Bix dot Blog

The unsupported use case of Bix Frankonis’ disordered, surplus, mediocre midlife in St. Johns, Oregon—now with climate crisis, rising fascism, increasing disability, eventual poverty, and inevitable death.

Read the current manifesto. (And the followup.)

Rules: no fear, no hate, no thoughtless bullshit, and no nazis.

So then Rachel Maddow put up a graph of “daily new confirmed cases” for New York City with the Y-axis from 0 to 70 with the line reaching to 60, and the X-axis from 3/2 to 3/13; side-by-side with a graph of “daily new confirmed cases” for Italy and Spain with the Y-axis from 0 to 3000 with the line for Italy reaching to about 2750, and the X-axis from 2/23 to maybe 3/12. And then she said this while those graphs sat on screen together.

Our numbers don’t look like South Korea. Our numbers look like Italy.

She never once mentioned the disparate scales on both the X- and Y-axes; she simply kept putting up mismatched graphs and making stern pronouncements about how things here look just like Italy. It’s one the single most irresponsible bits of television reporting during a crisis that I have ever seen.

Originally published to bix.blog by Bix Frankonis. Comments and replies by email are welcome.