professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
No bio...
User ID: 1157
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1hr ago
Casual clothing is now commonplace in many work environments, with people even wearing branded tshirts and the like.
Not entirely a good thing.
Jazz/rock/hip-hop/metal/etc are just considered normal forms of music instead of the work of Satan corrupting our kids.
Not entirely a good thing, either.
Jews/Italians/Irish/etc are now considered an ordinary form of white instead of as foreign criminals and scum.
Well. Not all of those are actually wins among progressives! Making Jews white was probably worse for them, in some ways, this decade. And surely crushing the mob played a role in that shift for the Italians?
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
2hr ago
I think I’ve heard Yglesias and Noah Smith types are best described as the ones who say wrongthink right before it’s acceptable for people on the left to think something.
Indeed! Saw someone call them "Overton Window-washers" and I find that to be a fit-enough name for that role.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
2hr ago
And yet campus Leftists don't seem to bother with "Lebanese Apartheid Week.
Kind of interesting since Lebanese-Americans almost code as white in modern progressive terms, because so many were Christians that immigrated fairly early and integrated quickly- Jamie Farr and Casey Kasem come to mind.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
2hr ago
they do not tolerate anti-Semitism either, especially not within their own ranks.
In what ways do they not? Up until being forced by the new administration, elite colleges were quite happy to tolerate anti-Semitism. Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan come to mind.
The exception being that any critique of George Soros (or I guess now his son) does get coded as unacceptable anti-Semitic, which is... telling, I think.
It’s similar to the case of the ‘Democrats are the real racists’ narrative, which does not work on Democrats one bit.
Indeed. The truth of the statement doesn't matter. Whether they're anti-Semitic or anti-civilization, neither accusation has an effect; it just slides off the closed ideological defense system.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
2hr ago
Whether the motive here is technically anti-semitism is debatable,
It's "anti-successful population," of which anti-semitism is a named subcategory.
Or "anti-Western," for a somewhat broad category of West that might include Korea and Japan. "Anti-civilization" would be more accurate but almost none of them actually conceive of themselves that way.
particularly because there is a small but real number of Jews in this group
Likewise, self-hating Jew is a common enough subcategory of oikophobia that it has its own wiki page.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
2hr ago
the Palestinians achieve military supremacy?
They'd have to have more schools than weapons depots, and maybe not rip out water mains installed by bleeding hearts to convert into weapons.
Flying pigs will convert to Judaism first.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
1d ago
nonconsensual
Fascinating how "consent" came to be a universal moral solvent, and by extension, a lack of consent can extend much further than any sane person might think.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
2d ago
"Americans" are not a race or ethnicity. They just aren't. On no serious theory are black Americans not Americans.
I'd be happy to go with "no hyphenated Americans" but that died a miserable death long ago. Alas!
Feel free to disagree with them, but denying American as a race or ethnicity is exactly what generates people like that, who refuse to disbelieve their lying eyes about what groups get certain privileges.
without trying to gerrymander what the bare word "American" means into uselessness.
Done been gerrymandered into meaninglessness anyways.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
2d ago
I really hope people with heart attacks, cancer appointments, etc still went
Probably varied heavily by region and severity, and we'll never really know the stats.
At one point early on I had some sort of gallbladder attack, with symptoms fairly similar to appendicitis. I bet on it not being that, and it turned out okay. But maybe somebody else ignored the same symptoms for the same reason and it didn't. So goes life.
I just dislike bad reasoning
As we should!
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
2d ago
Thoroughly seconded.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
2d ago
It also stopped people having heart attacks from going to the hospital, stopped people with cancer from having appointments, et cetera and so forth.
all the evidence I've seen (including a fair bit from the rationalist space) indicates it's pretty unlikely it was a lab leak.
I'm no expert despite my username, but my opinion on the rationalist evidence is that it's centered on a couple people that are really good at constructing arguments (regardless of reality), and a lot of motivated reasoning around common sense being wrong.
I agree with Nybbler that no one outside of China has sufficiently granular and unfiltered data to even begin considering a clear distinction between the two.
edit:spelling
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
2d ago
Huge public consequence, but highly distributed, and did not hit anyone responsible as hard as it hit everyone else.
No goat got cooked, no crazy racist "ethicists" lost their jobs, et cetera and so forth.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
2d ago
that was mostly other stuff and general distaste for him personally.
entirely for other stuff, at least on paper. His COVID Emmy got taken away for the other stuff.
Weird times.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
2d ago
smoke right in the ward until you can't see the opposite wall
In my experience spending time at hospitals working or visiting family, patients temporarily check out "against doctor's orders" to go have a smoke in the alley and then check right back in. Perhaps some jurisdictions are stricter about this.
The nurses would wag a finger if you snuck in food that actually had taste, but they only got serious about it if the patient was in the pre-surgery fasting period (for obvious reasons).
