Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
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User ID: 80
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
2/2
You could not possibly be more wrong. I endeavor to behave in a fashion that requires no justification, and to the extent I fail there is no excuse. My hatred is unjustifiable, flatly evil, and something I am actively attempting to get a rein on.
I wish you the best, and while it's ludicrous and perhaps a failure of imagination on my part, I fundamentally believe this is the attraction of Conflict Theory.
One of us is very badly wrong.
Unlikely. The world is more complex than "Everything is 100% explainable by conflict theory" and "my country(wo)men are saintly altruists who take no selfish acts," and the truth is likely in the middle. The US isn't headed towards glorious fully automated luxury gay space communism, nor is it headed towards apocalyptic prepper wasteland where we fight over bottlecaps, it'll shamble along a good while longer.
Avoid the problem by declining to live in Blue areas or exposing my kids to blue organizations. Coordinate political power along explicitly tribal interests so that we can secure a livable future free of Blue oppression. Attempt to get enough resources to successfully bypass doom if that coordination fails. Hope for a miracle, get on with living life in the meantime.
Well, segregation is your right as a private citizen I suppose. This country only works insofar as we put in the work to have hard discussions across the chasm of differing worldviews, and I'd encourage you to not give up on trying to communicate or understand or empathize, but I suppose it's better than most of the alternatives.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
1/2
Apologies upfront, but this will probably be my only reply in this thread. Not because I don't care, but because I don't have the time to exchange essays and frankly given the timestamps of your replies it's probably best for the both of us.
Assume that I suck to an unbelievable degree at this, and that probably says woeful things about my character, but it's just barely possible that there's some valuable signal buried in the above shit-heap of noise. Then read it again, and if you're up to it, give me a short summary of the argument you think I'm trying to make.
Alright, I read it again. I'm still incensed. I'll expand on why in a moment, but we can go piece by piece.
I did not make sweeping generalizations about a group I dislike.
You did.
This law isn't being proposed because it solves a problem. It's being proposed because Blues hate Reds and want to harm them. That tribal hatred, by no means unique in its character and very much reciprocated by Reds, wants to Do Something About The Bad People.
From the Blue perspective, legally redefining Red Tribe parenting as child abuse is certainly a pretty good way to hurt the outgroup, and options for retaliation are limited and costly. The algorithm is working! And for those who might have concerns, never fear: Guzman's got you covered. '
when people like me use the term "groomer", we are not saying "I really don't like this person." We're saying that we consider the people so labeled, the officials supporting them, and the section of the public providing their ideology to be a direct, serious and immediate threat to our children.
You don't get to open with an angry rant about a law being proposed by a Virginian democrat, pepper it with mentions about blues hating reds and wanting to harm them, wrap it up with 'actually, these people are groomers and I consider them an immediate and serious threat to my children', stuff the same argument you've been making for as long as I've been around in the middle, and claim that you aren't waging the culture war. Out of all the replies to your post, how many were interested in an academic discussion about the finer points of the law being downstream of cultural values versus people wanting to bitch about Thing Blue Person Did This Week? I'd count one for the former, almost everyone else in the latter. While I'm sure my reading comprehension skills are subpar for the local community, everyone is responding to the 'hatejacking,' not just me. You just don't care because the other contrarian, totally-independent critical thinkers agree with your take.
I think I did, in fact, go to considerable effort to contextualize and steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
Your steel-man:
A major politician attempting, within their sphere of influence, to criminalize the way half the country raises their kids is not someone saying something wacky on twitter.
Wow, really? So your half of the country uses pronouns given at birth, which this law would criminalize, and the other half of the country calls their children ze/zir? Literally the entirety of blue tribe has trans children, and the parenting style of >99% of red tribe families with cis children will be criminalized? That's your steel-man?
But whatever. Like I said, the rules don't matter, and even if they did, nobody would care what I think.
My best summary of your argument, parts of which I agree with and have made myself:
Laws are irrelevant, what matters are the upstream values of the people writing them, the people voting for the people writing them, the people enforcing them and the people willing to obey them. A group of people with no shared values who hate each other and defect constantly who adopt the United States constitution and system will not become the United States; conversely, if we memory-holed the constitution and judicial system overnight, people in respectable communities here would still put back their shopping carts, mow their lawns, send their kids to school and so on and so forth. There's plenty of happy little enclaves throughout history who lived your Good Life without our laws, and plenty of shithole countries that imitate our system with poor results.
Our values have diverged so far that we can no longer have productive debates, discussions or peaceful coexistence. Life is now a zero-sum game dictated by how best to harm the outgroup. In short, Conflict Theory.
You've made this argument repeatedly with a different event du jour tacked on, usually a bad thing that you cite as evidence to support your worldview. Usually, if you'll forgive the armchair psychology and repeated assumptions about your state of mind, something you're personally incensed by.
Why would you respond to a claim that it doesn't matter if the law is passed or not by pointing out that the law probably won't pass?
