Trump is certainly to blame for a lot of the botched pandemic response. No argument here. I am by no means a Trump supporter nor have I ever or will I ever vote for that clown.

However, blaming all that’s gone wrong on Trump — as so many do, especially “liberals” — just seems utterly wrong to me. We’d already spent the last 40 years gutting our most important agencies, undermining confidence in government, and slashing budgets wherever we could. Much of that was done by Democrats, or allowed by them. Trump didn’t have anything to do with any of that except the last few years where he cut just a bit more.

I think a lot of the Trump blame stems from the desire not to point fingers at the DNC and for liberals to avoid casting blame on themselves for the vast failures of liberalism. After all, 99% of them bought into the neoliberal swill and hogwash about free markets, were ardent advocates of bootstrapism, and most of them believed and probably still believe that lack of good fortune is one’s own fault.

Trump, then, is just a mild symptom of a disease they actively spread for almost two generations now. How much better would Clinton have done? Some, sure, but in the face of all that’s already been destroyed, and the intransigence and misogyny she would’ve been confronted with, how much better?

what’s the dumbest thing that’s ever been mansplained to you?

mine is one time I was driving and my husband let me know our home was “up ahead on the left.”

— Priscilla (@itsPKav) August 1, 2020

I wish someone would mansplain this stuff to me, as I am terrible with directions.

I have literally driven past my own house before (many times) because, as I said, I am fucking terrible with directions.

Please always mansplain to me where I need to turn, because if you don’t tell me I will probably miss it.

What this post is discussing is related to (though not quite the same) as something I’ve thought about a lot in the last few years — and that is how very readily people forget events and stats of affairs that occurred in their own lifetimes.

They remembered when people could easily find a local job if they wanted one, even without a staggeringly expensive degree and massive debt. When you didn’t have to move far away from your family if you didn’t want to. When you could afford to raise family on a single breadwinner’s salary. When you could buy a house in your 20s. A time when there weren’t quite so many boarded up storefronts, panhandlers, food banks, or people living in their cars. When small local businesses thrived instead of just Wal-Mart and Amazon. They told these stories to their children as if they were describing some sort of long-vanished and forgotten culture, even though it had existed within their own lifetimes.

This is puzzling to me. Extremely so. I’m 44, and I recall things and ways we used to be that people who were also there claim “never happened.” I know they are wrong, very much so, but how do people forget so much so easily? I need to understand this and just don’t.

The first 10 on today’s playlist:

Some of those songs have long damn titles, aye?

Smaller bodied people *systematically* received earlier antiviral treatment than larger bodied people. Controlling for this difference eliminates impact of obesity on H1N1 fatality. Obesity kills, but the critical mediator is not biology, it's bias.https://t.co/nSiYEUKhkx

— rfrosencrans (@rfrosencrans) August 1, 2020

I see and note this. I haven’t read the paper and probably won’t soon (too much else to read).

I am very suspicious, though, of studies where factors are “controlled” out. It’d take more time to examine than I have, however. Just all too often scientists “control” for the very thing they should be examining, befitting the biases of the time. I do think there is anti-obesity bias in health care. I’m not saying it’s there for a good reason, but I understand why it’s present: obese people have worse outcomes across a wide range of diseases and conditions, and many conditions could be vastly improved and sometimes eliminated by just losing weight (examples: diabetes, PCOS, asthma, etc.)

I know to the fat acceptance types all of this can be explained somehow by bias, but that seems just excuse-making, considering The Health Effects of Overweight and Obesity.

All that said, obese people should get equitable treatment in health care and elsewhere, too. But I don’t want it to become a “dangerous truth” that there are risks to obesity. We already pretend that too much that is the case is not — let’s not allow this to become yet another area of absurd pantomime.