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Biden had a pretty big moment of turning republicans long desire about them wanting to cut SS and medicare against them and forceing them to admit that its off the table.
Mccarthy had to shush his party multiple times which has to be embaressing.
MTG cosplayed as cruella de vil for some bizzare reason.
Biden was pretty combative and really went after republicans by stateing his support for a lot of positive things that republicans just couldn't find in themselves the ability to support.
It was noteably 10 minutes longer than last years.
I also saw that fox decided to cancel the super bowl interview the president gives to the network hosting the event. It was going to be hosted by the "fox soul" subdivision but for some reason they just didn't want it.
the PV talk was bad but at least it was better then the tankie shit that came before. I'm glad everyone got their interest in engaging with GH out of their system.
Largely a domestic focused speech, lots of "finish the job" moments. Annouced his support for going after cancer like bono went after AIDS. (bono was in audience).
Specifically the Insulin cap discussion was about "finishing the job" and making it capped for everyone in every state, and not just the economically deveoped ones.
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On February 12 2023 04:52 Sermokala wrote:
...
the PV talk was bad but at least it was better then the tankie shit that came before. I'm glad everyone got their interest in engaging with GH out of their system.
I think it's clear that people prefer to flock to engage posts from posters like BlackJack and oblade about the most inane topics incessantly and avoid things like the absurdity of Biden bragging about making sure insulin producers have ample profits on something that people need to survive and was explicitly never intended to be sold for profit (or exploring their objections to revolutionary socialism in the US) to protect their worldview.
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On February 12 2023 04:52 Sermokala wrote:
Biden had a pretty big moment of turning republicans long desire about them wanting to cut SS and medicare against them and forceing them to admit that its off the table.
Mccarthy had to shush his party multiple times which has to be embaressing.
MTG cosplayed as cruella de vil for some bizzare reason.
Biden was pretty combative and really went after republicans by stateing his support for a lot of positive things that republicans just couldn't find in themselves the ability to support.
It was noteably 10 minutes longer than last years.
I also saw that fox decided to cancel the super bowl interview the president gives to the network hosting the event. It was going to be hosted by the "fox soul" subdivision but for some reason they just didn't want it.
the PV talk was bad but at least it was better then the tankie shit that came before. I'm glad everyone got their interest in engaging with GH out of their system.
Largely a domestic focused speech, lots of "finish the job" moments. Annouced his support for going after cancer like bono went after AIDS. (bono was in audience).
Specifically the Insulin cap discussion was about "finishing the job" and making it capped for everyone in every state, and not just the economically deveoped ones.
Wasn't it also about passing it as a law instead of just an EO?
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United States10501 Posts
On February 11 2023 23:40 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On February 11 2023 21:04 BlackJack wrote:On February 11 2023 10:55 ChristianS wrote:On February 11 2023 10:07 BlackJack wrote:On February 11 2023 09:41 ChristianS wrote:On February 11 2023 09:11 BlackJack wrote:On February 11 2023 08:39 ChristianS wrote:
I basically said the same thing in the other thread, but I don’t get the impression there’s that many fact-checkable claims in the video to begin with? It gives a guy’s name and says he works at Pfizer, which it sounds like fact-checkers have more or less verified but as I said in the other thread, it’s not really their MO to hire an actor for that part, so I always figured he probably did actually work for Pfizer in some capacity.
After that it’s apparently a lot of hidden camera footage of the guy talking, interspersed with cutting to James O’Keefe “explaining” what was happening. That is their MO. Usually the video makes a whole host of horrible allegations, nominally supported by the evidence, but if you took the video and cut all the O’Keefe explanatory bits it wouldn’t be at all obvious they actually supported the allegations. PV claims the explanatory bits are just summarizing context that would be apparent from the unedited footage, people ask them to release the unedited footage and they refuse.
But BlackJack, can you actually give an example of a claim the video makes that *could* be proven false by a journalist investigation? Because my impression is that it’s mostly “Pfizer is doing this or that illegal and/or unethical business practice/experimentation.” Generally Pfizer will deny it. It’s understandable not to take them at their word, but who else is in a position to conclusively say “this business practice/experiment type is not happening anywhere in the company”? Pfizer is a *massive* company, and virtually everything they do will be kept confidential.
Otherwise this is essentially like if I made a bunch of unsupported allegations to the effect of “BlackJack owns a dungeon under a false name somewhere in the Asian continent where they torture babies.” It’s not true (I assume), but what’s a fact-checker supposed to do with that? How can you prove a negative like that? All they could say is “These allegations are completely unsupported and do not come from a reputable source,” which is basically what every article about the PV video says. Sure, the example of the most obvious thing that can be proven or disproven is who the guy is and what he does. You can't simultaneously believe that it's probable this guy works for Pfizer but also difficult to verify what he does at Pfizer. If he works at pfizer then pfizer should know exactly who he is and what he does. Obviously pfizer would rather not answer that question and so far the media has been happy to not even ask it. Most of the "fact checking" on this has been "We googled the guy's name and didn't find anything so we consider this unverified." Snopes is the only one that I saw that said they specifically asked pfizer who the guy was and whether he works for them. I bet the media could get an answer from pfizer of who the guy is and what he does there if they put a slight bit of effort in. Can’t say this for certain, obviously, but it’s extremely likely that journalists called Pfizer, asked if the guy works for them, and got some kind of non-answer. Pretty standard PR strategy to say “We’re not answering individual questions at this time, but please refer to the press release we put out.” Possibly combined with something like “we’re not at liberty to discuss HR particulars of any specific employee.” Frustrating, but well within Pfizer’s rights and probably the best strategy if they just want this to go away (which they would want, of course, whether they were doing anything shady or not). Sounds like Snopes took some extraordinary measures like searching Wayback Machine LinkedIn for him, testing out if an email to first.last@pfizer.com (or w/e their convention is) gets bounced back or not, etc. and didn’t get anything conclusive. Then after they published someone wrote in with evidence of a LinkedIn profile suggesting he had some job title like “Director of D&D, something something strategy something something mRNA.” That’s a weird job title, though not totally implausible. It’s also weird a guy like that would have so little online footprint, though not totally implausible. You can also say anything you want on a LinkedIn page, so it’s not exactly conclusive. It’s valuable to look into this, if only because it would be good to know if PV has escalated to fully fabricating the hidden camera footage. But I was already assuming the guy exists, and that he works for Pfizer. Dim as my opinion of PV is, I was already prepared to tentatively take their word for that. So… do you have any other claims that are fact-checkable from the video? Because right now it sounds like the most likely explanation is that various outlets did exactly the investigation you think they should have, and they just didn’t find anything publishable. I agree that Pfizer probably gave a non-answer from a PR person. That’s always the first play in the playbook for any scandal. Then typically the media stays on the story until they can’t just keep saying “no comment” without them looking ridiculous. The question here is why should the media accept that non-answer. Why are people content with their media accepting non-answers? What does “stay on the story” mean here? I’ve heard in-depth journalistic investigations described in detail, and usually they *don’t* involve somehow forcing the company/government/secretive organization to actually answer the question. Generally they follow other leads. Snopes seems to have gotten pretty creative in that regard, and reached a pretty unsatisfying answer, but that’s not uncommon with narrow, specific questions. If the guy doesn’t wanna talk, and the company doesn’t wanna talk, and they haven’t talked publicly about his employment anywhere we can find, that’s a dead end, no? Just putting a spotlight on things can get you more information. More eyes on it, more people that may be willing to come forward to talk, more pressure on pfizer to stop giving non-answers, etc. If practically nobody is going to cover this and practically nobody is going to ask questions then pfizer is never going to feel compelled to give a straight answer and new leads are not going to materialize. And you’re still not actually giving me a consequential claim the video makes they could investigate. It seems like your motivation is less to do with the video than with media credibility in general. Or, less charitably, it kinda seems like you just wanted to do some low-effort sniping at “the media” and don’t really care about the rest. In which case, you took your shots, and they were as ill-received by the thread as you surely expected. Are we done here? Can we talk about the SOTU or that big explosion in Ohio or something? Yes, I hope I have made it clear that my commentary is on the media coverage of the PV video. I think the answers offered here for why there has been so little media coverage are not very convincing. The most popular being offered is "PV has absolutely zero credibility so why should the media cover this." Unless you have your head in the sand you should have known 10 years ago that O'Keefe has no credibility and yet the media has still been happy to cover his projects and recordings. So that seems unlikely to be the answer, doesn't it? But frankly, while it’s clear you want to talk about the media coverage, it doesn’t seem like you actually have a nuanced criticism. Aside from some vague bromides like “stay on the story,” “shine a spotlight on things,” or “keep asking questions until you get some answers,” you don’t actually have an idea of what such an investigation should look like. From my limited understanding of journalistic investigations, this has every indication of a story in which most questions are unanswerable, and even the basic ones you might be able to answer (e.g. does Pfizer employ a man by this name) seem to have come to dead ends without conclusive answers. If you want to say all the top experts of another profession are doing their job wrong, you really oughta come better armed than this. ————————— So a bit of background: one of the bigger black marks against the Biden administration in my book was more or less forcing the railway workers union to accept the deal with their bosses instead of striking last year. The workers had some eminently reasonable demands (e.g. “nonzero sick days!”) but the government was worried a rail worker strike would fuck supply chains even more than they already have been, and raise prices of basic goods at a time when inflation was already blowing up (right before an important midterm election!) so the government basically said “nope, we decided you’re taking the deal. Oh look, there’s an agreement in place, striking would be illegal!” Questionably legal, and especially disappointing considering the administration has otherwise been pretty pro-union, but I guess when it affects reelection chances they’re prepared to do some backstabbing. This has taken on renewed relevance after a train derailment carrying a massive amount of toxic chemicals caused a massive explosion in the Ohio town of East Palestine recently (yes, that’s actually the town’s name). I haven’t seen a clear breakdown of what the chemicals on board were, but the most commonly cited one is an absolutely enormous amount of vinyl chloride (I also saw phosgene referenced). Authorities evacuated the surrounding area indefinitely, and apparently executed a “controlled release” of toxic fumes by burning a lot of the vinyl chloride before it could explode all at once. It’s not yet clear how much damage this has done (is still doing?) to the surrounding area and population; I’ve seen claims on Twitter of mass death of nearby wildlife and livestock, despite authorities saying it’s safe, but I haven’t verified any of that. The union angle isn’t being discussed much, but safety reforms to prevent derailments like this were among the union’s demands last year. I haven’t seen any precise breakdowns of what caused the derailment and whether any of the union’s desired reforms would have prevented it, but if so it puts at least some blame on the administration.
