on politics. Twitter is not how you contribute to scientific or expert discourse and the indigo blob has very little real impact on policy. You thought you were immune to twitter misinformation and you thought that because experts communicated on twitter that meant you can be part of the discussion too. You were wrong on both counts. If you want to contribute to expert discussion, then do the hard graft. Craft your hypothesis, gather the evidence to support it. Publish the results. Don't shit-post on twitter and expect to not be dumped on.
Bravo! Thanks for this. I live in Aotearoa-New Zealand & we closed schools, had initial global and later local lockdowns until we got a vaccine, closed the borders to international air & shipping (with managed exceptions for citizens & supply chain continuity), aggressively vaccinated & boosted, and have one of the lowest per capita deaths from COVID in the entire world. Not only that, but with masking & social distancing our seasonal 'flu and respiratory illnesses plummeted, and as a result seasonal deaths from these factors went down.
As you say, you can help students catchup with academic studies affected by school closures, but not if they are dead. Not to mention the grandparents, parents, teachers, medical personnel etc. that were lost in some countries (USA) but exponentially less so in other countries (Aotearoa-NZ). The obsession with personal "freedom" over communal responsibiity is not an argument that impresses someone with elderly relatives with health problems who would not have been able to survive a COVID infection ... We all learned positive things from fighting the pandemic together, apart from the "right-wing" anti-vaxxers who got radicalised directly from US right wing Tweeters & podcasters etc. But they too were protected (largely) from being infected by the majority acting responsibly.
Perfect post. I mostly enjoy Nate’s writing around polling data, and political probabilities. But his lab leak posts and his theories on “flawed” lab leak reporting fell into conspiracy theory dribble a long time ago, and he’s blinded by his need to save face. There are few if any incentives for scientists to speak out on Twitter against the lab leak theory, and endless incentives for Twitter clout chasers to push it. He has fallen into that latter camp and doesn’t know it.
Great job explaining how he got there and why he’s wrong.
Hawaii has the lowest Covid death rate of American states because they did what NZ did…Republicans predicted Hawaii would end up with a death rate similar to a state on the continent with a similar median age because:
1. Covid was seasonal
2. Vaccines and masks were ineffective
3. Nothing could be done about it and so mitigation measures simply delayed the inevitable
Funny, the authors of the Proximal Origin paper disagree with you on the science.
To quote Dr. Kristian Anderson on Feb 1, 2020, “I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”
But what does he know? He's just a scientist who publishes in some rag named Nature.
You can find that quote, and the complete archive of slack messages that it was found in, at https://public.substack.com/p/covid-origins-scientist-denounces. (And we have the slack messages thanks to FOIA requests - nobody has actually disputed their authenticity.)
The authors of the Proximal Origin paper do not disagree with me at all. Every single one of them very VERY strongly agrees with me. You are quoting messages out of context. At the time of those messages the Covid sequence had not been published so the possibility of accidentally releasing a wild virus engineered to infect human cells was very real. That all changed the moment the COVID sequence was published and people BLASTed it against known viruses. No part of it was any known virus. So there is literally zero chance of some sort of experiment escaping. ALL such research on viruses is done in known and well characterized strains. No one takes unknown strains and randomly mixes them together, while adding 1000s of random and unpredictable mutations (that take decades to arise naturally), on top of a furin cleavage site that could not have been predicted from known data. Its not an experiment any trained scientist or in fact anyone with IQ higher than 2 digits would ever do. The only plausible lab leak hypothesis is that wild strains isolated in Wuhan were not cultured under conditions that made it easier for them to recombine and jump the species barrier. In that case the parent strains for COVID would have been found pretty darn chop-chop.
Some of the authors would've disagreed with OP... in *February 2020*. They changed their minds not long after. And frankly, any scientific beliefs from that time period should be nearly categorically disregarded. They had so little information compared to what we know now.
This reminds me of the Cambridge Spy ring. How could a respected member of the educated upper class, Anthony Blunt, do what he did? The elite press could not accept it. Until they did.
I think Nate Silver is starting to presuppose on almost every issue that there is indigo blob, it's too far to the left, and the right position is to the center. And when he argues he treats his opponents like they're complete idiots, blinded by ideology or arguing in bad faith.
I really respect Silver I just think he needs to stop categorizing his opponents as liberal sheep.
Why should the "Indigo Blob" be dismissed? After all, they are the American supermajority. What kind of government is it that doesn't represent most of the citizenry?
Basically makes similar points, but assumes a different readership and makes a contrarian argument for each’s assumed readership. Anyway, seems like both are right, in their own ways.
Nate Nate Nate... thought-provoking as always, but suffering from several key flaws.
Definition of Left-Wing Bias: This discussion brings to mind the adage, "reality has a well-known left-wing bias." Many of the institutions categorized as "left" are labeled as such by those interested in discrediting objective truths or methods, such as scientific inquiry. A bit ironic given Mr. Silver's own reliance on data-driven insights. What defines left-wing bias? It often seems to be a shifting goalpost, convenient for marginalizing or dismissing perspectives that don't align with a certain agenda. I'm a bit disappointed that Mr. Silver conveniently elides defining the crux of his entire argument.
Real Left-Wing Bias vs. Mainstream Media: Equating the journalistic standards of outlets like the New York Times, ESPN, or ABC with genuinely progressive voices (which are considerably smaller in numbers and reach) seems both inaccurate and in bad faith. The comparison with right-wing bias institutions, driven by overtly partisan interests, distorts the landscape and creates false equivalence.
Good Faith vs. Bad Faith Arguments: The characterization of mainstream media as left-wing fails to recognize the core difference between good faith and bad faith argumentation. Painting conservative discourse as solely ad hominem or dishonest oversimplifies a bit, but it's indeed difficult to find a parallel to some of the right's rampant disinformation strategies. A media breakdown based on good faith vs. bad faith would offer a more nuanced and honest picture.
We literally have emails from Trump's kids about meeting with Russians to try and get dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of Trump's campaign.
The reality is that the investigation into Trump's collusion with Russia was noted to be stymied by the administration by the Muller Report.
And Hunter Biden is honestly not a very interesting story. The problem is that Hunter Biden is not Joe Biden and there's no evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegal. Hunter Biden is a scumbag, but that's not really relevant to Congress. The coverage of it has honestly been fine overall; it's pretty obvious that Hunter Biden was trading on Joe Biden's name to get jobs and money, but no one has been able to find any evidence of Joe Biden doing anything unlawful.
The media has given it an appropriate level of coverage, I think.
There are other things that I'd say are far more evidence of bias (the fact that BLM was a scam and that the person who founded it misappropriated the money to buy mansions for herself should have been a big story, but has been basically not reported on).
Trump’s own appointee appointed Mueller!! Plus one of the major media figures pushing RussiaGate is a Bush Republican in good standing, Nicole Wallace. The liberal media covered RussiaGate just like the right wing echo chamber covered Benghazi…that’s just partisan politics in this century. The reason Trump received unfair treatment is because Bush Republicans orchestrated a coup to install Pence as president…and then they lost interest once Trump started governing like Jeb!
During Trump’s 4 years Democrats treated Trump as one would expect…the group that treated Trump unfairly were Bush Republicans.
I was involved in GOP politics during the Tea Party Movement…the people I was around were College Republicans and never questioned the GOPe and either wanted a job with a GOP think tank or an executive branch job when a Republican won the White House. So that’s why Lizard Cheney was elected into leadership by House Republicans when Trump was president…for Republicans power is the goal while for Democrats implementing policy is the goal.
Hi Nate, I want to add the perspective of a foreigner regularly reading the news media in the US and the liberal blogosphere.
I live in Chennai, India. I think the American media is heavily narrative-driven; and creates an echo chamber as bad the ones liberals decry at conservatives. The difference is that it is pretty obvious to see through conservative propaganda, but harder for liberals themselves to see that they are being propagandized.
During the second wave of Covid that hit India (Delta), the American and British media started insinuating that Covid numbers were being fudged by the Indian government under Modi. Many methodologies were used to show that the expected death rate was diverging from the actuals.
However, it was obvious to someone like me reading these news stories that the Western media did not actually directly make the claim that the Indian central government was cooking up the numbers. This is because Indian central government does not count deaths in India (the same as in the US). States and municipalities do, and these are not under the control of the Indian central government.
In order to believe that the Indian central government was doing this, you would have to believe that the thousands of municipalities around India were somehow collaborating with Modi. To anyone who actually lives in India, this kind of collaboration is impossible, given that many of these local bodies are run by political parties in opposition to Modi's BJP.
Once the Western media started these carefully worded articles on the death number conspiracy theory, I could see that the liberal blogosphere jumped in to connect the dots. I could see articles and comments throughout that Modi was spreading "misinformation" on Covid in India.
I live in India and the capability of the central government to spread any such misinformation is very limited.
This two-step of the western media writing essentially a narrative about India; and the liberals following these to their logical conclusion has occured repeatedly, in the coverage of India in the past 4 years. This has become such a din of complete misinformation on the country, that it has managed to convince congressional representatives such as Ilhan Omar into stepping into the conflict between India and Pakistan on Pakistan's side.