Because literally everyone responding to you is hyperventilating about the government criminalizing the parenting of the entire Red Tribe. Because someone needs to pump the brakes, because someone needs to at least culture war in the opposite direction if we have to be waging the culture war in the first place.
Just for the sake of wild speculation, imagine for a moment that I am not actually attempting to radicalize other Reds, incite violence, or generally hate-jacking it over the idea of large-scale death and misery with my fellow rage-monsters. Imagine that I'm actually trying, very imperfectly, to convince you specifically that you're wrong about something really, really important: that some of the core assumptions you and people like you rely on for your political and social reasoning actually have a really big and very hazardous blind spot in them.
I reject what you're saying both because 1) I disagree, and believe in the decency and character of the vast majority of my fellow citizens, including you and your fellow rage-monsters and 2) even if you were right, I'm not going to accept it, shrug and go back to scrolling on reddit while my country burns. I'm going to rage against the dying of the light even as you laugh and say 'told you so stupid motherfucker' the same way I'm raging at you now, I'm going to enlist in the armed forces, run for office, start a goddamn substack, argue on the internet, have a family of 6 or whatever it takes to make the world a better place because we are not just passive bystanders, we are what makes this country what it is. There's always going to be freeloaders, cynics and rage-monsters. Spreading cynicism and conflict theory begets more cynicism and conflict; regardless of the truth value of your statements I believe that you're making the problem worse.
Do you remember what you said years ago when I asked why you still bother to post around here? Perhaps I'm insufferable, naive, self-righteous and overzealous but I prefer my answer to what I remember yours was, which amounted to 'it helps pass the time.' If only I could find it.
If a law like this actually passes and starts getting enforced, will you reconsider the relevance of the above post?
Hardly, and the inverse law already exists in Texas. I can fairly easily mentally model a steel-man where both Texan politicians and Guzman are doing what they think is best for the children. Also, the law doesn't matter, remember?
It would take some truly titanic event to turn me as cynical as you. Like concentration camps, civil war, a real coup or living in Russia.
Guzman is motivated by some combination of political ambition and desire to be a Good Person. For her, "good person" is defined by her tribe, which is Blue. Blue Tribe holds that Red anti-LGBT bigotry causes vast harm and suffering, and that preventing and/or punishing this bigotry helps make a better world, that the world will be a better place when Red hostility to LGBT culture has been eliminated, and that actively working to achieve that elimination is a good thing.
You flip between Guzman and Blue tribe as a whole depending on which is more convenient, and project the former onto the latter to justify you writing off half the country. You're rehashing this conversation. Again, you ignore the majority of values that we do share and catastrophize over the marginal cases of trans children with deeply conservative children. In a country of over 300 million, I have no doubt there are a few hundred cases of miserable trans children and angry parents that you could make a probative mountain to bury me under. I suspect you're less interested in the mountain 300 million people tall where this isn't the case.
Not to say I don't take your concerns seriously, or minimize the suffering of those people, or argue that they should be charged with a felony and thrown in jail. But I'm not about to lose my faith in western civilization or this nation because we don't have a great solution for this problem.
Okay. So what happens when they do dominate? Do you think this is all just posturing, and they'd never really do it because that would be crazy? What happens if they decide that no, actually, they're gonna try it?
I think there's a world where trans people face more acceptance than they do now, that surgery and medicine improve their ability to transition more seamlessly, and where people come around not because blue politicians rammed it down their throat but because they don't feel threatened by it anymore. If there are indeed people attracted to being trans for persecution complex reasons, the total number of trans people goes down. And this is congruent with what I think you were saying above; if trans people aren't viewed as a threat anymore values will change organically and a law like this will have broader majority support.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
You're correct insofar as democrats aren't nonpartisan saints, also dislike outgroup media and have their own criticisms of red tribe media.
You're incorrect insofar as the politicians and base of one party are much more vociferous in their criticisms of what they call the mainstream media, of CNN and 'the failing NYT,' of fake news and the Washington Compost, sleepy-eyed Chuck Todd, the dying WSJ, 'Dumb as a rock Sour Lemon Don Lemon,' and so on and so forth. I suppose about 8 years ago I can remember people saying 'Faux News.' I can remember some measured comments from Obama bemoaning conservative media and echo chambers, but it really pales in comparison, doesn't it?
We can talk about why that is, and I don't think it's because my outgroup are moral monsters, but it doesn't change the fact that it is.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Similarly, all those "anti-trans" bills are about biological males participating in women's sports teams - has anyone finagled some clever scheme to ban trans students from all extracurriculars purely as a Fuck You wedge to punish the outgroup?
This is false.
The latest directive comes in the form of a letter issued in late February to DFPS directing the agency to classify medical treatments for transgender adolescents—such as puberty blockers and hormone injections—as “child abuse” under existing state law. The letter calls for DFPS to investigate parents who help their children access such treatments, as well as licensed facilities that administer them. The letter also imposes penalties on any “mandatory reporters” like doctors, nurses, and teachers who don’t report instances of treatment to the agency, as well as on members of the general public.
