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
16d 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
26d 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.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Real OGs were playing UMS on brood wars, and it's gone f2p.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Poopgate is just the natural result of the claims that Trump wears suit jackets with large tails so he can hide evidence of soiling himself. The story was, and is, that he's not just Evil, he's also dementia-riddled and hence losing control of his bowels.
Did you watch the video? Someone was having a bad time. I don't have Trump's soiled diapers to rub in your face, but even if I did, you wouldn't believe me then. /shrug
Though I do note how you wove in that last sentence about Trump's mental faculties: are you claiming the Poopgate et al. videos are true, or is it simply a case of "who cares if they're true, so long as the stick beats the dog?"
Again, the video itself is 'true' insofar as it exists and isn't doctored by AI to my knowledge. The point of the last line is that Trump could deteriorate fairly quickly in the next few years similarly to Biden. I'm not sure why you'd leap to insinuating that the point is to undermine the public's confidence in Trump, why my point is that the ground truth could be mental decline.
Looking at your linked map, for instance, there's an odd clustering on the Connecticut/New York state border. And the areas with low immunisation include New York state, whereas West Virginia has high immunisation coverage. Minnesota, that impeccably Blue state, also has low coverage. So "voted for Trump" does not seem to be correlation, much less cause.
Looking at the state level is misguided. Every red state has blue urban centers, and every blue state has red rural counties. More granularly:
The Northeast, Midwest, Northwest, and Pacific coast had high MMR vaccine uptake, and clusters of high coverage were concentrated in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. Low coverage was seen in West Texas, southern New Mexico, northern Arizona, parts of Mississippi, and the rural Southeast.
At the state level, county-aggregated estimates ranged from 61.6% in New Mexico to 79.1% in Massachusetts (median, 71.3%). County-level estimates showed even wider variation, with a median uptake of 71.4% (range, 35.8% to 86.8%). Counties with the lowest uptake were mainly in Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas, with the highest coverage in parts of Indiana, New York, and Oregon.
So, uh, let's blame those Ukrainian Mennonite Mormon Trump voters?
I grant that they aren't garden-variety Trump voters, but do you think Mennonites vote for Harris?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
What counts as "corrupt" is open to a lot of discussion, but I don't think the institutions have always been this incompetent. Just look at NASA.
HIV was discovered in the early 1980s, a few years after AIDS was recognized as a disease. The first drug was AZT 4 years later (6-7 years after the pandemic started), and that was a stroke of luck in that they repurposed an oncology drug that just happened to have activity against HIV. The first protease inhibitor (something designed specifically to target an HIV protein) was mid 90s, or ~15 years later.
Contrast that to COVID-19, where we had a bajillion genome sequences within months of the virus spreading, RNA-Seq datasets from infected patient lungs which led to a number of therapeutic trials (unfortunately didn't pan out, but still good shots on goal). We had paxlovid (a COVID-19 specific protease inhibitor) within a year. We had mRNA vaccines in a similar timeframe, which were more effective than anything we'd seen prior and outperformed anything the Chinese could do - how many other American institutions can say the same? That's about a 10x compression in timelines for identifying, characterizing and developing drugs to an emerging virus.
All of this, pearls before swine. Hundreds of thousands? Millions? of man hours by people like me all so some retard on twitter can go viral (no pun intended) for writing some hysterical slop about how the mRNA vaccines are going to cause mass infertility/blood clots/insta-death (how did all those predictions pan out?). The public has no idea how much effort is expended on things you would never think of - pharmacology, every manufacturing/storage/distribution step, toxicology and safety, in vitro and preclinical models. The public is ignorant of how far we've come, and the oceans of sweat and tears and grinding in the lab that have built this edifice to improve their lives.
Half the country saying the FDA moved too quickly, mRNA vaccines are dangerous, blah blah blah. Other half saying they have the blood of hundreds of thousands on their hands. Half the country saying lockdowns are ineffective (as if China didn't exist), the other half that the government doesn't care about their safety and people are dying. Maybe in addition to the internet, the other thing that's changed is everyone with a twitter account feels entitled to weigh in on every issue.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Can you sit down and read an RCT and determine if it has fraudulent data?
Not if they just make up or fudge the numbers. In my field I can catch most of the bullshit that isn't outright lying. If it's far enough outside my wheelhouse, almost certainly not.
Thus people have to fall back on cruder heuristics such as "do I trust this institution." Keeping that trust is part of the institution. And, well, if an institution explodes its institutional trust it's pretty fair to assign at least some of the blame for the resulting fire to the institution for deceiving people.