I have thought about the motivations here - back in 2016, when Trump was elected, I remember that the western press tried to make it part of a pattern across the world. They identified "right-wing populist" take overs in various parts of the world; and in order to make the case, claimed that Modi was the Indian Trump, a right-wing populist.
However this made no sense, because (unlike Trump) Modi had been a politician throughout his life and came into power in the central govt after serving office in his home state. You have to search hard in his policies for populism.
The terms "right-wing" or "left-wing" do not have the same meaning in India that they do in American politics. Modi's BJP actually has the biggest labor union in India affiliated to it. Some of the worst laws on free speech in India (section 66A of Information technology Act, 2008) which led to arrests of citizens for online speech were actually done BEFORE Modi's party came into power - these were passed by the "left-wing" government in power then (now in opposition).
Most politics in India occurs in the states, and to interpret all policies of the central government solely through these ideas of left-wing and right-wing classification does not make sense in India.
The rot is so deep in this kind of propaganda, that last month I was reading a book on Amazon by author Brad Strong, and the article interpreted Indian small merchants opposition to Amazon as due to "Hindutva politics of Modi". It was clear that he had no idea what he was talking about, but hoped to impress his readers.
With conservatives, I believe it is easy for reasonable people to see that their media is far out; but liberals live in an equally well-propagandized environment in the US, but have no idea themselves.
During the Iraq war, around 2004, a cleric named Mohammed Sadr came into prominence. When I used to read NYT or Washington Post, I noticed that this cleric was always mentioned with an adjective - "the radical cleric Mohammad Sadr". I wondered what made him "radical", but it was clear that he was opposed to the US occupation.
Last year I was reading again about Iraq, when Sadr was mentioned again in the Washington Post. I saw that the newspaper now wrote "The influential cleric" Sadr.
What made him "radical" then and "influential" now is not his actual policies, but the way the reporters in liberal newspapers wanted to represent him in the minds of liberal readers. This is propaganda, of course, but it is hard to detect.
Just coming to this comment, but your central claim is completely unfounded. It is true that there were valid allegations of the governments fudging covid numbers in India. And even though the deaths were tracked by the state government, a lot of these state governments do have BJP in power.
Gujarat naturally was the best example of this. Here is an Indian Express report (not an American newspaper) which cites this very statistic.
https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/ahmedabad/excess-deaths-gujarat-double-official-covid-19-mortality-first-wave-study-8097948/
"With conservatives, I believe it is easy for reasonable people to see that their media is far out; but liberals live in an equally well-propagandized environment in the US, but have no idea themselves."
This is not exactly a reasonable claim.
Do most conservatives really think Fox News and Breitbart are hyperbolic exaggerations, designed to bolster policy proposals, and discount it appropriately?
Does a liberal like Nate really see through the information that confirm his own biases and motivated reasoning? Especially if it's got the right aesthetics of rationality and individuality, but not enough context to reach conclusion.
Even if there was a completely accurate source of news, would it be beyond scrutiny as "propaganda" by people who'd rather have their own "alternative facts" be the basis for policy?
People have different values, and ascribe different value to news that informs them about the consequences of different policies.
Very few people are going to agree what should be the headline of the New York Times.
Even fewer people are capable of being held to the scrutiny when they get it wrong about value and importance and possible consequences.
The elephant in the room is climate change coverage. The bias and hyperbole on the effects are off the scale. .
The NYT and CNN bias and distortions of the truth - are probably unmatched by any other mainstream outlet on any other subject.
They scan the world for anything occupancies that can be linked to climate change - never giving the long term trends - which often ( nearly always) tell a completely different story.
Can you give an example of these long term trends telling a different story? Please be as specific as possible.
Sure
Wildfires increasing /world on fire. is the NYT /CNN narrative
The trend is less land being burned from them. 20 years ago it was 3% - now it is 2,2% . .
Hurricanes - there has been no increase actually a slight decrease.
Same with tornadoes, droughts, and floods.
Deaths from weather related disasters are down by 97% over the last 100 years.
All the stats are here:
https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters
I won't fully disagree with your view that media sometimes exaggerates or draws links that aren't fully founded. But, I'll accuse you of the same. Your statement that it's off the scale is hyperbole of it's own, and there really is good reasons to believe that recent wildfires and higher global temperatures have a link. The way that's explained is sometimes really poor.
At the same time, your insistence on focusing on deaths declining in the last 100 years is a far more obvious case of distortion. The amount of effort that has been intentionally put into reducing that number is enormous, and to think it has signal quality of the risk created by the actual weather patterns is ridiculous. So, why have you held on to that statistic that obviously has no value to this conversation if not to exaggerate it's importance to the conversation?
Your other points have similar flaws. Wildfires higher 20 years ago.. only data source you linked (https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters#wildfires) shows that yes, 2006-2023 the trend is pretty flat.. but what about a comparison to 1980. 600% of the acreage. That kind of cherry picking is a weird to bring to a discussion about wanting less bias.
I think it's also unfair to throw all of these topics into the same bucket. Media narrative has not been the same for all of them:
Hurricanes: More powerful hurricanes, not more hurricanes. Generally resisting the narrative that any particular hurricane can be linked to climate change. Yes, there's some exceptions to that generality.
Wildfires: Yes, the narrative is that they are made more likely and severe, and that we probably would not have the experiences we're having without climate change. I consider that accurate though.
Flooding and Drought: Yes, this is usually represented as linked. It should be. But it's a hard story to tell properly. What's important here isn't the absolute trend in floods and droughts, but in that the patterns for them are changing and overloading preparations made. If you prepare for a flood in one place, and a drought in another, and the patterns switch such that you now see a flood where you didn't prepare for it, it doesn't matter that the place you prepared for a flood didn't get one.
Thanks for pointing out the Hurricane's are not more frequent... but stronger. I came here to respond to that oversight. https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3184/a-force-of-nature-hurricanes-in-a-changing-climate/
The ignorance of severity is not limited to someone with a Right leaning bias. When I teach statistics I point out that the increased likelihood of earthquakes because of fracking kind of misses the point because these more frequent earthquakes happen in the middle of nowhere and don't seem to amount to any real increased risk of major danger. Increased risk of "minor damage" is a weak reasoning point to shut the whole thing down as many anti-fracking opponents would want. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/earthquake-hazards/science/hazard-estimation-induced-earthquakes
The damage caused by earthquakes (As referenced in the Signal and the Noise) and I suspect hurricanes are to be found on a power law curve and more severe occurrences is really the only measure of things that will matter in terms of destructive outcomes.
Someone already pointed this out but the fire statistic is misleading. Global surface area burned by fire has declined according to satellite data, but this is also human-caused and has potentially negative environmental repercussions due to the change in ecosystem for those regions experiencing this decline. The decrease in global fires has been near the equator where humans are preventing fires from burning newly settled land. So far, this has outweighed the *increase* in risk of fire posed by man-made climate change (which especially impacts northern climates), but they are two separate trends and combining them actually obfuscated many meaningful trends. Does the NYT care more about the fact that grassland in Africa is being burned less or that New Yorkers need to spend a day inside due to decreased air quality caused by wildfires? One of those things is absolutely more relevant to their reader base, and is also being caused by climate change.
I don't think deaths from natural disasters is the best metric here, I assume we've gotten a lot better at building infrastructure and responding to prevent deaths caused by these events. If you look at economic damages it paints a much different picture. The deaths one is just what this website shows by default.
But I think the issue here is much bigger than this. The entire group of climatologists/meteorologists/etc who have spent their lives studying this topic are telling us about this. You look at one chart and feel comfortable disregarding entire fields of scientific study? Have you read a single paper about the issue?
"The entire group of climatologists/meteorologists/etc who have spent their lives studying this topic are telling us about this. "
Telling us about what? Notably they aren't telling us about storm frequency, that is the punditocracy that has taken off with that one, so firstly, are you sure what you've been hearing is actual scientific opinion or pundits' ignorant takes on same?
More basically: well of course the entire group of climatologists are telling us about climatology. Similarly Oncologists tell us about Cancer (but also probably Climate Change these days but I digress).
Maybe the best source I can provide is the IPCC report https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/ which is authored by scientists.
If you are trying to posit that scientists dont actually believe this, maybe post a paper/meta-analysis which has this contrary view?
This is from the IPCC report:
Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their attribution to human influence, has strengthened since AR5 (Figure 2.3). It is virtually certain that hot extremes (including heatwaves) have become more frequent and more intense across most land regions since the 1950s (Figure 2.3), while cold extremes (including cold waves) have become less frequent and less severe, with high confidence that human caused climate change is the main driver of these changes. Marine heatwaves have approximately doubled in frequency since the 1980s (high confidence), and human influence has very likely contributed to most of them since at least 2006. The frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation events have increased since the 1950s
over most land areas for which observational data are sufficient for trend analysis (high confidence), and human-caused climate change is likely the main driver (Figure 2.3). Human-caused climate change has contributed to increases in agricultural and ecological droughts in some regions due to increased land evapotranspiration (medium confidence) (Figure 2.3). It is likely that the global proportion of major (Category
3–5) tropical cyclone occurrence has increased over the last four decades. {WGI SPM A.3, WGI SPM A3.1, WGI SPM A3.2; WGI SPM A3.4; SRCCL SPM.A.2.2; SROCC SPM. A.2}
The page is interactive you can put any disaster in and choose the effect.
