About those Anti-Vax Democrats . . .

No, I'm not going to let the Democrats forget what they did and said regarding the COVID vaccines that they eventually foisted upon us. In case you are thinking that I'm a conservative or a republican, not true. I haven't voted republican for decades. I am now completely politically homeless. I've seen 100 times more BS than I need to see to be convinced that both of our two major political parties (and their allied media) are corrupt to the core.

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New Study Regarding Tribalism in Politics

New study by Bernstein, Zambrotta, Martin, & Micalizzi on political tribalism. Disturbing and not surprising to anyone who has eyes and ears. Title is: "Tribalism in American Politics: Are Partisans Guilty of Double-Standards?"

Here is the discussion section:

Across experiments, we found strong evidence for the existence of political tribalism and the application of double-standards. In Study 1, we found that tribalism occurs for the perceived legitimacy of hypothetical election outcomes. When asked whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden would be the legitimate president under three different scenarios, Republicans viewed Trump as more legitimate than Biden while Democrats viewed Biden as more legitimate than Trump. Similarly, in Study 2 Part 1, Republicans supported identical presidential policies and actions more under Donald Trump than Barack Obama while Democrats supported identical policies and actions more under Barack Obama than Donald Trump.

A noteworthy element this study is that each item was, in fact, true under both Presidents, which highlights the study’s real-world importance and is an important contribution over prior experiments. In Study 2 Part 2, we showed that Republicans viewed identical statements attributed to Bill Clinton as more bigoted than those attributed to Donald Trump while Democrats viewed the statements as more bigoted when attributed to Trump instead of Clinton. Further, Republicans viewed a statement advocating colorblindness to be generally not racist when attributed to either Dr. Martin Luther King (MLK) or Donald Trump (though racism scores were slightly higher in the latter condition); Democrats also viewed the statement as low in racism when attributed to MLK, but the racism score increased drastically when attributed to Trump. Taken together, these studies suggest that tribalism permeates many aspects of political life and discourse. Policy agreement differs according to the person enacting the policy. Perceptions of racism and xenophobia depend on the person who utters the statement. Alarmingly, even the perceived legitimacy of elections is dependent upon the winner; that is, people assign different standards for election legitimacy depending upon whether their preferred candidate wins or loses. Moreover, some of these effects are rarely seen in the social or cognitive sciences (e.g., Fs>250 when sample size <150), which suggests that tribalism plays a large role, at least in certain contexts.

Our main interest was in documenting if bias exists among each side of the political aisle. However, the study does invite us to ask which side exhibits greater tribal bias . . . To the degree that our results can help weigh in on this question, there was some indication that bias is higher among Democrats, which we call “left-leaning asymmetry”

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Groups Claiming to Fight “Disinformation” Hide What They Are Doing

At Public, Michael Shellenberger writes:

The people who say they are fighting disinformation appear to be transparent and trustworthy. Groups like Stanford Internet Observatory and the Atlantic Council put photos, bios, and contact information for their staff and board members on their websites. They record videos that explain their work. And they regularly write for mainstream media publications.

But of the 50 top ”anti-disinformation” governmental and nongovernmental groups in the world, which Matt Taibbi’s investigative team at Racket identified, only one has agreed to answer our questions, and only 10 even bothered responding to our repeated requests for an interview.

It’s reasonable to wonder if this low response rate has something to do with the fact that I have repeatedly called for all of them to be defunded and dismantled because they are violating a fundamental human right.

But the key “disinfo” censorship groups are not giving substantive interviews to other independent journalists. Indeed, over the last several weeks, they have increasingly gone quiet....

Two weeks ago, BBC heavily promoted the launch of its own “anti-disinfo” program called “Verify,” but has refused to answer questions about it or make its 27-year-old host, whose role is apparently to fact-check all of the news, available for an interview.

And now, the lead censorship organization, Stanford Internet Observatory, is refusing to respect a House Judiciary Committee subpoena for records in the form of “tickets” from the Jira project management software system...

Why? What are Stanford Internet Observatory, Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab, BBC, and other pro-censorship organizations hiding?

Stanford Internet Observatory says it was simply “flagging” disfavored views to Twitter and Facebook, not demanding that they be censored, and not acting on behalf of the government.

But the de facto leader of the SIO, and the rest of the Censorship Industrial Complex, Renee DiResta, openly boasted that the Virality Project existed to act as a proxy for the U.S. government’s Department of Homeland Security in demanding censorship by social media platforms of true vaccine side effect information.

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“Schools”

It's cheap and easy to put up a sign saying "School" on the front of a building. It's entirely another thing to run a functioning school. Many of our schools are among our institutions that are being rotted out on the inside. This is permanently hurting millions of people and threatening America's future. From City Journal:

No issue is more pressing in California than education. In late October, the state released scores for the first post-Covid-shutdown state standardized test, conducted earlier last year. The results were horrendous. Less than half of all students who took the Smarter Balanced test—47.1 percent—met the state standard in English language arts, down 4 percentage points from 2018–19. One-third of students met the standard in math, down 6.5 percentage points. Only 16 percent of black students and 9.7 percent of English learners met standards in math.

Not only did test scores plummet; the state’s chronic absenteeism rate has also skyrocketed. The no-show rate leapt from 14.3 percent in 2020–21 to 30 percent in 2021–22. (California defines chronic absenteeism as students missing 10 percent of the days they were enrolled for any reason.) But amazingly, during the 2021–22 school year, data showed that the state’s four-year high school graduation rate climbed to 87 percent, up from 83.6 percent in 2020–21.

How is this possible?

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