Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
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User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2d ago
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2d ago
Did I miss some flameout that prompted this?
Of those who unironically use low human capital as an insult.
Those people aren't progressives, and they're still around. It's the ones who were nodding along with Hanania right up until he started saying Orange Man Bad. And the econ-pilled ones who were mad about tariffs.
@Amadan is the embodiment of the Platonic philosopher-king, and their judgement is infallible, like the pope speaking ex cathedra. The jannies of the Motte are of a different breed than the soft, nepotistic babies of Reddit. They are veterans of forum warfare. The Navy Seals of the mop force. If you take a look at Amadan's profile and sort by top rated, you will see a long list of people they've dunked.
My pet theory is that @Amadan is Freddie DeBoer. Hear me out.
He's obviously invested in TheMotte, but rarely makes a top-level post (has he ever?) on a new subject - and he can't, because it would inevitably be about basketball or education policy or half-asian babies and destroy his opsec. When he talks about his politics, it's always how he's a true leftist but the progressives put him up on the wall for wrongthink (Freddie saying HBD-adjacent things, being cancelled). He clearly has a job that allows him to piss away hours in the middle of the workday on the sisyphean task of internet jannying. 'Classical-liberal' politics. It all fits. Giants walk among us.
The whole point of the Motte is to talk to weirdos and freaks such as myself with as much politeness and decorum as can be managed.
I'm confident most progs manage to be at least as decorous as this post.
Perhaps your words aren't as convincing to others as you thought it was. Get gud. Skill issue.
The world is too complex for anyone to properly grasp. The purpose of echo chambers is to selectively filter/spin stories that flatter their ingroup, or make the outgroup look bad. I'm fairly confident that if you perfectly swapped someone's social environment to be full of partisans of the opposite valency, and fed them a curated media diet you could change their politics fairly easily over time.
In other words, a lone prog crusader isn't going to convince TheMotte any more than you're going to turn Reddit pro-Trump, regardless of how eloquent either of you are.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5d ago
291, but why did it default me to the 50-69 age bracket? I assume scores would be positively correlated with age.
Failed at cultural knowledge, but I already knew that would be true.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
15d ago
Out of curiosity, are airborne and droplet borne viruses that structurally similar to contact or food/water borne viruses?
Roughly, yes, depending how wide your lens is and precisely what you mean by structure. Most airborne viruses are RNA based, but many bloodborne pathogens (Ebola, HIV, HCV, etc) are also RNA viruses. If you meant shape, icosahedral is most common but there's plenty of variety and overlap between bloodborne/airborne (Ebola is long and filamentous).
Is airborne Ebola like worrying about cars suddenly flying like planes, or are we talking a few base pairs for smaller adaptations?
More than 'structure' (depending what you meant by that), you should pay attention to tropism. Ebola expresses surface proteins that enable it to initially infect immune cells, then various endothelial (blood vessel) and other structural cells which are not accessible in the airways. COVID has a surface protein that binds ACE2, which is expressed on the surfaces of airways, part of the gut, etc. Other viral proteins are also key for proliferating in a given cell type, but you can get a lot of mileage out of just looking at the spike proteins and which receptors they bind.
Could you make turbo airborne Ebola by grafting COVID spike protein onto the surface of the Ebola capsid, and misting some into a volunteers face? Hey, sounds like a Nature paper to me!
...but also probably not, I doubt it would work without a pretty significant engineering effort beyond that simple change. So more akin to cars flying like planes. I'm not aware of any viruses that are known to have drastically changed routes of transmission like that.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
15d ago
It is with great anger that I say they're doing it again. Indeed, they never stopped.
The paper you're citing is 12 years old. Although I guess you're directionally correct in that you could probably find papers published by someone in the academy that you would call GoF.
I don't follow Dr. Perez or the field, but amusingly he was on a paper last year describing a safe platform for doing the kind of work you're talking about.
They're making super dangerous airborne diseases in ferrets... For no good reason at all...But so far as I can tell nobody had anything to gain besides publishing some 'good' papers. These scientists were just doing science with complete disdain for the risks. They were going out to caves to gather these coronaviruses and bring them to Wuhan.