I don't agree deaths are not an important metric - I thing they are the most important .
You are missing the point anyway . I am not arguing warming is not man made .
This is about media bias - after a bushfire occurrence the left wing media tell us the world is " on fire" - the truth is the trend is down - the omit that , because they want to distort and obscure the truth. The same is true for all the other disasters - they are not increasing -
The scientist don't say what the left wing media says they do - and probably what you think they do,
You are also presumably confusing predictions for the future and actual facts and evidence for things that have occurred.
They don't tell you deaths are down 97% because they don't want you to know that -
It is harder to sell climate change as an existential threat - when deaths are at an all time low and falling.
The media doesn't tell you that deaths are down 97% is because it is wildly misleading as a measure of the rate and severity of natural disasters. Food systems and medicine have come a long way since the 1931 Wuhan flood.
You are just picking this one metric that reinforces your view and claiming you have the real "facts and evidence". You don't think the scientists studying this issue have looked at empirical data about natural disasters in their analysis? Come on.
If you want to do your own research, I'd recommend scholar.google.com, which lets you search through academic papers.
Here is a recent paper about wildfires after a cursory glance https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301479721018314
About the media, when you use phrasing like the media "doesn't want us to know" or things like that, I think you are totally off base. It sounds like you are posing some grand conspiracy which is just not how these things work in reality. I'm not saying the media is perfect but If the media is biased towards anything its clicks.
I would encourage you to link a specific article and point to a specific false or misleading claim.
But the point is not whether ACC is an "existential" threat or not. (Any one outcome is highly unlikely.) The issue is what's the cost benefit analysis of any specific measure aiming at slowing down and eventually reversing CO2 accumulation. The typical news item is largely irrelevant to that issue.
Well I agree there should be a cost benefit analysis of cutting CO2b- and I also agree the media don't ask that question.
And that is partly my point.
But also if rhe media distort the present- how can we make the right decisions for the future?
Great point. Malcom Gladwell just released a podcast about how the decrease in murders might be hiding a significant consistency in number of gunshot wounds... because we are better at trauma treatment.
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/guns-part-4-moral-hazard
The website you cited does not agree with your conclusions:
Over the past 30-35 years we notice three general trends in the charts below (although there is significant year-to-year variability):
on average, the annual number of wildfires has not changed much;
on average, the total acres burned has increased from the 1980s and 1990s into the 21st century;
the combination of these two factors suggest that the average acres burned per wildfire has increased.
If you actually go through those categories, it seems like the storms ARE becoming more severe, on average. The biggest indicator is the cost in terms of % of GDP.
The data seems aligned with the picture that NYT and CNN are painting.
As far as acres burned, I don’t know what you’re looking at to come to such a conclusion. The graph on the site you link has a significant increase since 1983:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/acres-burned-usa
Another source: https://www.epa.gov/system/files/images/2022-07/wildfires_download2_2022.png
I’m having some trouble finding the trend on hurricanes from this figure on your linked site:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ace-north-atlantic-hurricanes
But this one shows an increasing density of “above normal” years:
https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2021-04/cyclones_download2_2021.png
Nasa satellite data in link - shows the decline.
The link you have shown is for North America hurricanes only.
I will find you the global ones theat show slight decline.
Also In Floods and droughts
https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/1686296353654104064?t=EIi1ju0Rv7I8sZgEOQBlbw&s=19
I finally found a NASA source for the negative trend of yearly global percentage burned (https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/90493/researchers-detect-a-global-drop-in-fires). It’s good to look at the actual source instead of climate denier Bjorn Lomborg, whose citation links always seem to be his own tweets. There’s a reason he doesn’t link the actual articles. For instance, the link above includes the following quote:
“Climate change has increased fire risk in many regions, but satellite burned area data show that human activity has effectively counterbalanced that climate risk, especially across the global tropics,” Morton said. “We’ve seen a substantial global decline over the satellite record, and the loss of fire has some really important implications for the Earth system.”
On the other hand, after a decade of countless non-profits and non-partisan media coverage suggesting we need enormous consumption taxes on carbon, Democrats were forced by democracy to take a policy route a lot closer to what Jim Manzi proposed in Cato over a decade ago. The main lesson of Nate's bell curves for conservatives and centrists is that voting Republican, not complaining about media bias or expressing yourself on Twitter, is the strongest thing you can actually do to shape policy choices.
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/08/11/jim-manzi/keeping-our-cool-what-do-about-global-warming/
☆ occurrences
Just feels like this opinion has only sprouted up now because you've been arguing with people about covid orgins, and then you went searching for reasons to back up your current feelings. I guess the question that I would ask is, has the main stream media taken on liberal biases or has the political right in America become so detached from reality that previously uncontroversial facts are now seen as "liberal"?
This is a bizarre take.Since the early pandemic, at least, Nate has been discussing these issues regularly on Twitter.
Nate does desperately want to say "I was right" about something that's inherently unknowable. So much in fact, he'd rather form coalition with other folks who are applying motivated reasoning to propagate policies and narratives Nate should otherwise disagree with.
If Nate wanted to get closer to the truth, he should be badgering the CCP.
It's interesting to understand why he doesn't, and who he directs his ire at instead.
Not to be cute, but we don't know enough to say whether the issue is unknowable - and it is certainly not "inherently" unknowable.
Nate doesn't have influence in the CCP, but he does in the anglosphere. I think it's that simple.
Maybe a little bit of both, but it depends on the topic (as Nate says). The mainstream media, reflecting progressive obsessions, is generally insane on issues relating to race and gender, because the reporters generally share progressives’ insane views on those topics. On other topics, the media is much closer to reality and conservatives are the wierdos.
It depends what you mean by conservative. A majority of conservatives don't support outright abortion bans, but like the ideological capture of the Dems on matters of race and gender, it seems to always be the extremists which manage to push forward their policy agenda.
Then there is Ukraine and America's penchant for Forever Wars. Don't get me wrong- the West was quite right to support Ukraine after Russia invaded, but let's not forget that the invasion was provoked. Let's not forget that it was the NATO assertion that Ukraine and Georgia would inevitably join NATO at the Bucharest summit which caused the Russo-Georgian war back in 2008, and the current conflict could have been easily avoided if the concessions suggested in the Minsk Accords had gone forward.
And Ukraine is a relatively mild example of the Neocon mindset which now infects the Democratic Party. No less than seven US lead coup attempts in Africa, in eighteen months- many against democracies- pushing the whole of Africa towards BRIC, BRI and greater China alignment. https://theintercept.com/2022/03/09/intercepted-podcast-africa-coup/ Practically the first thing which Biden did of which the legacy media was at all critical of was the Afghanistan withdrawal- which was undoubtedly the correct decision, albeit atrociously managed on the ground. Besides which, as China has all too amply demonstrated in the past decade through the realignment of the Global South into its economic and diplomatic influence, the American exercise of hard power, economic bullying and direct subversion of democratically elected government is infinitely inferior to the Chinese approach of winning friends through generosity. YouTube is currently in the process of de-ranking African media sources which pour scorn on the recent American attempt to win back influence in Africa, but here is one such video and fairly typical of the growing animosity many in Africa feel about America's bullyboy tactics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsMZ3uyzd2U
Finally there is climate change. All dissent, of any kind, is now treated as denial. True, climate change is real and long-term serious problem, but the fact that 98% of climate scientists now agree that there is proof of AGW doesn't mean that the majority or even most of them believe that climate change is an existential threat. In many ways, the recent unprecedented Tonga eruption in 2022 (of which the media has been curiously silent, given the huge impact we are already beginning to feel from a sudden 5% to 13% increase in global water vapour), allows us to peer into the future for climate impacts from human activity- probably to somewhere between 2040 and 2060.
https://phys.org/news/2023-01-tonga-eruption-chances-global-temperature.html
The reason why Russia's neighbors want to join NATO is because Russia has a long history of invading its neighbors.
The invasion of Ukraine was not provoked - it was part of Russia's greater policy of conquering and subjugating its neighbors.
The reality is that Russia needed to be destroyed at the end of World War II, and needs to be destroyed today. It's really just the reality of the situation.
Appeasing dictators does not work. The Russians, along with the Germans, were the instigators of World War II in Europe when they conquered Poland and split it between them.
People focus upon Chamberlain too readily for a large portion of their views on 'appeasement'. Hitler only happened because of Versailles. Versailles only happened because the British were worried about the German industrial build-up and 'miscommunicated' their intentions if Germany attacked Russia. The Germans only attacked Russia because von Moltke was worried that Russia would surpass Germany in industrial and military might and wanted to fight a war he saw as inevitable at a time which was more favourable to Germany.
I'm not disputing that Putin wanted to invade Ukraine- my point would be why give him the excuse? His demands in the run up to the invasion were ludicrous, but we could have easily robbed him of his pretext for invasion, by either Britain or America guaranteeing that Ukraine would not join NATO for the foreseeable future. This would have boxed Putin in- my dad, career military, always used to say that a country couldn't go to war unless its leaders succeeded in building a 'hate factor' in the population. A simple assurance at the cost of a little domestic political popularity for either America or Britain could have deprived Putin of his pretext to his own people as to casus belli.