I would be skeptical of a straight line being drawn from this derailment to Biden railroading the rail workers with a new agreement they didn't want. Personally I always thought that decision would have fewer consequences for Biden than it might for Pete Buttigieg down the road. It's somewhat of a bad look to scoff at people who question your right to taking a paternity leave in the middle of a supply chain crisis and then turn around and push through an agreement where rail workers don't get any paid sick days.
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On February 12 2023 07:59 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On February 11 2023 23:40 ChristianS wrote:On February 11 2023 21:04 BlackJack wrote:On February 11 2023 10:55 ChristianS wrote:On February 11 2023 10:07 BlackJack wrote:On February 11 2023 09:41 ChristianS wrote:On February 11 2023 09:11 BlackJack wrote:On February 11 2023 08:39 ChristianS wrote:
I basically said the same thing in the other thread, but I don’t get the impression there’s that many fact-checkable claims in the video to begin with? It gives a guy’s name and says he works at Pfizer, which it sounds like fact-checkers have more or less verified but as I said in the other thread, it’s not really their MO to hire an actor for that part, so I always figured he probably did actually work for Pfizer in some capacity.
After that it’s apparently a lot of hidden camera footage of the guy talking, interspersed with cutting to James O’Keefe “explaining” what was happening. That is their MO. Usually the video makes a whole host of horrible allegations, nominally supported by the evidence, but if you took the video and cut all the O’Keefe explanatory bits it wouldn’t be at all obvious they actually supported the allegations. PV claims the explanatory bits are just summarizing context that would be apparent from the unedited footage, people ask them to release the unedited footage and they refuse.
But BlackJack, can you actually give an example of a claim the video makes that *could* be proven false by a journalist investigation? Because my impression is that it’s mostly “Pfizer is doing this or that illegal and/or unethical business practice/experimentation.” Generally Pfizer will deny it. It’s understandable not to take them at their word, but who else is in a position to conclusively say “this business practice/experiment type is not happening anywhere in the company”? Pfizer is a *massive* company, and virtually everything they do will be kept confidential.
Otherwise this is essentially like if I made a bunch of unsupported allegations to the effect of “BlackJack owns a dungeon under a false name somewhere in the Asian continent where they torture babies.” It’s not true (I assume), but what’s a fact-checker supposed to do with that? How can you prove a negative like that? All they could say is “These allegations are completely unsupported and do not come from a reputable source,” which is basically what every article about the PV video says. Sure, the example of the most obvious thing that can be proven or disproven is who the guy is and what he does. You can't simultaneously believe that it's probable this guy works for Pfizer but also difficult to verify what he does at Pfizer. If he works at pfizer then pfizer should know exactly who he is and what he does. Obviously pfizer would rather not answer that question and so far the media has been happy to not even ask it. Most of the "fact checking" on this has been "We googled the guy's name and didn't find anything so we consider this unverified." Snopes is the only one that I saw that said they specifically asked pfizer who the guy was and whether he works for them. I bet the media could get an answer from pfizer of who the guy is and what he does there if they put a slight bit of effort in. Can’t say this for certain, obviously, but it’s extremely likely that journalists called Pfizer, asked if the guy works for them, and got some kind of non-answer. Pretty standard PR strategy to say “We’re not answering individual questions at this time, but please refer to the press release we put out.” Possibly combined with something like “we’re not at liberty to discuss HR particulars of any specific employee.” Frustrating, but well within Pfizer’s rights and probably the best strategy if they just want this to go away (which they would want, of course, whether they were doing anything shady or not). Sounds like Snopes took some extraordinary measures like searching Wayback Machine LinkedIn for him, testing out if an email to first.last@pfizer.com (or w/e their convention is) gets bounced back or not, etc. and didn’t get anything conclusive. Then after they published someone wrote in with evidence of a LinkedIn profile suggesting he had some job title like “Director of D&D, something something strategy something something mRNA.” That’s a weird job title, though not totally implausible. It’s also weird a guy like that would have so little online footprint, though not totally implausible. You can also say anything you want on a LinkedIn page, so it’s not exactly conclusive. It’s valuable to look into this, if only because it would be good to know if PV has escalated to fully fabricating the hidden camera footage. But I was already assuming the guy exists, and that he works for Pfizer. Dim as my opinion of PV is, I was already prepared to tentatively take their word for that. So… do you have any other claims that are fact-checkable from the video? Because right now it sounds like the most likely explanation is that various outlets did exactly the investigation you think they should have, and they just didn’t find anything publishable. I agree that Pfizer probably gave a non-answer from a PR person. That’s always the first play in the playbook for any scandal. Then typically the media stays on the story until they can’t just keep saying “no comment” without them looking ridiculous. The question here is why should the media accept that non-answer. Why are people content with their media accepting non-answers? What does “stay on the story” mean here? I’ve heard in-depth journalistic investigations described in detail, and usually they *don’t* involve somehow forcing the company/government/secretive organization to actually answer the question. Generally they follow other leads. Snopes seems to have gotten pretty creative in that regard, and reached a pretty unsatisfying answer, but that’s not uncommon with narrow, specific questions. If the guy doesn’t wanna talk, and the company doesn’t wanna talk, and they haven’t talked publicly about his employment anywhere we can find, that’s a dead end, no? Just putting a spotlight on things can get you more information. More eyes on it, more people that may be willing to come forward to talk, more pressure on pfizer to stop giving non-answers, etc. If practically nobody is going to cover this and practically nobody is going to ask questions then pfizer is never going to feel compelled to give a straight answer and new leads are not going to materialize. And you’re still not actually giving me a consequential claim the video makes they could investigate. It seems like your motivation is less to do with the video than with media credibility in general. Or, less charitably, it kinda seems like you just wanted to do some low-effort sniping at “the media” and don’t really care about the rest. In which case, you took your shots, and they were as ill-received by the thread as you surely expected. Are we done here? Can we talk about the SOTU or that big explosion in Ohio or something? Yes, I hope I have made it clear that my commentary is on the media coverage of the PV video. I think the answers offered here for why there has been so little media coverage are not very convincing. The most popular being offered is "PV has absolutely zero credibility so why should the media cover this." Unless you have your head in the sand you should have known 10 years ago that O'Keefe has no credibility and yet the media has still been happy to cover his projects and recordings. So that seems unlikely to be the answer, doesn't it? But frankly, while it’s clear you want to talk about the media coverage, it doesn’t seem like you actually have a nuanced criticism. Aside from some vague bromides like “stay on the story,” “shine a spotlight on things,” or “keep asking questions until you get some answers,” you don’t actually have an idea of what such an investigation should look like. From my limited understanding of journalistic investigations, this has every indication of a story in which most questions are unanswerable, and even the basic ones you might be able to answer (e.g. does Pfizer employ a man by this name) seem to have come to dead ends without conclusive answers. If you want to say all the top experts of another profession are doing their job wrong, you really oughta come better armed than this. ————————— So a bit of background: one of the bigger black marks against the Biden administration in my book was more or less forcing the railway workers union to accept the deal with their bosses instead of striking last year. The workers had some eminently reasonable demands (e.g. “nonzero sick days!”) but the government was worried a rail worker strike would fuck supply chains even more than they already have been, and raise prices of basic goods at a time when inflation was already blowing up (right before an important midterm election!) so the government basically said “nope, we decided you’re taking the deal. Oh look, there’s an agreement in place, striking would be illegal!” Questionably legal, and especially disappointing considering the administration has otherwise been pretty pro-union, but I guess when it affects reelection chances they’re prepared to do some backstabbing. This has taken on renewed relevance after a train derailment carrying a massive amount of toxic chemicals caused a massive explosion in the Ohio town of East Palestine recently (yes, that’s actually the town’s name). I haven’t seen a clear breakdown of what the chemicals on board were, but the most commonly cited one is an absolutely enormous amount of vinyl chloride (I also saw phosgene referenced). Authorities evacuated the surrounding area indefinitely, and apparently executed a “controlled release” of toxic fumes by burning a lot of the vinyl chloride before it could explode all at once. It’s not yet clear how much damage this has done (is still doing?) to the surrounding area and population; I’ve seen claims on Twitter of mass death of nearby wildlife and livestock, despite authorities saying it’s safe, but I haven’t verified any of that. The union angle isn’t being discussed much, but safety reforms to prevent derailments like this were among the union’s demands last year. I haven’t seen any precise breakdowns of what caused the derailment and whether any of the union’s desired reforms would have prevented it, but if so it puts at least some blame on the administration. I would be skeptical of a straight line being drawn from this derailment to Biden railroading the rail workers with a new agreement they didn't want. Personally I always thought that decision would have fewer consequences for Biden than it might for Pete Buttigieg down the road. It's somewhat of a bad look to scoff at people who question your right to taking a paternity leave in the middle of a supply chain crisis and then turn around and push through an agreement where rail workers don't get any paid sick days.
