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hydroacetylene
5m ago
My white, tradcath, smoking and drinking are what you do, Covid measures are the mark of the beast circles did very well.
Face it- the virus just doesn’t affect people who don’t give a shit.
I did have an uncle whose annual hospital stay was due to Covid. But, like, his annual hospital stay.
zoink
9m ago
The neurotic shot takers I know do seem to be sick a lot, but they also seemed to be sick a lot before covid. Possibly too much observation bias for me to draw a strong conclusion.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
12m ago
Exactly. The entire trans-sports debate needs to be reframed in those terms: the debate isn't really whether MTFs can be allowed to compete, it's whether they be allowed to win.
Which is what's so frustrating about the dishonesty of the debate. Athletics are great, I'm a big advocate for them, but formal competitions aren't a necessary component. There are plenty of hobbyists across many sports who never compete, will never compete, and still get a lot out of it. Most rock climbers never compete. Most golfers never enter a tournament. Most Yogi aren't even aware of the idea of a tournament!
Most of the people at my BJJ gym will never enter a formal comp, and while the girls tend to stick together at need the rolls are co-ed. If a trans girl joined the gym, she'd have every opportunity to advance at the gym, and if I had to roll with her (though I'd probably avoid it if I could) I'd treat her like anyone else weaker than me, and she'd be expected to treat other women the same way. It's only once you start talking about a comp that there's any possibility of real trouble, and most people never enter comps. Hell, my good friend is a black belt, entered one tournament in his life, broke his collarbone, and immediately said "never doing that again."
Trans advocates, taking them in good faith, are giving trans girls terrible advice when they send them to join the track team, where they'll be constantly hounded. If a trans girl has interest in athletics, she should just pick up hobbyist athletics without the expectation of winning medals in anything.
hydroacetylene
15m ago
The implication of calling it ‘Kung flu’ ‘chink virus’ ‘Chinese cringe aids’ etc was, in the minds of those actually calling it that ‘it’s a flu. It’s way overblown.’
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
19m ago
That helps, and those aren't stroads, but it's convenient for a variety of reasons to mingle residential and commercial developments (as has been done for nine thousand years from Chatalhoyuk until WWII).
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
23m ago
I’ve long since come to the conclusion that modern psychology and psychiatry are not just dead ends, but actually more harmful than anything else we could have come up with. It actually seems to make whatever problems that existed beforehand and makes them worse.
Yeah as I wrote above, I think that it can work in some cases for some people, but on the whole as a society I agree it's pretty corrosive to norms and civility.
I work in retail. I’ve apparently signed up to be an emotional tampon and am expected to accept that not only does the customer have the perfect right to treat me like crap, im not even allowed to object because “they might be having a bad day” or trouble at home or work or the moon is in the wrong astrological house.
Yep I've worked McDonalds and other jobs. It's not great. I feel for you man. Luckily enough if you're on here you're probably smart and well connected enough to find something much better.
The worst is in personal development. Because modern psychology encourages a feelings first model, people tend to overthink those feelings and put more emphasis on how you feel. This tends to make those feelings last longer and become deeper as you turn a bad day into a bad week and on to full on depression.
I actually do think "working through your feelings" is a legitimate thing, with incredible results. The problem is the actual teaching of it needs to be done by an incredibly wise and spiritually developed person to work. The vast, vast, vast majority of therapists are shambling emotional wrecks themselves, just spilling out their own pain and problems onto their clients.
Hence why I think working with God, Christ, or another idealized figure is, even from a purely secular/materialist lens, far better than trying to rely on flawed human therapists.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
29m ago
· Edited 21m ago
The AI community seems to care more about bioweapon risk, that's a big part of the whole AI safety rhetoric. But why should anyone care about whether AIs can synthesize bioweapons when the experts are already doing it so carelessly?
Nearly all of us also want GoF shut down, to be clear.
There is, however, some significant difference between "a vaccine-resistant smallpox pandemic", as bad as that would be, and the true final form of bioweapons that a superintelligent AI could possibly access.
The absolute best-case of what that looks like, as in "we know 100% that this can be done, we just don't know how yet" is an incompatible-biochemistry alga with reduced need for phosphate and a better carbon-fixer than RuBisCO (we know RuBisCO is hilariously bad by the standards of biochemistry; C4 and CAM plants have extensive workarounds for how terrible it is because natural selection can't just chuck it out and start over). Release this, it blooms like crazy across the whole face of the ocean (not limited to upwelling zones; natural algae need the dissolved phosphate in those, but CHON can be gotten from water + air), zooplankton don't bloom to eat it because of incompatible biochemistry, CO2 levels drop to near-zero because of better carbon fixation, all open-air crops fail + Snowball Earth. Humanity would probably survive for a bit, but >99% of humans die pretty quickly - and of course the AI that did it is possibly still out there, so focussing only on subsistence plausibly gets you knocked over by killer robots a few years later.
Medium-case is grey goo.
Worst-case is "zombie wasps for humans"/"Exsurgent Virus"; an easily-spread infection that makes human victims intelligently work to spread it. To be clear, this means it's in every country within a week of Patient Zero due to airports, and within a couple more weeks it's worked its way up to the top ranks of government officials as everyone prioritises infecting their superiors. Good. Luck. With. That.