And both sides misjudged the likely fallout from the conflict. Putin believed his generals in thinking that Ukraine would be an easy victory, over within six weeks. The Anglo-American leadership thought it would unite the world in condemnation and collapse Russia, strengthening Western Hegemony.
What did happen? Yes, Europe is finally approaching sane levels of military spending, but that's a silver lining to a very dark cloud. Russia is now a de facto satellite of China. India, Africa, much of Asia and much of South and Central America have all shifted more towards China economically and diplomatically- particularly in Africa where attitudes towards Western diplomats and journalists have become downright hostile, especially towards America. There is fair chance that the dollar will lose its status as the global currency reserve. For the first time in living history, when American diplomats engage with their counterparts they are made to feel as they are no longer setting the agenda- and instead get lectured at.
Here's the thing appeasement is not appeasement when it accomplishes your own military, economic and diplomatic objectives, and frustrates your enemies objectives. The West could have effectively boxed Putin in and frustrated his aims with a simple assurance over NATO- effectively rendering him impotent and apoplectic with rage as America and her allies continued to arm Ukraine, train its military and strengthen its economy.
But we didn't- because to so would have made us look weak to our own electorates after the debacle of Crimea. Craven politicians won out over gritty real world pragmatism and Ukraine is ultimately paying the price. I know Russia is ruined military for a generation, but the same could be said for Western hegemony. We are no longer living in a bipolar world, with America balanced against China, instead the world is now multipolar with an emerging Global South, and the longer Ukraine continues the more the Global South aligns towards China.
China is the only real victor in this conflict.
> the West was quite right to support Ukraine after Russia invaded, but let's not forget that the invasion was provoked.
You could have led with this so I wouldn’t have wasted time reading your opening platitudes.
Perhaps provoked was too strong a word- but let's not forget that the attitude of America towards Russia has been one of increasing belligerence ever since the US illegally exited the ABM treaty. For those who know their history, it was America's decision to site Jupiter missiles in Turkey which ultimately provoked the Cuban Missile Crisis ( a situation which could have easily escalated to nuclear war had either Castro or Curtis LeMay been the key decision makers)- in this light we can see that any attempt to disrupt the fragile balance of parity of nuclear deterrence is inherently irresponsible, given that rational systems increasingly cease to exist under the friction of fear, suspicion and belligerence, surely tempting Mutually Assured Destruction.
NATO membership of Ukraine was always going to be a red line for Russia, for the simple reason that missile defence systems can be easily converted to offensive 'first strike' capability within two weeks to a month, given the ranges involved. Of course, both Russia and China have also long been working to develop an edge in this regard, but their approach, quite correctly, has been to do so through technological means.
People think that there is no way Russia will tempt nuclear escalation. People have been wrong about Putin before- myself included. Currently, the chances of a nuclear war in the next five years are somewhere between 2% and 5%. This jumps to 10% to 50% if Putin is removed through violent means or if the regime comes under existential threat.
Why do I draw this conclusion? Because 30 years living underground, stocked with Western luxuries, your progeny to emerge as autocrats to a new Russian empire, governing roughly 10% of the previous population might seem preferable to the alternate situation facing the Putin inner circle- imprisonment in a Russian prison, familial destitution and likely extra-judicial killings against one's family, all likely to ensue in the chaos of a power struggle.
It seems the Biden Admin has finally recognised the danger- otherwise why would they be tacitly allowing peace talks to occur?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/former-us-officials-secret-ukraine-talks-russians-war-ukraine-rcna92610
The existence of Russia and China in their current form makes nuclear war much more likely. The total destruction of their current forms of government will greatly decrease the odds of nuclear war.
This is the sort of jingoism that one might expect on Newsmax.
Only if one discounts the very likely probability that nuclear war will ensue if their governments fall. Totalitarian states lack the convenient valve of the opposition party- populations can only blame their leaders, or if convinced otherwise, outsiders. Obviously, its in the leaderships own best interest to assign blame to external factors.
And why is COVID’s origin so important to our body politic in the first place? The more immediate problem, then and now, was Trump’s terrible initial response -- lying that it was totally under control and praising Xi -- followed by the right’s treating vaccinations as a kind of wedge issue that literally got thousands of their supporters killed.
Millions of people have died, plausibly due to sloppy government researchers funded by the US govt inside our biggest geopolitical rival, and you don't understand why people think it's important to know what happened?
1) It is plausible but very unlikely that "sloppy" researchers are the cause for COVID, by culturing wild strains without the proper containment procedures that allowed wild strains isolated from the wild to get habituatlly exposed to human cells or the researchers themselves.
2) Even in this unlikely case US funding would have had ZERO impact on the outcome. The Wuhan institute would be fully funded by the Chinese even if the US govt didn't give them one cent and routine isolation of wild virus requires zero US knowhow.
So the originally poster is absolutley right.
Who should do what differently now (should have done then) if we had know that COVID definitely resulted from a lab leak? Faster or slower development am roll out of vaccines? Different messaging about effectiveness vs "safety" of vaccines? Massive screening of asymptomatic people? Different NPI's? Fewer/shorter school closings?
I think there were errors in all these decisions, but I don't see how knowing the origin of the virus would have or should have affected them.
This is a great point. When you artificially restrict the analysis to a very small set of questions, then lab leak is meaningless. You are very smart.
Who is saying that there should have been a difference in diagnosing or treating COVID? It seems disingenuous to focus on that rather than such an outcome adding ample evidence of the enormous risk such labs present to society. It would bring into question whether or not procedures such as gain of function are ethical, what biosafety level minimums should be applied to certain types of research, if detailed logging (including telemetry data) should be required to be kept in independent escrow for future outbreak analysis, if such research should be required to be done aboard ships or in highly isolated areas with strict quarantine procedures, etc. Sure, I would argue that much of this should be done regardless of the origin of COVID, but it's hardly a stretch to think that the cost and pain of implementing such measures would be more palatable if we had a good reason to believe the lack of such measures resulted in the deaths of millions.
Not nearly as important as having a would-be president who just last week said how much he admires Xi’s “iron grip” on China.
So to be clear, we can only discuss one thing? So long as Trump exists and speaks publicly, COVID origins and the fraud by government-paid scientists around the topic cannot and should not be discussed?
Yep, that’s it Mike. You’ve cracked the code. Good work!
The “lane leak theory” in 2020 was not a theory. It was an exercise in political misdirection, an attempt by Trump and others to make someone else the villain and him the victim. It’s the same discourse, from some of the same people, that brought us “the Chi-na virus” and the “kung flu” and Brett Weinstein and hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and talk radio hosts dying because they refused to get vaccinated.
By all means, keep investigating the origins, but GTFO with blaming “the media” instead of the people right here in the USA who sought to muddy the waters, and continue to do so to this day.
> The “lane leak theory” in 2020 was not a theory. It was an exercise in political misdirection, an attempt by Trump and others to make someone else the villain and him the victim
Which is why in Feb/Mar 2020, prominent liberal govt scientists said it was plausible and the most likely option. They were covering for Trump! You're a real genius DJ.
Two reasons. First it would have shown us that the current regime in place was incompetent and two it demonstrated how officials were willing to lie when it suited their political or collective agenda. Pretty important and I don’t see how you can really think otherwise.
Completely agree. He's only choosing to elevate this issue in particular because people had the temerity to disagree with him on twitter.
I would argue both are true, and they feel related to me. As the media has absorbed more far left progressives, it's become easier for far right media to point and say, "Look, this is what everyone in the mainstream media believes, aren't they crazy?" This allows the right wing media to cut off more and more right wing viewers from other news outlets, which in turn allows them to go further to the right.
Just anecdotally - when I talk to my (very conservative) extended family about the mainstream media, they often bring up talking points I can imagine being raised in some Huffington Post op ed which don't actually reflect the views of most democrats. For example: we should stop farming cows because they release too much methane, we should legally recognize people who identify as animals. Most dems don't believe these things, but when left wing publications print more fringe-y progressive takes, it gives the right wing media cover to dismiss the entire "Indigo Blob" as radical leftists and move further to the right.
Hi Nate, this is really well written and interesting. And I see where you're coming from, and why you want something like this to make sense.
I really think it doesn't make sense, at all. It rests on the claim that liberal-vs-conservative can be reduced to numbers ... and that those numbers can be rated objectively ... and that those numbers balance out, more or less. I think all of those claims are false. I think that when people accuse you of faux-centrism, this is what they have in mind: you have this idea that there's a deep truth to politics, that centrists are the only ones who can see that truth, and that the true position is itself centrist.
I imagine that you're going to reject this out of hand. I wonder what I could say to help you see what is radically questionable (and, indeed, necessarily false) about your position of centrism-uber-alles.
Maybe I can put it this way. In poker there's a correct play no matter what. It's possible to play too aggressively and it's possible to play too passively. The correct way to play is a mean between these extremes. The correct way to play can be mathematically modelled and rationally understood based on criteria that are accepted by all people of good will. In all of these respects, politics is simply not like poker! I feel like you're trying to use statistical models that work for poker, but simply have no purchase at all on the reality of the political world.
