1. Another thing that Progressives have to get back is the whole "This person is good vs. this person is bad" mindset. America is a white supremacist country, which inherently means even the most well meaning politicians will have to disappoint eventually. But a lot of

2. Progressives don't seem to understand this. Like, for some reason people thought Obama was going to be a super-leftist, when he ran on working with folks with opposing views. Then y'all thought Bernie was going to spend fight the establishment (despite his history applauding
3. ( funding for jails, police officers and saying he would keel using drones) yet y'all were heartbroken when he supported Biden. Ya know, like he said he would. Now y'all are going at AOC for not wanting to force a M4A vote. You will literally never get anything accomplished if
4. You keep projecting your ideas on th3se folks instead of living in the real world. Politics isn't about who is good or who is bad, it's about getting shit done. Point blank. That's literally all it comes down to. And any elected official who has to govern a country that
5. Believes Obama is a secret Muslim, covid doesn't exist and that we should build a wall to keep out the foreigners probably aren't going to be lectured about your calls for equality and fairness, because at th end of the day, most of this electorate is still shitty. And like
6. I've been saying for the longest time, that means if you really want progressive policies in this country, you HAVE TO ACONOWLEDGE THAT YOU ARE OUTNUMBERED IN REGARDS TO VOTES AND WORK ACCORDINGLY! And No, no amount of new voters is going to overcome this outside of local and
7. Congressional races. This means even your most revered elected officials are going to end up deviating from always cosigning the most progressive policies or working with the most progressive people. This also means you have to govern from a viewpoint that this country will
8. Largely reject policies which they view as benefiting Black/Brown/Native folks, even if the policy would help everyone. There's no way around it. No explaining, no pointing out how their landlords/bosses are selfish, nothing. These folks will gladly suffer if it means they can
9. Rest assured that a person of color isn't doing better than they are. This means you need to become screwed with policy. Wanna defund the police? Present it as a bill named after a whitr service man who was killed during a police interaction and require that deparmwnts provide
10. Social workers and access to resources like housing while mandating that taxes can't be raises to accomplish this. Wanna legalize weed? Present it as a probusinesss bill. Wanna expand Amtrak? Tailor the proposal to increase tourism in small cities that have been losing
11. Young people and sell it as a jobs bill. You're not going to talk these people onto doing the right thing folks, the sooner you face that, then the sooner you can stop being constantly disappointed and we can actually get progressive policies.

More from Government

This is a good piece on fissures within the GOP but I think it mischaracterizes the Trump presidency as “populist” & repeats a story about how conservatives & the GOP expelled the far-right in the mid-1960s that is actually far more complicated. /1

I don’t think the sharp opposition between “hard-edge populism” & “conservative orthodoxy” holds. Many of the Trump administration’s achievements were boilerplate conservatism. Its own website trumpets things like “massive deregulation,” tax cuts, etc. /2

https://t.co/N97v85Bb79


The claim that Buckley and “key GOP politicians banded together to marginalize anti-Communist extremism and conspiracy-mongering” of the JBS has been widely repeated lately but the history is more complicated. /3


This tweet by @ThePlumLineGS citing a paper by @sam_rosenfeld and @daschloz on the "porous" boundary between conservatives, the GOP and the far-right is relevant in this context.


This is a separate point but I find it interesting that Gaetz, like Roy Moore did In his failed Senate campaign, disses McConnell. What are their actual policy differences? MM supported taking health care away from millions, a tax cut for the rich, conservative judges, etc. /5
Which metric is a better predictor of the severity of the fall surge in US states?

1) Margin of Democrat victory in Nov 2020 election
or
2) % infected through Sep 1, 2020

Can you guess which plot is which?


The left plot is based on the % infected through Sep 1, 2020. You can see that there is very little correlation with the % infected since Sep 1.

However, there is a *strong* correlation when using the margin of Biden's victory (right).

Infections % from
https://t.co/WcXlfxv3Ah.


This is the strongest single variable I've seen in being able to explain the severity of this most recent wave in each state.

Not past infections / existing immunity, population density, racial makeup, latitude / weather / humidity, etc.

But political lean.

One can argue that states that lean Democrat are more likely to implement restrictions/mandates.

This is valid, so we test this by using the Government Stringency Index made by @UniofOxford.

We also see a correlation, but it's weaker (R^2=0.36 vs 0.50).

https://t.co/BxBBKwW6ta


To avoid look-ahead bias/confounding variables, here is the same analysis but using 2016 margin of victory as the predictor. Similar results.

This basically says that 2016 election results is a better predictor of the severity of the fall wave than intervention levels in 2020!

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