Random Rant Thread

[miscmisc]

The case presented in the impeachment trial is so much better than I ever imagined. Not that there was any doubt that Donald Trump was guilty, but the presentation really hammered home how enormously guilty he is. There were a lot of things that I didn't even know.

In a Stalin show trial, you present a bogus case in a big show, with the predetermined result of conviction. In this one, they presented a strong, compelling case in a big show, with the predetermined result of acquittal. I don't know what we should call it. Reverse-Stalinist?

The fact that it's such a compelling case and that the Dems did such a surprisingly good job presenting it makes the whole thing even more of a farce, a mockery of the rule of law.

[gols]

Latest example of political/media groupthink in UK.

[gols]

Great article basically making exactly miscmiscs point about trade after Brexit:

flipchartfairytales.wordpress.com/2021/01/12/brexit-bureaucracy-its-not-a-bug-its-a-feature/

[miscmisc]

I'm too far away from Britain to understand what's going on, and the online world is not the real one. But it really seems to me that there's disconcertingly little media coverage on Brexit even on the British media. No doubt that has a lot to do with Covid-19. But you'd think there ought to be a little more on such an important topic than that.

There's just nothing on the horizon to make up for the losses caused by small-medium businesses going belly up in various sectors. Foreign businesses are leaving the UK, and none are coming into it. That's another net loss for the British economy.

What that article says - and what I said too - is mostly Captain Obvious stuff, and not even the fine print. But I don't get the impression that people over there understand it.

I'm afraid of the UK becoming yet another major country where mindless outrage politics becomes 100% mainstream. That feels like the endgame of this.

[miscmisc]

What's been going on in Texas re: blackout caused by low temperature really is the textbook on how NOT to run public utilities. It is basically a man-made disaster. It's not that the state hadn't been warned. El Paso went its own way to specifically avoid this, for instance.

Texas has its own electricity grid because it doesn't like government regulations. Texas doesn't update its power plants because it doesn't want to "interfere with the private sector and markets," and, again, because it doesn't like government regulations.

In order to save the hospitals and nursing homes, they basically had to switch off everything else. So it's not rotating blackouts, but just one long solid blackout.

Sure, it's rare to have such cold weather. But not THAT rare. Texas is in the South, but not a tropical paradise. Most of it is a fucking desert.

What an embarrassment.

[miscmisc]

Zuckerberg utterly ruined the world.

[miscmisc]

This is pretty amazing.

You should read the whole thread.

To put it very simply, this suggests two things.

1. The idea of partial herd immunity slowing or even halting the spread of Covid-19 has turned out to be wrong. The curve for herd immunity is NOT linear, which means the idea of natural herd immunity is highly, highly suspect. And you can say that even without mentioning the problem of variants/mutation.

2. The most important thing is the attitude and compliance of the people. The government restrictions and rules, while being necessary and effective to a degree, can only do so much. It depends more on what percentage of the people in the community take it seriously enough.

Not an earth-shattering notion at all, but he calls the political leaning, which has a super-strong correlation with how seriously one takes Covid-19 in the US, "the strongest single variable I've seen in being able to explain the severity of this most recent wave in each state." Since he has been tackling all kinds of Covid-19-related data for months now, that statement has a lot of weight.

[miscmisc]

It's become increasingly evident that those herd immunity fanboy epidemiologists actually didn't pay any attention at all to the notion that natural antibodies can fade out and that the viruses can mutate.

And those people call themselves experts. And some of them even ran the national policies in their countries.

It's like physicists forgetting about quantum tunneling when they study electron.

Academia needs to be cleaned up to get rid of those idiots.

[miscmisc]

A friend of mine in Texas will have to pay $4,500 for five days of electricity usage in his small house.

A fruit of the wholesale deregulation of the industry in the state.

Now watch the companies beg the government for money after all. That's how "free market" always works.

[miscmisc]

Serbia's agonizingly tightrope diplomacy between the "West" and "East," largely necessitated by the geopolitical situation that the country cannot escape, turns out to be an advantage in this case. They can welcome everyone and everything, be it American, British, Chinese, Russian, Indian etc., without any political/emotional hurdles. They are literally buying every vaccine available in the market.

[miscmisc]

I was saying for years that Zuckerberg would ruin our societies in profound ways, and it's good that many people finally realized the extent of the illness. But it's also too late. Way too late.

It's NOT that there's something inherently harmful about the basic mechanism/architecture of Facebook; It's Zuckerberg's business model with that tool that was obviously going to lead to the crazification of people and amplification of conspiracy theory politics. That intellectually vacuous man has been basically monetizing people's loneliness, paranoia, insecurity and fear for years. All tech giants are dangerous entities whose wings will have to be crippled one way or another, but the danger posed by Facebook was most obvious. Yet it took Q fucking Anon for many to see the obvious. Unbelievable. 

And now we'll have to live with the consequences. It's just too late, and that website will keep steadily ruining our society.

[miscmisc]

By far the biggest policy mistake that most countries have made during the pandemic is that they didn't spend enough on bailing out restaurants/bars/pubs. They could've afforded it, but didn't do it. You may think it's just a small thing, but believe me, it will have noticeable political ramifications down the road.

[miscmisc]

You should read this thread if you suffer from the so-called long-Covid, or know people who do.

Anecdotally, I know a person, a man in his 60s, whose long-Covid got significantly better after getting vaccinated. He had suffered from it for three months, with extreme fatigue, low SpO2, loss of focus, etc. He was vaccinated a few weeks ago, and now he's almost as fine as he used to be.

And I know another person, a woman in her 40s, who managed to get out of it after getting reinfected. She had suffered for several months from the usual long-Covid symptoms, including the damage to the sense of taste in her case, but after recovering from her second Covid, in which she had to be actually hospitalized due to dangerously low SpO2 despite feeling less sick than she was in her first one, the symptoms were mostly gone. She's not sure if she's "back to normal," but the difference seems absolutely drastic.

[miscmisc]

Chris Cuomo @ CNN did that embarrassing family jerk-off with his brother while he was sick with Covid, talking about his hallucination of their Dad, Mario Cuomo, and shit like that, massively helping his brother improve his image. It was a clear violation of standard journalistic practice.

And now reaping the embarrassment you sow, etc.

Seriously, it was absolutely, absolutely embarrassing that people gushed over and got aroused by that megalomaniac liberal Trump clone. Many fools seriously talked about him running for president instead of Biden. I called them idiots, and now you see they were and most likely still are fucking idiots.

Andrew Cuomo is really one of the biggest assholes that I know. If you think he's arrogant, multiply that by four. I'm so happy that he's going down in flames.

[miscmisc]

Jake Tapper @ CNN, the quintessential centrist of the US mainstream media, going disconcertingly left.

Seriously, this realization is the central pillar of being leftist in America.