Let's imagine a society that was politically divided, most saliently, over religion: say the two big blocs are Christians and Buddhists. Our poker-playing-centrist then goes around assigning numbers to every media outlet, from -10 (maximally Christian) to +10 (maximally Buddhist). Can you see how incoherent this would be? For several reasons: (a) the meaning of "Christian" and "Buddhist" varies over time; (b) there are many different ways of being both Christian and Buddhist at any given time; (c) some Christians will share more in common with some Buddhists than they will with other Christians (and vice-versa); (d) trying to be "centrist" between the two belief sets is not inherently a sensible or reasonable way to be; (e) there are real moral issues at stake, and it's possible (likely!) that the Christians or the Buddhists at any given time will have a better, more sensible, more human take on them, which the centrist (by self-definition) will not be able to think about.
I know you think you're being rational and sensible. But there are some aspects of reality where actually being rational and sensible requires engaging with the content of what is being argued. Politics, like religion, is an arena in which human beings make claims about whether certain things are true and good (and beautiful, to complete the classical trifecta). Taking these sorts of claims, assigning them numbers, and then adding up the numbers ... is simply not a sensible, rational way of interacting with them.
There actually are correct answers about politics. A lot of people get upset over them because they don't want to believe they are correct.
BLM is a scam. The person who ran BLM did it to buy a mansion for herself. Said scam was promoted by Russia. Black people are no more likely than white people to be shot by police under the same circumstances according to studies.
Donald Trump's campaign was promoted by Russia. So was Bernie Sanders. This was done to weaken the US.
Bernie Sanders lies constantly.
Wage stagnation is a myth.
The reason why unions became unpopular is because of their associations with organized crime and the Soviet Union.
Socialism is based on 19th century antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Donald Trump tried to overthrow the government of the United States.
Cutting taxes does not, generally speaking, lead to better economic outcomes.
Raising taxes also does not, generally speaking, lead to better economic outcomes.
A lot of government spending is wasted.
There's no evidence that gender affirming therapy works; it has never undergone the standard clinical trials necessary to prove it would be safe and effective in the treatment of gender dysphoria.
Global warming is real, but not apocalyptic. It is more of a long term expensive problem.
Regulations are not inherently good or inherently bad; it depends on the regulation on whether it is good or bad.
Incarcerating criminals lowers crime rates by preventing criminals from committing more crimes.
There is substantial evidence of corruption within the Republican party, and for all they claim to be pro-police, they are very much against law enforcement actually enforcing laws against members of their own tribe, as evinced by their attacks on the FBI and IRS auditors.
Some of the above probably upset you, but all of it is verifiable.
It's a problem when you insist things are objectively correct, while also saying some other things are mere subjective opinion.
If you really insist it's all verifiable, some of it is only verifiable by cherry picking your sources and applying motivated reasoning.
It'd have been more interesting if you proposed a solution that mitigates this problem, rather than depend on your apparent authority.
I think you should direct your comment at Nate, not me. I 100% agree with you that some things are just true! I don't agree with all of your claims, but they don't upset me much and they're not a bad place to start!
Nate really spent half a day writing a "both-sides" argument.
And then posted it.
all models are wrong, some are useful. I hear the same arguments for "race is a social construct", "words have no inherent meaning" and so on.
Mathematicizing what isn't mathematical can be a rhetorical trick of false certainty, true. But we can make true enough statements about the distribution of ideology. I'd say: argue _exactly_ why this model fails to do what it's meant for, rather than the truism that models are models.
I think YOUR mistake is to assume that the "poles are real and essential. I think they are labels for collections of positions on a multitude of issues -- optimal tax on CO2 emissions, criteria for admitting immigrants, whether to have a VAT or not and what rate, how to regulate trade and investment with China, etc..
I think we might agree with each other....? I certainly agree with you that the poles are not real or essential. "Left" and "right" are often used as labels for collections of positions --yes, agreed.
But I don't believe that we learn anything if we assign numbers to people's answers to these various questions (questions that can cross-cut against each other in any number of dimensions) -- let alone that adding up the various numbers tells us anything.
Let's make up two people and call them me and you: obviously I'm not me and you're not you. These are just people. So anyway. Say I'm pro-VAT and you're anti-VAT ... and so our poker player adder-upper person codes me as "left" and you as "right." But actually I'm pro-VAT for reasons of efficiency, while you're anti-VAT because you think it will be enforced unfairly against poor people. So now I'm "right" and you're "left." But my reasons of efficiency ultimately come down to a belief what matters is equality among persons of all colors and races, and that undercutting efficiency will destroy the possibility of a post-racial state, so now I'm "left" again. And your worry about a VAT being enforced unfairly against poor people really comes down to a concern about poor appalachian white people, who you believe will be a critical factor in achieving your dream of a cleansed white racial state ... so now you're "right" again.
People are complicated! Maybe not often as complicated as my example ... but things like this do happen. I just think it's foolish to try to convert people's beliefs to numbers on a single axis -- whether you label that axis left vs right or Christian vs Buddhist or anything else.
Again, none of it is like poker. Poker really does have "too aggressive" and "too passive" and a sweet spot called optimal play which is located somewhere in the middle. It's sensible to reason about poker based on that single axis. Politics, like religion, not so much.
Most of this made sense to me, but not this: "For example, if public health officials would strongly prioritize “equity” when coming up with a plan to distribute vaccines but the general public would not, they should defer to the public."
Why? Public health policy should be based on smart principles (and also other factors like legal requirements), not poll results. Using "equity" for vaccine distribution means making an effort to make vaccinations broadly available to everyone -- including lower-income groups, racial minorities, and disabled people who can't leave their homes. Even if the general public doesn't want the housebound to get vaccinations, for example, that doesn't matter. They still should. The same goes for people who don't own their own cars and would either need transit to get to the vaccination site or vaccinations brought to their neighborhoods. Your approach of favoring some groups over others is not only immoral (surely killing people for being disabled is understood to be immoral, right?) but it's illogical. It's like mimicking the early COVID cruise ships, where the passengers can quarantine, but the crew rooms together and gets COVID--which it then transmits to the rich people. It doesn't contain the disease.
Using "equity" for vaccine distribution meant a set of policies that prioritized giving vaccines to the right racial mix over those most at risk. This meant choosing to have more people die.
Not just white people, either. An "old and at risk people first" strategy would have saved both black and Hispanic lives. In other words you're defending a policy that chose to let more blacks die, in the name of delivering a fair share of vaccines to blacks. This is beyond absurd.
Even worse, we had a confusing set of rules that resulted in many vaccines not getting used on anyone at all early on. For example in California in mid Jan 2021, 73% of vaccines got to nobody. See https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-story-of-vaccinateca for how that got fixed. (Hint: By volunteers who focused on shots in arms over silly rhetoric about equity.)
This is what people don't understand. "Equity" based decision-making frequently leads to outcomes that are worse for all groups. But these decisions improve the reputation and self-image of leaders in progressive spaces, because they optimize for the metric that progressives care about more than any other: group disparities.
All things being equal % below poverty level is the biggest factor in a population’s Covid death rate in America.
That is only true if the things that you hold equal are bigger factors like age, preexisting conditions and vaccination status.
But yes. After you control for enough of the other factors, poverty becomes a significant factor.
No, Maine is the oldest age population state and it has a relatively low Covid death rate. Age is only a big factor at the population level on the low end like Utah and Austin and DC. So Utah doesn’t have a great vaccination rate but it has a very low Covid death rate.
Nice job completely missing Ben's point. An 80 year old is 4,000x more likely to die from a covid infection. Now let's think about how much lower that ratio is in the case of race or socioeconomic status...
I’m talking about the biggest factor for a population in America…America is old and unhealthy and so when comparing different populations in America factoring in old age doesn’t tell you anything while factoring in young age explains why Utah has a very low Covid death rate.
*4000x compared to 20 year old
There's a bit more nuance than that. There's two ways of doing equity based policy. One is as you describe, and I agree it is suspect.
The other way is to use known inequities to more efficiently target resource distribution to produce an aggregate outcome that is better overall even when the outcome is measured in a way that is blind to inequity. In this model, discrimination in policy exists, but the goal being aimed for is not a discriminatory one. When policies should reference inequities then becomes an empirical question. This model is much harder to argue against, I think.
Distinguishing between these two models is important.
I disagree.
By definition, equity is the attempt to create equal outcomes. Redistributing resources to what more efficiently provides opportunity may result in more equality, but it won't be equity.
Our desire to create equality of opportunity may result in an inefficient distribution of resources. I support actually doing that. But, even though that goes beyond your "better model", it still does not give equity.
The only thing that I've seen create equity is denying opportunities to those who are doing well. And that tends to go nowhere that I would consider good.
You can easily combine an equity strategy with a science-based approach. Yes, the elderly are most at risk of severe COVID. Additionally - historically marginalized communities are even higher at risk, and have a more difficult time accessing traditional routes of vaccine administration (doctor's offices, as many do not have a dedicated PCP).
An equity approach would be dedicating resources to ensure that, among the high-risk population, distribution resources are targeted at reaching those who are more unlikely to easily have access to the vaccine.
See how easy that is?
Counterpoint: you only get one top priority. If your top priority is equity then you are necessarily deprioritizing public health.