The letter is the follow-up to a legal opinion Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton released a few days prior, defining such procedures as child abuse and labeling gender-reassignment surgeries as “forced sterilization,” among other claims.
The Florida 'Democrats are pedophiles' law attempts to conflate discussions about the existence of gay or transgender people with exposing them to sexually explicit material:
—No Federal
funds may be made available to develop, implement, facilitate, or fund any sexually-oriented program, event, or literature for children under the age of 10, including hosting
or promoting any program, event, or literature involving
sexually-oriented material, or any program, event, or literature that exposes children under the age of 10 to nude
adults, individuals who are stripping, or lewd or lascivious
dancing.
Okay, I'm on board.
—The
term ‘‘sexually-oriented material’’ means any depiction, description, or simulation of sexual activity,
any lewd or lascivious depiction or description of
human genitals, or any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related subjects.
Ohhh, I see the trojan horse now. So, for example, showing a story with a gay couple would be a discussion about sexual orientation, wouldn't it? Or a discussion about why boys have to wear pants while girls can wear dresses would be skirting (heh) dangerously close to verboten language. Essentially, you're claiming that talking about the existence of gay or trans people is 'sexually-oriented' material in a way that discussing heterosexual relationships is not. Republicans want to pass something like this nationally.
If we gave voice to the central majority rather than the extremists on either margin, there's probably a course to be charted. I think most people are uncomfortable with letting 6 year olds opt for irreversible surgery, and virtually all with CPS agents dragging away your child because you questioned their pronouns. Conversely, I also think most people are uncomfortable with a China-like security apparatus trying to memory-hole the existence of gay people.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Well the results for 2022 have just been released and people who answered "not at all" for trust in mass media is at 38%. This has been characterized by the talking heads, and many rationalists as "a crisis of sense making" but I don't really see it that way. Sounds more like healthy skepticism if you ask me.
And with that in mind I think the fact that trust in the media seems to break pretty cleanly along class and partisan lines (70% of Democrats having a fair amount of trust or greater in the media vs less than 14% of Republicans) explains a lot.
They asked the wrong question. Conservatives have just succeeded in redefining the term 'the media' to only refer to outgroup institutions, but that doesn't mean ingroup institutions don't exist. It's safe to bash 'journalists' and the 'media' because to them it categorically excludes their preferred sources of news.
Conversely, if your question was 'Do you expect Libs of Tik Tok/conservative talk radio to report facts fully, accurately and fairly' your Democrat and Republican numbers would flip.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Do you have any suggestions for comparable Red Tribe transgressions? From my perspective, Reds just look less invested in this part of the game, possibly from having a smaller "standing army", as it were, of professional partisans who spend all day thinking up culture war offensives to enact.
Either you already know the answer to this question, you'll say my response is categorically different (politics vs. social engineering) or that my response is just wrong, no? I doubt there's any huge culture war development I'm aware of that you remain ignorant of.
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False election claims, often knowingly false claims made by Trump et al to undermine faith in the election system for personal benefit. Recently elected Republican election official harassed by his own party for saying he hasn't found any evidence of fraud. Cyber ninjas debacle. etc, etc, etc. Explicit, unabashed gerrymandering. Power plays like this one.
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Roe v. Wade, Texas bounty hunter law, decades of unconstitutional abortion laws in southern states, assassination of doctors providing abortions, armed men screaming abuse at women walking into planned parenthood and a concerted effort to trick them into 'pregnancy crisis centers' instead.
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Nobody cares anymore, but southern states still push creation science and religion. Children are indoctrinated by whatever religious sect their parents choose for them. Children are inundated with things like the pledge of allegiance, armed forces propaganda and media glorifying the US military to an extent that you won't even recognize as weird if you haven't lived abroad.
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How about don't say gay laws? Or other anti-trans legislation? Laws banning discussion of [equity]9https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/heres-the-long-list-of-topics-republicans-want-banned-from-the-classroom/2022/02)? What about book bans? There's a lot of focus on lawn boy and it's ilk, but look at some of the shit people are using that as cover to ban. Oh no, a child might see a muslim person portrayed as anything other than a terrorist! The horror! The handmaid's tale is banned by a dozen states.
I'm sure if you cared more about the culture war you could make hay out of a dozen crazy bills proposed by some state legislators in the south.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Thanks.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I agree with the first paragraph! I don't have time to do this justice, but I hope you'll accept this placeholder and I'll get you a real response in the not-too-distant future.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Thanks for the reminder. I promise upfront not to argue with you, but if you're willing to indulge a question I'd appreciate it.
IOW, there are rules.
From my perspective, I hold my tongue on a lot of snarky one and two line posts that strike me as culture warring. 1 2 3 4 5.
