At the Springtime Café...

... you can talk all night.

"There are only different hellish ways to adapt to a pandemic and save both lives and livelihoods. I raise Sweden..."

"... not because I think it has found the magic balance — it is way too soon to tell — but because I think we should be debating all the different ways and costs of acquiring immunity. When I look across America, though, and see governors partly lifting lockdowns — because they feel their people just can’t take it anymore for economic or psychological reasons, even though their populations have little or no immunity — I worry we may end up developing more herd immunity but in a painful, deadly, costly, uncoordinated way that still leaves room for the coronavirus to strike hard again and overwhelm hospitals.... Herd immunity 'has historically been nature’s way of ending pandemics,' added Dr. David Katz, the public health physician.... 'We need to bend with her forces...' That means a designed strategy, based on risk profiles, of phasing back to work those least vulnerable, so we gradually cultivate the protection of herd immunity — 'while concentrating our health services and social services on protecting those most vulnerable' until we can sound the all-clear."

From "Is Sweden Doing It Right?/The Swedes aren’t battling the coronavirus with broad lockdowns" by Thomas Friedman (in the NYT).

You'll have to take my word that this was my theory all along.

I didn't want to cast aspersions on a particular individual on this blog, so I never wrote it on the internet, but I said it out loud around the house. This was always my theory: "Woman Who Blamed Trump after Giving Her Husband Fish-Tank Cleaner Now Under Investigation for Murder" (National Review).

Top-floor sun.

(From yesterday, at 6:15 a.m.)

(And if you're enjoying this blog, please consider supporting it by using the Althouse Portal to Amazon when you're doing your shopping.)

"It’s a Bayesian thing. Part of Bayesian reasoning is to think like a Bayesian; another part is to assess other people’s conclusions as if they are Bayesians..."

"... and use this to deduce their priors. I’m not saying that other researchers are Bayesian—indeed I’m not always so Bayesian myself—rather, I’m arguing that looking at inferences from this implicit Bayesian perspective can be helpful, in the same way that economists can look at people’s decisions and deduce their implicit utilities. It’s a Neumann thing: again, you won’t learn people’s 'true priors' any more than you’ll learn their 'true utilities'—or, for that matter, any more than a test will reveal students’ 'true abilities'—but it’s a baseline."

From "Reverse-engineering priors in coronavirus discourse" by Andrew (at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science,) via "What’s the Deal With Bayesian Statistics?" by Kevin Drum (at Mother Jones).

Both of these posts went up yesterday, that is, 2 days after I said, "Shouldn't we talk about Bayes theorem?" I'm not saying I caused that. I'm just saying maybe you should use Bayesian reasoning to figure out if I did. I will stand back and say, this is not my field. I'm only here to encourage it.

"Confused by This Anti-Joe Biden Meme? The Creator Says You Just Don’t Get the Joke."

"Before being censored by Twitter, the way the image was shared blurred the line between parody and misinformation"  — by Ali Breland (in Mother Jones) — about this image created by Brad Troemel:



It's a great satire, but unfortunately, many people who were sharing it took it to be an actual ad from the Biden campaign.

“The DNC and the Biden campaign are the ones responsible for your familiarity with this type of messaging, because they’re the ones who have been fucking campaigning on it,” Troemel [said]. “This image wouldn’t be shared if it wasn’t so believable.”...

Jennifer Grygiel, a communications professor at Syracuse University who specializes in social media and memes, [said] “He seems to want to cross his arms and say that everyone is so stupid,” Grygiel said on the phone, skeptically. “He may claim that he’s helping democracy, but he’s lost control of his art.”

"The best and surest way to beat Trump is to... give all the disaffected Republicans, conservatives and independents only one alternative to Trump."

"Giving them a conservative alternative might be ideologically satisfying, but it increases the likelihood that Trump can pull off another narrow win In the past several months, I’ve been approached about running as a conservative independent in the general election. I’ve had people suggest that I run as a Libertarian. My answer has always been the same: No. Because I won’t do anything that might help Trump win.... I know how committed Justin is to the founding ideals of liberty and limited government. When this is over, I’ll gladly join him in fighting for those principles again. If he wants, I’ll join him in starting a new political party. Right now, our only job is ridding the White House of an authoritarian con man. The last thing we need is a third-party candidate. Not this year, congressman."

From "You can’t win, Justin Amash. You can only help Trump get reelected/We both came in with the tea party wave. Reelecting this president isn’t the way to go out," by Joe Walsh (WaPo). This Joe Walsh is a former member of Congress and the author of a book called "F*ck Silence: Calling Trump Out for the Cultish, Moronic, Authoritarian Con Man He Is." He's not the Joe Walsh doing the guitar solo in "Hotel California" (the best guitar solo of all time according to a 1998 poll of readers of Guitarist magazine).

"The last thing we need is a third-party candidate. Not this year...." You could say that... or you could say the opposite. This is THE year for a 3rd-party candidate. This is the ONE time the 3rd-party candidate can actually win. Biden is a terrible candidate — way too old and seemingly mentally debilitated and burdened with a late-breaking sex-assault allegation. And Trump is very divisive and very, very weird.

And why would Amash necessarily hurt Biden? Why wouldn't he hurt Trump, which would help Biden?

From the comments over there: "Don't believe a word of this article. Amash won't draw anything among Democrat voters. He's a hard right conservative. Walsh was recruited to write this by the GOP for the same reason the Mafia sends your best friend to kill you."