Dr. Gonzo

Tbf Al Arabiya isn't the greatest source of news for Iran - they've been caught just making shit up before and they're about the only source I've seen reporting on this quarantine fire. Although, also tbf, Iran does have a load of uneducated and reactionary people - so it might have happened. But it's not the best source. I think something even more stupid, though, is verifiably true. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-51706021 - I saw the video of this on Persian twitter yesterday; idiots licking a holy shrine to demonstrate that they wouldn't get coronavirus because the shrine would protect them. This is the danger of having an authoritarian theocracy - having a bunch of idiots that do stupid things that are dangerous. Two of the shrine lickers have been arrested... but still... that's just profoundly stupid on their part.

Maybe if he hadn't acted like this every day since he started campaigning for president. I don't think the "Trump being a moron is an act" argument flies when he goes and repeatedly does stuff that demonstrates pretty clearly he's a moron. Maybe it'll take a public health crisis for Americans to learn that you shouldn't let just any idiot be president. Doubt it though, Pence was instrumental in creating an AIDS epidemic in Indiana and Indiana was ecstatic that he was the VP nominee.

I think it’s a good thing overall for us though, even though we’ve lost a well respected and highly rated youth coach. It makes being our youth team manager look like it’ll qualify you to be the first team manager of at least a League One side & I suspect we’ll be loaning him a few kids for their development while he’s with them. So I think it makes working with our youth team a bit more attractive and in the immediate future let’s us have a place we know and trust they’ll be getting good time on the pitch to develop.

Yeah, but not the TV news

The Taliban have ended the peace deal they signed with the US last week. Apparently Afghanistan wasn't a part to the talks and the US made a commitment that Afghanistan would be doing a prisoner swap of 5,000 people they're holding. The Afghan government said they absolutely wouldn't be doing that. Gotta be one of the shortest peace deals in history. And one demonstrating woeful incompetence.

Chelsea fans laughed when they lost the European Cup? Southerners are weird.

Tbh Terry slipping just gave United a European trophy and made me hate him and Chelsea even more. I’m so glad he’s fucking retired. That man is dogshit personified.

John Terry, the cunt, did the original embarrassing slip. If United didn’t profit, it’d have been much funnier

I was going to let this go, but no it fucking can. 700+ Americans who are just beer drinkers is still a big enough sample size to get a fairly accurate survey. Is it as accurate as it should be? Fuck no it’s not. But in less argumentative news, I’m feeling pretty ill and I hope I don’t have this fucking disease

BBC are saying there are far more deaths in Iran than being reported, according to hospital sources: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-51673053 At least 210 according to the beeb! Hope that's not true, but I certainly trust the BBC more than the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Do you have any info about the new deaths & the ages of the victims, or no?

I just want a beer now

Around 2/3 of Americans drink, 41% of them say they primarily drink beer; a sample size of only beer drinkers doesn't mean that it doesn't reflect a sample size of all Americans. It might indicate flawed sampling, but it can still be used to say "38% of Americans. But there's flaws in literally every sort of sampling like this. It's more inaccurate to dismiss it as just false statistics you can't take seriously. Considering some of the crazy shit that so many people out there believe, it's not that outlandish that over 1/3 of Americans think coronavirus is caused by a Mexican beer.

@DeadLinesman

I don't think there's anything misleading about it, other than the fact they don't mention the survey's confidence level, confidence intervals, or standard deviation. But I suspect most people aren't going to give a shit about statistics terms, let alone understand them. Here they took a sample of "beer drinking Americans" - which is the target demographic for Corona beer, as that article indicates that Corona is heavily dependent on the US market. There's a lot of different characteristics that are encompassed in Americans who drink beer - so there's no reason to really ask the respondents their age, gender, IQ, etc... because they don't really care about these sub-demographics. They're looking to take a sample of beer drinking Americans, it's done by a PR firm that's probably been hired by Corona to ask this question to see if the virus has anything to do with their drop-off in sales. I don't think it's a poor attempt, it's just how you conduct a survey. Obviously a higher sample size would make things better. They probably should mention the confidence levels and all of that stuff that lets you really interpret the data from these surveys in the news - and more people should probably learn about what these things are and what they mean.