Yeah, like I said, I haven’t seen any direct evidence that the derailment would have been prevented by a reform the union asked for. Is that the threshold for blame though? I mean, if someone releases a radioactive agent that increases the rate of cancer, we can’t say for sure which people wouldn’t have died otherwise, but we could still blame the polluter for the excess deaths. If we can’t say for sure the union’s reforms would have prevented this specific derailment, isn’t this still a strong vindication of the union’s arguments that safety provisions are insufficient and the railway companies are flirting with disaster?
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United States10501 Posts
On February 12 2023 08:53 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2023 07:59 BlackJack wrote:On February 11 2023 23:40 ChristianS wrote:On February 11 2023 21:04 BlackJack wrote:On February 11 2023 10:55 ChristianS wrote:On February 11 2023 10:07 BlackJack wrote:On February 11 2023 09:41 ChristianS wrote:On February 11 2023 09:11 BlackJack wrote:On February 11 2023 08:39 ChristianS wrote:
I basically said the same thing in the other thread, but I don’t get the impression there’s that many fact-checkable claims in the video to begin with? It gives a guy’s name and says he works at Pfizer, which it sounds like fact-checkers have more or less verified but as I said in the other thread, it’s not really their MO to hire an actor for that part, so I always figured he probably did actually work for Pfizer in some capacity.
After that it’s apparently a lot of hidden camera footage of the guy talking, interspersed with cutting to James O’Keefe “explaining” what was happening. That is their MO. Usually the video makes a whole host of horrible allegations, nominally supported by the evidence, but if you took the video and cut all the O’Keefe explanatory bits it wouldn’t be at all obvious they actually supported the allegations. PV claims the explanatory bits are just summarizing context that would be apparent from the unedited footage, people ask them to release the unedited footage and they refuse.
But BlackJack, can you actually give an example of a claim the video makes that *could* be proven false by a journalist investigation? Because my impression is that it’s mostly “Pfizer is doing this or that illegal and/or unethical business practice/experimentation.” Generally Pfizer will deny it. It’s understandable not to take them at their word, but who else is in a position to conclusively say “this business practice/experiment type is not happening anywhere in the company”? Pfizer is a *massive* company, and virtually everything they do will be kept confidential.
Otherwise this is essentially like if I made a bunch of unsupported allegations to the effect of “BlackJack owns a dungeon under a false name somewhere in the Asian continent where they torture babies.” It’s not true (I assume), but what’s a fact-checker supposed to do with that? How can you prove a negative like that? All they could say is “These allegations are completely unsupported and do not come from a reputable source,” which is basically what every article about the PV video says. Sure, the example of the most obvious thing that can be proven or disproven is who the guy is and what he does. You can't simultaneously believe that it's probable this guy works for Pfizer but also difficult to verify what he does at Pfizer. If he works at pfizer then pfizer should know exactly who he is and what he does. Obviously pfizer would rather not answer that question and so far the media has been happy to not even ask it. Most of the "fact checking" on this has been "We googled the guy's name and didn't find anything so we consider this unverified." Snopes is the only one that I saw that said they specifically asked pfizer who the guy was and whether he works for them. I bet the media could get an answer from pfizer of who the guy is and what he does there if they put a slight bit of effort in. Can’t say this for certain, obviously, but it’s extremely likely that journalists called Pfizer, asked if the guy works for them, and got some kind of non-answer. Pretty standard PR strategy to say “We’re not answering individual questions at this time, but please refer to the press release we put out.” Possibly combined with something like “we’re not at liberty to discuss HR particulars of any specific employee.” Frustrating, but well within Pfizer’s rights and probably the best strategy if they just want this to go away (which they would want, of course, whether they were doing anything shady or not). Sounds like Snopes took some extraordinary measures like searching Wayback Machine LinkedIn for him, testing out if an email to first.last@pfizer.com (or w/e their convention is) gets bounced back or not, etc. and didn’t get anything conclusive. Then after they published someone wrote in with evidence of a LinkedIn profile suggesting he had some job title like “Director of D&D, something something strategy something something mRNA.” That’s a weird job title, though not totally implausible. It’s also weird a guy like that would have so little online footprint, though not totally implausible. You can also say anything you want on a LinkedIn page, so it’s not exactly conclusive. It’s valuable to look into this, if only because it would be good to know if PV has escalated to fully fabricating the hidden camera footage. But I was already assuming the guy exists, and that he works for Pfizer. Dim as my opinion of PV is, I was already prepared to tentatively take their word for that. So… do you have any other claims that are fact-checkable from the video? Because right now it sounds like the most likely explanation is that various outlets did exactly the investigation you think they should have, and they just didn’t find anything publishable. I agree that Pfizer probably gave a non-answer from a PR person. That’s always the first play in the playbook for any scandal. Then typically the media stays on the story until they can’t just keep saying “no comment” without them looking ridiculous. The question here is why should the media accept that non-answer. Why are people content with their media accepting non-answers? What does “stay on the story” mean here? I’ve heard in-depth journalistic investigations described in detail, and usually they *don’t* involve somehow forcing the company/government/secretive organization to actually answer the question. Generally they follow other leads. Snopes seems to have gotten pretty creative in that regard, and reached a pretty unsatisfying answer, but that’s not uncommon with narrow, specific questions. If the guy doesn’t wanna talk, and the company doesn’t wanna talk, and they haven’t talked publicly about his employment anywhere we can find, that’s a dead end, no? Just putting a spotlight on things can get you more information. More eyes on it, more people that may be willing to come forward to talk, more pressure on pfizer to stop giving non-answers, etc. If practically nobody is going to cover this and practically nobody is going to ask questions then pfizer is never going to feel compelled to give a straight answer and new leads are not going to materialize. And you’re still not actually giving me a consequential claim the video makes they could investigate. It seems like your motivation is less to do with the video than with media credibility in general. Or, less charitably, it kinda seems like you just wanted to do some low-effort sniping at “the media” and don’t really care about the rest. In which case, you took your shots, and they were as ill-received by the thread as you surely expected. Are we done here? Can we talk about the SOTU or that big explosion in Ohio or something? Yes, I hope I have made it clear that my commentary is on the media coverage of the PV video. I think the answers offered here for why there has been so little media coverage are not very convincing. The most popular being offered is "PV has absolutely zero credibility so why should the media cover this." Unless you have your head in the sand you should have known 10 years ago that O'Keefe has no credibility and yet the media has still been happy to cover his projects and recordings. So that seems unlikely to be the answer, doesn't it? But frankly, while it’s clear you want to talk about the media coverage, it doesn’t seem like you actually have a nuanced criticism. Aside from some vague bromides like “stay on the story,” “shine a spotlight on things,” or “keep asking questions until you get some answers,” you don’t actually have an idea of what such an investigation should look like. From my limited understanding of journalistic investigations, this has every indication of a story in which most questions are unanswerable, and even the basic ones you might be able to answer (e.g. does Pfizer employ a man by this name) seem to have come to dead ends without conclusive answers. If you want to say all the top experts of another profession are doing their job wrong, you really oughta come better armed than this. ————————— So a bit of background: one of the bigger black marks against the Biden administration in my book was more or less forcing the railway workers union to accept the deal with their bosses instead of striking last year. The workers had some eminently reasonable demands (e.g. “nonzero sick days!”) but the government was worried a rail worker strike would fuck supply chains even more than they already have been, and raise prices of basic goods at a time when inflation was already blowing up (right before an important midterm election!) so the government basically said “nope, we decided you’re taking the deal. Oh look, there’s an agreement in place, striking would be illegal!” Questionably legal, and especially disappointing considering the administration has otherwise been pretty pro-union, but I guess when it affects reelection chances they’re prepared to do some backstabbing. This has taken on renewed relevance after a train derailment carrying a massive amount of toxic chemicals caused a massive explosion in the Ohio town of East Palestine recently (yes, that’s actually the town’s name). I haven’t seen a clear breakdown of what the chemicals on board were, but the most commonly cited one is an absolutely enormous amount of vinyl chloride (I also saw phosgene referenced). Authorities evacuated the surrounding area indefinitely, and apparently executed a “controlled release” of toxic fumes by burning a lot of the vinyl chloride before it could explode all at once. It’s not yet clear how much damage this has done (is still doing?) to the surrounding area and population; I’ve seen claims on Twitter of mass death of nearby wildlife and livestock, despite authorities saying it’s safe, but I haven’t verified any of that. The union angle isn’t being discussed much, but safety reforms to prevent derailments like this were among the union’s demands last year. I haven’t seen any precise breakdowns of what caused the derailment and whether any of the union’s desired reforms would have prevented it, but if so it puts at least some blame on the administration. I would be skeptical of a straight line being drawn from this derailment to Biden railroading the rail workers with a new agreement they didn't want. Personally I always thought that decision would have fewer consequences for Biden than it might for Pete Buttigieg down the road. It's somewhat of a bad look to scoff at people who question your right to taking a paternity leave in the middle of a supply chain crisis and then turn around and push through an agreement where rail workers don't get any paid sick days. Yeah, like I said, I haven’t seen any direct evidence that the derailment would have been prevented by a reform the union asked for. Is that the threshold for blame though? I mean, if someone releases a radioactive agent that increases the rate of cancer, we can’t say for sure which people wouldn’t have died otherwise, but we could still blame the polluter for the excess deaths. If we can’t say for sure the union’s reforms would have prevented this specific derailment, isn’t this still a strong vindication of the union’s arguments that safety provisions are insufficient and the railway companies are flirting with disaster?