It is possible for things, like normal GoF, to be extremely bad and yet still be a long way from the true, horrifying potential of the field.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
34m ago
If you ever go door to door in local politics, you quickly learn to avoid greeting people by their first name, even if they know you could know their address-name connection, and know vaguely that you looked them up in voter records to know they are regular voters, they still get freaked out by being greeted that way.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
36m ago
Fair play.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
39m ago
Thank you for the write up. I never would have had the patience to wade through all that university politics myself, your summary was much punchier.
It's amazing how impactful the Vietnam War was on our culture, and that we never really dealt with it. Dave Barry once said that untangling Vietnam is impossible in America because of the conflicts between two groups: draft dodgers who didn't fight in Vietnam but supported the war (George W. Bush, Donald Trump, Joe Biden0, and veterans who served in and opposed the war (John Kerry, Al Gore, Tim O'Brien). Twenty years after he wrote that, most of those people are dead, but we never got any closer to really figuring out what we thought about it. American society has never really come to grips with what we did in Vietnam.
Who was right between the Kill 'em All Caucus who thinks that We Didn't Lose We Left; and the protestors who said we never should have been there in the first place?
Forrest Gump is an entire film devoted to relitigating the boomer generation's trials and tribulations, and of course Vietnam is a major plot; but when Forrest has to get up at the national mall and say what he thinks about Vietnam, they cut the mic.
The protestors were objectively correct about basically everything they said: Vietnam was a pointless war, Ho ho ho Chi Minh did in fact win, the dominos didn't fall, and fifty years later a Vietnam run by the same Communist Party is a close Capitalist trading partner and just on the border of becoming a direct military ally against Red China. It's hard to see how the destruction of several million Vietnamese and the incineration of billions of dollars of treasure made the world today better in any way, compared to a counterfactual in which the United States simply let North Vietnam reunite with the South without outside interference. One has to posit a lot more hypothetical counterfactual moving parts to get there, and I don't think that justifies the costs.
On the other hand, the establishment won, The Man still stands. The institutions survived and thrived, Nixon and Reagan came back. If the pinko protestors turned out to be right about everything they said with regards to Vietnam, they turned out to be wrong about a lot of other things, and anyway their tone was considered a national shame. I grew up hearing these horror stories about returning veterans being spit on in airports, and so much of the GWOT era of "Support Our Troops" and our subsequent combination of distance from and lack of criticism of the military stems from this era. The colleges and police departments that crushed the campus protestors changed their politics, but they never fell. The direct institutional heirs of all the people who committed the crimes of the Vietnam era are in power today, running the same institutions that did committed those crimes, mostly without any formal apology or real effort to avoid such mistakes in the future.
And they never really squared up what it meant to be the President of Columbia University: the campus protestors of the Vietnam era were right, they were correct, especially according to the liberal leading lights of Columbia; but what does acknowledging that mean to an ordered institution that cooperates with the same US Government that dropped the Agent Orange?
So you end up with this generation of students that have been taught that the Protestors Were Right, and that the 1968 Columbia protests were heroic, and it's really hard to come up with a fact-based argument against them; and then you have the institutional heirs to the organization who have the same incentives to restore and maintain order on campus, and the result is this mishmash of actions.
But what's telling here is that the universities completely lack even a semblance of pain tolerance. Nobody, from the president to trustees to faculty to students, seems to be willing to countenance the idea that they can tell Trump "NUTS" and just go on without federal funding indefinitely. While taking a significant haircut in terms of funding, costs, educational opportunities, etc; the Federal Government can't actually force Columbia to do anything. If Columbia really, truly said as an institution: we're a University, we take academic independence seriously, we're not going to let the federal government get involved in hiring decisions or what we teach... Then there's nothing Trump could do about it.
This was the inevitable endpoint of identity politics, a total inability to tell anyone they are wrong.
Hieronymus
39m ago
These were public policies made by public health professionals. The public health professionals thought the vaccines reduced infection rates and that's why they set the policy the way they did.
They did believe this, but I also remember discussions about how privileges could incentivize vaccination. I think that was applied as an argument in both directions: It was a reason to allow vaccine passports rather than just keeping things closed altogether, and it was an argument for not loosening things up on those the speaker considered defectors against society.
Fortunately for me, my blue state tended to either open things up or close them rather than using a passport strategy, as I was both vaxxed and stubbornly opposed to proving it on principle.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
52m ago
The implication with "Wuhan flu"/"Chinese flu" etc comparisons was that it was comparable to the Spanish flu, which is our primary modern point of reference for a communicable disease that kills a lot of people.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
57m ago
I caught COVID once before vaccines were available. Then I caught it anywhere between 3-4 mores times, including after 2 boosters. There was little difference in severity.
It's not a good idea to go off such n=1 anecdotes in general.
Yes, and the flu shot has very similar but quieter opposition as the Covid vaccine- working class conspiracy theories that it spreads illness, shortens lifespans to save social security, doesn’t work at all but big pharma bribes employers to push it, etc are a dime a dozen.
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