Why would I want to increase the likelihood of all my staff and patients catching covid on top of whatever illnesses they're already here for?
Fun thing is the COVID vaccine barely if at all decreases transmission, so they'll get it anyways! There's also some potential that the vaccine increases rejection risks.
So... transplant patients are screwed coming and going. Either they don't get the transplant because they refuse the vaccine, or their rejection risk increases because they did.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
2d ago
I am providing the level of evidence and care that OP deserves. No one is going to change anyone's mind on this topic anyway, we all settled into camps nigh-on six years ago.
Personally, performing for social media while at work (as distinct from consuming while on a break or waiting for a run to complete or whatever) is unprofessional regardless of immediate busyness, and that particular trend was just one of the many social psychoses going around as a side effect, but to each their own.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
3d ago
They don't wear it properly, it's not fit to their face, they take it off cause they're sweaty, they forget, they remove it to eat (ah yes, just like Eat Out To Help Out, it's nice of viruses to not spread when you're hungry), etc. So in actuality, masks weren't actually that useful.
As a COVID Never Forget, Never Forgive type, I feel an obligation to eat crow when this subtopic comes up. I think it was Scott Alexander that said something about the Noble Mask Lie being mostly wrong but yes people would wear them incorrectly; I agreed that yeah N95s are tricky to get exactly right but surely people will were surgical masks fine, and that's better than nothing.
Boy howdy was I wrong. Watching people wear their mask below their nose squashed what little hope I had for a lot of people. Absolute theatre.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
3d ago
you have to factor in the fact that no modern society is willing to turn the sick or injured away from hospitals
Completely false- modern society was quite happy to turn away people from organ transplants and other necessary surgeries if they didn't have the vaccine.
There was a whole Reddit community dedicated to mocking people that died of COVID. Pathetic cretin Jimmy Kimmel mocked them on national TV.
Modern society will absolutely turn people away, as long as they get to feel ideologically justified when they do so.
But in the end, our leaders were under pressure to act rapidly, and this was the best answer they could come up with at the time.
This is the most polite damning with faint praise I think I've ever heard.
Their best was completely and utterly retarded.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
3d ago
What was the death rate or side effect rate from vaccines? It's not going to be even 6 figures
How are you defining side effect? Unless you're defining it narrowly, "side effect rate" is going to be like 90+% of people that take a vaccine- the vast majority of people have some degree of soreness and lethargy after a vaccine, and COVID vaccines seem worse for this than most.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
3d ago
I remember hospitals and the healthcare system being utterly overwhelmed in the early days of the pandemic.
I remember all the nurses so bored they made tiktoks all day.
New York was briefly overwhelmed, in part because they refused to work with field hospitals for braindead ideological reasons. Even that was briefly.
Quarantine has been an effective measure to mitigate infectious disease outbreaks for nearly a thousand years
Lockdown isn't quarantine, either.
Covid era lockdowns are nothing compared to historical ones, when you could be summarily executed for crossing the wrong boundary
Alas, we finally could've done something about New Yorkers moving south.
Most people accepted the fact that staying at home was a very small sacrifice compared to all the lives that could be saved, directly or indirectly.
Well. Until they got sufficiently bored and found an ideological-acceptable reason to throw parties.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
3d ago
I think that Trump should have take super harsh lockdown measures in like the first two weeks while it still hadn't reached the U.S., or very shortly afterwards, and was possible to contain. Once it reached more than 1 states it was too late.
This would've been possibly January? Maybe December? Very few people in the US were paying attention at that point. Well. Publicly paying attention.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
3d ago
medical ethicists
I know AIs tailor responses to the individual, so maybe it was easy to predict my actual position, but I'm still amused that the first time I said something positive about bioethicists and bioethics as a field, Claude basically called them idiots. It's the only time I've encountered Claude say something negative about that kind of favored group without prompting.
I don't think Claude was wrong, mind you. Incredibly ideologically poisoned field. But still.
They spent most of late January to early Feb 2020 procuring masks from U.S. retail and hospital supply chains and shipping them back to China.
Fascinating!
Thank you for sharing. Sounds like it was, in the grand scheme, fairly tolerable to go through in a competent country.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
3d ago
most of the policies implemented were policies that they wish they would have implemented in the early days of GRID.
Interesting psychology/cultural power dynamic there: you can restrict everyone, but you can't restrict only certain groups.
professorgerm
clutching my imitation pearls
7d ago
isn't it safe to assume that the guy who made "because I got high" was probably in posession of narcotics?
He references that in "Will You Help Me Repair My Door":
The warrant said "Narcotics and kidnapping"/ The warrant said "Narcotics and kidnapping"/ Are you kidding? I make my money, rapping/ Why does the warrant say "Narcotics?" (Well, I know narcotics)/ But why kidnapping?
Interesting/sad/etc to watch self-inflicted backsliding in parts of UK, Belgium, Germany, France, and Sweden.
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