I guess, maybe. I suspect that during many contract negotiations for many professions that something like "improved safety" or "safer working conditions" is included in the verbiage put out by unions. I also think that workplace accidents are an inevitability even though we should strive to eliminate them completely. I don't think that just these two things being proximal in time is great evidence. But I'm not saying the opposite either.
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On February 12 2023 09:22 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2023 08:53 ChristianS wrote:On February 12 2023 07:59 BlackJack wrote:On February 11 2023 23:40 ChristianS wrote:On February 11 2023 21:04 BlackJack wrote:On February 11 2023 10:55 ChristianS wrote:On February 11 2023 10:07 BlackJack wrote:On February 11 2023 09:41 ChristianS wrote:On February 11 2023 09:11 BlackJack wrote:On February 11 2023 08:39 ChristianS wrote:
I basically said the same thing in the other thread, but I don’t get the impression there’s that many fact-checkable claims in the video to begin with? It gives a guy’s name and says he works at Pfizer, which it sounds like fact-checkers have more or less verified but as I said in the other thread, it’s not really their MO to hire an actor for that part, so I always figured he probably did actually work for Pfizer in some capacity.
After that it’s apparently a lot of hidden camera footage of the guy talking, interspersed with cutting to James O’Keefe “explaining” what was happening. That is their MO. Usually the video makes a whole host of horrible allegations, nominally supported by the evidence, but if you took the video and cut all the O’Keefe explanatory bits it wouldn’t be at all obvious they actually supported the allegations. PV claims the explanatory bits are just summarizing context that would be apparent from the unedited footage, people ask them to release the unedited footage and they refuse.
But BlackJack, can you actually give an example of a claim the video makes that *could* be proven false by a journalist investigation? Because my impression is that it’s mostly “Pfizer is doing this or that illegal and/or unethical business practice/experimentation.” Generally Pfizer will deny it. It’s understandable not to take them at their word, but who else is in a position to conclusively say “this business practice/experiment type is not happening anywhere in the company”? Pfizer is a *massive* company, and virtually everything they do will be kept confidential.
Otherwise this is essentially like if I made a bunch of unsupported allegations to the effect of “BlackJack owns a dungeon under a false name somewhere in the Asian continent where they torture babies.” It’s not true (I assume), but what’s a fact-checker supposed to do with that? How can you prove a negative like that? All they could say is “These allegations are completely unsupported and do not come from a reputable source,” which is basically what every article about the PV video says. Sure, the example of the most obvious thing that can be proven or disproven is who the guy is and what he does. You can't simultaneously believe that it's probable this guy works for Pfizer but also difficult to verify what he does at Pfizer. If he works at pfizer then pfizer should know exactly who he is and what he does. Obviously pfizer would rather not answer that question and so far the media has been happy to not even ask it. Most of the "fact checking" on this has been "We googled the guy's name and didn't find anything so we consider this unverified." Snopes is the only one that I saw that said they specifically asked pfizer who the guy was and whether he works for them. I bet the media could get an answer from pfizer of who the guy is and what he does there if they put a slight bit of effort in. Can’t say this for certain, obviously, but it’s extremely likely that journalists called Pfizer, asked if the guy works for them, and got some kind of non-answer. Pretty standard PR strategy to say “We’re not answering individual questions at this time, but please refer to the press release we put out.” Possibly combined with something like “we’re not at liberty to discuss HR particulars of any specific employee.” Frustrating, but well within Pfizer’s rights and probably the best strategy if they just want this to go away (which they would want, of course, whether they were doing anything shady or not). Sounds like Snopes took some extraordinary measures like searching Wayback Machine LinkedIn for him, testing out if an email to first.last@pfizer.com (or w/e their convention is) gets bounced back or not, etc. and didn’t get anything conclusive. Then after they published someone wrote in with evidence of a LinkedIn profile suggesting he had some job title like “Director of D&D, something something strategy something something mRNA.” That’s a weird job title, though not totally implausible. It’s also weird a guy like that would have so little online footprint, though not totally implausible. You can also say anything you want on a LinkedIn page, so it’s not exactly conclusive. It’s valuable to look into this, if only because it would be good to know if PV has escalated to fully fabricating the hidden camera footage. But I was already assuming the guy exists, and that he works for Pfizer. Dim as my opinion of PV is, I was already prepared to tentatively take their word for that. So… do you have any other claims that are fact-checkable from the video? Because right now it sounds like the most likely explanation is that various outlets did exactly the investigation you think they should have, and they just didn’t find anything publishable. I agree that Pfizer probably gave a non-answer from a PR person. That’s always the first play in the playbook for any scandal. Then typically the media stays on the story until they can’t just keep saying “no comment” without them looking ridiculous. The question here is why should the media accept that non-answer. Why are people content with their media accepting non-answers? What does “stay on the story” mean here? I’ve heard in-depth journalistic investigations described in detail, and usually they *don’t* involve somehow forcing the company/government/secretive organization to actually answer the question. Generally they follow other leads. Snopes seems to have gotten pretty creative in that regard, and reached a pretty unsatisfying answer, but that’s not uncommon with narrow, specific questions. If the guy doesn’t wanna talk, and the company doesn’t wanna talk, and they haven’t talked publicly about his employment anywhere we can find, that’s a dead end, no? Just putting a spotlight on things can get you more information. More eyes on it, more people that may be willing to come forward to talk, more pressure on pfizer to stop giving non-answers, etc. If practically nobody is going to cover this and practically nobody is going to ask questions then pfizer is never going to feel compelled to give a straight answer and new leads are not going to materialize. And you’re still not actually giving me a consequential claim the video makes they could investigate. It seems like your motivation is less to do with the video than with media credibility in general. Or, less charitably, it kinda seems like you just wanted to do some low-effort sniping at “the media” and don’t really care about the rest. In which case, you took your shots, and they were as ill-received by the thread as you surely expected. Are we done here? Can we talk about the SOTU or that big explosion in Ohio or something? Yes, I hope I have made it clear that my commentary is on the media coverage of the PV video. I think the answers offered here for why there has been so little media coverage are not very convincing. The most popular being offered is "PV has absolutely zero credibility so why should the media cover this." Unless you have your head in the sand you should have known 10 years ago that O'Keefe has no credibility and yet the media has still been happy to cover his projects and recordings. So that seems unlikely to be the answer, doesn't it? But frankly, while it’s clear you want to talk about the media coverage, it doesn’t seem like you actually have a nuanced criticism. Aside from some vague bromides like “stay on the story,” “shine a spotlight on things,” or “keep asking questions until you get some answers,” you don’t actually have an idea of what such an investigation should look like. From my limited understanding of journalistic investigations, this has every indication of a story in which most questions are unanswerable, and even the basic ones you might be able to answer (e.g. does Pfizer employ a man by this name) seem to have come to dead ends without conclusive answers. If you want to say all the top experts of another profession are doing their job wrong, you really oughta come better armed than this. ————————— So a bit of background: one of the bigger black marks against the Biden administration in my book was more or less forcing the railway workers union to accept the deal with their bosses instead of striking last year. The workers had some eminently reasonable demands (e.g. “nonzero sick days!”) but the government was worried a rail worker strike would fuck supply chains even more than they already have been, and raise prices of basic goods at a time when inflation was already blowing up (right before an important midterm election!) so the government basically said “nope, we decided you’re taking the deal. Oh look, there’s an agreement in place, striking would be illegal!” Questionably legal, and especially disappointing considering the administration has otherwise been pretty pro-union, but I guess when it affects reelection chances they’re prepared to do some backstabbing. This has taken on renewed relevance after a train derailment carrying a massive amount of toxic chemicals caused a massive explosion in the Ohio town of East Palestine recently (yes, that’s actually the town’s name). I haven’t seen a clear breakdown of what the chemicals on board were, but the most commonly cited one is an absolutely enormous amount of vinyl chloride (I also saw phosgene referenced). Authorities evacuated the surrounding area indefinitely, and apparently executed a “controlled release” of toxic fumes by burning a lot of the vinyl chloride before it could explode all at once. It’s not yet clear how much damage this has done (is still doing?) to the surrounding area and population; I’ve seen claims on Twitter of mass death of nearby wildlife and livestock, despite authorities saying it’s safe, but I haven’t verified any of that. The union angle isn’t being discussed much, but safety reforms to prevent derailments like this were among the union’s demands last year. I haven’t seen any precise breakdowns of what caused the derailment and whether any of the union’s desired reforms would have prevented it, but if so it puts at least some blame on the administration. I would be skeptical of a straight line being drawn from this derailment to Biden railroading the rail workers with a new agreement they didn't want. Personally I always thought that decision would have fewer consequences for Biden than it might for Pete Buttigieg down the road. It's somewhat of a bad look to scoff at people who question your right to taking a paternity leave in the middle of a supply chain crisis and then turn around and push through an agreement where rail workers don't get any paid sick days. Yeah, like I said, I haven’t seen any direct evidence that the derailment would have been prevented by a reform the union asked for. Is that the threshold for blame though? I mean, if someone releases a radioactive agent that increases the rate of cancer, we can’t say for sure which people wouldn’t have died otherwise, but we could still blame the polluter for the excess deaths. If we can’t say for sure the union’s reforms would have prevented this specific derailment, isn’t this still a strong vindication of the union’s arguments that safety provisions are insufficient and the railway companies are flirting with disaster? I guess, maybe. I suspect that during many contract negotiations for many professions that something like "improved safety" or "safer working conditions" is included in the verbiage put out by unions. I also think that workplace accidents are an inevitability even though we should strive to eliminate them completely. I don't think that just these two things being proximal in time is great evidence. But I'm not saying the opposite either.