"easily"
It's difficult to differentiate between people who would take your approach and the usual gaggle of DEI crusaders who use the exact same terminology to describe an approach that, as stated by others, is effectively willing to accept a higher number of total deaths in return for having a better racial distribution of COVID death.
Thanks to universities and corporations, too, a lot of people have experienced the latter category of person and seen them wield institutional power.
I would add that the person you responded to is extremely credulous of the intentions of the "equity" proponents, which is a huge problem. Those people are crusaders who don't have a victory condition, and so should be taken with a whole Lot's wife of salt, because they will never stop crusading.
I think everyone commenting on this (including, perhaps, Nate Silver) have misunderstood the meaning of the term "equity" here, seeing the word and assuming it has some racial or class connotation. This is incorrect.
The hyperlink leads to a set of slides in which the word "equity" appears four times, all of them in a section marked "Balancing Goals." The issue at hand was balancing two different priorities: "Prevention of Morbidity and Mortality" and "Preservation of Social Function." In plain language, who gets the vaccines first - those at the highest risk of death, or those who are most needed by society? The sick and the elderly, or frontline health workers? That's the context in which the term equity is used.
I don't really blame anyone for making that mistake, as Silver put it in a pretty misleading context. It's not up to me to decide if he did this on purpose.
Utah had a vaccination point system where being a minority counted for twice as much as a co-morbidity - like diabetes or a heart condition. This was done for equity purposes according to their slideware.
Regardless of what we linked, we know for a fact that there were attempts to allocate vaccines by race (giving the 'good' races preferential access). This is what he and others are referring to.
Thanks Nate. This is why I pledged.
“In this formulation, -10 reflects maximal left-wing bias and +10 reflects maximal right-wing bias.”
We need to know more about “this formulation” and how the scales leading up to the “maximal” biases were determined.
It’s for illustrative purposes only, but attaching numbers to it makes it seem more rigorous than it actually is. I think that piece could have been presented better.
Yeah I’m gonna need to see the aggregated data on this to take it seriously. You know, like an average of polls.
Yeah this is a useful illustration, but if it is just Nate’s perception and isn’t backed up by some analysis or data it’s value is limited. I’m hoping each of those segments is a real media outlet and the -10 to -10 scale based on some arguable measure...
Yeah this is a useful illustration, but if it is just Nate’s perception and isn’t backed up by some analysis or data it’s value is limited. I’m hoping each of those segments is a real media outlet and the -10 to -10 scale based on some arguable measure...
In the post-Trump term era I don't get how there is a scale that could possibly make sense. Is +10 liberal "full communal ownership of everything" (and what outlet actually promoted something like that?). And is +10 conservative "Vaccines aren't real, windmills give you cancer, Obama was born in Kenya, and we need a king?" How do you even begin to compare those things? And what do you do when the leader and majority of the Republican party is in +9 conservative territory and the Democratic president is +3 left.
The core problem with this article is it makes perfect sense that the 70% of left leaning (or previously conservative) people are freaked the heck out by the fact that the other 30% are playing semi-automatic Russian roulette with our system of government and the environment. If your problem is that dissent from the 70% gets punished unduly harshly, maybe the solution is for the conservative side of any debate to earn back some credibility it gave over to the insane right.
I question the calibration of the scale in Nate's first figure. I'd say "maximal left-wing bias" would be articles advocating for some form of genuine socialism: government ownership of all means of production, etc., with the benefits distributed equally and some form of democratic government, while "maximal right-wing bias" would be articles advocating extreme oligarchic control of production and benefits, and autocratic government. In that formulation, while I think we see +10 in some right-wing outlets, I'd be surprised to see a -10 or anything close in any main-stream media outlet.
I agree with your doubts, but think your examples are too kind to the very dubious premise (that this even lends itself to a 1 to 10 scale). Your examples don’t do justice to “maximal” (certainly not on the left), which would by definition have to be even more extreme. They would have to be the most extreme possible. That’s “maximal.”
Then there’s the matter of “bias”, which in almost every definition is pejorative. We have to see not just an editorial approach but actual “bias” (bad faith, prejudice, dishonesty, sins of omission or the like) in the presentation.
I have no doubt bias exists. We need to see how it can be defined, quantified, filtered through a left/right either/or dichotomy and then put on on a 1 to 10 scale.
I could go on and on. Why are we weighing solely on the extent of political sentiment, irrespective of how egregious (and possibly dishonest) the bias is? Are major stories weighted more? Can one sentence push an article to a 10? Or are we judging not by the most extreme sentiment possible but by the limits of the current Overton Window? If so, how is that determined?
The whole notion of the two (one for the left, one for the right right) 1 to 10 scales (10 is “maximal”!) of “bias” is just silly. It’s not serious.
I mean, the vaccine thing is cherry picking and overall this statement is beyond the pale: " I think institutions like the media — and certainly science and medicine — provide substantial, non-zero-sum benefits to society and that this mission has been somewhat compromised in recent years by left-leaning partisanship."
OK, I agree on the schools thing. But the non-left leaning partisans are literally full of people who deny climate change and want to defund whole departments of the government dedicated to science. Trump famously put a bunch of yahoos in such departments and they promptly shutdown the science and data-driven things. They literally shutdown the science.
I'm a long time fan of Nate's. And by any rational standard, I'm a left-leaning Centrist.
But this whole thing is so convoluted and contrarian, and it just misses the fundamental thing here.
And that fundamental thing is the 30% of yahoos who think the world is flat, don't believe in climate science, or are racists or homophobes, or think we should have a king, or think Mexicans are to blame for their rural white issues, should probably not be contributing or influencing any conversation. Nate makes the mistake here of not really explaining what contributions these people are making overall. What are they adding that is so great to have around?
And then more broadly, I think we can confidently say that the US was alot better politically before social media and Fox, when yahoos were basically de platformed in their caves because they couldn't say Yahoo stuff IRL.
And now with social media and Fox, yahoo stuff has now come out IRL too.
But here's Nate saying... What is Nate even saying.
Gender affirming care has never undergone RCTs. There's no clinical evidence of efficacy of these treatments.
The attack on standardized testing is driven by people not liking what standardized tests tell us.
The same is true of the attack on IQs.
The same is true of the attack on genetic-linked behavioral studies.
The same is true of criminological studies - the people who pointed out that black people were no more likely to be shot than white people under the same circumstances were roundly attacked.
The right does not have a monopoly on anti-science. The idea that the left is pro-science is simply false.
There's a huge amount of really gross things going on in academia driven by the far left.
Gender Affirming care seems to have a fair bit of evidence (studies) affirming its efficacy. If you have alternate evidence, maybe you’d consider updating the Wikipedia page and citing your sources there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puberty_blocker
Also, it seems like RCT is methodologically inappropriate for transgender healthcare in adolescents.
“Gender-affirming interventions have physiologically evident effects and are highly desired by participants, giving rise to concerns over adherence, drop-out, response bias, and generalizability. Complementary and well-designed observational studies can instead be used to ground reliable recommendations for clinical practice and policymaking in adolescent trans healthcare, without the need for RCTs.”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26895269.2023.2218357
There is no evidence that these treatments actually help people. The "studies" done are all of poor quality and lack randomized control groups, which means that they have zero ability to demonstrate whether or not they actually benefit anyone. Long-term studies suggest that people who undergo these treatments commit suicides at a much higher rate than the general population, so obviously these treatments do not resolve the issue.
That's why the UK has restricted access to several of these treatments to experimental settings and why Norway's medical advisory board has recommended the same - because these treatments were applied without ever demonstrating the benefits.
Not doing RCTs is a violation of the Nuremburg code.
The anti-RCT rhetoric comes from people who are both civilly and criminally liable for malpractice should these treatments be demonstrated to be ineffective, as it means they've been giving people ineffective or even harmful "treatments" with zero scientific basis.
The idea that RCTs are "inappropriate" is simply false; it is a desperate attempt to prevent these treatments from being tested. They never should have been applied en masse to people without them in the first place.
What reason is there to believe that these treatments would be effective? The origin of the justification for genital alteration comes from folks like John Money, who was, it later turned out, a child molester who had fabricated his research.
The reality is that there's no scientific or medical basis for current "gender affirming care" practices; there's no reason to believe that they would be helpful, and indeed, no other psychological disorder is treated in this way.
There is not actually any such body of research claimed; all of the studies are completely lacking in things like control groups and randomization and are severely prone to response bias.
Studies that eliminate response bias (such as studies of whether or not people discontinue use of hormones) have found vastly higher rates of cessation than the studies that are prone to response bias (on the scale of an order of magnitude of difference).
https://ukom.no/rapporter/pasientsikkerhet-for-barn-og-unge-med-kjonnsinkongruens/sammendrag
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56601386
Furthermore, the studies are beginning to show that the old saw of "denying these people medical transition leads to them offing themselves at drastically higher rates" is total bunk.
Neither this nor anything Titanium Dragon says are remotely true. The theory that gender affirming care improves lives and decreases suicide simply encompasses more evidence - and requires less explanation for discarding opposing evidence - than the alternative you're proposing. This is why TD here needs to lie about the 2020 NICE report - which pointed to potential issues with methodology (these issues themselves being reasonably understandable given the possible ethics violations involved) but did not, as TD claims, say anything about their accuracy - and why they need to cite a 2020 study about methodology in the first place, rather than more recent, more direct studies like this one https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2789423.
