Random Rant Thread

[K1power]

While the topic is being discussed again I might as well give you guys a bit of an update from my end.

A few weeks ago mask regulations have loosened up over here and we don't have to wear them in stores anymore.
That said, even after getting my first shot I wasn't immediately comfortable with the idea of walking around public buildings again without wearing one. I'm rather careful and can't just go on/off cold turkey with something like this.

I eventually stopped wearing them, but always have one with me or in the car just in case. I still social distance, wipe everything that may have been touched and wash my hands (probably) entirely too often. I've also been pretty much avoiding all types of social functions with friends and family since March last year.

When it comes to my relatives I believe the majority of them has been vaccinated or is in the process of it. As far as friends go I have two main groups; one of them is mostly vaccinated, the other one isn't. I flat-out told the anti-vaxxer group I'm not even considering meeting up with any of them. They know I judge them for it, and they probably consider me a sheep. It is what it is.

A few of my acquaintances started spewing anti COVID/regulations/vaccine BS on social media and I dropped them like a bad habbit. If you're no more than an acquaintance I don't have the time and energy for your bullshit.

After a very slow start, currently 55,7% of the population is fully vaccinated here in the Netherlands. Let's hope more people get their heads out of their asses. It's a scary idea that some people need to be on a ventilator before reluctantly seeing the light.

Now that I got my second shot and things are opening up again there is a handful of reunions with friends around the corner that I'm looking to attend.

I dunno, it feels weird. It's a mixture of excitement and nerves I guess.

Hope all of you are doing well.

[miscmisc]

Good to know that you've managed it well so far. Congrats on your second shot. I took mine (Moderna) too, and boy did I have nasty side effects the next day, lol. The headache and fatigue were even more intense than the ones that I had with real Covid. Go figure.

I went back to my Texas home earlier this year, and I just knew that there was going to be a huge wave there again. The vaccination rates are still significantly higher over there than in Japan, but everyone was acting as if it were basically over. Almost all of my friends were acting that way even in my "liberal" social bubble despite the Delta variant very obviously creeping into the state, and a huge number of people plainly refusing to get vaccinated ever.

Even the prudent Americans went ahead of themselves in the vaccination euphoria to such a degree that now they even get mad at the idea that maybe, maybe people should mask up again. The vaccination rates in the US are way too low for their current life style to be justified given the super-spreading nature of the Delta variant.

The only thing that has prevented the situation in those US states from getting even worse is the fact that vaccinated people and unvaccinated ones just don't mingle. They live in different worlds now. Not that they didn't before, but there are such clear lines to separate the tribes these days.

Anyway, I still do not see the vaccination rates in the US significantly improve. I'm sure there are some people at the margin who can still be persuaded, but not many.

[miscmisc]

I have been called a doom&gloom guy, most notably by myself, in this thread pretty much since the beginning, but there has also been one constant theme that appears to contradict my doom&gloom label on the surface yet actually ties almost all of my rants together at the deepest level - and it is that people tend to think, for no good reason, that they live in some special, unique period in history.

That they just love to think that they are special in some way.

UNPRECEDENTED technological revolution! 

UNPRECEDENTED political crisis!

And they are almost always wrong. I have to say "almost" because, for instance, the WWII generation in Eurasia can say justifiably that they lived in a very unique period in history, a period of humongous destruction that is.

Now, I usually don't quite agree with Matt Yglesias. And in fact, I don't really agree with him on many of the points that he raised in the article below. But in terms of the basic insight, or "philosophical temperament" if you will, he and I are in a very, very similar place. It's just that I would be a bit more alert to the "black swan" aspect of social/natural phenomena, and I certainly don't rate liberalism nearly as highly as he does.

I'm pretty sure the article will be absolutely shat on by much of both left and right, but I understand where his insight and frustration comes from. Part of my mind is always, always there too.

The case against crisis-mongering
We face problems. As have all societies ever.
www.slowboring.com/p/fake-crisis

[miscmisc]

Ed Yong's latest article has been upped an hour or so ago:

HOW THE PANDEMIC NOW ENDS
Cases of COVID-19 are rising fast. Vaccine uptake has plateaued. The pandemic will be over one day—but the way there is different now.
www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/08/delta-has-changed-pandemic-endgame/619726/

This new surge brings a jarring sense of déjà vu. America has fallen prey to many of the same self-destructive but alluring instincts that I identified last year. It went all in on one countermeasure—vaccines—and traded them off against masks and other protective measures. It succumbed to magical thinking by acting as if a variant that had ravaged India would spare a country where half the population still hadn’t been vaccinated.

[miscmisc]

As Ed's article says, the Delta variant's R0 seems to be 7-ish. By any reasonable measure that's not the same virus at all as the one that I caught back in Feb/March 2020. The original SARS-CoV-2, and even the Alpha/Kent variant, relied a whole lot on super-spreading events, which practically rendered R0 deceptive, but with such an astonishingly high R0, that number pretty much says everything about the virus. In other words, the Delta variant doesn't need any super-spreaders to ravage communities. If you've got it, you are likely to give it to others.

And if you haven't got it - and perhaps even if you already got it months ago like me - you are likely to get it at some point too. Hopefully you will have been fully vaccinated when that happens.

Oh, and with such a high-R0 virus with SARS-CoV-2's characteristics, the herd immunity through vaccination alone is mathematically unachievable.

