Random Rant Thread

[miscmisc]

I don't know whether these people are trying to get the most "excitement" out of the attention that the pandemic gave them.

"But recent vaccine trials showed us that there is no cross-strain protective immunity for a variant of the virus."

Er, what?

The vaccine worked less well against B.1.351 (the Brazilian variant), but only in the sense that it couldn't prevent some people from getting infected and having symptoms. The fact of the matter is that NO ONE got sick enough to be hospitalized or die. NONE among the patients, the majority of whom were infected with the very B.1.351 variant!

What the hell does this Dr. Murray mean by "no cross-strain protective immunity?" Isn't what I described above exactly "cross-strain protective immunity?"

What truly matters is whether you actually get sick or/and die of it. If some people do get infected, but few of them get really sick, who cares?

I really don't know why even some "experts" do this, scaring people for God-knows-what purpose.

"COVID-19 is here to stay." All right, Sherlock, so fucking what? We aren't playing the game of elimination here; We are just trying not to get sick, genius.

[miscmisc]

People still seem to underrate QAnon and its danger. It's quite clearly a league above 911 Truth Movement and such. Yes, 911 Truthers are actually a lot more coherent, but that doesn't matter. QAnon is far more extensive, specific, concrete, confident. The scale is just way bigger, and people are willing to actually *act* on it.

It's a religion.

[miscmisc]

One positive thing that the Trump administration did is to burn down the foundation of right-wing economics.

He inherited a decent job market from Obama and "overheated" it with more deficit spending. Then... nothing happened.

No inflation whatsoever. All it did was reduce unemployment even further.

Now, it was no big deal for many - or even most - of the Republican politicians for whom the whole supply-side economics thing was just a political tool to stick it to the libs to begin with. That's why they are trying to recover the austerian narrative again, albeit more subtly than before. They don't care whether it's a valid argument or not.

But what about those poor "Moderate Republican" economists? What about those poor "supply-side" business Republicans? The Greg Mankiws and Meg Whitmans of the world who kept saying for decades that deficit spending would not only cause inflation but also significantly damage productivity and even *lower* employment?

What about their credibility? The whole school of thought has been completely reduced to a political tool. It's not considered a serious argument anymore.

Let's cry for that particular kind of conservative "Never Trumpers."

[miscmisc]

By far the best acting that I've seen in a long time. Frighteningly real.

This dude's literally the essence of every half-drunk horny white frat boy in America. Nailed it beautifully, and the chin-guard mask is a nice 2020-21 touch too, lol.

[miscmisc]

Economists/data analysts in economics have almost consistently produced better models for Covid-19 than epidemiologists.

Unfortunately that's a fact. Like I said, the whole field needs to do some hard self-reflection. It's a mess riddled with basic data analysis errors.

[miscmisc]

It's amazing that every single problem (for British businesses/workers) that I noticed after Brexit has turned out to be caused by a *British* position/insistence, and thus inevitable and basically unsolvable.

It's pure politics to insist on the so-called "freedom" of, say, food hygiene rules. That completely meaningless insistence, in the name of "independence," makes exports/imports of many, many British businesses practically impossible. Their EU trading partners will have to look elsewhere, and many small businesses will be crushed, run over by a freight train.

It looks incredibly perverse. What kind of a "negotiation" is that?

There's a staggering amount of incompetence and irresponsibility in this. The EU is not an innocent party either, but this is just madness.

There would be riots over this if British people really understood what their government got them into. It's just that they don't seem to understand any of it.

[miscmisc]

Yet somehow he felt the need to wear an expensive *N95 mask* underneath. Weird isn't it if he wears a mask(s) only because he would be fined otherwise in the Capitol.

These fuckers think most Americans are absolutely stupid.

[miscmisc]

I knew I wasn't the only one who was getting increasingly disturbed by this trend, and sure enough:

[miscmisc]

???????

This retarded clown is who represents a former president of the United States of America, folks.

Just incredible.

[miscmisc]

This is like a Stalinist show trial except that in this one Stalin and Co. are actually the sane ones who successfully make their opponents and attorneys seem absolutely unhinged and stupid, only to be somehow voted down and lose the case in the end.

I mean, I don't even know what the hell I meant above, but Trump is so guilty that It's plainly absurd that we have to even watch this, and that he most likely won't be punished.

[miscmisc]

And this creep holds his invisible Kipper while drinking water like Marco Rubio.

Fucking degenerates.

[miscmisc]

I've made fun of and criticized the New York Times plenty here and elsewhere. But if you reflexively assumed that the paper fired McNeil only for saying the n-word several times during a trip with high school kids, and that it's an absurd case of the "woke" culture going extreme, you must pause a bit and think.

Now, I know what kind of kids go on that sort of foreign trips. Most of them are rich, non-bright ones, Manhattan kids. They go on those trips for their CV, basically. Not a very trustworthy bunch.

But I also don't think the paper would fire him just like that ONLY because he said the n-word a couple of times in front of those kids. I wasn't there, so I don't really know. But I can easily imagine him being very provocative for no good reason at all, and most importantly, gratuitous.

"The intent doesn't matter" sounds pretty bad, but ultimately you can never know one's true "intent." In that sense, it *can't* matter.

Again, I don't really know what happened, how McNeil behaved. But I'm fairly certain that there was a lot more than merely "saying the n-word several times during the trip" involved in the paper's decision.

[miscmisc]

When you have to defend the indefensible, you must go for absurdity to muddy the water. There's nothing special about that, but only lawyers with no sense of shame whatsoever would stoop that low.

The worst thing about it is that these clowns are saying all that nonsense simply because they have to say something, anything. They are sure that they will "win" in the end anyway, and know that it has nothing to do with the "arguments" that they make. They might as well just be reading out the first 50 pages of Das Kapital or something.

The world is laughing at America.

[miscmisc]

This is a lot worse than the New York Times firing McNeil.

How the Media Cracks Down on Critics of Israel
I was fired as a newspaper columnist after I joked about U.S. military aid to Israel on social media.
www.currentaffairs.org/2021/02/how-the-media-cracks-down-on-critics-of-israel

[miscmisc]

On a related note, this insufferable man is kvetching again.

All of these countries are geopolitically more important for the US than Israel, so there's that, Danny.