Am I the only one that finds it darkly amusing

[conuly]

that the same people always screaming on and on about lefties being shills are really themselves the shills, or else taken in?

I'm not sure whether it's accidental projection or intentional plausible deniability or both, but.

******************

Are There Number 1 Pencils?

Who First Buried the Dead?

How an Early Female Travel Writer Became an Immunization Pioneer

John Quincy Adams Kept a Diary and Didn’t Skimp on the Details

Why The Last 'Wild' Horses Really Aren't

Where Did All the Advertising Jobs Go?

A Student Solution To Give Utah Debtors A Fighting Chance

The way streets and buildings are arranged makes a big difference in how heat builds up

The Amazing Story of the Russian Defector Who Changed his Mind

The Art of Chinese Propaganda Posters

Ban the Olympics

The Republicans’ Endless Attempts to Destroy Obamacare Haven’t Succeeded Just Yet

Namibia’s Strange Cold War Export to East Germany

The Link Between Autism and Trans Identity

Supreme Court Gets Moving, Issuing As Many Decisions In One Day As It Has In 5 Months

What “chain migration” really means — and why Donald Trump hates it so much

Trump’s Hardline Approach Is Forcing Immigrant Advocates to Readjust

The Myth of the Hacker-Proof Voting Machine

What Ever Happened to Brendan Fraser?

Do You Believe Her Now? With new evidence that Clarence Thomas lied to get onto the Supreme Court, it’s time to talk seriously about impeachment. (Nobody could be worse than Clarence Thomas. No need to wait for the next president with him. Let's do this now.)

The Myth of What’s Driving the Opioid Crisis

How inflation turns petty criminals into felons

America’s Most Toxic Town Is Not Where You Think

U.S.-Trained Police Are Hunting Down and Arresting Protesters Amid Post-Election Crisis in Honduras

'Dirty meat': Shocking hygiene failings discovered in US pig and chicken plants

The American Right’s Deep Ties to Reactionary Europe

Nationalism has a way of oppressing others.

More Guns Do Not Stop More Crimes, Evidence Shows

The NRA Has An Anti-Semitism Problem

In Georgia, It’s the NRA and the Legislators vs. the Police

Scott Pruitt cited the Bible to defend his oil-friendly policies

The shadow over Egypt

Comments

[jesuswasbatman]

The article about the transatlantic far right leaves out the current key role of shared Islamophobia in promoting those connections. One of the most important results of this is the cycle of propaganda it creates - American far-right sites print wildly exaggerated or fictitious tales of Muslim crime and terrorism knowing that their audience won't be able to check the facts because of the language barrier, and European sites then point to the American stories as the truth that the PC leftist traitor local media are suppressing.

Projection vs. Suckers vs. Both?

[dewline]

Why not both?

Both is accurate.

[siderea]

I learned about Number 1 pencils in the late 1980s from a composer I studed with, who recommended them highly for handwriting music score. I've had one ever since.

[siderea]

The Myth of What’s Driving the Opioid Crisis

The myth that the epidemic is driven by patients becoming addicted to doctor-prescribed opioids, or painkillers like hydrocodone (e.g., Vicodin) and oxycodone (e.g., Percocet). [...] But this narrative misconstrues the facts. [...] According to a 2016 national survey conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 87.1 million U.S. adults used a prescription opioid—whether prescribed directly by a physician or obtained illegally—sometime during the previous year. Only 1.6 million of them, or about 2 percent, developed a “pain reliever use disorder,” which includes behaviors ranging from overuse to overt addiction.

O_o Okay, I'm already dubious about the science here, but granting it: only about 2 percent?

Would you take a drug that had a 2% chance of giving you cancer? Would you take a drug that had a 2% chance of giving you paranoid schizophrenia?

Another team found that abuse and addiction rates within 18 months after the start of treatment ranged from 0.12 percent to 6.1 percent in a database of half a million patients.

Six percent? One in sixteen patients?

A 2016 report in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that in multiple published studies, rates of “carefully diagnosed” addiction to opioid medication averaged less than 8 percent.

EIGHT percent? One in thirteen?

And this is supposed to substantiate his point that addiction via prescription is a "myth"?

And then he repeats that song and dance about how the ones who became addicts already had something wrong with them like a mental illness such as depression. I thought the life-time prevalence rate of depression was something absurd like 1 in 5; so he's saying one in five people are at known elevated risk of developing an addiction if prescribed opioids?

[chomiji]

"Would you take a drug that had a 2% chance of giving you cancer?"

Depends on what the drug was supposed to treat.

Tamoxifen, commonly prescribed as a followup to surgery and radiation for breast cancer, has a less than 1% chance of causing endometrial cancer. Guess who was one of the lucky less than 1%? And even at 2% I think I would have taken it, because the alternative was worse.

Not everyone deals with either pain or percentages very well.

[conuly]

Would you take a drug that had a 2% chance of giving you cancer? Would you take a drug that had a 2% chance of giving you paranoid schizophrenia?

Maybe. How long will these conditions take to develop, is the cancer treatable, and what's the alternative? I mean, if it's a lifesaving medication I'll probably gamble on cancer ten years from now over being dead in ten minutes.

[chomiji]

Yeah, projection. If they accuse someone else of doing something, they themselves are probably doing whatever-it-is.

They think they are fine human beings, and they do these kinds of things on those situations, so if the other guys, who are not such fine human beings, are put in those situations, than of course these non-GOP scumbags are going to do whatever-it-is.

They are tempted (and succumb) to abuse underage children, so Dems in similar situations must of course be exploiting underage children.

When they come into possession of significant sensitive information that they could use against the other party, they use it regardless of the implications for national security, so when Dems have similar information, of course they'll sell it off to the highest bidder.

It's like that supervillain flaw in fantasy or comics, where the Big Evil is completely unable to understand that the Good Guys would ever resist the temptation to do wrong.

[bibliofile]

I agree, definitely projection.

They think they are fine human beings, and they do these kinds of things on those situations, so if the other guys, who are not such fine human beings, are put in those situations, than of course these non-GOP scumbags are going to do whatever-it-is.

This.

It also explains, I think, all the extreme travel expenses by Trump's various administrative appointees. Why should they change their habits? Government spending is by definition wasteful -- why would the head of any agency NOT fly in the most comfy ways possible? (Much less *shudder* coach.)