Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
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User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1d ago
At least nobody's had molten silver poured down his throat this time.
Have you seen the price of silver these days?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9d ago
How many male, rust belt town kids, who kept going to Church weekly well into 20’s vote Democrat? Might be able to shorten that today to - male and has had manual labor jobs for at least a summer.
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?
I would guess with probably a 50% probability that without moderation Reddit would become the Third Reich in 6 months. Leftist places online seem to need to be protected to exists.
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.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9d ago
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9d 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
12d 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
22d 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
23d 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.
Why would you think Fox News would represent the most extreme right-wingers?
From Breitbart:
See, the SoH toll is a good thing!
Comments section (are these real people? AI? Russian bots? I'll never know) is euphoric:
I was wondering how conservatives would face the reckoning from this debacle; our regulars here who routinely claimed the 'Uniparty' (encompassing Bush, Obama, Biden and some unclear number of their predecessors up to their favorite historical president) was responsible for Iraq/Afghanistan while Trump executed a clean break with 'America First' have been oddly silent for the last month. If the conflict rekindles and turns into another Forever War, I predict Trump will be relegated to the Uniparty With Jewish Characteristics, while Jay Dee or his successor is packaged as another Clean Break from RINOs. If this is truly the end of the war, I expect them to double down on the glorious special military operation narrative.
If you're expecting a mea culpa or acceptance of the fuckup...I'd take the other end of that bet any day of the week.
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