popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
As usual they're gerrymandering the claim so they can get the sticker result they want. Pfizer "were hopeful in spring/early summer 2021 that vaccines would be effective against transmission" but "transmission was not a study endpoint". "Prevention of transmission (and asymptomatic COVID) were not primary endpoints of these trials and were never a claim of the pharmaceutical companies in developing these vaccines"
So the vaccines were developed and tested for preventing severe disease. Fair enough. But the "point" of this story is that vaccine mandates were sold politically as preventing transmission, while that was never actually the aim of these vaccines and was not scientifically demonstrated, as admitted by the FDA in their emergency use authorization. Whether Pfizer technically collected some data on transmission while researching symptom reduction is besides the point.
@Skylab's argument stands completely.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I yut renaming Columbus Day on the condition it's renamed "William Penn Day" or something. Unfortunately, it will either stay Columbus Day or we see an identarian victory and it's Indigenous Peoples day.
While I strongly endorse the observation Columbus was a terrible human being and have wanted to "cancel" him, so to speak, since before it was cool, I reject the submarine message of the identarians: that settling the Americas was our original sin as a nation. That the USA, Canada etc should be ashamed of their past. I don't agree.
I think the English, Dutch, and French settlement of the New World was conducted with a reasonable amount of virtue given the day and age, and cannot be reasonably characterized as genocide, or even "land theft" in most cases, unless you believe the natives had some sort of spirtual claim to hegemony over the Appalachias because they happened to be there circa 1600. (If you want to see a genocide, look to the Iroquois were doing to the Hurons around them.) And even the Spanish colonization, which was spearheaded by bloodthirsty sociopaths whose basic goal was to enslave the natives, eventually transitioned to more humanitarian-ish administration under Jesuits and the Habsburg crown.
The pattern of North American settlement seems to be that European settlers arrived, settled unused land, and were tolerated and traded with. Eventually the colonies grew to a point to cause border friction with the natives, putting land native used intermittently at a low level of intensity under cultivation. If the tribes were peacable, they would simply be marginalized. If the tribes were aggressive they would eventually attack, be defeated and destroyed or forced to migrate west. This kind of dog-eat-dog geopolitics was no different from the situation before the colonists arrived; the colonists simply had much better economic practices and military technology, so they won the game.
During the height of the pandemic, a fairly well-known IDW figure tweeted something to the effect of "To be resistant to hive mind programming, you must either be autistic or an asshole." I agree with a weaker version of her sentiment. I'd say: To be resistant to hive mind programming, you must either be the sort who processes society's rules intellectually, not intuitively, or you must hate society and not find its opinion relevant.
This set of people obviously includes sociopaths, assholes, disagreeable misanthropes, and socially illiterate nitwits. But I don't agree that it's the entire set. Jesus Christ, MLK, and Buddha were in that set. They may have been "criminals" but only in a non-central way.
@gog should boycott if they are a non-central non-conformist. (AKA not criminal, self-absorbed, or an asshole.) That is the only sort of non-conformist who can set a positive example and start a preference cascade towards the end of moral panic. If they are a "central" non-conformist, they should not boycott, but will ignore moral advice in any case.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
For your own mental health, I suggest you employ the old trick of flipping a coin, then do whatever option you find yourself hoping for.
That said, I think it is the duty of those who are insulated from formal reprisal for non-conformity to non-conform. You are a teacher; you don't even need to fear being passed up for promotion. Of course, I am assuming you are an upstanding citizen in the non-culture war parts of your life. If you are a callous, uncharitable, self-absorbed, or god-forbid criminal person in other areas, non-conformity will not make you a saint, and I'd prefer you restrain your non-conformist streak, lest other non-conformists be so tarred.
The major price you'll pay is the scorn of peers who have already elliptically disclosed you have a low opinion of, and maybe being pilloried by activist students. Being pilloried with dignity is, likewise, a duty. There will be no reward.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Three possibilities, not mutually exclusively. I'd imagine at least two apply to most straight white cis male supporters of this candidate:
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Genuine belief in social justice ethics and analysis. Social justice offers an energizing moral narrative, which conservatism often struggles to provide. Voting for a good cause causes good feels. Even if, much like donating to charity or helping a neighbor, it goes against your superficial self-interest.