When half the country is panicking and wants lockdowns, and half the country is enraged and fedposting about civil liberties, how exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population? If Fauci had noped out day one and been replaced by a COVID mega-dove, you still would have burned credibility with half the country. We'd just be having this conversation with inverse valence.
I maintain that:
- The lockdowns were popular in the beginning.
- Institutions have historically always been this level of corrupt/incompetent, and all that changed was the internet.
- It's nevertheless still optimal on the societal and individual level to largely trust the institutions.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Overall I would say July-August is when the oh-shit moment comes and it becomes obvious they could lose the eastern half of the country.
Alright, we'll see if I remember to check back in this summer.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
You're an actual expert on this stuff.
The bitter lessons of COVID were that my colleagues and I aren't epidemiologists, our actual specialty is worthless for making predictions in the real world and internet autists with sufficient time and motivation are at least as knowledgeable about the literature. At this point, a literate caveman with GPT terminal debating me about the literature would be like watching stockfish demolish a grade school chess class.
But the common rebuttal I've seen from right-wingers is that Canada is seeing a proportionally worse increase with no RFK. The "other" factor they point to that both nations have in common over the relevant time frame is mass immigration from nations with much lower overall vaccination rates.
I was actually unaware of the outbreak in Canada. Seems like I was wrong and @The_Nybbler was right, it's the mennonite communities in Canada/Texas and apparently 'Slavic' (Ukrainian? Russian? Apparently services are held in both) immigrants in South Carolina. Not really your garden variety Trump supporters. Mea culpa.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
If we had a vaccine that reliably stopped influenza (instead of the bullshit yearly one people try taking which misses 75% of the time)
Supposedly it reduces symptoms more than prevents you from getting sick in the first place, but I haven't dug into the clinical literature.
As for the rest - I was joking. I am pro MMR.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
I was personally very saddened to learn that the FDA is going to begin cracking down on compounding pharmacies offering products which mimic branded pharmaceutical products.
I haven't taken the time to properly verify, but I have heard that the compounded forms of the oral GLP-1s are worthless. GLP-1 peptides are too large to cross the gut and just get degraded, you need an additional mix of chemicals to essentially irritate the gut and let some of the peptides through. Even then, the bioavailability is trash.
The injected forms may suffer from QA issues, I wouldn't know.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
In 1964 there were 458,000 measles cases, and 421 deaths, over a smaller population, no lockdowns.
How barbaric. Our ancestors were truly uncivilized.
There has been a small general drop in vaccination, but it's not clear if it has had a significant effect.
It's...not? I mean, I guess I don't have healthcare records for every measles patient, but are you genuinely going to make the argument that a nearly 100x increase in measles cases, centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor? What would that be?
The general drop you can blame on government overreaction to COVID.
No, I think I'll blame the people who choose to not get vaccinated instead. Unless you'd like to make the argument that vaccine-skeptics lack the mental capacity to be assigned agency?
A number of stories I vaguely follow have largely been ignored by this space. To start discussion:
Ukraine
Back in November, there was discussion about the imminent fall of Pokrovsk, encirclement of Ukrainian troops and collapse of the frontline:
Going by the aphorism 'If you're reading this, it's for you', it looks like the American press is preparing the public for a closing act of the majestic capeshit arc that started with the Maidan massacre. Ukrainians are generally eager to negotiate, nobody believes in winning anymore
It seems like the capeshit arc rages on, and yet another prediction of Ukrainian (or Russian, for that matter) collapse goes in the dustbin. Deepstatemap shows the UA holding onto a corner of Pokrovsk, the ISW map doesn't seem to have moved significantly, there haven't been any MSM news articles on Pokrovsk since December (?!), Russian economic collapse seems yet to materialize. Does anyone have more insight?
Measles makes a comeback in the US - who wants some lockdowns?
2025 recorded ~2500 measles cases in the US, and 733 recorded so far in 2026. This is the highest number of cases since about 1990, and for the 90s/2000s we saw low double-digit numbers of cases. A handful of children have died. Solely based on the numbers, I think you'd expect a case or two of encephalitis but I'm unsure. The biggest outbreaks are in Spartanburg county, South Carolina (Trump - 66% of the vote), Gaines county, Texas (Trump won 91% of the vote) and Mohave county, Arizona (Trump won 77% of the vote). As far as I can tell, there are no real cities in any of these counties. We're seeing a remarkable inversion where historically infectious disease outbreaks would start in the cities and people would flee to the suburbs/countryside. Maybe my next startup idea should be a chain of sanatoriums (sanatoria?) in NYC or SF.
Trans identification decreasing?