Not to complain or cry that they should get warnings and/or bans, but my impression was that we were thunderdoming it. Are you willing to comment on whether from your perspective the mod philosophy is the same as in the Old Place or if there was a deliberate change early on to retain users?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I never really see you posting here calling out anyone on your side for being gleeful about suffering
Wherein I complain about woke people taking over science fiction awards (so many upvotes!)
Wherein I incredulously share an anecdote about a woke woman denying physical differences between men and women (oh so many upvotes! The community loves me)
Wherein I say the BLM protests were probably on balance bad and many of the conservative critiques were correct (you may want to ctrl+F BLM).
I could go dig up older reddit posts in the same vein, but since you can't be arsed to put any effort into it, I don't see why I should either. For a while now I've wanted to say kudos for the great name and flair, but honestly, your one and two liners aren't worth engaging with so this'll be the last you hear from me.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I think you have someone confused with me, but rock on.
It was meant to be more of a royal You than a personal critique.
Yeah, all those outgroupers. Not a shred of human decency among them.
The majority of republicans or conservatives, as you said elsewhere, don't really care. There are some ghouls on twitter of all political stripes that are a bit deficient in human decency though, yes.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
Well, whatever, the rules are made up and the points don't matter.
Remarkably absent from both your post and the replies are the fact that Republicans control the Virginian house of delegates and the governorship, so this has about as much chance of passing as the Illinois bounty law. Even if Democrats had slim majorities in both houses and the governorship, I'd be shocked if something like this could pass. The far end of trans rights is generally a losing issue for democrats and, by extension, taking children out of their parents control makes the majority of people in both parties uncomfortable.
The cause is the Tribes, Blue and Red, and their manifestly incompatible values. Blues/Reds do not Like Reds/Blues. Contrary to arguments presented here for years, we do not share values, moral intuitions, a workable understanding of The Good. The Culture War is not about mistakes, and people are not going to come to their senses any minute now and realize all this was just a whole heap of silly goosery. The Culture War is a conflict. We cannot all get along, because we have lost the fundamental capacity to agree on what "getting along" consists of.
The virtuous cycle of Conflict theory:
Step 1: Find blue person doing bad thing
Step 2: Equate blue person with entire Blue tribe
Step 3: Claim entire Blue tribe wants to hurt me and mine
Step 4a: Spend a lot of time on the internet talking about igloos <- You are here
Step 4b: Hurt blue tribe
It may be difficult to believe, but some people genuinely care about the wellbeing of Trans kids and think they're happier living as their chosen gender. I would be absolutely shocked to find that Guzman is so monstrous that she's primarily motivated by a desire to cause you suffering, and even if she were, the idea that the broader Trans movement was conjured up to harm you both beggars belief and smacks of hubris. Your attraction to Conflict Theory isn't for the truth value, rather you need it to justify your own behavior and hatred:
We're saying that we consider the people so labeled, the officials supporting them, and the section of the public providing their ideology to be a direct, serious and immediate threat to our children.
You'll reject any arguments I make to the contrary that Blue tribe is Out To Get You while ignoring or defending any Red tribe transgression. You've surrounded yourself by yes-men who will trip over themselves to fellate you regardless of what you write, and be outraged that my reply is anything other than happy seal noises.
According to your model, half of your fellow citizens represent a serious and immediate threat to your children. So, what comes next? No more AEO excuses for hinting darkly rather than speaking clearly.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Well, she successfully signaled her opposition to conservatives, slagged off the nation (in their view), and now she winds up in prison for a minor drug charge in Russia, our geopolitical rival.
If our standards for 'deserving time in Russian prison' were 1) signaling opposition to democrats and 2) complaining about the state of the nation, there wouldn't be any conservatives left to post in the Culture War thread. Not to mention what she said:
"I honestly feel we should not play the national anthem during our season," Griner said. "I think we should take that much of a stand.
"I don't mean that in any disrespect to our country. My dad was in Vietnam and a law officer for 30 years. I wanted to be a cop before basketball. I do have pride for my country."
As far as 'slagging off the nation' goes, it's pretty anodyne.
Why wouldn't they be gleeful?
Dunno...some shred of human decency? The same way I'm not gleeful about red triber suffering. The same way that if I were, you would be outraged and calling me out for it.
An analogy might be Ben Shapiro going to Texas and getting a harsh prison term for something that was legal in California. You could bet your bottom dollar that Twitter would be physically heavier from all the glee-tweets.
And you could bet yours that you would be rage-posting about it to thunderous applause. That doesn't mean you need to carry water for people hating on Brittany Griner or that you or twitter are behaving morally in that hypothetical.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
You talk about a lot of reasons why Alex Jones is a terrible person
No, I listed some of the ways in which the hypothetical OP gave differed from the Jones trial.
whether or not angry rhetoric and conspiratorial thinking qualifies as inciting other people to criminal behavior.
If you're asking legally, I'm not particularly interested in LARPing a lawyer this afternoon and chasing tails with others doing the same.
