Folamh3
User ID: 1175
Folamh3
3d ago
How many people who were complaining about the "kids in cages" at the southern border are ardent Zionists and don't see any inconsistency in their beliefs about the morality of border enforcement?
I don't see any inconsistency between "when policing a border, a certain level of stringency and invasiveness is required when the people trying to enter the country include underage terrorists who have been groomed into committing suicide bombings; but that level of stringency and invasiveness is inappropriate when policing a border to prevent economic migrants from gaining illegitimate access to a country".
Folamh3
3d ago
Day 19 of NaNoWriMo. I crossed the 30k mark last night. This has been a very bipolar experience, I find myself wildly vacillating between "this book fuckin slaps" and long dark nights of the soul. I swear I'm hitting every point on this graph several times a week. I'm on an upswing now: between the amount I wrote on the train this morning and the amount I wrote on my lunch break, I've completed nearly half of my daily quota today already. Can't wait to get home and finish today's quota.
Funnily enough, I'm actually feeling pretty good about the style of the book, on a sentence-to-sentence, paragraph-to-paragraph level. It's only the story, pacing etc. I'm unsure about. But I feel emotionally invested enough in my characters that I'm legitimately feeling guilty about the fate that's soon to befall one of them, which must be a promising sign. No turning back now, just a week and a half left. The only thing I'm disappointed about is that I was looking forward to having a first draft by November 30th, but realistically at 50k words I'll probably only have between 60-66% of a first draft. Planning to take December 1st off, then resume writing on the 2nd, maintaining the pace of 1,667 words/day until I have a complete draft. Hopefully that means I'll be done a week before Christmas.
Folamh3
3d ago
I wonder what your therapist would have made of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Doublethink promotes wellness?
Folamh3
4d ago
Weirdly enough, in the parody series Barry Trotter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Gerber_(parodist)), Barry and Ermine get married and have a son who's a Squib. Because their son has grown up around magical people, he experiences a "grass-is-greener" effect in which Muggle culture seems impossibly exciting and exotic to him. His childhood ambition is to become an actuary in an insurance firm.
Folamh3
4d ago
Finished Final Cut last night, loved it. Started My Brilliant Friend on the train this morning, having heard from everyone and their mother that it's fantastic. Only got about fifteen pages into it, don't know where it's going yet.
Folamh3
4d ago
All I can say is that it's a numbers game: throw enough shit at the wall and eventually some of it will stick. Most of what I've written in my life I can no longer bear to look at, but there's the odd story here and there that I'm still proud of.
I've only told a couple of people about the book so far and am deliberately not going into a huge amount of detail. The basic premise is that it's set in eastern Europe. There's a woman working for a pharma/medtech company who's working on an invention which has the potential to completely revolutionise diagnosing fertility disorders, but she's concerned that the invention will be stolen from her and used for purposes she doesn't intend.
Folamh3
4d ago
People hurt themselves with cars, knives, and guns all the time but we allow people to buy those in part because cars, knives, and guns are useful.
Virtually all jurisdictions require a license to operate a car. Many jurisdictions either require a license to own a firearm, or forbid it entirely. Many jurisdictions place strict limitations on who may purchase knives (e.g. minors).
Race: The stereotype that African Americans are less educated is not true.
It bothers me that I have no problem imagining a woke person asserting that this stereotype is false, and then in the next breath asserting that lower rates of educational attainment among African-Americans is one of many metrics demonstrating the extent to which the US is still a systemically racist country. It should not be possible for a mentally sane person to simultaneously believe "owing to systemic racism, African-Americans have lower rates of educational attainment than white Americans" and "the notion that African-Americans are less educated than white Americans is a false and harmful stereotype".
Like, if you believe that African-Americans are less likely to get an education because of racist policies or teachers or how assessment procedures, that directly implies that African-Americans are less educated than white Americans! The latter "stereotype" cannot be false without completely invalidating the former assertion.
Related: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/if-you-believe-in-structural-racism-16c
Folamh3
4d ago
That all people with geeky interests (video games, anime, D&D etc.) are unusually intelligent.
Nerds are intelligent, and a lot of nerds have geeky interests, but there are plenty of people with geeky interests who are utterly lacking in intelligence or even common sense.
Folamh3
4d ago
That people who play sports, exercise a lot etc. are just "dumb muscle"
All things being equal, the guy going to the gym four times a week is probably smarter, more accomplished and more disciplined than the nerdy Reddit moderator who blows all his disposable income on Funko Pops.
