nopie
1yr ago
I think that the leaders perform more like PR function and due to their power we cannot really think of terms we use for common men. Zelensky definitely played a role of inspiring leader and helped a lot in this war. But I suspect that Ukrainians would have fought bravely regardless and they are real heroes.
When people resist occupation risking their lives like in Bucha or the conductor was shot for refusing to play at the occupiers' concert, they are real heroes. If a robber comes to your house and at the gunpoint demands you to give all valuables, it would be insanity to refuse because your life is more valuable. However, during the war you are defending your country and if you are a civilian who decides to resist despite torture and risk of death then you are a hero. Many many Ukrainians turned out to be heroes.
nopie
1yr ago
That is actually very common. Most people who want to discredit conspiracy theorists actually know very little about the subject and the conspiracy theorist actually knows a great deal more (albeit often with his own bias that misleads him). When starting dialog, the discreditors are quickly faced with a failure which they don't want to accept and simply start mocking the opponent.
I already said in another place that I totally support Scott on his stance to write a long and detailed rebuttal. Maybe his choice about ivermectin wasn't the most interesting to majority but people write detailed PhD theses about more boring subjects and learn a great deal about many things. Who am I to say which subjects one should engage to and which are not allowed?
nopie
1yr ago
The problem with “let's try masks because they might help” is that there are countless potential interventions without any benefit. For example, you could regulate humidity in buildings because the belief is that dry air favours viral adhesion to airways. It would be moderately expensive but the evidence that it would help with anything is zero.
Most of low-hanging fruit in public health is already picked and any progress towards better medicines is painstakingly slow and requires good and thorough evidence. It is ok to be sceptical of any media reports about new game-changing drugs or interventions. Only very few of them will be finally approved and even fewer of them will have good effectiveness.
nopie
1yr ago
Bucha atrocities have been very well documented and confirmed by several independent sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucha_massacre
Russian narrative about it hasn't been confirmed, that's true.
nopie
9mo ago
I cannot predict what will happen but Prigozhin is trying to convince people to join his side by appealing to their grievances.
No one could convince Russians to protest the war. They are all united in their struggle for Russian supremacy. When the military incursion towards Kyiv started, Russians on social media cheered. But they also expressed that 300 casualties was a very high price. Little they knew that soon it would be 3000, then 30 thousand and 300 thousand is not so far away and still losing.
Prigozhin manipulated those sentiments by saying that he is not against Putin but against the corrupted generals who are to blame for this loss. Russians like to talk how bad is their corruption, how the government doesn't care about them at all etc. They might or might not see Prigozhin as their saviour but he has certainly changed the situation irreversibly and the narrative that the current leadership is not competent is not going to go away until something big happens.
nopie
1yr ago
But Russia is very dirty, much dirtier than most EU countries. That explains why Poland is so much against Russia and prefer to be aligned with the EU :)
nopie
1yr ago
People voluntary locking down is a very strong argument against mandatory lockdowns. There was no need for police fining people jogging in park when the same result can be achieved voluntary, letting people themselves to decide what is more important for them.
However, the governments should have decided to leave certain services running, for example, schools.
The last thing – idea about difficulty to avoid large numbers of deaths completely ignores that covid risk was strongly age stratified. Some governments still ignores that by pushing vaccination to young children who all already have had covid.
nopie
1yr ago
He was instrumental in the shift from COVID 'let it rip' to 'do something' and probably improved the UK's response to COVID from catastrophic to very bad.
With this he was clearly wrong. The UK results are very bad, even worse than for countries with less restrictions. Most lockdowns and school closures were pointless because it was elderly people who mostly died. If they had concentrated on protecting the elderly, they would have done better. But overall, even with that most countries overreacted.
The UK didn't introduce vaccine mandates unlike many other countries, so at least they did one thing right. But I doubt it had anything to do with Cummings.
nopie
17d ago
It is hard to believe that US intelligence is becoming worse. The recent events (Ruso-Ukrainian war, Crocus City Hall shooting) show that is has become better.
It appears that CIA has wide access to online communication worldwide and combined with modern AI technologies that allows to sieve vast amounts of information and find a needle in the haystack. A translator I had known got hired by a US agency couple of years ago. She has never spoken what she does but I suspect that she works on automated translation models for US intelligence. Currently we should assume that communication in any language is equally monitored and analysed.
Also, it hard to believe that if Russians really possessed such technology that many describe as improbable it wouldn't have leaked by now. Even best agents eventually make mistakes.
Russians have been involved in assassination in other countries, like in the UK. But we know that because eventually we found some evidence. It is likely that it could have happened in this case too, especially after repeated attacks in several countries. Unless, of course, CIA knows more about these cases but keep silent.
And third, why would Russians use this technology against targets of low importance instead of someone who really matters?
nopie
4mo ago
I think you are overreacting.
Yes, he might be in his mania episode which may cause problems to him. But the article itself is not that great, he just probably imagines it to be.
First of all, it is very shallow and lacks details about any critical infrastructure. Don't be distracted by the a fraction of a page of making nitro-glycerine. It is just to illustrate that decentralized forces can have access to information. But the example is trivial and not meaningful.
He just managed to write an awful and long article that could be summed: AI doomers are wrong and desperate.
Immunity debt is a possibility but needs more studies.
We don't need to prove that public health interventions caused harm. Those who decided to implement them had to prove that they are safe and effective, just like we do with medicines.