You might disagree with them, you may be so cynical as to believe that scientists only care about publishing some 'good' papers, but I can guarantee that most people doing this kind of work believe they're making the world a better place. They believe in a future free from infectious disease. Try some mistake theory and charity for a change.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
24d ago
When does "criticism" of the current military action in Iran (and by criticism I mean a variety of behaviors from our political leadership to randoms on the internet) become "treason" (both in the firm prosecutable sort and the "historically your neighbors would have stopped talking to you or maybe chased you out of town" sort)?
Never? Unless you're trying some bait and switch with "criticism" in scare quotes.
I get it, people are mad at Trump, Republicans, America, the Jews, Israel, whatever.
If you're asking that question, I'm not sure that you do.
We've got an unpopular president starting a war in the middle east while conservatives close rank and accuse anyone against it to be unpatriotic traitors. Is it 2001 or 2026? I'm eagerly awaiting the return of freedom fries and politicians being pressured into wearing US flags on their lapels.
A significant part of the case for Trump in 2016 was people swearing up and down that Trump was a non-interventionist, that Killary Clinton was a mad warmongerer in the lineage of Bush who would kick off WW3 and MAGA was the only political faction that wouldn't send us to war. Trump's second term has been nothing but foreign intervention and saber-rattling! Where are those people who told me this would never happen? Weren't you one of them?
If everyone returns to their corners now at the very least we have billions of dollars in economic dysfunction, realistically we have tremendous destabilization in the region which is going cause the biggest problems we've seen in decades. In truth, we call it all off now, Iran will probably finish arming themselves and nuke a civilian population, likely Israel. Even the most anti-semitic person who ever lived should be able to understand how bad doing that could go. It would likely be the worst thing that's ever happened just from the resulting chaos.
'Hey, I just made the case for why the guy I voted into office made a terrible decision that I swore he never would that could easily cost us trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives. But ignore all that! Now that it's happened, you have to put aside your silly bickering and support the president and flag.'
Make the PR bad enough and we stop with the job half done and everyone loses.
You mean like we left the job half done in Afghanistan? Do you think some better domestic PR magically would have defeated the Taliban?
I have to admit, this is one of the funniest timelines. A year or so ago conservatives here were smugly telling me that Biden and Harris had ushered in a golden age for conservatives, that the left was imploding and Christianity was ascendant. Today Trump is massively unpopular, immigration agenda in shambles, and he literally decided that taking a page out of the Bush's playbook was a good idea. If he manages to preside over another financial crisis or recession, well, that would just be the cherry on top.
I'd say that I'm looking forward to hearing what those people think about the war in Iran, but if I'm being honest, it's probably just going to be more blackpills and fedposting about the fourth box of liberty.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
25d ago
I haven't tried it yet myself so no idea which are best/reputable, but these were recommended by reddit:
https://www.vcoins.com/en/coins/ancient/roman-coins-2.aspx?category=roman
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
25d ago
Does anyone else collect coins or stamps?
I never had much respect for the goldbugs until I inherited my dad's coin collection. It's remarkable holding a series of coins from 10 consecutive years and the first 5 are worth 60$ a pop because of the silver content while the next 5 are worthless nickel alloys worth their face value despite being a 70 year old coin. I was also blown away by some cool historical pieces I never imagined my dad had (and I'm not sure he was even aware of their value) - British currency from the early 19th century, a dollar bill from the first year the US printed dollar bills, some other antique American and Mexican coins worth a couple hundred dollars with fascinating stories. Not to mention just how based some of the older currency was; the detail on some of these coins is amazing, the pre-euro French and German currencies are beautiful pieces. And the old silver and gold coins have such a nice feeling of heft. There's some primal human magpielike desire to accumulate precious metals and I wasn't even aware of what we'd lost by transitioning entirely to bits.
Not to mention I found out that some ancient Roman and Greek coins are so common that you can own a 2000 year old coin with nice detail for tens of dollars, or 60-90$ for the silvers. It's mind-boggling to me that there isn't more interest and that these pieces are just available for anyone to own rather than being on display in museums.
How about - how many male, rust belt town kids, who went to church throughout their childhood and then went to the northeast/west coast to a prestigious college end up voting democrat?
The only reason I would pass on that bet is that there are hyper-motivated NEET-autists (see: 4chan) who would spam Hitler memes and scare off the normies. It wouldn't become the Third Reich because a bunch of middle-class redditors had a change of heart and started goose stepping down Park avenue.
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