The great pandemic might be the most warned about disaster in human history https://t.co/YUSNtJZNQY pic.twitter.com/sBfmXQKMGV
— Ronan (@rfitz77) May 3, 2020
But…”no one could have known!”
Everyone who wasn’t a dumbass knew. I have been reading books about this topic for at least 15 years. This was inevitable. I will keep beating this drum because I am already seeing the above “no one could’ve known” garbage everywhere. And there will be much, much more of it.
Wooden Bomb: A largely-hypothetical nuclear weapon with absolute reliability, an infinite storage life, and which requires no special handling, storage, or surveillance while in stockpile. The term derives from the expression “as trouble-free as a block of pine.”
From The Swords of Armageddon: U.S. Nuclear Weapons Development Since 1945, Volume 1
If you think Covid-19 deaths are bad now, wait till you get a load of fall. That’s when it’s really going to hit hard.
My wrists seem to have unexpectedly grown stronger with kettlebells: can hold iron cast pan for much longer with more flexibility 💪🏽
This is the kind of things that barbells seem to miss
— Trishank Karthik Kuppusamy (@trishankkarthik) April 30, 2020
I had to shift a full refrigerator out of its alcove recently, without much room to do it. My wrists, arms, core, everything is vastly stronger. I was actually surprised by how strong I was and how readily I could just make it do what I wanted.
I’ve moved refrigerators before that weren’t even full and it was not at all easy. I moved this one like it was nothing.
It’s great being strong again.
Yesterday while taking a walk I met an older man who worked at a chain grocery store and who told me that Corona is a hoax to impose socialism and that it didn’t kill that many people
We’re in a city that, according to the Times, has 20k dead. Folks like him are the most at risk
— Molly Crabapple🇵🇷 (@mollycrabapple) May 3, 2020
Once upon a time, I naïvely used to believe that once people were directly affected by climate change, they’d start to believe in the truth of it. Now I know this was wrong. People could literally be drowning from climate-change-induced flooding and they’d still deny its actuality and its effects.
Molly’s anecdote above demonstrates that mode of cognitive failure perfectly. Now I realize there is nothing — nothing at all — that’d make a very large percentage of people believe the truth if it’s something they are dead-set against. Once it’s tied into one’s identity, most would rather die than admit the veracity of something that contradicts that identity.
This is why we cannot and will not solve climate change, but it will solve us.
If someone's idea for the way society should function include downsides or tradeoffs, this does not automatically make it a bad idea.
If your ideas for how society should function also include zero downsides or tradeoffs, your ideas are probably not very good.— Aella (@Aella_Girl) May 2, 2020
This is the issue with a lot of liberal ideas about the world isn’t it? They’ve fetishized perfection, demonized anyone who says that it’s unachievable, that the world has ineluctable tradeoffs just by the circumstances of living in an entropic universe (if nothing else), and then expel as unclean anyone who points out these necessary concessions to reality.
This is the obverse of centrism, I think. The “we can’t try anything or do anything because it’s not perfect” approach to the world.
My main mistakes in life have always resulted from assuming people were smarter than they actually were.
I love this quote from Richard Feynman: https://t.co/JdieUKfIIW
"Learn from science that you must doubt the experts…Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." pic.twitter.com/tcCdWrYuNR
— Rudy Havenstein, gradually, then suddenly. (@RudyHavenstein) May 2, 2020
That is pretty much my approach and attitude right there. Experts often know much less than they pretend to, and even if they do know something it’s inapplicable or invalid in the now-changed circumstances.
I don’t have any hatred for uptalk as some do, but I often can’t tell if those who use it are asking me a question or not. Sometimes I start answering the question I think they’ve asked, only to realize they weren’t really intending the interrogative at all.