Fair enough. I’m trying to research what exactly the safety demands of the union were, and whether any were related to the incident. Unfortunately most of the articles I’m finding are from last year, and the safety stuff is mostly an asterisk. I did find this piece from The Lever:
Before this weekend’s fiery Norfolk Southern train derailment prompted emergency evacuations in Ohio, the company helped kill a federal safety rule aimed at upgrading the rail industry’s Civil War-era braking systems, according to documents reviewed by The Lever.
Though the company’s 150-car train in Ohio reportedly burst into 100-foot flames upon derailing — and was transporting materials that triggered a fireball when they were released and incinerated — it was not being regulated as a “high-hazard flammable train,” federal officials told The Lever.
Documents show that when current transportation safety rules were first created, a federal agency sided with industry lobbyists and limited regulations governing the transport of hazardous compounds. The decision effectively exempted many trains hauling dangerous materials — including the one in Ohio — from the “high-hazard” classification and its more stringent safety requirements.
…
Full disclosure: I hadn’t heard of The Lever so I looked them up. They’re a pretty obviously left-leaning source, founded by David Sirota (journalist, but also, Sanders campaign speech writer).
That said, the article is pretty long and goes pretty in depth on rail companies’ lobbying to avoid additional safety requirements. Those include avoiding getting these materials categorized as “hazardous” for shipping purposes, avoiding requirements to upgrade their brakes from a pretty ancient design, and - relevant to present discussion - the union’s demands. The union’s demands apparently were mostly focused on staff reductions and massive mandatory overtime without paid leave, labor issues which obviously affect safety.
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On February 12 2023 06:05 Erasme wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2023 04:52 Sermokala wrote:
Biden had a pretty big moment of turning republicans long desire about them wanting to cut SS and medicare against them and forceing them to admit that its off the table.
Mccarthy had to shush his party multiple times which has to be embaressing.
MTG cosplayed as cruella de vil for some bizzare reason.
Biden was pretty combative and really went after republicans by stateing his support for a lot of positive things that republicans just couldn't find in themselves the ability to support.
It was noteably 10 minutes longer than last years.
I also saw that fox decided to cancel the super bowl interview the president gives to the network hosting the event. It was going to be hosted by the "fox soul" subdivision but for some reason they just didn't want it.
the PV talk was bad but at least it was better then the tankie shit that came before. I'm glad everyone got their interest in engaging with GH out of their system.
Largely a domestic focused speech, lots of "finish the job" moments. Annouced his support for going after cancer like bono went after AIDS. (bono was in audience).
Specifically the Insulin cap discussion was about "finishing the job" and making it capped for everyone in every state, and not just the economically deveoped ones. Wasn't it also about passing it as a law instead of just an EO?
Why let reality get in the way of a narrative?
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United States10501 Posts
On February 12 2023 10:09 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2023 09:22 BlackJack wrote:On February 12 2023 08:53 ChristianS wrote:On February 12 2023 07:59 BlackJack wrote:On February 11 2023 23:40 ChristianS wrote:On February 11 2023 21:04 BlackJack wrote:On February 11 2023 10:55 ChristianS wrote:On February 11 2023 10:07 BlackJack wrote:On February 11 2023 09:41 ChristianS wrote:On February 11 2023 09:11 BlackJack wrote:
[quote]
Sure, the example of the most obvious thing that can be proven or disproven is who the guy is and what he does. You can't simultaneously believe that it's probable this guy works for Pfizer but also difficult to verify what he does at Pfizer. If he works at pfizer then pfizer should know exactly who he is and what he does. Obviously pfizer would rather not answer that question and so far the media has been happy to not even ask it. Most of the "fact checking" on this has been "We googled the guy's name and didn't find anything so we consider this unverified." Snopes is the only one that I saw that said they specifically asked pfizer who the guy was and whether he works for them. I bet the media could get an answer from pfizer of who the guy is and what he does there if they put a slight bit of effort in.
Can’t say this for certain, obviously, but it’s extremely likely that journalists called Pfizer, asked if the guy works for them, and got some kind of non-answer. Pretty standard PR strategy to say “We’re not answering individual questions at this time, but please refer to the press release we put out.” Possibly combined with something like “we’re not at liberty to discuss HR particulars of any specific employee.” Frustrating, but well within Pfizer’s rights and probably the best strategy if they just want this to go away (which they would want, of course, whether they were doing anything shady or not). Sounds like Snopes took some extraordinary measures like searching Wayback Machine LinkedIn for him, testing out if an email to first.last@pfizer.com (or w/e their convention is) gets bounced back or not, etc. and didn’t get anything conclusive. Then after they published someone wrote in with evidence of a LinkedIn profile suggesting he had some job title like “Director of D&D, something something strategy something something mRNA.” That’s a weird job title, though not totally implausible. It’s also weird a guy like that would have so little online footprint, though not totally implausible. You can also say anything you want on a LinkedIn page, so it’s not exactly conclusive. It’s valuable to look into this, if only because it would be good to know if PV has escalated to fully fabricating the hidden camera footage. But I was already assuming the guy exists, and that he works for Pfizer. Dim as my opinion of PV is, I was already prepared to tentatively take their word for that. So… do you have any other claims that are fact-checkable from the video? Because right now it sounds like the most likely explanation is that various outlets did exactly the investigation you think they should have, and they just didn’t find anything publishable. I agree that Pfizer probably gave a non-answer from a PR person. That’s always the first play in the playbook for any scandal. Then typically the media stays on the story until they can’t just keep saying “no comment” without them looking ridiculous. The question here is why should the media accept that non-answer. Why are people content with their media accepting non-answers? What does “stay on the story” mean here? I’ve heard in-depth journalistic investigations described in detail, and usually they *don’t* involve somehow forcing the company/government/secretive organization to actually answer the question. Generally they follow other leads. Snopes seems to have gotten pretty creative in that regard, and reached a pretty unsatisfying answer, but that’s not uncommon with narrow, specific questions. If the guy doesn’t wanna talk, and the company doesn’t wanna talk, and they haven’t talked publicly about his employment anywhere we can find, that’s a dead end, no? Just putting a spotlight on things can get you more information. More eyes on it, more people that may be willing to come forward to talk, more pressure on pfizer to stop giving non-answers, etc. If practically nobody is going to cover this and practically nobody is going to ask questions then pfizer is never going to feel compelled to give a straight answer and new leads are not going to materialize. And you’re still not actually giving me a consequential claim the video makes they could investigate. It seems like your motivation is less to do with the video than with media credibility in general. Or, less charitably, it kinda seems like you just wanted to do some low-effort sniping at “the media” and don’t really care about the rest. In which case, you took your shots, and they were as ill-received by the thread as you surely expected. Are we done here? Can we talk about the SOTU or that big explosion in Ohio or something? Yes, I hope I have made it clear that my commentary is on the media coverage of the PV video. I think the answers offered here for why there has been so little media coverage are not very convincing. The most popular being offered is "PV has absolutely zero credibility so why should the media cover this." Unless you have your head in the sand you should have known 10 years ago that O'Keefe has no credibility and yet the media has still been happy to cover his projects and recordings. So that seems unlikely to be the answer, doesn't it? But frankly, while it’s clear you want to talk about the media coverage, it doesn’t seem like you actually have a nuanced criticism. Aside from some vague bromides like “stay on the story,” “shine a spotlight on things,” or “keep asking questions until you get some answers,” you don’t actually have an idea of what such an investigation should look like. From my limited understanding of journalistic investigations, this