…I know some years easter rolls up on a lazier schedule than usual…in fact, when I was a kid I’m pretty sure I thought it was meant to be the equivalent of getting to have a lie in on a sunday morning…but I think even the dotarded one knows that “in time for easter” =|= “June 1st”
…now I’m not saying that anyone ought to be thinking about getting back on the horse & back out to the herd before then…stopped clock…twice a day…yadda yadda
…but here’s the thing…or at least a thing…it’s sort of simple, so obviously it’s the sort of thing we have trouble with explaining to…well…too many folks…but all the same, here it is…society (which as recently as yesterday boris johnson, poster-haircut for the fuck-you-chum-I-got-mine brexit brigades notably rose from his sickbed to adjure the existence of in defiance of the once & future tory queen maggie the terrible, first of her name) is what we make of it…& since there are a lot of us, that tends to mean in a great many ways that it mostly consists of the way things go for most of us but looks…thanks to hundreds if not thousands of years of habit & convention & a considerable amount of effort on the part of some of us…a bit like quite a small number of people get to set the rules
https://theintercept.com/2020/03/26/americans-for-prosperity-cdc-coronavirus/
…so, as a general rule we don’t differentiate much between the sorts of rules that people with some very clear (& largely financial) interests in dictating some outcomes proclaim as inviolable
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/29/bankers-trump-economy-coronavirus-deaths
…& the sort that make things better for everyone if we all agree to follow them
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/26/coronavirus-us-economy-health-lives-trump
…like staying the fuck home as far as possible in the middle of a pandemic scenario…& avoiding each other as far as possible when you can’t…& cleaning shit down when you get home with it…& washing your damn hands…again…even if you just did before like an idiot you went & touched something you hadn’t…because…& here’s the thing I’ve been trying to get around to…the virus itself DGAF about any of that
…of course the party of small(-minded) government DGAF about the people it supposedly serves…because of course the delusionally tiny-minded bigots of humanity are going to doom all of us on the way to their highly-anticipated day of judgement
…speaking of which…has anyone ever considered that maybe there is a god & they’re just waiting for some sign that enough of us fucking get the joke before stepping in with a punchline where all the zealously-fucking-it-up-for-all-of-us types are excised from the fabric of reality in the blink of an eye leaving all the basically decent & reasonable folks behind in a moderately functional post-scarcity environment from which to bootstrap our way into a paradise of our own creation…no…fair enough…I get that a lot…where was I now…
…wait…what?
…fucking competitive…I mean I know that home is where the echoes are chambered but for crying out fucking loud…how many people are sucking down a steady diet of Fox News & the Sinclair Broadcast Group…or just dummkopf-twitter & the endless delights of facebook with its steady diet of illegitimate incipient deterioration of the collective IQ of humanity?
…because even if we get our collective shit together this thing is bigger than the shit we made allowances for
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/we-need-it-now-doctors-plead-help-nyc-borough-hardest-n1170701
…& with all due respect to Bernie…there’s another Senator I wish were still in this thing
…I’m not saying there isn’t an audience…or even a growing one…for the stuff Bernie’s trying to sell…but with most people staying home a lot more than usual maybe they would have had time to read of few more of those plans Liz had in such profusion
…but either way…I have to admit her campaign is still managing to impress me
…because one thing is for sure…at least some of us are paying attention…maybe even more then usual…& we have some downtime extending our way
Don’t attach too much importance to political polls. Seriously. Remember how wrong they were about the 2016 election? Polls really aren’t able to reach a representative sample of the population. According to Harvard Business Review, “response rates remain shockingly low, especially among younger people, Spanish speakers, Evangelicals, and African-Americans.”
https://hbr.org/2016/08/how-todays-political-polling-works
Other issues besides methodologies are questioned here, including leading questions, rising expense (it takes a LOT of calls to get a decent sample) and an uninformed public:
Bottom line: Lots of polls are more fiction than fact, and their usefulness is declining rapidly. Basically, pollster are only talking to people who don’t bother to screen their calls. Polls are a business, not a public service. If they can’t accurately deliver an answer, they’ll deliver an inaccurate answer, because they need to get paid.
…good points all…& thank you for the link, to boot
…always good to hear from you, either way
Thank you, I find myself starting to panic every time I see these polls!
Yes, I had to basically calm down my wife this weekend for the same reason.
Not to mention that a lot of people rally around leaders in a time of crisis as a coping/control mechanism, even if it’s obviously a bad call in the moment, and it’s not a permanent state of affairs (see George Bush’s 90% approval rating in 1991 followed by a loss in 1992, and that stuff moves a LOT faster now).
Methodologically, they should be counting no-responses as well, and reporting their response rate along with the margin of error, etc. I never think to check whether they do. Even still, margin of error is often so big as to render the results meaningless. I looked at one a couple weeks ago that was +/- 5%. You can’t really learn much from a poll like that.
…all also true…whoever it was that said there are lies, damned lies & statistics probably made a killing as a pollster
Keep in mind that Hillary never got beyond the margin of error. So, while a bunch of people were dumbfounded at how she lost, it really wasn’t a surprise to anyone who was actually paying attention. It’s the same thing here. The DNC is very likely going to lose yet another layup election because God forbid they actually stay the fuck out of the primaries and let the chips fall where they may.
Warren was my first choice, but the fact is that she has officially dropped out so the only person left is Sanders. We need to keep supporting him as much as possible, if for no other reason than to embarrass Biden into actually doing something useful.
This kind of made my morning…