Random Rant Thread

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Oct 28, 2020 14:47:18 GMT 1 bol said:

Oct 27, 2020 16:29:11 GMT 1 miscmisc said:

The Venn Diagrams of pro-wrestling fans and Trump fans overlap like crazy. That's all you need to know in order to understand why MEN of Latin American origins tend to like Trump (not a majority, but a significant minority) despite all the racist insults spewed by the clown over the years, whereas WOMEN of Latin American origins absolutely despise him on average.

Those men just find him exciting and fun while expecting absolutely nothing decent from politics. That's just their cynicism at work.

But Trump must actually get their asses off the couch to the voting booth.

Reminds me of the wwe ceo/owner Vince McMahon, an ally of Trump whose wife is part of the administration. He has a rather similar "charm" as Trump as a rich narcissistic-extroverted guy with quite some entertainment talent.

From what I've seen in wrestling discussions, there's quite some controversy around McMahon - some people dislike him as an exploiter and some former people around him also describe him as a sadist who loves to embarrass people under him, meanwhile there are others who are in favour of him seeing him as an interesting character and some even are like cultists spending tons of time trying to spin everything in favour of him (slandering critics, misrepresenting stories and so on). Wonder if the latter are for a large part what this group is about.

Well, McMahon is of course a sociopath, but of a different type than Trump.

I wouldn't say there's a stable correlation between the MAGA crowd and McMahon apologists, though. You can perfectly embrace Trump's freak show while being critical of McMahon's dealings in the business and his character.

But yes, those who admire McMahon have all the characteristics of Trump cult members. That much is absolutely true.

But it's more of the matter of whether you see politics and even reality as a whole purely as a spectacle to live in, and certain types of pro-wrestling fans absolutely do. They have no reason to support anyone who tries to pull down the Trump spectacle. They don't expect anything substantiative from politics anyway, so genuinely see no point in supporting someone like Biden. Hillary Clinton would make more sense to them than Biden.

And Latinos (male) happen to be a sizable group among those people. I think the PR/research department at McMahon's company would understand what I'm talking about.

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My Dog Ate My Homework 2.0:

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This is amazing if the polls actually reflect the reality.

Republicans are in danger of losing Georgia for pres, and BOTH Senate seats in this Southern state. Wowzer.

And the latter (Senate seats) is a MUCH bigger deal.

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A very good writer.

Cate Blanchett: 'Covid-19 has ravaged the whole idea of small government'
In this extract from essay collection Upturn, the actor considers the disruptions of the pandemic and the renewed fervour for social and economic justice
www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/29/cate-blanchett-covid-19-has-ravaged-the-whole-idea-of-small-government

As a person working in the arts sector, the lockdown was strangely familiar on one level – a lot of actors get stuck in a kind of limbo waiting for someone else to give them permission to do what they are good at. It was as if we were all waiting by the phone for our agent to call. It was also strangely unfamiliar because the community that holds us together, the audiences, as well as the changing of the shows and the new releases, were all put on hold too. The flow between us all was severely affected, and I was both heartened and horrified when it began to surface online. Heartened because the urge to express ourselves and the desire to communicate seems undaunted by anything. Horrified because the worst place to rehearse and perform is alone in the mirror, and sometimes the phone is just a mirror.

A brilliant paragraph.

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This is very helpful. Good presentation.

Ventilation is so, so, so important.

A room, a bar and a class: how the coronavirus is spread through the air
english.elpais.com/society/2020-10-28/a-room-a-bar-and-a-class-how-the-coronavirus-is-spread-through-the-air.html?ssm=TW_CC

And for the n-th time:

At present, health authorities recognize three vehicles of coronavirus transmission: the small droplets from speaking or coughing, which can end up in the eyes, mouth or nose of people standing nearby; contaminated surfaces (fomites), although the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicates that this is the least likely way to catch the virus, a conclusion backed by the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (ECDC) observation that not a single case of fomite-caused Covid-19 has been observed. Then finally, there is transmission by aerosols – the inhalation of invisible infectious particles exhaled by an infected person that, once leaving the mouth, behave in a similar way to smoke. Without ventilation, aerosols remain suspended in the air and become increasingly dense as time passes.