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Seeing slogans as tribal signals. They may consider conservatives their outgroup. All the formulaic nods to BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ rights may not be seen as policy forecasts as such, but ritual ablutions to esoterically say "I am NOT a member of the conservative tribe. Conservatives are no good people. If elected, I will fight that tribe and help your tribe." They do not expect Democrats to pursue policies that would seriously transfer resources from democrat-voting white guys to minorities to an extent that would harm them, but instead harass conservative cake shops and crack down on right wing radicalization, etc.
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Broadcasting luxury beliefs. This idea was popularized by Rob Henderson. Supporting policies that harm low class white people conveys, indirectly, that you are not one of those people. Straight white cis male voters for Daniela may, for example, be educated workers who live in rich neighborhoods and send their kids to private schools; as such, they never have to "pay the price" for people of different immigration status, such as drug violence, multilingual classrooms, uninsured drivers doing hit-and-runs, or depressed wages for low-skills jobs. Alternatively, they may aspire to that class, and so imitate its manners.
This is all well worn territory on the motte, but like @f3zinker I'm think you might be new here? Welcome aboard.
Do some people just read sports news all the time and relish all the drama? Seems like the male version of those women who are really into what the royal family is up to.
You have it. In the US, the NFL/NBA is reality TV for guys, and they memorize all the names like fantasy nerds will know that Tyrion's squire Podrick is of House Payne in Game of Thrones.
Quite a lot of the audience consumes the NBA through highlights and headlines, and even with the NFL, they tend to spend more time gossiping about it and listening to sports talk shows. The games are secondary. An alien could infer a lot about humans from this. Reality TV shows with the most female audience tend to be about relationships, secrets, and betrayal, while sports on the other hand are about competition, dominance, the sweetness of victory and the agony of defeat — really engaging to dudes.
NFL gameplay is, fundamentally, a slot machine. You watch the reels spin (the players line up, the quarterback is accepting the snap), they begin to slow, suggesting a possible outcome (a receiver breaks open, the pass rush is closing in), and finally you experience either euphoria, mild pleasure, or annoyance depending on the outcome. (Touchdown, the pass is complete, interception.) This tickles the lizard brain pleasantly enough, but it wouldn't command the spare attention of guys for five straight months without the drama.
What excites sports fans most is when a famous player wildly underperforms or overperforms expectations. Probably the three most energizing sporting events of the last twenty years were when Eli Manning and Nick Foles (two mediocre quarterbacks) beat Tom Brady in the Super Bowl. Two of those games were quite tedious slogs to watch, but they sent the sports talk world and watercoolers across the nation into a frenzy. Guys just love the narratives, the basking in glory or wallowing in humiliation.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I'd love to get daily dispatches from themotte about foreign politics, war, energy, and economics. Unfortunately those things take expertise to talk about. Running your mouth about the teacher wearing giant prosthetic breasts to shop does not.
What are your expectations? Are we coming near a grand showdown?
70% prediction: Italy is slapped on the wrist with some sort of minor bureaucratic penalty by the EU, at most.
How is this going to interact with the looming threat of grid collapse in Europe?
The fact Europe has bigger fish to fry is part of why the above is the most likely outcome.
Russia sanctions and the European willingness to keep Ukrainian army in the field? NATO expansions?
The US is keeping Ukraine in the field.
90% prediction: Sweden and Finland process to join NATO continues. 99% prediction: Italian politics aren't cited mentioned as a major factor if these talks derail.
Is her family and God rhetoric just fluff or do you expect some real moves in this regard?
I really am speaking from ignorance here, but based purely on my priors of the way these sort of politicians play out:
80%: Italy sees lower immigration while her government is in power.
99%: The fertility rate of native Italian women remains below replacement rate while her government is in power.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I also find the idea of a post-scarcity society ludicrous. Look around. The outcome of genetic and memetic evolution is that systems fill whatever resource budget is allotted to them. Since the early modern period the world GDP has grown by three orders of magnitude while population growth has grown by only one order of magnitude, and yet we still see fierce competition for resources within rich countries. If tomorrow we invented the technology to make us a Kardashev Type II civilization, within a few decades the elites would invent a status competition like redirecting planets for sport, and you'd see socialist politicians growing red in the face demanding a celestial body thruster subsidy for middle class, who deserve to be able to play with Ganymede for at least a minute per year. Within a century, some quintillionaire would use the zero point energy generator to clone themselves a trillion times and we'd be back to resource wars.