[miscmisc]

This thread is pretty nice as no braindead cretins have jumped in to say, "IF YOU WERE SICKER WITH VACCINE THAN COVID IT'S THE CURE WORSE THAN THE DISEASE ISN'T IT!!!!!!?????" yet. I was absolutely exhausted to deal with those roaches elsewhere who seem unable to THINK.

Perhaps that's entirely because only 8 people read this thread, but still nice.

[miscmisc]

What's truly idiotic about the whole demonic-liberal child-prostitute hysteria of QAnon and other assorted right-wing nutjobbery is that the underage prostitution thing has been a right-wing phenomenon for decades. I hinted at that many times in this thread too. I've talked to many of those former underaged prostitutes for older men (and even older women, too) as part of my field study way back. Their customers were mostly conservatives, including Christian fundamentalists.

It's mostly middle-aged-and-above "business owners" and the likes who are super into sex with underage girls, or boys too for that matter. And traditionally those people are overwhelmingly Republican. Therefore there are GOP operatives who organize that kind of stuff behind the scene, like these people.

St. Thomas GOP Chair Gisela Castro Medina Arrested In Florida On Sex Trafficking Charges
minnesota.cbslocal.com/2021/08/14/st-thomas-gop-chair-gisela-castro-medina-arrested-in-florida-on-sex-trafficking-charges/#.YRmUC1XhLFl.twitter

[miscmisc]

15 years ago I just didn't imagine myself defending Joe Biden, of all people, on 90% of his policy decisions 15 years later.

The question remains the same, though: How the fuck should we deal with the fickle, incoherent, irresponsible media and general public like this?

[miscmisc]

Erm, wait, she used to what???



Who is this shite geyser anyway? I've been a Guardian subscriber for ages, and still haven't figured out who the fuck she is.

[miscmisc]

Look, I could throw thousands of words at you to get into your skull what it was like to be not only against the Iraq War but also against the Afghan war back in 2001-2003, what a lonely, miserable place it was. But I will spare you all of that.

Instead, I'll just repeat the fact that over these 20 years they spent one trillion dollars to produce a complete Potemkin state that has collapsed faster than the speed of light with the minimum push by Taliban. This colossal failure doesn't seem to have discredited the whole monstrous enterprise even an iota for most of the mainstream reporters out there.

Just absolutely appalling.

[gols]

Aug 12, 2021 14:10:03 GMT 1 miscmisc said:

I'm pretty sure the article will be absolutely shat on by much of both left and right, but I understand where his insight and frustration comes from. Part of my mind is always, always there too.

The case against crisis-mongering
We face problems. As have all societies ever.
www.slowboring.com/p/fake-crisis

I can see what he means with regards to Trump etc, but he seems to be severely underestimating the impacts of climate change. The collapse of human civilization and possible extinction of most life on the planet seems like a pretty major crisis! Unless he means that the dinosaur society has already faced it...

[miscmisc]

He wrote a book titled One Billion Americans after all. He clearly hasn’t sufficiently thought it through. This notion that you can find all the solutions inside liberalism is laughable.

But even on this one, I kind of understand his sentiment. There are far too many people, typically on the left, who irresponsibly advocate the kind of stereotypically "incoherent left" stuff that would have zero chance of ever being accepted by more than 120 people. That kind of reckless advocacy will only lead to nihilism in the end. They seem in love with the image of themselves as super-serious social warriors, but fundamentally they are not serious people. I’d rather pay attention to what an EV engineer says than listen to any of those fools.

Only the moronic half-wits whose entire ideology consists of a bunch of tired Reaganite talking points would say in this day and age that there are “free market solutions” to climate change, but I’m very annoyed and even troubled by the likes of Sunrise Movement on the left as well.

[miscmisc]

Ah, yes, when it comes to issues like the occupation and war in Afghanistan, you definitely seek lectures from Brits, globally famous for graceful exits from imperial excesses and errors.

Parliament holds Joe Biden in contempt over Afghanistan
MPs and peers unite to condemn ‘dishonour’ of US president’s withdrawal and his criticism of Afghan troops left behind to face Taliban
www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/08/18/parliament-holds-joe-biden-contempt-afghanistan/

These fools never understand how ridiculous and grotesque they sound and even look to much of the world.

[miscmisc]

I'm against the "booster" shot in the US and elsewhere. Those hoarders.

It's amazing that people in the "first world" generally have no idea about the MASSIVE vaccine supply issue in much of the rest of the world. Even Japan, who placed orders earlier than virtually anyone other than the US and UK, had to waste precious two months because of the supply issue (and now will hoard like the US/UK/EU of course).

A pandemic needs a global solution. Hoarders will significantly delay it.

[miscmisc]

I've just halted my New York Times subscription. Couldn't stand it anymore, since the paper even stopped providing accurate information. Now it's entirely about the brand image, full of asinine articles full of misinformation. The paper seems to assume that every reader only knows things superficially and therefore they can get away with lazy assertions and plain falsehood.

They also seem utterly unable to stop the bad habit of free-riding on other journalists' work without giving them any credit at all.

And experts, in any field, should notice and cringe at how absolutely careless and irresponsible about important details the NYT people are if they read a NYT article on their own professional field. I've had to cringe about 10 times in the last six months alone.

I suppose that reflects this current world, where everyone is a shallow jack of all trades and master of none. So perhaps they have simply adapted themselves well to that.

So, well done, and farewell, the Paper of Record. I won't miss you at all.