Disinfecting everything is primarily for your mental health. There's very little evidence for fomite transmissions (via contaminated objects) .

You must:

1. Wear a mask

2. Ventilate/avoid poorly ventilated spaces

(and wash your hands)

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Facial masks is a good litmus test on whether someone knows what they are talking about.

And that's valid even if you don't think they work. You can be a MAGA fool who thinks masks destroy your freedom, and this test still works for you.

Find a person - preferably an "expert" - who's against masks, and ask the person what the downsides of wearing masks are.

If their answers include "the false sense of security," they have no idea what they are talking about.

With virtually all kinds of safety measures, including seatbelts, this "false sense of security" argument has been proven false by sociological studies.

You don't believe in the efficacy of masks, because you think they physically do not work for whatever reasons. Any other reason is utter bullshit of a typical too-clever-by-half kind.

I can guarantee you that this works every time, with anyone.

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Ossoff: "It's not just that you're a crook, senator."

Perdue is such a piece of shit that I'm glad that he's now trailing behind Ossoff by 2 points (he was leading the Democrat by 5-7 points in the previous poll).

I will be so happy if both Perdue and Loeffler get ousted. They really are the worst.

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This is very promising. The sample size is big enough too.

So, yes, this is the one that Trump took. You can't definitively say that he recovered thanks to this, but these results are VERY good.

But of course, the US government has been so negligent that it has no plan to make sure such drugs can be mass-produced and made available for the population outside the small circle of people including Donald Trump.

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In South Korea, for example, several factories have been permanently ready to switch productions in a day or two and mass-produce good stuff.

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Arizonans: "... Who? Maybe some actor from a James Bond movie?"

It kinda sucks I can't make the "Remember Brexit?" joke here because I talk about it way too often in this thread.

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In case you still don't know what the hell has been going on with Brexit, well, it's already happened. Brexit has actually happened. That's what the law says.

Doesn't feel like it because they are in a negotiating period of sorts. Trying to finalize the details and so on.

But that's probably news to most people in America (or here in Japan too for that matter). I bet quite a few of them think it has been cancelled or something. 

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This is a pretty devastating indictment of the sorry state which our society is in.

2020 has been a pretty... well, *eventful* year, but nothing really moved the needle one way or another.

It's almost like even the kind of events that do affect your life in a profound way don't really matter, because it's all just a gigantic tribal game where you live in an enormous echo chamber.

The right-wingers are far more responsible for this, and we can all thank Mark Zuckerberg for being even more effective than Fox News at creating this dysfunctional society.

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You really have to work hard to come up with a group of such shit "writers" and "scholars."

www.scholarsandwritersfortrump.com/

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OK, I have to do a bit of PR for my woman - well, this doesn't sound right... I mean, the female version of "my man," and that is of course AOC.

AOC’S NEXT FOUR YEARS
www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/10/becoming-aoc-cover-story-2020?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_brand=vf&mbid=social_twitter&utm_social-type=owned

On the cover of Vanity Fair, baby!

I know some of you are rather scared of her than inspired by her, and that's fine. Maybe some of you are leftists who are disappointed at her being too cozy with mainstream libs, and that's fine too. Hell, you may have a point.

But I'm still on the train, baby. Full steam ahead.

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A Flu Shot Might Reduce Coronavirus Infections, Early Research Suggests
www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-flu-shot-might-reduce-coronavirus-infections-early-research-suggests/

It is far from conclusive, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if this turns out to be the case.

I briefly mentioned way back the BCG vaccine being potentially able to mitigate the SARS-CoV-19 infection to some extent, and there are many, many ongoing researches on that in multiple countries now precisely because there are a lot of scientists who take that theory seriously enough.

Partly because it looks statistically significant, and also because it makes sense, immunologically speaking.

The flu vaccine is very different from the BCG vaccine of course, but a similar mechanism may be at work.

Who knows. But it's very important to take a flu shot anyway. I did, and so should you.