domain:streamable.com
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr 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
4hr ago
Fair play.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr 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
5hr 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
5hr 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?
5hr 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.
aldomilyar
5hr ago
I've also felt using it against other historical diseases is outlandish since it's not like somebody was sitting by every single dead body in the Spanish Flu outbreak and doing a genomic test to prove whether or not they'd ever expressed anything
aldomilyar
5hr ago
Why not? It's prettymuch the largest confounder in human history in terms of widespread behavior modification.
There's enough countries/regions in the world on various points of the infection virulence/lockdown severity scale you should be able to work out a metastudy
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5hr 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.
On the social level, the idea of “you don’t know what I’ve been though” has destroyed the mechanism of social shame that once stood as a bulwark against bad behavior. I might well be having a terrible time at home, but why must I treat other people who have nothing to do with that situation poorly? Furthermore, why does modern society insist that those other people are wrong to object? 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. This not only doesn’t help them (honestly, bad behavior tends to make people want to avoid you), but simply spreads all of this around as other people are stuck trying to cope with being treated poorly and use their social permissions to act like jerks in public.
Personally I think it also encourages narcissism as it never seems to get to the point of saying that what’s happening to me is not the most important thing in the world. Im not the center of the story here, and other people deal with is just as important as your problems, in fact they honestly don’t see you or your feelings as nearly as important as you do. Main character syndrome is rampant though and generally the advice of pushing for boundaries and getting what you deserve, and paying special attention to how everything makes me feel has created and maintains that problem. That’s not to say you never think about yourself or stand up for yourself, but I think psychology has pushed this far beyond the bounds of reasonable that many people raised in the modern mindset have no practice in thinking about other people as people.
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.
roystgnr
5hr ago
so might as well worry about what I can control.
It feels like a triage problem, doesn't it?
When your emergency center has too many victims to work on them all right away, you quickly assess them all and mark each person with one of 3 (in the original "tri"-age) tags: one group is going to live without your help, one is going to die regardless of your help, and one is borderline enough that they'll die without your help but live with it. You don't help the victims who need the most help, you help the victims where your help does the most good.
There's a bunch of wild possible futures where humanity dies out regardless of what I do, and there's a bunch of wild possible futures where humanity becomes so rich that we all end up fine no matter what I do. I might as well continue to focus on the more mundane possible futures that fall in between those extremes, even as the in-between category (which once felt nearly certain) becomes less and less likely, because the in-between futures are the only ones where my actions would have made a difference.
Tree
5hr ago
I also support taxing churches. They are very similar. We give them these exemptions and the worst partisans use the surplus to fight a propaganda war against each other at great cost to the rest of us. It's like a polarization subsidy.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5hr ago
Isn’t this a solved problem in a more local sense? You just put a housing development off the main road with deliberately curved and winding streets which has the natural effect of slowing down car speeds and limiting through traffic as long as the entry points were sensibly chosen. No need to be a mid sized town, this can be dropped into bigger city outskirts.
ChickenOverlord
5hr ago
At least in the US, colloquially they aren't called influenza vaccines, they're called "flu shots." Not sure on the origin of not calling them vaccines but my assumption has always been that it's because they don't reliably immunize against or prevent the flu.
JarJarJedi
5hr ago
Interestingly enough, in the movie they also felt the decision processes are not specified at all so they felt it's necessary to introduce a scene where Dr. Mensah essentially tells everybody what to do and then they stand in a circle, hold hands and hum (literally). Given that the show makers can be assumed to be extremely woke by default, it's interesting how they decided to present this. First, they obviously see the need to make decisions, and they go for the natural authoritarian approach (not even a vote!) but then they insert some kind of obscure ritual to woke-wash it and resolve the natural question of "how other people who have no decision power tolerate it?". Simply - they hum.
DirtyWaterHotDog
5hr ago
No more than there is a genocide going on against minorities in Muslim nations. There is strong pressure for displacement. But, I won't call it genocide. We need to reserve that word for the real deal. Can't be diluting definitions for war crimes. (Might be a lost cause)
America has low standards for granting refuge. Indian Sikhs have a 50%+ refugee approval rate despite facing no violence since 1990 and being quite rich by Indian standards. Hell, I'd argue Indian Sikhs are treated a lot better than Hindus in India. (legally and otherwise). White people have a reason to feel unsafe in South Africa. They should leave. They should likely receive refuge by the current standards for refugees in the US.
