“No me jodas!” https://t.co/8N1gHkFkpB
— Nils Gilman (@nils_gilman) October 31, 2020
Lockdowns are not a good long-term solution. Destroys society in other ways.
Month: October 2020
Yten
The first ten on today’s playlist:
Frow
“Frowzy” is such a great word. A++, would use again.
Hink
People get angry when you tell them to do their own thinking.
Feel the Burn
One of the problems I have with everyone’s identity obsession is that the narcissistic obsession itself and their identities are both just so boring.
My identity as Galactic Overlord is not boring. Which you’ll realize as my space lasers are frying your face off.
Not Equally Bad
I think liberals are obsessed with de-platforming and censorship because they are mostly incapable of offering up any better ideas than their opponents. Not that their opponents have good ideas. They don’t.
But neither do the liberals, and that is our whole problem.
Cor
The funny thing about Corbyn is that he's essentially a Saint, which is why the smears have always been so ludicrous. The man hardly has a mean bone in his body, which was precisely the problem, sadly. https://t.co/xTA2mXVBph
— Ian Welsh (@iwelsh) October 30, 2020
Yeah, he seems like a generally good guy. The UK will be worse off for decades because they (like America) are going fascist lite and discarding leaders like him.
But he was a bit spineless, and that was his doom. However, it’s exceptionally rare to find the necessary ruthlessness in concert with being generally good. That’s a one in a million combo. FDR is the last political leader actually elected to high office I can think of in the US who had both qualities. Probably Al Gore, too, but he didn’t win the only election that mattered.
Corbyn needed more Dexter and less Henri La Fontaine.
Ma
Excuse you, Glenn Close's character is clearly a Meemaw
— Midsammar💭 (@samthielman) October 30, 2020
No, Big Ma.
At least that’s what we called the matriarch of my family when I was a li’l demon child in the rural South.
Lock Us All Up
The horror of permanent quarantine is how perfectly it bleeds into American life—rising despair among the young, the isolation of the old, the failure of the state + society to proactively do anything, the empowerment of a professional caste to arbitrarily enforce the stagnation
— Isaac Wilks 🎤🐢 (@wilks_isaac) October 25, 2020
Well said. Permanent lockdown/quarantine, the weird fantasia that this will work in most countries, is where we’ve arrived because there is not the political nor the social capability currently to attempt any other approach.
However, that does not mean it’s a good one, because it certainly is not. The celebration, nearly, of this absurd level of restriction is something I will never understand.
Intrusive Thoughts
It’d be a terrible and cruel experiment that I’d never do in real life, but it’d be interesting to lead two people to fall in love with you and during this say the same (or as nearly as possible) things to them over the course of the two relationships.
Doing this would make one the Mengele of love, but I’m also sort of curious what would result. How similar are people? What would happen?
Note: don’t do this. It’s evil and bad. But my brain still wonders.
The Old Swing
The reason politics Twitter has a hard time understanding that swing voters exist is because no prominent voices on politics Twitter are swing voters. This is a very partisan and polarized platform and a poor proxy for the electorate as a whole. Campaigns that get this fact win. https://t.co/Zp3lSrPJea
— 1) (@Yair_Rosenberg) October 28, 2020
Twitter believes they don’t exist because as pointed out there are none on Twitter or among the commentariat.
But US elections are so close, even if “only” 5% are swing voters they might be worth competing for. This is something that Twitter people don’t understand because they “can’t imagine” how anyone could not be decided — but most people barely pay attention to politics, have no idea what is occurring in the news, and if they do vote they decide based on little to no information.
This is the reality; Twitter is the mirage.
All the Way Down, Jerry!
From the time of Zeno, philosophers argued and wondered whether the universe was continuous or discrete — flowing in a stream, or stopping and starting in little jerks.
With the discovery of the truth of quantum mechanics, it turns out that the universe consists of jerks all the way down.
Ride Up
Harley-Davidson unveils a gorgeous new electric bike called Serial 1.
Wow that is pretty sweet-looking. I’d totally ride that if I weren’t an American.
Could We Be
So we really are going to go with infinite lockdowns in both the US and the UK as a “solution” to this pandemic.
That’ll go well. Could we be any stupider as a people?
Pollsdown
Heyo, this chart from Deutsche Bank, probably because they are not Americans, says what you’re not allowed to admit anymore, and that is in the last election the polls were way off in quite a few states:
The quant/STEM religion is that they can never be wrong — that we can only fail them, not that they fail — and that belief is strongest in the US, probably because of how much absurd assclownery of the anti-science Right they must constantly push back against.
But yeah, the polls were wrong, the STEMmy quants were wrong, and here we are.