Here’s a new fresh horror I hadn’t considered yet: not only will GOP change rules to entrench their hold on power if they gain the presidency in November, they will also entrench the detachment from reality of all Republican voters, by wrecking the machinery of objective fact gathering
AP: ‘This is break glass in case of emergency stuff': Analysts alarmed by threats to US data gathering
Statisticians and demographers are sounding the alarm about threats to official data gathering in the U.S. in a new report and a letter to U.S. congressional leaders.
Meaningful data gathering has been under low-key assault here for a while. "It marks the second time in just over six years that a chief statistician has quit over a point of principle." financialpost.com/news/economy...
Wayne Smith said in an email to all StatsCan employees that he was resigning to preserve his personal integrity and to draw public attention to his concerns
It won’t only affect Republicans. All the data that the government collects will be skewed. They don’t want to collect climate data at all and you know unemployment under Trump will be listed as 1.5%. All Pravda all the time.
I was a census taker in 2020, and I can't tell you how much I learned about my city while doing it (they assign you to your own neighborhood). And I feel I was able to teach some skeptical folks about the value of the census. Both of those things are nightmare to the GOP.
I hadn't yet thought of that. But now, of course b/c of their hatred of actual facts & reality.
This is a nightmare.
The Republican Party abandoned facts a decade ago.
Past Republican Presidents to some extent or another had begun doing that before Trump
Couple that with the latest advances in AI... and it that intersects with advances in quantum computing... they will never give up control. We'll become Russia on steroids.
Reminds me of how the Conservatives under Harper ended the long form census in Canada