If you're asking morally, I take a dim view of people doxxing private citizens (including Ruth Sent Us, fig leaves notwithstanding and posting their private contact info. There's enough radicalized people on both sides such that publicizing the private info of any polarizing figure virtually guarantees that some nutjobs on one side or the other will harass them.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Would it be reasonable to sue/prosecute Ruth Sent Us or MSNBC into oblivion?
Yes. If, in fact, the Supreme Court had not struck down Roe v. Wade, but MSNBC repeatedly claimed that it had for literally years. Maybe if MSNBC repeatedly showed details of the Justices personal lives (as Jones did for the children's gravesites, parents phone numbers, etc) while claiming that they were deep state crisis actors or something. If the Supreme Court Justices were nobody private citizens who suffered their children being murdered instead of public officials who to some degree have sought the spotlight. For good measure, throw in substantial amounts of evidence that MSNBC knew what they were saying was false but said it anyways to sell snake oil penis enlargement pills. And then MSNBC just refused to comply with court orders so they received a default judgment against them.
I have to say if you're using that scenario to calibrate, we took a wrong turn somewhere. There's a debate to be had around publicizing addresses and other personal information of private citizens (all publicly available information if they own property - less of a problem when it was buried in filing cabinets, more of a problem now that apps can look up addresses in seconds), but that's a separate discussion considering all the other crap Alex Jones did.
Also, Alex Jones repeatedly admitted to shooting the children in Sandy Hook himself. Checkmate, conservatives.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Tucker and DeSantis are some of the early attempts to get controlled opposition out in front of this distrust, but they won't be the last.
Are you suggesting that Tucker and Desantis are intentional establishment plants meant to lead the new right astray, or am I misunderstanding the use of controlled opposition? If you believe this, who are the genuine leaders or influencers of the new right?
Did I miss something in the last 2 years? Why did they declare the "vaccines" to be 100% effective if they were never tested for transmission reduction? (and yes I am putting the term into quotation marks because they don't appear to be what is commonly thought of as vaccines, instead working as a kind of therapeutic with alleged short term effectiveness that must be dosed in advance.)
How, exactly, would you propose to measure transmission reduction in the context of a clinical trial? You enroll a thousand people, 500 vaccine, 500 placebo. 50 in each group get COVID. What next? Do you test whether their cohabitants get sick? Couldn't those people have gotten it somewhere else? You'd have to massively increase your study size to find a signal in the noise, or else try some kind of challenge study.
When you run a clinical trial, to my knowledge (and to be fair I'm not exposed to many infectious disease/vaccine style trials) you need endpoints that focus on the people you actually enrolled. Other papers will try to measure spread at a more macro scale.
And indeed, this is false - the vaccines did reduce spread (I linked 6 studies there with varying effect sizes) early in the pandemic, back when the vaccine actually matched the virus in circulation and (speculatively) the variant in question was much less infectious and more severe. I'd hazard a guess that the updated boosters could also reduce spread, although this might prove to be false given the characteristics of omicron plus some fringe possibilities like original antigenic sin.
What does "vaccine efficacy" mean?
You run into some weird semantic problems trying to strictly define it, and other problems disseminating information to the public through media outlets rather than directly from ID docs. As far back as February 2021, people were saying reducing symptomatic disease. You can also read how the Pfizer group defined vaccine efficacy in their original clinical trial paper, and it's not related to transmission.
Why did some countries roll out a vaccine passport?
It might have made sense very early on. I'd agree that it rapidly became counterproductive and foolish as new variants emerged and the vaccines certainly did not prevent spread. You could maybe make an argument that in some places like Canada the healthcare system was truly getting fucked at some points by COVID patients, although by then the data wasn't even clear that the vaccines had a strong effect against severe COVID anymore as far as I'm aware. Whether these policies persisted due to incompetence, bureaucratic inertia, malice or something else - who knows. You'll find plenty of folks here convinced that they know the answer to that question, so I'll leave it to them.
But if they didn't substantially stop the spread then why are we firing people from their jobs? For their own health?
We probably shouldn't be.
There was also the weird never-before-tried bookkeeping where nobody was considered vaccinated until two weeks AFTER the second dose.
Can you cite the study you're referring to?
Geert Vanden Bossche claims that you should never ever vaccinate during a pandemic, especially with a leaky vaccine because very bad things happen. I don't pretend to know the science but he also claims that this was generally accepted knowledge up until 2020.
How would you know that? The only real comparator that makes sense is Flu, and we vaccinate for that every year; regardless of whether we did or not, annual flu strains have emerged for much longer than we've vaccinated. HIV was a pandemic, but has no vaccine regardless and is a very poor comparator. SARS, MERS, etc never really took off. So we have no empirical data to support that argument.
But, assuming you're referring to this page (since you didn't actually link to anything), what do you want to do in this counterfactual world? Let everyone get COVID and then his hope is that children generate sterilizing immunity? Moreover, why wouldn't a population where 50% have natural immunity and the other 50% are spreading the virus behave any differently compared to a population where 50% have vaccine immunity and the other 50% are spreading in terms of variants emerging? His argument would hinge on natural immunity restricting transmission whereas vaccination did not, which as far as I'm aware, is not the case.
