"Fueled by psychopathic narcissism of a delusional autocrat in WH, the Capitol Hill rioters didn’t speak openly of white supremacy yet never had to bc it so drenched their cause like the kerosene-soaked rag of a Molotov cocktail."

If @Will_Bunch wrote it, you should read it™

2/ "The white mob that sacked the seat of U.S. government the moment it promised to look more like the real America was the living, contemporary proof of the “hard fact” that King warned about 54 years ago..."
3/ " But the very real gains of the last year... have encountered the harshest law of American physics, that for every step forward on race there is an unequal and often more powerful backlash, so strong in 2021 that it even breached the citadel of our fragile democracy"
4/ "While the Jan. 6 mob may have invoked the spirit of 1776, it was propelled instead by the cruel, icy currents of 1619, the year that the first slave ship reached our soil."
5/ "Some 80 years of white authoritarian government in the Deep South mocked any spirit of 1776."
6/ "Tangible signs of racial progress ...struggled against those 1619 undercurrents, from the “New Jim Crow” of mass incarceration to a steady erosion of voting rights from a modern Republican Party turning Abe Lincoln on his head"
7/ "One didn’t need a Ph.D. in American history to see that the life force behind the Jan. 6 insurrection was less about the political future of one man and more about that man’s promise to protect 402 years of white privilege."
8/ "Rays of hope from those occasional twists like King’s movement victories or Obama’s election, seems to have underestimated the never-ending force with which the reactionaries of 1619 keep bending back, with a riot on Capitol Hill their latest notion of “flattening the curve.”
9/ "...True racial reckoning to continue King’s legacy must focus on America’s gross economic injustices — the racial wealth gap, raising the minimum wage for our essential workers who are disproportionately Black and brown, and addressing the structural biases..."
10/ "The insurrectionists wanted to prevent those goals from happening, to preserve an America where success was less about the content of one’s character and more about the color of white skin."
11/ "Choice in '21 is btw radical but uplifting King vision that nation claims to celebrate, or the tyranny of white supremacist mob that tried to bludgeon it. As we still clean up the mess inside the Capitol, we need to grab that long moral arc & yank a little harder this time"

More from Government

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!

You May Also Like

First thread of the year because I have time during MCO. As requested, a thread on the gods and spirits of Malay folk religion. Some are indigenous, some are of Indian origin, some have Islamic


Before I begin, it might be worth explaining the Malay conception of the spirit world. At its deepest level, Malay religious belief is animist. All living beings and even certain objects are said to have a soul. Natural phenomena are either controlled by or personified as spirits

Although these beings had to be respected, not all of them were powerful enough to be considered gods. Offerings would be made to the spirits that had greater influence on human life. Spells and incantations would invoke their


Two known examples of such elemental spirits that had god-like status are Raja Angin (king of the wind) and Mambang Tali Arus (spirit of river currents). There were undoubtedly many more which have been lost to time

Contact with ancient India brought the influence of Hinduism and Buddhism to SEA. What we now call Hinduism similarly developed in India out of native animism and the more formal Vedic tradition. This can be seen in the multitude of sacred animals and location-specific Hindu gods