Several months late to the party, but in October a study came out suggesting the number of trans students applying to Brown had roughly halved, yoy. I suppose it's early to be declaring victory given that the data/methodology don't seem particularly rock-solid, but I'm definitely chalking it as evidence supporting my claim that there is a hardcore group of genuinely trans people, while the significant increases were rebellious teens and some better way to rebel will crop up to replace it. At the least, it's evidence that the doomers and blackpillers claiming lines go up are wrong.
Anecdotally, I've heard gen Z college students get off on being offensive. In 15-20 years Millenials will be even more deeply uncool and taking the place of boomers, while the alphas and betas rebel and move leftwards to areas we can't even imagine (but get ready for AI girlfriends. They'll be called AI-Attracted Individuals, and I'm planting a flag in the AIAI acronym right now).
Poopgate
In the most momentous news since Biden fell off a bike, leftist social media has been circulating a Forbes video claiming to show Trump soiling himself at the 0:34 mark (you'll have to find it on youtube yourself, sorry - and turn up your audio). We've now been blessed with Yahoo News' headline 'No credible evidence Trump pooped himself during executive order signing', which is interesting given the video that millions of people have watched.
It will be interesting watching Trump's mental faculties evolve over the next three years. Biden was notably sharper in 2020 than in his disastrous 2024 debate performance. Presumably Trump won't tolerate handlers the same way Biden did, so it seems like a situation that could rapidly dissolve into a ahem shitshow.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
At risk of drawing mod ire for being excessively glib
I'm no narc, you can be as pedantic and annoying as you like.
no, the baby isn't expressing anything because it can't read and didn't pick the shirt.
Your babies are just dumb compared to mine.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
It matters if I am now expected to say, as Just Being Courteous Nothing More, that a biological father is, in fact, a biological mother.
So the whole legal discussion was just a sideshow for coming back to the main externality, which is that some people expect you to say a certain thing and you dislike that?
I may be a Catholic, but even I try to hang on to some shreds of accordance with actuality and physical reality. If I'm supposed to just shrug and go with the flow, then hell why not accept perpetual motion machines, phlogiston, healing crystal vibrations, and drinking bleach to cure autism?
I'm sure you could manage to construct a beliefs system that encompassed the holy ghost, transgenderism and your hatred of Kamala Harris while excluding perpetual motion machines, phlogiston, healing crystals and drinking bleach without too much cognitive dissonance.
In fact it is. The application for citizenship is on the basis of the biological parent who holds Irish citizenship. The mother (woman) isn't an Irish citizen or holding Irish citizenship. The person who fertilised the egg is the one claiming Irish citizenship and requesting it on behalf of the child.
Am I understanding correctly that the child could be granted Irish citizenship if either parent were a citizen? From your post:
Persons born outside of Ireland who have an Irish national grandparent born in Ireland may obtain Irish citizenship through registration with the Foreign Births Register, which is maintained by the Department of Foreign Affairs.
The woman further submits that she could have claimed to be the “father” of the child and “could have possibly obtained citizenship by descent that way”.
So in a hypothetical where an Irish man abroad who can't get it done the old-fashioned way uses an IVF clinic with his own sperm to impregnate his foreign wife, is their child eligible for citizenship? And/or if the subject of your post had filled out the paperwork as father (which, for the record, you would probably still have posted here as evidence of trans hypocrisy), her child would have been granted citizenship?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
It boils my piss
That sounds unpleasant.
If you're going to smear a 'not insignificant' fraction of his fellow partisans in this community as misogynists, you better have everything cut and dry or I'm going to assume you're talking shit. Name names.
Her fellow partisans.
Naming names is either ban-baiting me or trying to start drama, but if you like, here are incidents where her piss is being boiled -
Here's her and sloot. Number of other comments in that thread.
Took me a while to figure it out, but here's her getting into it with 'The Mountain' guy on her previous account (you can follow her comments on his weekly posts if you like).
Here's what I thought would be the next flameout.
I would call the viewpoint that women are lesser, less agentic, less intelligent, less capable (excluding less physically strong) misogynistic. I don't think these arguments are particularly rare around here. Would you disagree with either point?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
The government should not assert that the male person who fertilised an egg is the child's mother
But who fertilized the egg is not what is being asserted, and outside of hospitals and genetics studies, 'who fertilized the egg' is not equivalent to 'father.' A baby wearing a shirt saying 'I love my two dads' isn't engaging in science denialism, it's just an expression of their relationship with two same-gender parents. Ditto for children of a remarried widower calling their father's new partner 'mom.' Gattsuru has other examples above.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Careful, you're going to trigger the libertarians.
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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