Children have an amazing innate immune capacity to generate sterilizing immunity. From a public health viewpoint (herd immunity!), it is therefore critical that we leave the children alone. But protecting our children from C-19 vaccination is also critical from an individual health viewpoint as vaccination with these non-replicating vaccines will prevent adequate education of their immune system. This is because spike (S)-specific, non-neutralizing antibodies (Abs) that are continuously recalled by the circulating Omicron (sub)variants will steadily outcompete their innate Abs and thereby prevent the child’s innate Abs to instruct the immune system on how to discriminate ‘self’ from ‘self-like’
It's just false; the half-life of antibody titers for both natural immunity and vaccinations is much too short for anyone to maintain sterilizing immunity for long. For a while, the antivaxx crowd latched onto original antigenic sin (OAS) and argued that natural immunity would be better, but the last time I looked at the data coming out, OAS was a larger problem for people who were naturally infected with the alpha variant as opposed to vaccination, with T cell responses being the wild card. We don't have a counterfactual world where we tried Geert's approach so he can claim he was right until the end of time, but most of the evidence points away from his model.
It feels like the push for the vaccines was a huge motte and bailey. They never really prevented transmission, that was the bailey. And the motte is that they make the infection less severe, which in theory is a falsifiable hypothesis, but I'm not convinced.
The rationalization for vaccines was a huge mess of idealogues on twitter, the media and talking heads on TV pushing their favored ideas with about as much exposure to scientific data and literature as the two sources you give.
Meanwhile, Florida's AG is fearmongering about vaccine side effects (scroll down to 'Florida man' section. I think Zvi is a bit dismissive of myocarditis because other papers have shown it is a side effect, but why Florida tried to do this...I don't know) and it seems like significantly more Republicans died of COVID (although I'm a bit leery of politically-charged population scale studies like this). Even John Nolte repeatedly argued that the mRNA vaccines were a triumph, and the anti-vaxx movement was orchestrated by the left to try and kill old Republican voters.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Thanks for the reply! Sorry, I was away all weekend. I'll take a crack at it.
So firstly, be clear in what you want to learn. Do you want to learn only programming? Or programming for some kind application?
Unfortunately, I think my final goals will be determined more by how much time I can carve out of the rest of my life for it rather than starting with some endpoint in mind. I'm fairly confident I never want to actually be writing the nitty-gritty code that analyzes bio data, but rather am looking for synergy with what I already know. I think at the far end if I ever end up running a bio startup incorporating machine learning it might be fun to mess around with in the beginning stages, or at the very least, be able to converse intelligently with the engineers involved. Bootstrapping a bio startup in my basement is much harder; you can do some bacterial and yeast work (probably illegally in a few different ways) for something in the range of thousands of dollars, but doing anything with mammalian cells would probably be in the 100k range just for capital costs and be more or less impossible to hide.
Anyways, that's where I'm at. I'll give those resources a try and maybe recalibrate my goals over the next few months.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Do you have any recommendations for getting into it later in life?
I messed around with Java, html and linux in high school, then got funneled into a pure bio track for about a decade for my career. At one point I went back to learning some R and python without having the fundamentals (I guess the academic version of a script kiddie) purely for doing genome sequencing/scRNA-seq work. Now I'm trying to learn some fundamentals; I've been working through the Harvard Edx CS50 class, with hopes of trying the machine learning class next.
Any thoughts? Keep in mind I'm probably limited to 1-2 hours per day with maybe a bit more flex on the weekend.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
This is probably old news to most of you better-rounded individuals, but read this the other day about the Roman Senate and was tickled. Transcribed from 'A Day in Old Rome':
Opening the session: Taking the Auspices
Gravely this official company seats itself in the curule chairs; gravely Varus casts a handful of incense upon the altar before the Victory, and a cloud of fragrance fills the hall. Then Varus, a tall and very majestic figure, signs to the senators; "Bring forth the chickens!"
Not a lip twitches in all that sedate audience as two attendants appear upon the platform setting down a small coop containing a few barnyard fowls. The consul rises and stands beside them next to him takes station an elderly senator also wearing the praetexta and holding a staff with a peculiarly shaped spiral head, a lituus -- the badge of office of an augur, lawfully entitled to proclaim the will of the gods. In a dead hush the servitors pass a small dish of grain to the consul who carefully scatters the grain within easy reach of the chickens. The latter, carefully starved since yesterday, snap up the grains eagerly. The even devour so fast that the wheat drops from their bills, a most excellent sign. The augur bends forward intently, watching their action, the motions with his staff: "There is no evil sight nor sound!" he announces in solemn formula.
A mutter of relaxation passes around the Senate. The servitors carry out the chicken coop. The consul shakes his great draperies around him with studied dignity and turns to the waiting assembly. "Affairs divine have been attended to; affairs human can now begin."