Oh good it's fucking spreading in California

For the record, my post is assuming the survey was just a "yes/no" question but... Yeah that's obviously not a big enough sample size to be able to claim it "speaks for all Americans" with any high confidence level (you'd need a sample size of 38,412 for a survey with a 95% confidence level & .5 confidence interval). But that's a ridiculous amount of people and I've never ever heard of any kind of survey polling that tests that many people. Granted, typically these surveys break people down more into particular groups. But with a 95% confidence level & a confidence interval of 3.5 (the higher the confidence interval, the less certainty there is about the population size) you'd only need a sample size of 784 for the US proximation (which this goes beyond, so this survey better confidence interval than 3.5). So small sample sizes don't necessarily mean the survey doesn't show anything useful. Otherwise surveys would probably never be conducted because they'd be prohibitively expensive.

So how does this law apply to the Rohingya - a religious minority in Myanmar?

Kurdish history is basically a story of constant discrimination and also getting betrayed by military allies. Pretty sad stuff tbh.

They are anti-Muslim laws though. It's pretty obvious tbh. The amendment specifically excludes Muslims from the list of religious groups eligible for citizenship after immigration. That's pretty obviously anti-Muslim, because if it wasn't... they'd not have been excluded. I think it's also against the idea of India being a secular nation, using religious basis to determine whether or not someone can ultimately become a citizen one day. Because using religion as a basis to determine anything is by definition non-secular.

In that article it says Putin and Turdogan are working to deescalate the situation. I don't understand what Turkey's end goal in Syria is. Are they backing rebels in Syria so they can annex that territory for themselves? Do they just want to kill off the Kurds? Because I'm sure Assad would love to kill the Kurds off.

There's a long history of tension between Muslims and Hindus in India with brutal violence that's condemnable from both groups. I don't think it's so simplistic as "this side is to blame" and I think it's crazy to think that I don't feel bad for 56 people burned alive because I find Modi to be untrustable, at best, with Hindu-Muslim relations. And I'm not sure an exclusionary law that denies Muslim immigrants the ability to obtain citizenship is a law that is not anti-Muslim. On the face of it, it's a law that's pretty directly anti-Muslim. It's tough to take the claims of a "lying foreign media" seriously tbh. That's the kind of shite that Iran pulls when Iran's been caught violating human rights by the foreign media. And it's tough to claim that a mostly western based media has strong Islamic sentiments tbh, I'm from the West and I think that our media's done a pretty fantastic job stoking anti-Islamic sentiment - look at this quote from a New Yorker article: "The word that was used most was “clash”—that young Hindu and Muslim men were “clashing,” and committing violence and vandalism on each other’s property. What happens increasingly with events like this in India is that an intensely polarized and rapid-acting media machine makes it impossible to discern what is really happening, or what the facts on the ground are. Even if you work in the press, it is getting harder and harder to distinguish what an image is actually showing you." https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-real-objective-of-mob-violence-against-muslims-in-india It's also why posting videos of what's happening with one twitter user's commentary of what that video is... doesn't actually mean a whole lot, as he discusses in the article. And it's pretty clear Hindus and Muslims are attacking each other as this chaos ensues and the authorities don't really do anything to keep the peace. This is the byproduct of a multicultural society that's historically been divided. But when you've got government authorities idly standing by and letting this violence happen on their watch, offering no real solutions to it... you've got to question whether or not they want that violence because they benefit from it in the long run. But when you've got a secular nation and a government in power that doesn't necessarily want to be a secular nation, you can see where their intentions might lie with this violence.

Considering Modi's history with the Gujarat riots, it is hard to know whether or not these are riots or if these are Hindu nationalist attacks on Muslims. Ministers working under Modi during that riot were convicted of massacres - he's got a more than troubled history with anti-Muslim policies because he's overseen shit like that.

Nah they’re bigger than you still. They’re a proper football club whereas yours is just propaganda for a country that wants more respect at the world stage.