honestly there has nothing been more flabbergasting than Democrats having faced down getting blown up / shot / kidnapped and then pretending like they have no power to do anything about it

It turns out it’s not that they didn’t care about their constituents, they’re just abject cowards who can’t even stand up for themselves in an ongoing emergency where the lack of consequences makes a second, third, fourth attack more likely????
“Ah ha, but let’s not ruin Biden’s first one hundred days”

A mob just tried to kill you??? Like, there’s bombs and stuff and a cop died???? Why the fuck do you think we’re on a normal schedule anymore!!!
Silicon Valley companies with soul-crushing moral cowardice built into their DNA have moved faster, *what is wrong with you*
The only thing fascists worship is power, or rather, the semblance of power. The only thing that sets them back is feeling like losers. You can’t play 4D chess with an ideology so one dimensional it isn’t actually an ideology
I’ve mentioned this before, but the first right-wing “vigil” for Jay Danielson, the Patriot prayer extremist who got shot to death in Portland? It was a double header event where the memorializing of his death got second billing next to *supporting Kyle Rittenhouse*
I see these terrible videos of a mob rushing en masse to beat and crush these cops, and then I think about that awful night in Portland when Danielson was shot, a protest medic — his supposed enemy — rushed to his side and applied pressure to his wound
Crowd dynamics are complicated things. Violence — physical violence to humans — has erupted at left-wing gatherings. But I never saw a crowd with this kind of brute sadism this summer.
There’s a difference between a crowd set to show they can withstand the worst, and a crowd out to do its worst. I’m horrified.
And all over what? A false belief — probably only loosely held — that the electoral count was wrong?
Imagine being so entitled that you think you’re storming the Bastille, knowing (or maybe not knowing, or simply not caring) what the Bastille was, and what the Capitol is.
But that’s exactly who they’ve been all along, eh? Turns out even when you add crowd dynamics and mob mentality into it, protesters who are anti-killing are going to act very differently from the people who are anti-anti-killing
The right-wing and its useful idiots are out concern trolling about “why weren’t you worried about the riots this summer” or yelling about antifa again. Aside from a fundamental difference in people being upset about literal murder and people being fake upset about fake bullshit-
— if you’re really asking this in earnest and not as a concern troll, I’m telling you these two things are substantively different. Not just in the fundamental cause or the targets of outrage. The *crowd* is different. The sadism is different.
Watching that video of the cop caught in the door, being crushed, crying out for help, his gas mask being ripped off his face... and then people start up a “heave-ho” chant to crush him harder? the kids who graffiti “kill all cops” don’t have the appetite for that
I’m sure there’s 10000 words that can be written about sadism as the core of white supremacy but fuck me, the only reason I’m tweeting is I’m genuinely disturbed.
All summer I’ve seen cops do sadistic shit to people. But this particular crowd first went “back the blue” in an implicit co-signing of that sadism. Then they showed up at the Capitol and inflicted that same sadism on the cops.
And of course if you take a glance at my mentions you can see people parroting lies about happened this summer. Claiming protesters blinded cops (didn’t happen, feds even had to backpedal in a lawsuit), claiming buildings burned down in Portland (lol), etc
This is an additional cost of right-wing propaganda. Turns out they made shit up because it was exactly the kind of thing they themselves wanted to.
PS please recall Ted Wheeler for helping fuel right wing propaganda

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Brief thread to debunk the repeated claims we hear about transmission not happening 'within school walls', infection in school children being 'a reflection of infection from the community', and 'primary school children less likely to get infected and contribute to transmission'.

I've heard a lot of scientists claim these three - including most recently the chief advisor to the CDC, where the claim that most transmission doesn't happen within the walls of schools. There is strong evidence to rebut this claim. Let's look at


Let's look at the trends of infection in different age groups in England first- as reported by the ONS. Being a random survey of infection in the community, this doesn't suffer from the biases of symptom-based testing, particularly important in children who are often asymptomatic

A few things to note:
1. The infection rates among primary & secondary school children closely follow school openings, closures & levels of attendance. E.g. We see a dip in infections following Oct half-term, followed by a rise after school reopening.


We see steep drops in both primary & secondary school groups after end of term (18th December), but these drops plateau out in primary school children, where attendance has been >20% after re-opening in January (by contrast with 2ndary schools where this is ~5%).

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I'm going to do two history threads on Ethiopia, one on its ancient history, one on its modern story (1800 to today). 🇪🇹

I'll begin with the ancient history ... and it goes way back. Because modern humans - and before that, the ancestors of humans - almost certainly originated in Ethiopia. 🇪🇹 (sub-thread):


The first likely historical reference to Ethiopia is ancient Egyptian records of trade expeditions to the "Land of Punt" in search of gold, ebony, ivory, incense, and wild animals, starting in c 2500 BC 🇪🇹


Ethiopians themselves believe that the Queen of Sheba, who visited Israel's King Solomon in the Bible (c 950 BC), came from Ethiopia (not Yemen, as others believe). Here she is meeting Solomon in a stain-glassed window in Addis Ababa's Holy Trinity Church. 🇪🇹


References to the Queen of Sheba are everywhere in Ethiopia. The national airline's frequent flier miles are even called "ShebaMiles". 🇪🇹