A lot of inflation in Europe is not related to Ukraine. Maybe prices for energy could be explained by war in Ukraine but food is very questionable. Even if the price of grains is determined by global market prices, their impact on total food should not be that much.
nopie
1yr ago
CIA had better intel from inner circles of Kremlin that enabled them to predict that Putin will start a war. It is not that hard to predict if you have inside info. But apparently even CIA underestimated Ukrainians and their resolve to fight and their preparedness. Anyone who had talked to Ukrainians for the last 8 years would have known how serious they were to fight and resist. It is strange that CIA miscalculated so much.
nopie
17d ago
I find it hard to believe that the US demanded that Ukraine stops doing business with Russia.
Also, I also don't believe that Poland's main export is labour. It is true that a lot of Polish people were working in other EU countries but now Poland is developing their own industries and getting richer in this way.
Ukraine however remained poorer than Russia, mostly due to its own corruption. Despite all the flaws of the EU, the EU membership has been good for economic development of post-Soviet countries. Ukraine could definitely benefit from the EU membership.
Why do you care about those people on internet?
Any reasonable person understands that it is morally wrong for one country to attack another that has never threatened you.
Then one can say – forget about morals, the power decides the outcome. Turns out Russia is not as powerful as we thought and they got stuck in Ukraine and are losing positions every day, thanks for western support.
A lot of people just suffer from denialism. The fog of war doesn't allow us to see clearly what is going on in every detail but in a nutshell the reality is clear. Russians might or might not manage to keep Donbas and/or the Crimea but the rest of Ukraine has remained an independent country and that is not going to change.
People in the western countries have free access to all the information and most of us see it clearly.
For a lot of Russians it is harder to see in this way because they suffer from collective delusions that Ukraine is a bad country (nazis or not) that does not deserve to remain independent and Russia is going to take over Ukraine and make it a glorious part of Russia.
nopie
9mo ago
Lockdowns were like imprisonment for me. Like a prolonged home arrest for no reason. Somehow it was very clear that they will be useless and the policies didn't even make sense.
Yes, they were the worst human rights violations in the western world since the war ended or something like that.
Only when you widen your comparison to places where wars and genocide still happens (Ukraine, other wars, Uigurs etc.), we can find examples with even worse violations.
nopie
1yr ago
The old method didn't work for me. When I was learning a second language (Russian) at school I memorized perfectly all declension tables and all grammar rules and still wasn't able to form a single sentence. I only learned it later with immersion when I had to live among Russians and learn to communicate in Russian. Now I have forgotten all the grammar rules but I can speak almost fluently.
Then I wanted to live in Spain, so I started learning Spanish by Pimsleur method which starts by using real sentences in conversion. It was great and motived me a lot. I am not fully proficient in Spanish yet but it enabled me to be able to deal with all practical matters in Spanish.
My observation is that memorizing rules do not translate well into internalizing them and being able to use in practice. Those kids who were good in Russian actually had exposure to Russia on the street or by watching cartoons in Russian.
It is possible that with this method you eventually reach a limit. Probably you then need to learn more things and appropriate training should be prepared. Sometimes knowing the detailed rules are necessary. But let's remember that people create these rules in their native language without being literate. Even a small child can sometimes correct my grammar.
nopie
1yr ago
If it was found in RCT trials that the drug does not treat the illness in the treatment group (whatever the reason), it would not get approved.
When we talk about the elderly, the number of lives saved becomes meaningless. We should use QALY or at least months of life extended on average.
Imagine a very old and sick person gets vaccinated for covid and this extends his life expectancy by 2 years. It won't be fully enjoyable life, probably still on wheelchair and full with health crisis but it is better than nothing.
Now we can compare how many QALYs were gained by antihypertensive medicines, by statins etc. and see the actual cost-effectiveness. Covid vaccines probably were quite effective among elderly but as now statins are generic and very cheap (£2 per month on average in the UK) and covid vaccines quite expensive (£50 per dose) I doubt that the gains are greater than for statins. I vaguely remember that statins provide additional life expectancy about 7 months on average. It doesn't sound much but on society's level that's quite impressive.
nopie
17d ago
Obviously when Ukraine joins the EU, it will be required doing business with Russia in accordance with the EU customs rules.
But that is completely different from the statement that the EU demanded Ukraine stop doing business with Russia.
We need to be precise what we mean to have a meaningful discussion.
nopie
4mo ago
I didn't read it as incitement at all. I think that a lot of people are in self-censoring mode and are constantly afraid that their writings could be perceived as racist and apply their standards to others too.
To me it sounded that he hates AI doomers and then imagines how they could become violent. He is probably wrong is his descriptions but just because they are very graphic, it does not mean that he encourages them.
It is similar to how some writers describe immigrants in Europe from Islamic countries by calling them scum and describe all their current and imagined crimes. Obviously, a lot of people consider this to be incitement against immigrants and call for censuring them. Slurs against immigrants are unjustified as it could indeed cause people to spread hate against immigrants but it is not condoning or incitement of crimes committed by those immigrants.
Here the discriminated group is AI doomers who are deeply unhappy with Fredie's article. Maybe I shouldn't call them AI doomers as it sounds offensive. I am not really familiar with the accepted terminology.
nopie
1yr ago
Probably not. Ukrainians would have started resistance and it would be very bloody and violent.
I would expect every country to fight if its existence was threatened, and asking for help is just natural too.
I don't see how Ukraine successfully fighting back Russian aggression escalates anything though.
nopie
1yr ago
Some people are waiting for Twitter to fail just like some were waiting for Russians to take Kyiv :)
Musk makes mistakes but overall I think Twitter will neither be a great success nor failure.
Adrenochrome exists. It is a pretty boring compound, structurally related to adrenaline, was tried in studies and found useless. Just like adrenaline, we could easily synthesize it chemically if it was found useful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenochrome
But failure to research such a simply fact unites both conspiracy theorists and their critics :)
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