It's also why they have to outright lie about the studies they do cite, which do not argue that medical intervention is *harmful* or *neutral* but that it is *insufficient*.
There's a total insufficiency of evidence, while people have been applying these treatments which have permanent effects to people. Following standard guidelines, none of these treatment regimens would have even been greenlit in the first place for adolescents - indeed, even doing these studies on adults would have run into very serious ethical issues right off the bat, because there's no mechanism of action , no other mental disorder is treated in this way, and the effects are permanent and irreversible.
Also, because of the generally poor scientific methodology we've seen for a very long time, generally speaking, if there's something that's full of bad experimental procedures, there's a good chance that whatever they're doing is probably deeply flawed.
If this treatment lowered suicidality, we would expect that we would see a decline in suicide in states with better access to this care. This is not the case; suicide rates are in fact higher in such states.
There are additional issues as well, such as the fact that several journals have outright stated they refuse to publish papers that could "harm" people undergoing these treatments - which they include as defining evidence that these treatments do not work or that the condition isn't actually intrinsic (hence the controversy and hatemail over the lateral spread study).
You are heavily influenced by the things that the media chooses to spend time on. Go ask a nice liberal lady on the Upper West Side what she thinks of nuclear power and prepare yourself for an anti-science whirlwind of crap.
Furthermore, the idea that one can "believe in" science is antithetical to science. Replication crisis, anyone?
I say this as an actual employed scientist.
About the ideological positioning of institutions, I want to again recall Covid times in India.
Back in April-May 2021, during the Delta wave in India, the Indian central government, decided to let the states negotiate directly with vaccine providers.
This decision was met with contempt and fury from the Lancet magazine, which blasted Modi for washing his hands off Covid management, and trying to pass the blame to the states.
However, I live in India, and in April-May 2021, it was the states which were clamoring for the ability to directly negotiate with vaccine providers! My own state (run by a party in opposition to Modi) was slamming the central govt for slowness in getting the vaccines; and wanted to get the vaccines directly.
It was clear that Lancet had no idea what was going in India, and was simply lashing out what the editor saw as a "Trump-like right-wing-populist" as Modi had been projected in the media coverage.
Nate, I appreciate your first footnote about distinguishing liberal from progressive or left. Including them together obscures more than it illuminates. And that is not just a European way of using the term (although parliamentary governments obviously have parties more directly aligned with beliefs than the two major American parties do, at least away from primaries, where those preferences get hashed out). At any rate, I'm looking forward to your article explaining your thinking on this point.
This is all well and good. So, there's liberal bias in the mass media, but what about the political system as a whole? What about the CONSERVATIVE BIAS of the massive influence of corporate lobbyists and large dollar donors on state legislatures, the presidency, Congress and even the Supreme Court? What about the CONSERVATIVE BIAS of massive gerrymandering of state legislatures? What about the CONSERVATIVE BIAS of the Electoral College, where a vote in a sparsely populated state can be worth as much as 3 1/2 times more than in a large densely populated state? What about the CONSERVATIVE BIAS of the Senate, where the same factors as in the Electoral College hold sway? It would be well to start and finish an essay such as this with the observation that media bias is only one part of a much bigger picture.
> the CONSERVATIVE BIAS of the massive influence of corporate lobbyists
Yes, when I think about large Fortune 500 corporations, I definitely think about MAGA conservatives and not the Indigo Blob. Companies that illegally use de facto and de jure racial quotas in their hiring are definitely MAGA conservative.
Don't forget those hard right billionaire individual donors like Bezos, ,Soros, Bloomberg, Steyer, Gates,...
Fortune 500 companies are going to donate across the political spectrum as their interests are served. But the original comment also referenced “large dollar donors.” If we look at the political biases of individual mega wealthy donors, it’s not even close. Conservatives have the clear advantage by far.
Do you think there is a MAGA conservative bias to “corporate lobbyists” or do you agree with me?
Conservative bias - probably. MAGA bias? No. I don’t see large corporate interests aligned with right wing populism except as necessary to serve their own interests.
Corporations are classic liberals, not conservatives. Corporations are generally in favor of gay rights and abortions, but also in favor of low taxes and lower levels of government regulation on them.
Also, FYI, the electoral college favors low population states; states like Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Hawaii all benefit from the electoral college.
The point is that the elite system (political, media, & ecoomic) is to the right of the American supermajority. That is severely problematic for a citizenry aspiring to actual democracy, as opposed to resigning ourselves to the status of a banana republic.
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2021/04/07/american-leftist-supermajority/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2020/11/29/polarization-between-the-majority-and-minority/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2021/02/22/moderates-are-extremists-centrists-are-right-wingers/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2020/11/08/fox-news-americans-are-the-left-wing-enemy-threatening-america/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/political-elites-disconnected-from-general-public/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2014/01/15/wirthlin-effect-symbolic-conservatism/
This: "For instance, by publishing misinformation that downplayed the possibility of a COVID lab leak in Nature Medicine to avoid causing trouble with China, giving credence to Trump, or drawing criticism of virological research. Or on a more routine level, by playing motte-and-bailey games between science and advocacy."
Is patently false sorry and it points to a key flaw in this article. Finding Alex Washbourne's argument credible is like believing heuristics suggesting that its night, when the sun is shinning outside.
What is being touted as "misinformation" here is the typical "cherry pick quotes without context to manufacture a fake controversy strategy".
The idea that COVID is manufactured is simply not credible. It never was. Everyone who has ever worked with a Virus has a pretty clear idea of what a gain-of-function experiment looks like. You do not take an unknown, unpublished and never studied virus backbone, slap on an unknown unpublished and never studied envelope gene and then modify the Furin cleavage site to something no one could have predicted and call that an experiment.
A lab leak is still possible, but it would be a natural strain isolated, but not yet characterised that escaped. The idea of a bioweapon or a gain-of-function experiment is simply not credible, no matter what bull-**** argument some contrarian on twitter makes.
The idea for example that a lab leak was "invonvenient" and therefore had to be "suppressed".
That is just not how science works. Standing up for the status quo has zero benefits in science. Zero. It does not help you get grants. It does not help you make a name for yourself. It does not get you high impact papers. You make a name and a reputation by bucking the status quo and proving it wrong. That is why it is very rare for people to try and "suppress" contrary views. The moment you try that you create an incentive for every other person in the field to make a name for themselves by proving you wrong, while at the same time gaining nothing in the process.
Therein lies the fatal flaw with your argument. You think that the "purple blob" exerts political influence on experts and institutions, because your contrarian views were "shat on" by Twitter. What actually happens is you swallowed misinformation from Twitter hook, line and sinker, because it agreed with your personal predjudices and biases and then you got the treatment that every contrarian and conspiracy theorist gets. Since you don't view yourself as a conspiracy theorist (because no one ever does) you see this not as evidence that you should maybe re-examine your priors, but as evidence of political biase by experts. That is the anti-vaxxer argument. Its also the flat-earther argument too.
Twitter is not a place to contribute to a public health discussion. It is not the place to contribute to a scientific inquiry on the origin of COVID. Twitter however does grant contrarians and fantasists who imagine themselves expert a route to communicate with actual experts and fancy that they can be part of the argument without the necessary expertise and knowledge. That is what happened to you.
Experts didn't dismiss your views because they are political. Public health experts didn't see COVID as an excuse to push their own political agenda. The twitter Zeitgeist has never been an important factor in the scientific consensus on any subject and it is not part of the conversation when it comes to non-partisan or expert institutions.
You continued refusal to accept the simple fact that COVID being engineered or being the result of a gain-of-function experiment is just not credible. That is not what experts are talking about when they say "lab leak", is just you doubling down on stupid. Alex Washbourne is a contrarian, who saw a chance to make a name for himself by taking a long-shot punt but he has nothing to lose. People on the other side of the argument however are putting their reputations on the lines if they are wrong and they have very little to gain by debunking the engineered virus theory. The fact that the majority of scientists in the field are all saying that its bull**** is the only heuristic you need. You are lumping the people taking a long-shot punt, together with people putting their career on the line and you call it 50-50. That is why you got "shat on" on twitter. The right thing to do is not to double down on stupid, but to stop and actually have an honest conversation with someone who understands this stuff and can explain to you, how gain-of-function experiments are designed, why they are ALWAYS done only one well studied and published strains, why it is clear that no one had the biological knowledge to design covid and what the actual credible lab-leak related possibilities are.
The same thing goes with the public health decisions on COVID. The arguments you made on twitter were things that people had already argued internally and considered in light of what was known at the time and you don't consider the counterfactual of what might have happened if schools were kept open. Your counterfactual is a different country with an entirely different set of parameters, because you don't have the capacity to model the actual situation on the ground and don't understand how noisy the data you relied on is. For example consider this: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01571-8 and a more recent meta-analysis: https://ebm.bmj.com/content/28/3/164.
