Had It in Holland Park

When Can We Stop Thinking About Trump Every Minute?Australia Condemns Lurid Tweet by Chinese Official as ‘Disgusting Slur’
The post, with a doctored photograph showing an Australian soldier with a knife to the throat of an Afghan child, sent relations between the two countries to a new low.

Trump’s Touted ‘Coronavirus Drug’ Linked To Psychiatric Disorders

EU’s recommends that product information for hydroxychloroquine mention possible psychiatric risks

Ahhhh,  now we get it.

How Democrats Suffered Crushing Down-Ballot Losses Across America

The Rotting of the Republican Mind
By David Brooks

In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality. Moreover, this is not just an American problem. All around the world, rising right-wing populist parties are floating on oceans of misinformation and falsehood. What is going on?
      Many people point to the internet — the way it funnels people into information silos, the way it abets the spread of misinformation. I mostly reject this view. Why would the internet have corrupted Republicans so much more than Democrats, the global right more than the global left?
      My analysis begins with a remarkable essay that Jonathan Rauch wrote for National Affairs in 2018 called “The Constitution of Knowledge.” Rauch pointed out that every society has an epistemic regime, a marketplace of ideas where people collectively hammer out what’s real. In democratic, non-theocratic societies, this regime is a decentralized ecosystem of academics, clergy members, teachers, journalists and others who disagree about a lot but agree on a shared system of rules for weighing evidence and building knowledge.
     This ecosystem, Rauch wrote, operates as a funnel. It allows a wide volume of ideas to get floated, but only a narrow group of ideas survive collective scrutiny. “We let alt-truth talk,” Rauch said, “but we don’t let it write textbooks, receive tenure, bypass peer review, set the research agenda, dominate the front pages, give expert testimony or dictate the flow of public dollars.”
     Over the past decades the information age has created a lot more people who make their living working with ideas, who are professional members of this epistemic process. The information economy has increasingly rewarded them with money and status. It has increasingly concentrated them in ever more prosperous metro areas.
    While these cities have been prospering, places where fewer people have college degrees have been spiraling down: flatter incomes, decimated families, dissolved communities. In 1972, people without college degrees were nearly as happy as those with college degrees. Now those without a degree are far more unhappy about their lives.
     People need a secure order to feel safe. Deprived of that, people legitimately feel cynicism and distrust, alienation and anomie. This precarity has created, in nation after nation, intense populist backlashes against the highly educated folks who have migrated to the cities and accrued significant economic, cultural and political power. Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center calls this the “Density Divide.” It is a bitter cultural and political cold war.
     In the fervor of this enmity, millions of people have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending. Millions not only distrust everything the “fake news” people say, but also the so-called rules they use to say them.
     People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers. The evangelists of distrust, from Donald Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community. Paradoxically, conspiracy theories have become the most effective community bonding mechanisms of the 21st century.
      For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools. For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.
     Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set. He and his media allies simply ignore the rules of the epistemic regime and have set up a rival trolling regime. The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source. Distrust and precarity, caused by economic, cultural and spiritual threat, are the source.
      What to do? You can’t argue people out of paranoia. If you try to point out factual errors, you only entrench false belief. The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking. That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.  

Splitting 5 to 4, Supreme Court Backs Religious Challenge to NY Virus Shutdown Order
What does the Supreme Court have against religious people? Why do they want them to die?Walmart Thanks Government For Completely Obliterating Their Small Business Competition
      U.S.—In an open letter addressed to state officials, Walmart leadership expressed gratefulness to the government for inflating their sales and stock price while completely pulverizing their small business competition.
     "Yeah, we know 2020 has been tough for the little people," said one board member while shoveling piles of cash into his vault. "But it's been super great for us! No longer do we have to worry about the baker down the street or the family-owned hardware store next door taking away some of our business. The government just blew them up! We didn't even ask them to! Can you believe it? What luck!"

Tory MP Ben Bradley Mocked After Calling For 'Minister For Men'

He mused: "Why have a minister for women but not one for men?"

Same reason there is a black police officers organization but no white police officers organization: 

Laws Needed To Combat Anti-Vaxxer 'Poison Garbage' Online, Says Labour
Yes, We want censorship. We need social media to only allow through those posts we agree with and not to allow those that we don't. If they get it wrong, they should go to jail.Sex-Abuse Claims Against Boy Scouts Now Surpass 82,000

When Will Hollywood Learn Scars Don’t Make People Like Me EvilBen Grimm, Deadpool, Rocky Dennis, Quasimodo, Elephant Man, Justin McCloud, Darkman, Robocop, Edward Scissorhands, Marv, Wolverine, Nick Fury, Urdnot Wrexm, Snake Eyes, Sandor Clegane, Tyrion Lanister, Rooster Coogburn, Snake Plisskin