like 95% of my cognitive abilities apparently go to "accurately weighing the MANY variables that determine if a restaurant is good or sucks using a methodology that is very hard to verbalize"

— Faine Greenwood (@faineg) January 10, 2022

I am also great at finding good restaurants, but this skill very much applies to other things too. This isn’t an isolated capability and I think she is being humble/underselling herself.

To find a good restaurant one must evaluate multiple noisy signals, ignore what most people believe to be true and compensate for all the review tampering. One must also adjust for regional factors and preferences (for instance, where a lot of old people live, very terrible restaurants with plain food will tend to be spoken of highly).

How I find a good restaurant is exactly the same method I use to determine if an expert is bullshitting or lying, and how I figure out complex problems in my day job. These skills are inseparable. It’ll never be perfect, but I’ll take my 80-90% hit rate in all those fields over most people’s 0-10% any damn day.

Sex with my husband is amazing – so why doesn’t he orgasm?

Eh, I’ve never orgasmed easily and never will. It doesn’t matter hugely to me. And if I overheat during sex, which I am prone to doing as I do not really sweat, there’s no way in hell it’s happening.

Contrary to what you read, not every guy is the same. Not all are motivated by the same things in the bedroom or anywhere else. I know that both male conformity-policing and feminists have portrayed all men as slavering, orgasm-seeking beasts, but it just ain’t so.

The husband might need a little help, but maybe that’s just how he is. (Still, having an honest and empathetic conversation about it is the right thing to do.)

Thinking about the time I got in trouble in first grade because there was some assignment to color a dog. And I colored mine orange because at the time we had an orange dog named Pork Chop. As neatly as I could, I wrote “Pork Chop” above my work.

The teacher then berated me because she claimed, “There’s no such thing as an orange dog and there’s no dog named ‘Pork Chop.'” After that, my art went full Fauvist (though I did not yet know that term) and I did what I wanted. Got sent to the principal a lot too as a result.

Thank you, first grade teacher, for turning me against the entire system early.

Lockdowns extend pandemics, assuming they work. That is their literal purpose, to drag out infections over a longer time scale to reduce hospital load

— Ryan Connell (@connellryan1) January 9, 2022

That’s exactly what lockdowns do and is their whole point. It’ll make a lot of people angry, but it’s in fact tautological.

Lockdowns cannot end a pandemic like Covid. Simply cannot. That was wishful thinking by those more hopeful than knowledgeable.

I am the suspicious activity I want to see in the world.

I wonder if the lib side transitioning more and more to “the vaccines don’t work” view will mean the conservatives shift the other way? It’s somewhat likely, I think.

People like jwz and other lockdown lifer Covid apocalypse people are in all but name anti-vaxxers. They lie about what the vaccines do, how they work, what they are capable of, and who would benefit from them

They all but say they are pointless. Just go to the anti-vax side. That’s where you belong. It’s ok. I can hate you just as well there, too.

The Long COVID news is still looking dire.

A lot of wrong, probably wrong, and absurdly wrong info in here.

One of the alarmist tweeters that jwz cited even admits he interpreted the main “Long Covid” study incorrectly.

In fact, that was EXACTLY how I interpreted the study, but I missed that they had a significant confounder — including single-dose individuals in the "vaccinated" cohort.

The secondary analysis tells a different story, showing double-vaccination provides a measurable benefit.

— Ian Ricksecker (@IanRicksecker) January 9, 2022

The lockdown lifers are grasping at anything they can now as Covid transitions to just another mild coronavirus among the half dozen that spread around the world every year. Long Covid is real, but is not the apocalypse people are wishing for, and 90% of people will recover from it — and getting vaccinated does seem to help even after the fact.

I have begrudging sympathy for the anti-vaxxers sometimes, though I will never be one of the moronic members of that tribe. And I have that sympathy because people are frequently and obviously lying to them about things, supposedly for their own good.

The jwz claptrap is really, really irresponsible and makes people getting vaccinated less likely.

(From what I’ve seen in reality rather than what these alarmists are prattling about, the chances of a double- or triple-vaccinated individual getting long Covid are basically nil, depending on how you define it of course. That is, they are about the same as a vaccinated person getting “long polio.”)

the specific trigger for this tweet(s) is seeing pictures of this guy who's my age, that I haven't seen since I was a teenager. at the time he was bluster and bravado, had a sexy panther sort of energy. it seems gone now, he seems more relaxed but also… domesticated?

— visa is doing final edits (99.2%) ✍🏾📖 (@visakanv) January 7, 2022

I looked up a few of the dominant jocks in high school not long ago. Damn, they did not age well. Even though more than a few of them bullied me, I almost pitied them. Almost.

They look domesticated, fat and weak. Whereas I’ve gotten better and bolder and stronger and wilder in my middle age. I became unleashed. I think now I could bodyslam most of them into the lockers. Well, except the ones who weigh 400 pounds now. Gonna have to work out just a wee bit more for that.

“I have enough food *because* someone else is starving.”
“I am safe *because* someone else is in danger.”
“I am respected *because* someone else is despised.”

this may sound like an absurd caricature but I can assure you that I have met numerous people who think this way!

— ƨꭋɘƨꭋɘvdo (@obversers) June 16, 2021

Most people think this way, I believe. It’s what capitalism as we practice it tells us, and liberalism is worse even than conservatism in a lot of ways regarding their reinforcement of this ideology. All is a zero-sum game, in our current mythology. If you have something it must’ve been taken from someone else; otherwise, how did you get it?

Yes, the world doesn’t work and doesn’t have to work this way, but in believing it, we have made it so in many cases, and are worsening this. It’s possible to have a world that lifts everyone, but no one seems to really want this.

I think I’ve figured out why a lot of liberal types hate weightlifting and people who improve themselves that way. It’s related to the real reason many women (and more than few men) hate pick-up artist stuff: it’s that people are upgrading themselves “artificially,” achieving advantages they otherwise would not have been able to attain.

To many libs, there is the way you “really” are (whatever the fuck that means) and improving yourself beyond that is seen as an unearned advantage. They don’t see education that way, of course, because it’s the terrain on which PMC-class libs were born competing, so they just view that as the natural order of things — even though, logically, from their diseased viewpoint it should be no different.

Upgrading yourself outside the narrow spectrum of the approved areas elicits their scorn, which in truth should be worn like a badge of honor.