has every indication of a story in which most questions are unanswerable, and even the basic ones you might be able to answer (e.g. does Pfizer employ a man by this name) seem to have come to dead ends without conclusive answers. If you want to say all the top experts of another profession are doing their job wrong, you really oughta come better armed than this. ————————— So a bit of background: one of the bigger black marks against the Biden administration in my book was more or less forcing the railway workers union to accept the deal with their bosses instead of striking last year. The workers had some eminently reasonable demands (e.g. “nonzero sick days!”) but the government was worried a rail worker strike would fuck supply chains even more than they already have been, and raise prices of basic goods at a time when inflation was already blowing up (right before an important midterm election!) so the government basically said “nope, we decided you’re taking the deal. Oh look, there’s an agreement in place, striking would be illegal!” Questionably legal, and especially disappointing considering the administration has otherwise been pretty pro-union, but I guess when it affects reelection chances they’re prepared to do some backstabbing. This has taken on renewed relevance after a train derailment carrying a massive amount of toxic chemicals caused a massive explosion in the Ohio town of East Palestine recently (yes, that’s actually the town’s name). I haven’t seen a clear breakdown of what the chemicals on board were, but the most commonly cited one is an absolutely enormous amount of vinyl chloride (I also saw phosgene referenced). Authorities evacuated the surrounding area indefinitely, and apparently executed a “controlled release” of toxic fumes by burning a lot of the vinyl chloride before it could explode all at once. It’s not yet clear how much damage this has done (is still doing?) to the surrounding area and population; I’ve seen claims on Twitter of mass death of nearby wildlife and livestock, despite authorities saying it’s safe, but I haven’t verified any of that. The union angle isn’t being discussed much, but safety reforms to prevent derailments like this were among the union’s demands last year. I haven’t seen any precise breakdowns of what caused the derailment and whether any of the union’s desired reforms would have prevented it, but if so it puts at least some blame on the administration. I would be skeptical of a straight line being drawn from this derailment to Biden railroading the rail workers with a new agreement they didn't want. Personally I always thought that decision would have fewer consequences for Biden than it might for Pete Buttigieg down the road. It's somewhat of a bad look to scoff at people who question your right to taking a paternity leave in the middle of a supply chain crisis and then turn around and push through an agreement where rail workers don't get any paid sick days. Yeah, like I said, I haven’t seen any direct evidence that the derailment would have been prevented by a reform the union asked for. Is that the threshold for blame though? I mean, if someone releases a radioactive agent that increases the rate of cancer, we can’t say for sure which people wouldn’t have died otherwise, but we could still blame the polluter for the excess deaths. If we can’t say for sure the union’s reforms would have prevented this specific derailment, isn’t this still a strong vindication of the union’s arguments that safety provisions are insufficient and the railway companies are flirting with disaster? I guess, maybe. I suspect that during many contract negotiations for many professions that something like "improved safety" or "safer working conditions" is included in the verbiage put out by unions. I also think that workplace accidents are an inevitability even though we should strive to eliminate them completely. I don't think that just these two things being proximal in time is great evidence. But I'm not saying the opposite either. Fair enough. I’m trying to research what exactly the safety demands of the union were, and whether any were related to the incident. Unfortunately most of the articles I’m finding are from last year, and the safety stuff is mostly an asterisk. I did find this piece from The Lever: Show nested quote +Before this weekend’s fiery Norfolk Southern train derailment prompted emergency evacuations in Ohio, the company helped kill a federal safety rule aimed at upgrading the rail industry’s Civil War-era braking systems, according to documents reviewed by The Lever.
Though the company’s 150-car train in Ohio reportedly burst into 100-foot flames upon derailing — and was transporting materials that triggered a fireball when they were released and incinerated — it was not being regulated as a “high-hazard flammable train,” federal officials told The Lever.
Documents show that when current transportation safety rules were first created, a federal agency sided with industry lobbyists and limited regulations governing the transport of hazardous compounds. The decision effectively exempted many trains hauling dangerous materials — including the one in Ohio — from the “high-hazard” classification and its more stringent safety requirements.
… Full disclosure: I hadn’t heard of The Lever so I looked them up. They’re a pretty obviously left-leaning source, founded by David Sirota (journalist, but also, Sanders campaign speech writer). That said, the article is pretty long and goes pretty in depth on rail companies’ lobbying to avoid additional safety requirements. Those include avoiding getting these materials categorized as “hazardous” for shipping purposes, avoiding requirements to upgrade their brakes from a pretty ancient design, and - relevant to present discussion - the union’s demands. The union’s demands apparently were mostly focused on staff reductions and massive mandatory overtime without paid leave, labor issues which obviously affect safety.
Yeah it's hard to say too much without knowing the details of what they were asking for in terms of safety and the details of what caused the derailment (But even if I had the details of both I would honestly still probably lack the expertise make sense of it). If it were something like a police union asking for body armor and then a couple months later a cop gets shot in the chest, or a pilot's union asking for more training on new aircraft and a couple months later a 737 Max crashes because the pilot wasn't trained on how to disengage the MCAS system, that would be pretty damning. But what we have here so far is more like the pilot's asked for some safety provision and a couple months later a plane crashes for some reason.
My take just from skimming your article is that if there is a villain in this story it would be lobbyists and paid-for politicians eroding safety regulations as opposed to Biden crushing the rail strike. Of course it could easily be argued that by Biden crushing the rail strike and essentially forcing the union to accept any lax safety regulations they have been fighting against, he wouldn't be free of blame either.
I think I remember listening to an NPR podcast on the rail strike back in December and one of the things they were fighting against were rail companies that wantd to run trains with a one person crew. I think the train in this derailment had a crew of 3. I don't know if this made any difference but I can't imagine how much it would suck to have your train derail and cause a massive hazardous leak and you're the only person working there to deal with it.
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On February 12 2023 11:23 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2023 10:09 ChristianS wrote:On February 12 2023 09:22 BlackJack wrote:On February 12 2023 08:53 ChristianS wrote:On February 12 2023 07:59 BlackJack wrote:On February 11 2023 23:40 ChristianS wrote:On February 11 2023 21:04 BlackJack wrote:On February 11 2023 10:55 ChristianS wrote:On February 11 2023 10:07 BlackJack wrote:On February 11 2023 09:41 ChristianS wrote:
[quote]
Can’t say this for certain, obviously, but it’s extremely likely that journalists called Pfizer, asked if the guy works for them, and got some kind of non-answer. Pretty standard PR strategy to say “We’re not answering individual questions at this time, but please refer to the press release we put out.” Possibly combined with something like “we’re not at liberty to discuss HR particulars of any specific employee.” Frustrating, but well within Pfizer’s rights and probably the best strategy if they just want this to go away (which they would want, of course, whether they were doing anything shady or not).
Sounds like Snopes took some extraordinary measures like searching Wayback Machine LinkedIn for him, testing out if an email to first.last@pfizer.com (or w/e their convention is) gets bounced back or not, etc. and didn’t get anything conclusive. Then after they published someone wrote in with evidence of a LinkedIn profile suggesting he had some job title like “Director of D&D, something something strategy something something mRNA.”
That’s a weird job title, though not totally implausible. It’s also weird a guy like that would have so little online footprint, though not totally implausible. You can also say anything you want on a LinkedIn page, so it’s not exactly conclusive. It’s valuable to look into this, if only because it would be good to know if PV has escalated to fully fabricating the hidden camera footage.