The darker possibility of the post scarcity society is this: Political structures follow economic power. (The ideas from this video are from The Dictator’s Handbook but I like the way CGP Gray lays it out.) If you create an economy where labor is 100% irrelevant to the economic production of a polity, political power will devolve from workers to whatever entity controls the power generators, AI farms, and fabricators. I think your prediction of "living in pods and eating bugs" is a very rosy prediction of what will happen to the average man in this new order.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Surely 90% of people there know about here, and 90% of people here know about there?
The blue ocean of prospective mottizens is the comment sections of various substacks and blogs, but it's quite difficult to reach those people without naked shilling.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
This is naive. "Normal" is when disgraced politicians and high-ranking bureacrats golden-parachute their way out of power, like they always have. Sometimes, when a foreign invader or violent revolution dismantles a government, they may hold a few responsible. Sometimes. But in "normal" circumstances, governments do not hold themselves responsible.
The quality of a diet, in terms of only weight loss, is a tripod of calorie deficit, satiation, and motivation. The calories are what actually make it work, the satiation and motivation aspects help people follow it.
The "twinkie diet" is a low-satiation low-motivation diet. It totally works, thermodynamically speaking — just eat TDEE - 500 calories worth of twinkies and you'll reliably lose one pound per week — but no human being is going to stick with it.
The keto diet is a high-satiation high-motivation diet. "Meat-based" diets like this have enjoyed wide popularity because people love eating chicken and steak, they're filling, and as a result most dieters stict to it.
This Levels diet seems like a high-satiation low-motivation diet. It will work very well for a few weeks, since unprocessed foods are filling and stop you from pigging out, but eventually people will (a) rebel against preparing and flavoring all their food from scratch (b) actually want to eat some dopamine-triggering processed foods, at least in moderation.
The anti-meritocratic part isn't that older kids are allowed to outperform younger kids. It's that someone born in August is automatically slotted in to be the "older kid", whereas the person born in September is forced to be the younger kid for every social, physical, or intellectual competition from ages 6-22.
I'm lukewarm on the motte of the social justice movement when they apply this kind of logic to race and sex/gender. I just disagree that they have identified the most important sources of unfair disparate outcomes, or that a society is illegitimate if it doesn't hunt those specific categories of unfair advantage out, whatever the human or societal cost. I basically think "born rich in a rich country" makes a rounding error of any other kind of privilege in the modern world.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
You usually need a little more analysis than a link and a summary for a toplevel post 'round these parts... This is one of many studies seeming to show the covid vaxxes are less effective than hoped / advertised in 2021. Why does this move the needle more than what we already know?
My point is that modern forever games are so complex that it's implausible or at least unpleasant to learn to play them on your own. A late 90s game like, oh, Fallout or Morrowind for example, you can have a pleasant time muddling through the middling level of complexity and mastering it on your own. This learning process was what I really loved.
Modern games are like making a choice between doing a worksheet of fifth grade math problems with fancy graphics OR going through the Khan Academy course for multivariable calculus with a tutor giving you formulas to memorize.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
"Forever games" can reach an unbelievable level of complexity, and they didn't exist (EDIT: as much) in the 90s. MOBAs, MMORPGs, arena shooters, strategy games, heck even Minecraft.
I think today's forever games are less engaging, though, because people engage with their complexity mostly by learning "the meta" that someone else discovered by rote. The standard advice given to HOI4 newbies is to watch five hours of tutorial videos that teach you how division templates and combat calculations work. In the 90s you would dive into a game and parse it for yourself.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
I think it's mostly lockdowns knocking people off their healthy extroverted life habits and hooking them on a NEET-ish lifestyle. This is akin to governments mandating that everyone try crack one year. For crack addicts, nothing will change. For most people, they'll go through one degenerate year and then resume their regular lifestyle on the other end. But for a portion of the population that were healthy but predisposed to become crack addicts, they will emerge in 2022 as crack addicts. That happened but for junk food, Netflix binging, and vidya.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
The word 'liberal' may need to be taken out back behind the woodshed with 'socialism' as term that's suffered too much linguistic erosion to be useful. People's aesthetic associations dominate their usage of the word. Not a shared definition.