So, say I were a chariot mogul being coerced by the courts into buying a carrier pigeon business. Could I hire a catspaw to sneak in and feed the senatorial augur-chickens the morning of the trial such that they aren't interested in the grain, or even poison them to delay my trial?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Half the reason I'm writing these is so I have something legible to gesture to next time someone brings the topic up. In general, though, I guess I'd ask that you understand that we really have some very significant differences in perspective, and it it isn't just invective
And since I ran out of characters:
What makes you think that I don't understand that we have different perspectives? I've been reading what you and others write for something like 4 years now. I regularly do the Fox news/breitbart/OANN circuit to see what you're exposed to. I read your substacks and whatever pieces the conservative users here link. I don't do the youtube/facebook/telegram/talk radio rabbit holes so maybe I'm missing the true, authentic conservative experience, but based on what little I've heard, that's probably for the best.
Your whole goal is to show that our worldviews are irreconcilable, that the die is cast and that our conflict is written in the stars. This is trivially true, in that you can unilaterally refuse to compromise or budge an inch no matter what I tell you and either force me to agree with you or just use that to support your position. Regardless what happens in the wider world, it's wide enough for you to find Bad Things happening, even more so given the incentives of for-profit media. You devote a lot of exposition to how the BLM protests prove that we're incompatible and out to get you, but you blackpilled before BLM, just like you were blackpilled before Trump just like (I presume) you were blackpilled before Iraq.
Differences in perspective are either due to misinformation, or it's a value judgment and one of us values x more than y. Frankly, our world is so staggeringly complex that we're all helplessly ignorant; some few people can specialize in a tiny sliver of one field among many, yet invariably, any given event draws an avalanche of takes from individuals whose conviction massively outstrips their knowledge.
Like, do either of us honestly believe we're experts on poverty rates in the US? Cherry picking some figures from a paper which probably cherry picked some figures in turn doesn't make either of us qualified to draw any kind of conclusion. The true 'perspective' we should be uniting behind is epistemic humility and calling out people who pretend otherwise.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I'm not claiming anything of the kind. My understanding is that the mainly-white opioid epidemic areas have all sorts of crime problems, theft, burglary, property crime, assaults, public intoxication, DUIs, fraud, looting, and so on. What they don't have is anywhere near the same level of violent crime, and especially murder. Like it or not, the evidence is quite clear.
And I'm claiming that there are double standards regarding how we discuss and treat drug offenders. By your own admission, opiate users are just less violent criminals, though I can attest that I've never once heard a red triber refer to them as anything other than victims. The party of law and order likes to talk about Chicago because they can blame the democrats; I guess they still like to talk about the opioid crisis because they can blame the globalist-China-sellout-democrats for those problems as well, but they sure don't like to talk about any of the crime you're referring to. Are you truly going to refuse to see any parallels between democrats telling impoverished communities of color that their problems are the fault of racist white nationalists without admitting that the Red tribe has their own victim mythos that they prefer to tell rather than taking responsibility and improving their lots?
There's a kernel of truth in the globalist narrative buried in heaps of salt, just as there is a kernel of truth to the fact that most social programs and redistributionist policies that would alleviate poverty are stymied by republicans in congress (and by extension, republican voters). Moreover, 'free trade' and laissez-faire economics have been the domain of Republicans from the 80s through what, the mid 2000s? Many of the people most upset about globalization happily voted for it for decades. At least on the free trade side, who can even guess at a counterfactual world where America turned inwards after WWII, and condemned condemned as damaging to the middle class and pursued protectionism? For all we know we lost the Cold War, sparked WWIII, or got wrecked economically by an ascendant mercantile Japan. What I am pretty confident in, though, is that TheMotte exists in this world, and it's populated by people absolutely convinced that our government is headed by some of the laziest, most corrupt and least competent politicians in history. Except for the few locals they voted for.
Start with blind axioms: Progressivism as an ideology aims to transform our society and culture. Progressivism as an ideology has succeeded in this aim to a considerable extent over the last fifty years. If I asked you which of those large-scale changes Progressives generally believe to have been net-negative with the benefit of hindsight, could you confidently name even a single one?
Quite the jump from a nihilistic 'human societies gonna society, the good life comes from God' worldview. But regardless, I'm sure you've gotten the same pushback that 1960s (or whenever the idyllic golden era you long for was) America is an arbitrary date to freeze in amber, and no doubt people have longed to do so in a recognizable way since the French Revolution if not the Greeks if not whatever proto-civilization we lack records of.
I hear replacing Christmas was poorly received, and not even the orgies were enough to keep heads on shoulders. More seriously, there's a reckoning coming for the NIMBY policies that wrecked the housing markets. A true reckoning would probably be someone sitting down and saying 'huh, those libertarians and conservatives might have been onto something 15 years ago...' rather than rebranding free market capitalism (red coded) as YIMBYism.
But then, do you think the modern right have major examples of policies they espoused that they believe have been net-negative, besides allowing the existence of the democratic party? That people and movements are both bad at admitting fault is not a particularly striking criticism.
