Vax Lacks

Am I crazy or was anti-vax originally far left-wing?

It was always a bit of both, but the far left-wing was dominant (maybe 60% of anti-vaxxers) up until 2015-ish or so. Then the right wing really started going batshit about then and now anti-vax clowns are about 70% MAGA dumbasses.

It’ll probably trade off again one day. Meanwhile, dozens of thousands will die easily-preventable deaths.

And yes, people will attempt to gaslight you, claiming it was “always” and only a right-wing thing to be anti-vax. History says different.

Freed From To

When you say that tattoos look bad people always come out of the damn woodwork saying, “I have right to do whatever I want with my own body!” Sure do. I agree with that 100%.

But I also have a right to say, “Damn, that looks like absolute crap.”

Those rights aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, both need to exist to have a free society.

Literate Rate Iterate

I wish there were a way to measure “practical literacy” vs. “can recognize some words and sound them out.”

That said, let’s talk about what’s pinging around in my brain. Literacy rates worldwide went from about 12% in the early 1800s to about 88% in 2016.

I suspect that 2016 number is about the peak of what I deemed above to be “practical literacy.” Already, large portions — perhaps even the majority — of Gen Z is not even close to being literate in any real sense. This will probably only get worse as TikTok and similar scourges take over the collective culture. Literacy is now passรฉ in the literal French verb sense — as in “past.” It’s no longer required nor desired for and by the majority of the population.

This ramifications of this change will be just as large an alteration of society as widespread literacy was. And I do not have any idea how it will play out, but that future is well on the way whether we like it or not. In most important aspects, it’s already here.

Too Little Idea

I like Ada Palmer, but here she is completely wrong.

It’s vogueish now in the world of history to claim there were (and can definitionally never be) dark ages or renaissances, and that the Renaissance did not exist. Too much to go into here, but this is the au courant belief for a variety of reasons, among them that these historians are attempting to push back as a political project against the idea that society can be improved as that implies some eugenicist goals.

People like Palmer misrepresent both the causes and the advent of the Renaissance. They portray the people like me who believe the Renaissance is a useful way to divide up history as believing that one morning people woke up and were like, “Hey, it’s the Renaissance! Awesome!” No one, of course, believes that. It was a gradual transition from the Middle Ages, which used to be (for very good reason) referred to as the Dark Ages.

But the reality is that the Dark Ages occurred, and so did the Renaissance, no matter how much clownish historians deny them. For instance:

And no handy-dandy chart, but after the fall of Rome people forgot to how to bake fucking bread. And pottery quality reverted back about two thousand years. Among many, many other apocalyptic changes.

You can actually read writing from the time of people saying, “This is the end of the world and nothing will be good again.” And they were right — for about 800 years.

I hate this modern trend of denying very clear, very obvious occurrences and historical changes for political reasons. Come on, Ada, ain’t nobody gonna CRISPR your baby to have blond hair because you think the Renaissance and the Enlightenment happened.

Same Same

Largely true, alas. The Right wants to be appear dumb while actually being the dumbasses they valorize, while the Left pretends to be intelligent intellectuals while also being the dumbasses they make fun of and disparage.

None of it is any good.

Beam Me Down

I can’t understand it either. One of the reasons I like watching UK TV shows is that they have more normal-looking people in them. I don’t need or want every single person in a TV show to look like a damn supermodel. It’s distracting and it’s nothing at all like real life.

I was glad Bella Ramsey got cast in The Last of Us for instance as she looks just like a regular person, not one out of a million beautiful.

We overvalue beauty and undervalue character.

Judge Bent

Do you judge people based on the car they drive?

No. But if they have a recumbent bicycle, I can guarantee they are slimy subhumans who subsist on a diet of donkey butts and octopus eyeballs. They abuse kittens and travel to faraway destinations for the explicit purpose of starving orphans.

They all somehow assassinated JFK and canceled Firefly. They are the ones who abscond with a single sock from the dryer, so you end up with no match.

The recumbent bicycle losers sneak in in the middle of the night and put mold on your bread and dust on your knickknacks.

There is no greater force of evil than recumbent bicycle riders. None.