Traditionally the "liberal" perspective of land use is that you gain ownership over land by working and improving it. If natives are not improving the land, but merely hunting on it, they don't own it. This was the justification of indian removal that early Americans used. For example, IIRC there was usually a provision to pay for any improvements on repossessed lands such as tilled fields or buildings.
Nowadays I try to use the term "classical liberalism" when talking about this kind of thinking, unless I know I'm in an audience that already has this background.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We have a good index to measure g but very poor indices to measure whatever single letter variables you want to assign to personal virtue. So eugenicists focus on g.
I'm a human environmentalist. I want homo sapiens sapiens to persist in their present form, forever. History is not on my side, as humans have already applied selection to ourselves several times. People who could not live pro-socially in a Dunbar's number tribe were weeded out somewhere between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago. People who balk at living in states are in the process of being weeded out and have been for the last ten thousand years; the last big tribes were forcefully sedentarized in the nineteenth century. I don't really know what direction humanity is currently self-selecting towards, but birth control is probably accelerating it.
The character of the human who thrives in this environment is sure to be quite different from what you see around you.
Unfortunately we can expect uncontrolled evolution to this effect even if you fight off the naive eugenics.
What I don't get why a ordinary joe (or a mottizen) who is concerned about illegal immigration would treat this as anything other than a stunt designed to distract them from Desantis prioritizing business interests over actually dealing with the problem.
I'm a moderate DeSantis fan who has since 2016 believed something along the line of "Trumpism deserves a better Trump". Trump, to me, seems like an incompetent narcissist who unintentionally ruptured America's bipartisan foreign policy consensus. He put ideas on the ballot that have a good deal of popular support, but because of campaign finance and the pecularities of the Democrat/Republican voting coalitions, never got any representation. Anti-interventionism, protectionism, immigration control, and nativism, to name a few.
Trump was able to do this with the power of the meme. CNN put him on TV over and over again because he was entertaining and ostensibly too much of a moron to be dangerous. But once Americans were exposed to this meme, it caused a preference cascade that took the establishment completely by surprise.
I think it's fine that DeSantis isn't solving the root of the problem. He is releasing a meme into the news cycle, which exposes (or manufactures?) the image of coastal elites who hang "No human is illegal" signs in their million dollar summer homes, but then call the national guard to deport fifty illegals who show up. Memes like this are incredibly powerful, and in my opinion, are the only way my side could possibly win.
Putting aside your take on the morality of the parties, which I think is ass backwards, the benefit of cracking down on employers is that it's a politically viable potential solution. If there are no employers for economic migrants, there will be no economic migrants.
The average American voter is not going to support shooting illegal border crossers. Nor are they going to support imprisoning families with their little kids at the border. And if you bus them back home, they'll be back within the fortnight. On the other hand, if prospective migrants know there's no opportunities in the USA, they won't come.
It's like how the HOA will tell you to secure your trash. They could just hire hunters to go after bears, skunks, and raccoons without imposing on you. But that solution is more expensive and makes people squeamish. By demanding an expensive and/or unpopular solution you're only guaranteeing a solution won't be implemented.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
It's very far from perfect but the best way to find new comments to old subthreads ATM seems to be browsing https://www.themotte.org/comments
Who are you referring to?
?
Scott Alexander, as I'm sure you'll know unless you're someone else wearing /u/DrManhattan16's nick as a skinsuit. The NYT doxxed him, forcing him to resign from his job, and eventually published an article highlighting his connections to HBD and gender gap in math ability writing, and suggesting obliquely that things like his blog are too dangerous to be tolerated on tech platforms. There were also people ready to publish damaging private emails from Scott after he predictably wrote a self-defense which I'm sure is purely a coincidence and was not coordinated in advance at all.
popocatepetl
2yr ago
Yep, looks like I'm just misremembering. Thanks for the investigation.
They controlled for age and locations, which are the two most obvious confounders. I'd be interested in seeing the 2022 data when it comes out, since you could still argue the April-December 2021 die-off is going to end up being mortality displacement, much like anti-lockdown Sweden having higher excess deaths in the early pandemic but lower excess deaths later.
It seems to me the origins of the Republican anti-vaccine turn is coterminous with their anti-lockdown turn: June 2020 and the "racism is the real virus" BLM riots. The seeds were there before, but the real resistance started when it became clear Covid rules didn't apply to public events that benefit the left.
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