But I was already assuming the guy exists, and that he works for Pfizer. Dim as my opinion of PV is, I was already prepared to tentatively take their word for that. So… do you have any other claims that are fact-checkable from the video? Because right now it sounds like the most likely explanation is that various outlets did exactly the investigation you think they should have, and they just didn’t find anything publishable. I agree that Pfizer probably gave a non-answer from a PR person. That’s always the first play in the playbook for any scandal. Then typically the media stays on the story until they can’t just keep saying “no comment” without them looking ridiculous. The question here is why should the media accept that non-answer. Why are people content with their media accepting non-answers? What does “stay on the story” mean here? I’ve heard in-depth journalistic investigations described in detail, and usually they *don’t* involve somehow forcing the company/government/secretive organization to actually answer the question. Generally they follow other leads. Snopes seems to have gotten pretty creative in that regard, and reached a pretty unsatisfying answer, but that’s not uncommon with narrow, specific questions. If the guy doesn’t wanna talk, and the company doesn’t wanna talk, and they haven’t talked publicly about his employment anywhere we can find, that’s a dead end, no? Just putting a spotlight on things can get you more information. More eyes on it, more people that may be willing to come forward to talk, more pressure on pfizer to stop giving non-answers, etc. If practically nobody is going to cover this and practically nobody is going to ask questions then pfizer is never going to feel compelled to give a straight answer and new leads are not going to materialize. And you’re still not actually giving me a consequential claim the video makes they could investigate. It seems like your motivation is less to do with the video than with media credibility in general. Or, less charitably, it kinda seems like you just wanted to do some low-effort sniping at “the media” and don’t really care about the rest. In which case, you took your shots, and they were as ill-received by the thread as you surely expected. Are we done here? Can we talk about the SOTU or that big explosion in Ohio or something? Yes, I hope I have made it clear that my commentary is on the media coverage of the PV video. I think the answers offered here for why there has been so little media coverage are not very convincing. The most popular being offered is "PV has absolutely zero credibility so why should the media cover this." Unless you have your head in the sand you should have known 10 years ago that O'Keefe has no credibility and yet the media has still been happy to cover his projects and recordings. So that seems unlikely to be the answer, doesn't it? But frankly, while it’s clear you want to talk about the media coverage, it doesn’t seem like you actually have a nuanced criticism. Aside from some vague bromides like “stay on the story,” “shine a spotlight on things,” or “keep asking questions until you get some answers,” you don’t actually have an idea of what such an investigation should look like. From my limited understanding of journalistic investigations, this has every indication of a story in which most questions are unanswerable, and even the basic ones you might be able to answer (e.g. does Pfizer employ a man by this name) seem to have come to dead ends without conclusive answers. If you want to say all the top experts of another profession are doing their job wrong, you really oughta come better armed than this. ————————— So a bit of background: one of the bigger black marks against the Biden administration in my book was more or less forcing the railway workers union to accept the deal with their bosses instead of striking last year. The workers had some eminently reasonable demands (e.g. “nonzero sick days!”) but the government was worried a rail worker strike would fuck supply chains even more than they already have been, and raise prices of basic goods at a time when inflation was already blowing up (right before an important midterm election!) so the government basically said “nope, we decided you’re taking the deal. Oh look, there’s an agreement in place, striking would be illegal!” Questionably legal, and especially disappointing considering the administration has otherwise been pretty pro-union, but I guess when it affects reelection chances they’re prepared to do some backstabbing. This has taken on renewed relevance after a train derailment carrying a massive amount of toxic chemicals caused a massive explosion in the Ohio town of East Palestine recently (yes, that’s actually the town’s name). I haven’t seen a clear breakdown of what the chemicals on board were, but the most commonly cited one is an absolutely enormous amount of vinyl chloride (I also saw phosgene referenced). Authorities evacuated the surrounding area indefinitely, and apparently executed a “controlled release” of toxic fumes by burning a lot of the vinyl chloride before it could explode all at once. It’s not yet clear how much damage this has done (is still doing?) to the surrounding area and population; I’ve seen claims on Twitter of mass death of nearby wildlife and livestock, despite authorities saying it’s safe, but I haven’t verified any of that. The union angle isn’t being discussed much, but safety reforms to prevent derailments like this were among the union’s demands last year. I haven’t seen any precise breakdowns of what caused the derailment and whether any of the union’s desired reforms would have prevented it, but if so it puts at least some blame on the administration. I would be skeptical of a straight line being drawn from this derailment to Biden railroading the rail workers with a new agreement they didn't want. Personally I always thought that decision would have fewer consequences for Biden than it might for Pete Buttigieg down the road. It's somewhat of a bad look to scoff at people who question your right to taking a paternity leave in the middle of a supply chain crisis and then turn around and push through an agreement where rail workers don't get any paid sick days. Yeah, like I said, I haven’t seen any direct evidence that the derailment would have been prevented by a reform the union asked for. Is that the threshold for blame though? I mean, if someone releases a radioactive agent that increases the rate of cancer, we can’t say for sure which people wouldn’t have died otherwise, but we could still blame the polluter for the excess deaths. If we can’t say for sure the union’s reforms would have prevented this specific derailment, isn’t this still a strong vindication of the union’s arguments that safety provisions are insufficient and the railway companies are flirting with disaster? I guess, maybe. I suspect that during many contract negotiations for many professions that something like "improved safety" or "safer working conditions" is included in the verbiage put out by unions. I also think that workplace accidents are an inevitability even though we should strive to eliminate them completely. I don't think that just these two things being proximal in time is great evidence. But I'm not saying the opposite either. Fair enough. I’m trying to research what exactly the safety demands of the union were, and whether any were related to the incident. Unfortunately most of the articles I’m finding are from last year, and the safety stuff is mostly an asterisk. I did find this piece from The Lever: Before this weekend’s fiery Norfolk Southern train derailment prompted emergency evacuations in Ohio, the company helped kill a federal safety rule aimed at upgrading the rail industry’s Civil War-era braking systems, according to documents reviewed by The Lever.
Though the company’s 150-car train in Ohio reportedly burst into 100-foot flames upon derailing — and was transporting materials that triggered a fireball when they were released and incinerated — it was not being regulated as a “high-hazard flammable train,” federal officials told The Lever.
Documents show that when current transportation safety rules were first created, a federal agency sided with industry lobbyists and limited regulations governing the transport of hazardous compounds. The decision effectively exempted many trains hauling dangerous materials — including the one in Ohio — from the “high-hazard” classification and its more stringent safety requirements.
… Full disclosure: I hadn’t heard of The Lever so I looked them up. They’re a pretty obviously left-leaning source, founded by David Sirota (journalist, but also, Sanders campaign speech writer). That said, the article is pretty long and goes pretty in depth on rail companies’ lobbying to avoid additional safety requirements. Those include avoiding getting these materials categorized as “hazardous” for shipping purposes, avoiding requirements to upgrade their brakes from a pretty ancient design, and - relevant to present discussion - the union’s demands. The union’s demands apparently were mostly focused on staff reductions and massive mandatory overtime without paid leave, labor issues which obviously affect safety. Yeah it's hard to say too much without knowing the details of what they were asking for in terms of safety and the details of what caused the derailment (But even if I had the details of both I would honestly still probably lack the expertise make sense of it). If it were something like a police union asking for body armor and then a couple months later a cop gets shot in the chest, or a pilot's union asking for more training on new aircraft and a couple months later a 737 Max crashes because the pilot wasn't trained on how to disengage the MCAS system, that would be pretty damning. But what we have here so far is more like the pilot's asked for some safety provision and a couple months later a plane crashes for some reason. My take just from skimming your article is that if there is a villain in this story it would be lobbyists and paid-for politicians eroding safety regulations as opposed to Biden crushing the rail strike. Of course it could easily be argued that by Biden crushing the rail strike and essentially forcing the union to accept any lax safety regulations they have been fighting against, he wouldn't be free of blame either. I think I remember listening to an NPR podcast on the rail strike back in December and one of the things they were fighting against were rail companies that wantd to run trains with a one person crew. I think the train in this derailment had a crew of 3. I don't know if this made any difference but I can't imagine how much it would suck to have your train derail and cause a massive hazardous leak and you're the only person working there to deal with it.
Nightmarish. I’ve been around for a couple moderate chemical spills (<10 liters of not-that-hazardous stuff) and a bunch of trained chemists still tend to panic and not know what to do. What the fuck do you do when you just wrecked an entire train and spilled its whole cargo of vinyl chloride (and God knows what else)?
I’ve seen this Twitter thread going around. Union source so obviously not impartial, but one of the pages it links goes into a fair amount of detail about the crash and various causes:
+ Show Spoiler [Spoilered for length] +…in the last 10 years, the Class One carriers have dramatically increased both the length and tonnage of the average train, while cutting back on maintenance and inspection, and we have a time bomb ticking…
In order to mitigate in-train forces, railroads prior to PSR would build trains with the heavier cars on the head end and the lighter cars on the rear end. This prevents severe slack run-ins and run-outs throughout the trip and if the train’s emergency brakes are applied, you don’t have heavier cars running into lighter cars which causes jackknifing. This particular train had 40% of it’s weight on the rear 1/3 of the train. Most of this tonnage was made up of loaded tank cars which are very heavy and slosh back and forth when coming to a sudden stop. This sloshing after a stop can continue the pushing of more cars off a track in a jackknifing situation which is what occurred in this Ohio wreck.
…
Video footage has emerged online (see video link below) showing one of the wheels on this train on fire as it passed by the camera. If this footage is authentic, it’s very likely that car caused the derailment. This damaged car apparently was allowed to leave its initial terminal because it wasn’t inspected properly due to car inspectors being laid-off and time allowed per car inspection being dramatically reduced by the industry. If this did indeed occur this way, the train would’ve gone into emergency and the heavy tank cars on the rear end would’ve slammed into the derailed cars causing the 50 cars to pile up off the track and catch fire.
"Precision Scheduled Railroading" is more than likely a major culprit in this incident for the following reasons:
-- Inspection times have been cut resulting in the defective car remaining in the consist.
-- Train was excessively long and heavy… 151 cars, 9300 feet, 18,000 tons.
-- Train was not blocked properly because PSR calls for limited car dwell times in terminals. Blocking a train for proper train handling (placing the majority of weight on the head end and ahead of cushioned draw bars) takes longer so this practice has been mostly eliminated by the rail carriers.
link
If that analysis is right (and obviously I’d prefer to have that confirmed or corrected by a more thorough, independent investigation) the main union issue that’s relevant here is so-called “precision-scheduled railroading,” which from what I can gather is a bit like LEAN manufacturing, but for rail freight. It’s meant to increase cost-efficiency by minimizing the amount of sorting, inspection, and staff needed to transport a given amount of traffic. That also involves combining shipping into fewer, longer trains.
In this case, that meant heavier cars were not sorted to the front as they normally would to prevent jackknifing; the train was longer and heavier than normal; and it seems like one of the cars had a malfunctioning wheel that an inspection could have caught (but PSR reduces the number of inspections). There’s still years of lobbying to blame for why the cargo wasn’t classified as hazardous, why the trains weren’t required to upgrade their brakes, etc. but it sounds like there’s good reason to argue PSR enabled less safe operating conditions while removing safety checks that could have averted the disaster. And opposing PSR on a variety of grounds was central to the union’s arguments last year.
I think that’s as close as the union is going to get to an “I told you so” here; I guess YMMV as to whether that qualifies as “the union asked for safety reforms that would have prevented this from happening.”
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The follow up report is rough. Indications are that this was a well-known problem, and there was/is no intention by the Biden admin and Pete Buttigieg to fix it any time soon. They aren't going to correct it on their own volition, but perhaps relatively paltry public pressure to act can force their hand. I won't be holding my breath though.