ChickenOverlord
5hr ago
Biggest impact from COVID on me was a positive one, my job became 100% remote and I was able to wear pajamas for weeks at a time.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
5hr ago
If my (extremely amateur) experiences with images is any guide, then it’s extremely bad at permanecense (google tells me this is not a word but I feel like it is).
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
6hr ago
There would be a deep irony if the money making professors all bailed for China, thus having the opposite effect Trump intended
DirtyWaterHotDog
6hr ago
When has policy ever been about the numbers ? It's about sex appeal.
Utilitarians can be surprisingly blind at times. Covid wasn't sexy. No spectacle, no myth building, no clear narrative. Deaths were slow, honorable & blameless. Ofc people don't care in proportion to the numbers.
No movie or even harrowing video to speak of. Hell, there wasn't even an iconic photo. Statistically, I know the Bengal famine killed a lot of people. But viscerally, my emotions are tied to the photos of piled up bodies, literally (not figuratively) looming vultures and 1st hand stories of families prostituting themselves for food. There is a villain (Churchill). There is intrigue ( what if they hadn't diverted reserves to Australia). There is a story.
Plane crashes are sexier than car accidents, which causes disproportional worry. Tuberculosis, a 'CURABLE DISEASE' !! kills 1.25 million every year. No one cares. Malaria kills 600k every year. Yet, the most visceral image of it is Bill Gates releasing non-viral mosquitoes to a room of white people. Covid is no exception.
The Ukraine war went from being sexy urban warfare 'Hordes of migrants, tanks built up in front of Kyiv, hot women crying and destroyed cities' to more conventional unsexy warfare in the woods. No one cares anymore. Israel and Palestine keep producing visceral imagery at an unheard-of rate, and it stays sexy.
Tragedy has pretty privilege. It's all that matters.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
6hr ago
Not all the endowments can be taken at face value. It’s kind of like a university’s 401K, while it’s counted in net worth it’s not immediately accessible. Also the stock market being unusually good the last 20 years has caused some of them to grow more than expected, but that’s not something you can bank on indefinitely. Thus, the 15 billion being unable to entirely sustain current spending. Even Harvard it’s something similar.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6hr ago
Don't try to engage with this, it's the right wing version of the periodic calls to end tax exemptions for churches. Neither is going to do much of anything.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
6hr ago
I think another sign that something was seriously wrong at Columbia is that they run the Columbia Teacher’s College, the premier destination for teacher training — that is best known in recent years for being the exact ones who were flagrantly wrong on the Science of Reading stuff, ironically mistraining teachers. Great write up.
how amazing the feminist environmentalist communist etc. preservation alliance is
For me it looked very light on details on how exactly amazing it is - like, how their economy actually works? I get it, everything is free and there's no money, but how does it work? Is it just a huge hippie commune? BTW, how huge - how many people actually live there - it is 100 people, a thousand, a million? Never discussed. Who's in charge and what being in charge actually means? How the governance works - who decides what to do and where the external money - which they use - come from, and who decides how much of that money is spent on what? There are some officers - like chief of police - but who appoints them and how? Pretty much none of that is covered except as a third-hand mention in passing by Murderbot who barely understands what it means and really can't even contextualize it, so it just accepts it as "it's how it is with those weird humans but it's my humans so whatever they do must be a good thing". Again, this looks very much like indoctrination process of a college freshman who's not great in critical thinking because it has been successfully educated out of him. This vagueness is a double edged sword and the Murderbot is explicitly an extremely unreliable narrator in all matters human.
the author herself is openly very far left and has in interviews quite clearly talked about the anti-capitalist messages in the murderbot series
That's why I usually avoid authors' interviews (and same for actors, producers, etc.) as much as I can. Usually nothing good comes from it but spoiling a good work of art.
Given Marohn's published views on stroad repair, I suspect he sees the Texas solution - use part of the right-of-way for a limited-access road and part for "frontage roads" (which are actually streets in Marohn's taxonomy) and only allow access between them every few miles
I wonder if Texas got this from Mexico? This is a common pattern in high-traffic areas down there, although IME the driving experience kind of sucks that may be more for Mexico reasons than a flaw with the concept.
The issue is mostly "how do you turn left (and/or cross over) without a bunch of traffic lights on the arterial"?
In Mexico they just... put a bunch of traffic lights on the arterial, with predictable impacts on congestion -- plus the added quirk that left turns are for some reason accomplished by pulling into the slip road to your right, waiting for a left-turn light, then turning left across both directional lanes on the arterial part (also the opposite slip road I guess).
It's kind of fun, but I don't really get it.
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.
More options
Context Copy link