Random Rant Thread

[miscmisc]

America was quietly saved today.

[miscmisc]

I just cannot for the life of me understand the Americans who are still going ahead with their "normal" Thanksgiving holidays, inviting/visiting their elderly parents.

"Oh, don't worry, there will be 28 people, but everyone will have been tested."

Jesus Christ, man. SARS-CoV-2 will feast on these fools.

No, most of them aren't even part of the MAGA "Freedom" crowd (they, for one, wouldn't even bother to get tested).

There must be one thousand screws loose in their heads. EVERYONE is telling them that vaccines are around the corner, and still they can't forgo ONE Thanksgiving.

What kind of twisted pretzel logic would they come up with if their parents ended up in ICU beds, and then dead? I for sure wouldn't allow them to blame it on the fucking viruses.

[miscmisc]

[miscmisc]

I'm probably not exaggerating it if I say that about half of the women who have tried to convince me on chakra, chi, zodiacal power distribution, the Meridians, some ancient Japanese woo-woo that I had never heard of, quantum spiritual connections and so on in my life are QAnon believers now. That's my impression.

It's kind of astonishing. One of them went to Yale.

[miscmisc]

You could say Ed is a bit too harsh here, but Iowa is definitely way, waaaaaaaay past the stage where these "partial" measures - restaurants/bars closed at 10PM, gatherings up to 14 people, mask mandatory *if within 6 feet of someone else for 15 minutes or longer* (LOL) -  would have any effect at all. That crazy right-wing governor deserves something much worse than sarcasm.

[miscmisc]

Looks like we have at least two vaccines that actually work. It's hard to imagine this turning out to be wrong later.

COVID-19 vaccine trial complete, Pfizer and BioNTech update their promising result
www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/covid-19-vaccine-trial-complete-pfizer-and-biontech-update-their-promising-result

Like I said, with these numbers, SARS-CoV-2 will have an incredibly hard time next year.

[miscmisc]

I feel sorry for Stanford graduates. What a shit school. They covered themselves with shit through this pandemic.

Mordor of the Covid misinformation. You might say it's just the Hoover Institute, but since the school never disowns that odious think tank, they are inseparable.

Well, actually I don't feel sorry for them because everyone knew it was a shit school, and they decided to go there anyway. Who in the right mind would go to Stanford if they have other options.

[miscmisc]

A friend of mine who lived in rural Wisconsin for five years has just left their rural town for Milwaukee, because he and his families were yelled at as they were wearing masks in public - even by the people that he used to have dinner parties with.

His son has a preexisting condition. Many people in the town should know that. Yet they yelled and called my friend "sheep."

He couldn't stand it anymore. He quit the job that he loved, and moved out. His new job in the city pays less, but he feels a lot safer now.

Rural America is not a place for sane people to live in now. It's a complete wasteland.

[miscmisc]

Still so many people don't understand it. It's so frustrating.

This is not the flu because with the flu, one virus carrier infects 1-2 other people, on a fairly consistent basis if the conditions are met.

With Covid-19, most people do NOT infect others. But those who do can infect 100 other people, easily.

That's a HUGE difference. That's why you cannot treat this one just like the flu. It's just a very, very different viral disease with fundamentally different characteristics.

But so many people still treat it like the flu. They say that they understand it's not the flu but don't act like it, because they don't understand that when we say "It's not the flu," we aren't really talking about the fatality rates and so on.

When we say that it's not the flu, we aren't talking about its severity but about its nature.

[miscmisc]

This is amazing.

nederland.isidewith.com/en/

My result was... 95% GroenLinks. I don't know if I should be happy with this result or not, lol.

[miscmisc]

One way to see Trump's defeat is that he lost the election as the incumbent despite the fact that 56% of Americans said they were financially better off than they were four years ago. And since the incumbent is Republican and this well-known Gallup polls tend to skew toward Democrats, the estimated number is even higher than 56%.

That's HIGHLY unusual. Normally an incumbent with such a solid number never loses the election.

[miscmisc]

This is the argument/message now.



"We have wanton disregard for human lives, and that should scare China."

[miscmisc]

Even as a joke (which it isn't), there's a big flaw in the above argument.

What this pandemic has shown is Americans' wanton disregard for *other people's lives*. I know too many health workers not to know how a typical American asshole acts when they learn they themselves got Covid - total panic.

In a war, you sacrifice your life for *other people's lives*. This pandemic has shown that Americans are bad at that if anything.

Excessive narcissism dominates our society. The only thing that can save it in a real war is technology, and when that becomes ineffective for whatever reason, the whole thing would fall apart. The US is extremely powerful. But it's also a paper tiger in many ways, which the Chinese know.

[miscmisc]

The more I learn about what happened in Florida in this election, the more I'm convinced that liberals just fundamentally do not understand America.

I wouldn't say that identity politics is always bad. There are occasions and issues in which it's even necessary.

But you rely on that in a big election at your own peril.

Many of them seem to have learned nothing from their failure in 2016.

[miscmisc]

Theodor Adorno said that in authoritarianism there tends to be deliberate clownishness, as a counter force against the norms and traditional order.

Trump is a total clown, but that can't be a reason to dismiss his moves as mere jokes. If you are a democrat, with a small 'd', you ought to recognize it as what it is - an authoritarian revolt against democracy.