In the aftermath of a fiery Ohio train derailment, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s department has not moved to reinstate an Obama-era rail safety rule aimed at expanding the use of better braking technology, even though a former federal safety official recently warned Congress that without the better brakes, “there will be more derailments [and] more releases of hazardous materials.”
Buttigieg, who heads the Department of Transportation that oversees the railroads, has not said anything yet about the Ohio train derailment.
Rail regulators in Buttigieg’s Transportation Department have not proposed strengthening the safety rules in question, even amidst these warnings that upgraded braking systems could have prevented recent accidents, or reduced the ensuing damage.
There is at least one brake safety proposal currently under consideration by federal rail regulators — an industry-backed rule relaxing brake testing requirements.
The changes under consideration are staunchly opposed by five major rail unions.
www.levernews.com
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Oh, well yeah. If we're gonna change anything, let's make sure we make it even easier for big corporations to skirt safety requirements. Not like we have enough examples of huge and completely preventable disasters in recent memory from companies pushing ahead and ignoring the advice of basically everyone just so they can make a little bit more profit.
Nahhh, it'll be fine.
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United States10501 Posts
On February 13 2023 04:54 GreenHorizons wrote:The follow up report is rough. Indications are that this was a well-known problem, and there was/is no intention by the Biden admin and Pete Buttigieg to fix it any time soon. They aren't going to correct it on their own volition, but perhaps relatively paltry public pressure to act can force their hand. I won't be holding my breath though. Show nested quote +In the aftermath of a fiery Ohio train derailment, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s department has not moved to reinstate an Obama-era rail safety rule aimed at expanding the use of better braking technology, even though a former federal safety official recently warned Congress that without the better brakes, “there will be more derailments [and] more releases of hazardous materials.”
Buttigieg, who heads the Department of Transportation that oversees the railroads, has not said anything yet about the Ohio train derailment.
Rail regulators in Buttigieg’s Transportation Department have not proposed strengthening the safety rules in question, even amidst these warnings that upgraded braking systems could have prevented recent accidents, or reduced the ensuing damage.
There is at least one brake safety proposal currently under consideration by federal rail regulators — an industry-backed rule relaxing brake testing requirements.
The changes under consideration are staunchly opposed by five major rail unions.
www.levernews.com
The article wants the government to mandate new braking technology on trains instead of the same braking technology we have been using for the last 150 years. There's no evidence to suggest that the new brakes would have prevented this derailment. What exactly is the "well-known problem" you are referencing? That hundreds of millions or billions of dollars hasn't been spent on an upgrade that probably wouldn't have prevented this derailment in the first place? I think you should put a little more time into forming an opinion on this. Maybe mandating ECP braking is the way to go, maybe it's not. But it seems that what you've done is read one very biased article and determined that Biden/Pete are fucking up.
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On February 13 2023 04:54 GreenHorizons wrote:The follow up report is rough. Indications are that this was a well-known problem, and there was/is no intention by the Biden admin and Pete Buttigieg to fix it any time soon. They aren't going to correct it on their own volition, but perhaps relatively paltry public pressure to act can force their hand. I won't be holding my breath though. Show nested quote +In the aftermath of a fiery Ohio train derailment, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s department has not moved to reinstate an Obama-era rail safety rule aimed at expanding the use of better braking technology, even though a former federal safety official recently warned Congress that without the better brakes, “there will be more derailments [and] more releases of hazardous materials.”
Buttigieg, who heads the Department of Transportation that oversees the railroads, has not said anything yet about the Ohio train derailment.
Rail regulators in Buttigieg’s Transportation Department have not proposed strengthening the safety rules in question, even amidst these warnings that upgraded braking systems could have prevented recent accidents, or reduced the ensuing damage.
There is at least one brake safety proposal currently under consideration by federal rail regulators — an industry-backed rule relaxing brake testing requirements.
The changes under consideration are staunchly opposed by five major rail unions.
www.levernews.com
Yeah, although “well-known problem” isn’t quite right regarding the regulation Buttigieg is refusing to do. A newer, better, more expensive brake design exists; we could mandate that everyone update their fleets to the new design but Buttigieg is refusing to. The newer brakes wouldn’t necessarily have prevented the incident; you could argue they would have produced less wear and tear on the part that failed, so maybe it wouldn’t have failed, but parts are always going to fail sooner or later. Without an inspection regime that would identify the part before it failed catastrophically, it would still be a matter of time before an incident.
On the subject of problems with corporate media: this derailment is a great example of the kind of story the media tends to drop the ball on. It doesn’t really fit into party politics (it’s not like the Republicans would have been more pro-union or pro-regulation), so both Republicans and Democrats are generally happy to ignore the issue. I certainly hope that won’t happen in this case - if nothing else, people in affected areas deserve a robust investigation of what health effects they are being subjected to. But we’ll see, I suppose.
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On February 13 2023 09:57 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On February 13 2023 04:54 GreenHorizons wrote:The follow up report is rough. Indications are that this was a well-known problem, and there was/is no intention by the Biden admin and Pete Buttigieg to fix it any time soon. They aren't going to correct it on their own volition, but perhaps relatively paltry public pressure to act can force their hand. I won't be holding my breath though. In the aftermath of a fiery Ohio train derailment, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s department has not moved to reinstate an Obama-era rail safety rule aimed at expanding the use of better braking technology, even though a former federal safety official recently warned Congress that without the better brakes, “there will be more derailments [and] more releases of hazardous materials.”
Buttigieg, who heads the Department of Transportation that oversees the railroads, has not said anything yet about the Ohio train derailment.
Rail regulators in Buttigieg’s Transportation Department have not proposed strengthening the safety rules in question, even amidst these warnings that upgraded braking systems could have prevented recent accidents, or reduced the ensuing damage.
There is at least one brake safety proposal currently under consideration by federal rail regulators — an industry-backed rule relaxing brake testing requirements.
The changes under consideration are staunchly opposed by five major rail unions.
www.levernews.com Yeah, although “well-known problem” isn’t quite right regarding the regulation Buttigieg is refusing to do. A newer, better, more expensive brake design exists; we could mandate that everyone update their fleets to the new design but Buttigieg is refusing to. The newer brakes wouldn’t necessarily have prevented the incident; you could argue they would have produced less wear and tear on the part that failed, so maybe it wouldn’t have failed, but parts are always going to fail sooner or later. Without an inspection regime that would identify the part before it failed catastrophically, it would still be a matter of time before an incident. On the subject of problems with corporate media: this derailment is a great example of the kind of story the media tends to drop the ball on. It doesn’t really fit into party politics (it’s not like the Republicans would have been more pro-union or pro-regulation), so both Republicans and Democrats are generally happy to ignore the issue. I certainly hope that won’t happen in this case - if nothing else, people in affected areas deserve a robust investigation of what health effects they are being subjected to. But we’ll see, I suppose.
Fair enough, I take responsibility for the miscommunication. It's easy to interpret what I said to mean the "well-known problem" was specifically the brakes and that they specifically caused the crash + Show Spoiler + rather than what Sherrod Brown mentioned in the article; Railroads (and capitalists generally) using their lobbyists to block and/or weaken safety measures that protect workers and communities irrespective of whether there's a specific previously suggested measure that would have prevented this specific crash.
On the media, it is remarkable that despite several interviews it seems somehow this crash still hasn't come up for Buttigieg and afaict he still hasn't spoken to it at all. I presume this has to change by Monday (more than a week after it happened), but who knows. If he does speak to it, I don't have high hopes for the corporate media that's gone this long without asking him about it to ask tough follow-up questions.
I don't know that Biden's addressed it directly either, though he did mention Ohio several times in his SOTU after the crash. Now that I think about it/glance around, I don't know that the Biden administration has acknowledged this happened (or has been asked about it) in any capacity?
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According to Rep Bowman (NY-16), the EPA stated that the vinyl chloride from the East Palestine disaster has entered the Ohio River basin. From the site of the disaster, should it make its way into the river itself (which is likely), the chemicals will flow all the way to the Gulf of Mexico by means of the Mississippi River and could potentially affect millions of people in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana
Additionally, last week, West Virginia governor Jim Justice stated that the chemicals had already entered the Ohio River in West Virginia
(WTRF) West Virginia Governor Jim Justice said on Wednesday that chemicals from a train derailment spilled into the Ohio River in the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia after a train derailed Friday in East Palestine, Ohio.
Gov. Justice said, “There were chemicals that went into the Ohio River, and immediately the people of Weirton acted and acted promptly and everything to basically shut down and transfer over to an alternate supply source for their water.”
Gov. Justice added that officials moved quickly with an abundance of caution.
The Governor said, ‘We had a lot of people jumping in, whether it was our DEP or the Emergency Management Division, the DHHR, the National Guard, all began offering support and help. We feel like everything is fine here.”
Gov. Justice said more details will be given as they move forward.
7News sister station, WKBN, said one of the concerns of local residents has been water contamination after dead fish were found in nearby streams.
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United States10501 Posts
There’s so little trust in the media to adequately do its job these days
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On February 14 2023 15:28 BlackJack wrote:
There’s so little trust in the media to adequately do its job these days
That does tend to happen when the president screams about the lugenpresse every time he's in front of a microphone.
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Since the moment that accident happened i'm reading about how it's getting no coverage.
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EPT