Moreover, the idea that desiring to transform our society and culture is unique to progressives seems patently false. Was Reagan transforming our polity by espousing free trade rather than the rampant protectionism that carried the day in the 18th and 19th centuries, whereas pro-union democrats were conserving it? Is Moldbug the true conservative because he wants a neo-monarchic-corpo-state? Enough of that, I'm sure you're familiar with the argument.
From my perspective, serious conflict exists. Sometimes prosecuting conflicts is desirable, whether with words or nukes, because the point of contention really is worth it. Sometimes it's not, but while an assumption of the possibility of compromise is a reasonable first-resort, it's not useful as an axiom.
You know how my answer to that goes.
I'd agree that this is at least potentially a problem for my narrative, if the increase were fairly uniform. On the one hand, I think there was a significant disparity of how Red and Blue areas handled the riots, and assumably a difference in the general attitudes of their populations before the riots, so I'd expect blue areas to see a disproportionate amount of the increased crime.
You neglect to consider widespread unemployment, breakdown of routine and social ties due to the pandemic, so on and so forth. I would push it harder, but it's not clear to me why this pattern didn't hold true in other countries. Too many variables and too many superficial news articles, not really a satisfying answer.
In the first place, it mostly wasn't black people rioting this last time. The racial resentments of the Black community were employed as a pretext by mostly-white rioters, often over the explicit objection of local blacks, who were then left to deal with the long-term consequences.
I'm not sure I believe this, or how you would prove it. Say 20% of the black population of LA rioted in the 90s, and the same fraction of black people turned out after George Floyd joined by, say, 5% of the white population that made the protest 50-50. Would you characterize that as a pretext for mostly-white rioters to burn black neighborhoods to the ground, when the same fraction of the black community was turning out? Moreover, any counterfactuals would support your argument in other ways; all black rioters, black people perpetuate violent crime, if they burned white neighborhoods instead of black neighborhoods, blue tribe wants to burn down innocent red tribe homes, etc.
83% of black Americans express some support for BLM. I expect the views you'd get from people living in those neighborhoods would be a bit more nuanced than white rioters just looking to cause trouble burned down my house, we're all living on Joe Biden's plantations as neo-slaves.
Blacks should believe that police help them on net because that is the straight, utterly inescapable truth. Black criminals harm innocent blacks directly and at staggering scale.
There's probably a tradeoff between 'X will grow up fatherless because his dad is serving life in prison for petty theft' and police turning a blind eye towards rampant gang violence. I don't know where the sweet spot is, but blindly optimizing for line goes down for violent crime probably does hit a point of doing more harm than good, which has been the argument of the criminal justice reformers.
I don't think the evidence supports a claim that either party is actually better at managing the general economy,
Fox news has entered the chat.
Blue States and areas are, in general, significantly wealthier than Red states. If this were down to policy, though, if Blue policies lead to wealth and Red policies lead to impoverishment, then you need to explain why Blue cities and states contain areas that have been very poor for a very long time. If Blue policies actually eliminate poverty, why is there so much poverty in Blue areas?
Looks like I was poorly informed on this front. I'd always seen stats on the welfare systems being more robust and generous in blue states, which is true, but it's more than [eaten up by the cost of living(https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/measuring-poverty-in-the-united-states-comparing-measurement-methods/) (states colored in red actually have higher poverty levels after accounting for federal programs and some CoL adjustments). It's interesting that welfare is so much more effective at reducing poverty in red states than in blue states (see, for example, the impact of SNAP on poverty is mostly felt in red states, although I can imagine the outcry if they tried to peg aid to the CoL in some way. Debatably, these social programs are largely supported by democrats at the federal level, and 80% of the welfare budget is spent by the feds. Welfare spending at the state level per capita is a bit more varied, although probably less consequential relative to the feds. I'd need to read more, but maybe I should limit the amount of time I waste on things without clear answers...
Mississippi also just kind of sucks.
The better deal they're demanding isn't "some economic inefficiencies", it's unlimited, unquestioned power for Blue Tribe, with zero responsibility for any actual improvement of outcomes. That is unacceptable.
I think they'd actually be pretty happy with similar representation in congress and some lucrative occupations, along with middle-class opportunities. Maybe some respect too. Sounds a bit like what people around here demand for the rust belt whites, a
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
So what specifically does the sneer about efficiency mean here?
Damnit Spock, I'm a doctor, not a statistician!
I don't know who you are or how long you've been around, but it's pretty frustrating to hear you say that. Mere months ago we were being told (by - wonder of wonders! - Naraburns) that actually, the forum is politically balanced, and liberals were too thin-skinned and used to dominating online spaces:
You're the second person I've seen this week saying something to this effect. But we've gone from a mod calling us 'users whining about anti-left biases' to 'of course this place leans right you fucking idiots' so fast I'm getting whiplash.
For the record, I think Naraburns is a good mod.
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