The public health experts were right that this was not as simple decision. Closing schools did have the negative effects some social scientists predicted, but that has to be weighed against the effects of reduced spread. Is some learning loss for many children a bigger problem than 1% of children losing a parent? What about 0.1% of children? What about 0.01% of children? It will take a very long time for us to find out, but the vast majority of public health experts will say someone dying is not in the same ballpark as loss of schooling. After all you can do something about the latter, but you can't bring people back from the dead. Maybe it will emerge that school closures were not the right policy after all. Even if it does your picking that policy and defending it on twitter because it agreed with your intuition, contributed nothing to the discussion. Even if it turns out school closures were the wrong approach, when faced with a similar choice in the future public health experts will still put the risk of someone dying first. You didn't get that then and that is why you got dismissed by experts on twitter.
Experts do not form the views based on politics. Public health experts don't make decisions that affect people's lives and livelihood based on politics. Twitter is not how you contribute to scientific or expert discourse and the indigo blob has very little real impact on policy. You thought you were immune to twitter misinformation and you thought that because experts communicated on twitter that meant you can be part of the discussion too. You were wrong on both counts. If you want to contribute to expert discussion, then do the hard graft. Craft your hypothesis, gather the evidence to support it. Publish the results. Don't shit-post on twitter and expect to not be dumped on.
Bravo! Thanks for this. I live in Aotearoa-New Zealand & we closed schools, had initial global and later local lockdowns until we got a vaccine, closed the borders to international air & shipping (with managed exceptions for citizens & supply chain continuity), aggressively vaccinated & boosted, and have one of the lowest per capita deaths from COVID in the entire world. Not only that, but with masking & social distancing our seasonal 'flu and respiratory illnesses plummeted, and as a result seasonal deaths from these factors went down.
As you say, you can help students catchup with academic studies affected by school closures, but not if they are dead. Not to mention the grandparents, parents, teachers, medical personnel etc. that were lost in some countries (USA) but exponentially less so in other countries (Aotearoa-NZ). The obsession with personal "freedom" over communal responsibiity is not an argument that impresses someone with elderly relatives with health problems who would not have been able to survive a COVID infection ... We all learned positive things from fighting the pandemic together, apart from the "right-wing" anti-vaxxers who got radicalised directly from US right wing Tweeters & podcasters etc. But they too were protected (largely) from being infected by the majority acting responsibly.
Perfect post. I mostly enjoy Nate’s writing around polling data, and political probabilities. But his lab leak posts and his theories on “flawed” lab leak reporting fell into conspiracy theory dribble a long time ago, and he’s blinded by his need to save face. There are few if any incentives for scientists to speak out on Twitter against the lab leak theory, and endless incentives for Twitter clout chasers to push it. He has fallen into that latter camp and doesn’t know it.
Great job explaining how he got there and why he’s wrong.
Hawaii has the lowest Covid death rate of American states because they did what NZ did…Republicans predicted Hawaii would end up with a death rate similar to a state on the continent with a similar median age because:
1. Covid was seasonal
2. Vaccines and masks were ineffective
3. Nothing could be done about it and so mitigation measures simply delayed the inevitable
Funny, the authors of the Proximal Origin paper disagree with you on the science.
To quote Dr. Kristian Anderson on Feb 1, 2020, “I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”
But what does he know? He's just a scientist who publishes in some rag named Nature.
You can find that quote, and the complete archive of slack messages that it was found in, at https://public.substack.com/p/covid-origins-scientist-denounces. (And we have the slack messages thanks to FOIA requests - nobody has actually disputed their authenticity.)
The authors of the Proximal Origin paper do not disagree with me at all. Every single one of them very VERY strongly agrees with me. You are quoting messages out of context. At the time of those messages the Covid sequence had not been published so the possibility of accidentally releasing a wild virus engineered to infect human cells was very real. That all changed the moment the COVID sequence was published and people BLASTed it against known viruses. No part of it was any known virus. So there is literally zero chance of some sort of experiment escaping. ALL such research on viruses is done in known and well characterized strains. No one takes unknown strains and randomly mixes them together, while adding 1000s of random and unpredictable mutations (that take decades to arise naturally), on top of a furin cleavage site that could not have been predicted from known data. Its not an experiment any trained scientist or in fact anyone with IQ higher than 2 digits would ever do. The only plausible lab leak hypothesis is that wild strains isolated in Wuhan were not cultured under conditions that made it easier for them to recombine and jump the species barrier. In that case the parent strains for COVID would have been found pretty darn chop-chop.
Some of the authors would've disagreed with OP... in *February 2020*. They changed their minds not long after. And frankly, any scientific beliefs from that time period should be nearly categorically disregarded. They had so little information compared to what we know now.
This reminds me of the Cambridge Spy ring. How could a respected member of the educated upper class, Anthony Blunt, do what he did? The elite press could not accept it. Until they did.
I think Nate Silver is starting to presuppose on almost every issue that there is indigo blob, it's too far to the left, and the right position is to the center. And when he argues he treats his opponents like they're complete idiots, blinded by ideology or arguing in bad faith.
I really respect Silver I just think he needs to stop categorizing his opponents as liberal sheep.
Why should the "Indigo Blob" be dismissed? After all, they are the American supermajority. What kind of government is it that doesn't represent most of the citizenry?
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2021/04/07/american-leftist-supermajority/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2020/11/29/polarization-between-the-majority-and-minority/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2021/02/22/moderates-are-extremists-centrists-are-right-wingers/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2020/11/08/fox-news-americans-are-the-left-wing-enemy-threatening-america/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/political-elites-disconnected-from-general-public/
https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2014/01/15/wirthlin-effect-symbolic-conservatism/
This is kind of an interesting mirror image of Hanania’s “Why the Media is Honest and Good” - https://www.richardhanania.com/p/www.richardhanania.com/p/why-the-media-is-honest-and-good?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Basically makes similar points, but assumes a different readership and makes a contrarian argument for each’s assumed readership. Anyway, seems like both are right, in their own ways.
Nate Nate Nate... thought-provoking as always, but suffering from several key flaws.
Definition of Left-Wing Bias: This discussion brings to mind the adage, "reality has a well-known left-wing bias." Many of the institutions categorized as "left" are labeled as such by those interested in discrediting objective truths or methods, such as scientific inquiry. A bit ironic given Mr. Silver's own reliance on data-driven insights. What defines left-wing bias? It often seems to be a shifting goalpost, convenient for marginalizing or dismissing perspectives that don't align with a certain agenda. I'm a bit disappointed that Mr. Silver conveniently elides defining the crux of his entire argument.
Real Left-Wing Bias vs. Mainstream Media: Equating the journalistic standards of outlets like the New York Times, ESPN, or ABC with genuinely progressive voices (which are considerably smaller in numbers and reach) seems both inaccurate and in bad faith. The comparison with right-wing bias institutions, driven by overtly partisan interests, distorts the landscape and creates false equivalence.
Good Faith vs. Bad Faith Arguments: The characterization of mainstream media as left-wing fails to recognize the core difference between good faith and bad faith argumentation. Painting conservative discourse as solely ad hominem or dishonest oversimplifies a bit, but it's indeed difficult to find a parallel to some of the right's rampant disinformation strategies. A media breakdown based on good faith vs. bad faith would offer a more nuanced and honest picture.
Get back on the podcast Nate, we miss you ;)
The left 's coverage of climate change, BLN Russia Trump dossier, Hunter Biden are off the scale biased.
I consider myself left wing- but have nothing but contempt for most left wing journalists- they are not interested in the truth.
And of course a lot on the right are the same
We literally have emails from Trump's kids about meeting with Russians to try and get dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of Trump's campaign.
The reality is that the investigation into Trump's collusion with Russia was noted to be stymied by the administration by the Muller Report.
And Hunter Biden is honestly not a very interesting story. The problem is that Hunter Biden is not Joe Biden and there's no evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegal. Hunter Biden is a scumbag, but that's not really relevant to Congress. The coverage of it has honestly been fine overall; it's pretty obvious that Hunter Biden was trading on Joe Biden's name to get jobs and money, but no one has been able to find any evidence of Joe Biden doing anything unlawful.
The media has given it an appropriate level of coverage, I think.
There are other things that I'd say are far more evidence of bias (the fact that BLM was a scam and that the person who founded it misappropriated the money to buy mansions for herself should have been a big story, but has been basically not reported on).
Trump’s own appointee appointed Mueller!! Plus one of the major media figures pushing RussiaGate is a Bush Republican in good standing, Nicole Wallace. The liberal media covered RussiaGate just like the right wing echo chamber covered Benghazi…that’s just partisan politics in this century. The reason Trump received unfair treatment is because Bush Republicans orchestrated a coup to install Pence as president…and then they lost interest once Trump started governing like Jeb!
Not sure what your point. I said both sides are biased.
They are as vas as each other- with if anything the left being worse.
The right are marginally more tolerant of dissenting voices.
The left are never anything more than tribal the whole time.
Their coverage of climate change is as dishonest as possible.
During Trump’s 4 years Democrats treated Trump as one would expect…the group that treated Trump unfairly were Bush Republicans.
I was involved in GOP politics during the Tea Party Movement…the people I was around were College Republicans and never questioned the GOPe and either wanted a job with a GOP think tank or an executive branch job when a Republican won the White House. So that’s why Lizard Cheney was elected into leadership by House Republicans when Trump was president…for Republicans power is the goal while for Democrats implementing policy is the goal.