Folamh3
6d ago
Larry David directed a movie with a similar premise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sour_Grapes_(1998_film)
I haven't seen it but everyone says it's terrible, including David.
Folamh3
6d ago
none of that is mutilation, just regular surgery.
There is nothing "regular" about surgery to remove healthy organs and tissue with the ultimate goal of ameliorating psychic distress. You're welcome to defend this practice, but don't pretend it isn't a major departure from the common practice of surgery as generally understood.
Folamh3
6d ago
Do you object to roads, because they put criminals on the path towards bank robbery?
I'm sorry, but analogies are really not your strong suit.
That public roads can be used by bank robbers to escape from robberies is an unintended, unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of the existence of said roads.
Small children receiving "gender-affirming" surgeries is not an unintended consequence of Levine calling for the age limits on minor transition to be removed. That outcome is the sole purpose of Levine having done so. It is exactly the outcome Levine is trying to bring about.
Folamh3
7d ago
Relatedly, I couldn't find a single Onion article against the Left
I sometimes joke that there's one based guy writing for the Onion and they let him off the leash a few times a year.
https://theonion.com/negative-review-of-a-wrinkle-in-time-peppered-with-cr-1823656342/
Folamh3
7d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_government_response_to_the_COVID-19_pandemic is pretty much the only response that makes sense in a country with land borders.
Folamh3
7d ago
I bet the word mutilation isn't in there even once.
What on earth is this meant to prove? "In their official communications, the IDF have never referred to their military operation in Gaza as a 'genocide': ergo, it can't possibly be one". Would you expect anyone in the world to be persuaded by such a facile argument?
Folamh3
7d ago
Really? "Fail to support" transition, or "try to block their kid from accessing the relevant medical treatments"?
In the state of California there was a bill governing custody disputes between divorced parents, which would make a parent's decision to affirm the child's stated gender identity (or not) a factor to take into consideration in said disputes. Essentially, if a married couple gets divorced and their child has announced that they are trans, if one parent affirms the child's stated gender identity uncritically and the other parent is more sceptical and prefers a watchful waiting approach - all things being equal, the judge is meant to rule in favour of the former parent.
What do they mean by "affirmation"? "Affirmation includes a range of actions and will be unique for each child, but in every case must promote the child’s overall health and well-being." - so this isn't as simple as providing a child with medical treatment which has been recommended by a qualified professional.
This bill was voted on and passed in both houses, before being vetoed by Governor Newsom. Elected representatives in the state of California believe that if a child announces that they are trans, the correct position for the child's parents to adopt is to uncritically affirm the child's gender identity without question.
Rabies kills 70,000 people per year, with a 100% lethality rate. Does that make rabies worse than the black plague (a pathetic 30-50% lethality)?
It doesn't make rabies worse than the black plague, but it does make rabies more lethal, by definition.
And you don't find it all odd that your proposed policy is 100% benefit, 0% cost?
I have no idea what this question means.
"there is absolutely nothing anyone in the entire world could possibly have done that could have reduced Covid deaths in any way"
I never said that, don't put words in my mouth.
Folamh3
7d ago
If Alex Jones had killed those kids with overwhelming evidence pointing to him, but somehow been found not guilty in a criminal case, then the parents of the murdered children had sued him in a class-action civil suit for wrongful death in which he'd been found guilty (à la OJ Simpson), the amount of damages he would've been ordered to pay would've been lower than this. OJ Simpson was ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages. Adjusting for number of victims and inflation, our hypothetical Alex Jones would have been ordered to pay $922.41 million - far short of the $1.48 billion the real Alex Jones was ordered to pay.
I feel like "killed twice as many people" is pretty obviously "more lethal"?
There were 16,000 murders in the US in 2018, but "only" 3,340 murders in El Salvador. I guess this means the US was "pretty obviously" 5 times as dangerous as El Salvador?
No, because DUH, the US population is fifty times the size of El Salvador.
Even more pertinent example: millions of people have been killed with guns since they were invented, but nukes have only killed a quarter-million people. I guess this means guns are "pretty obviously" more lethal than nukes?
No, because DUH, hundreds of millions of bullets have been fired in combat situations, but nukes have only been deployed in combat situations a grand total of twice.
It's so obnoxious that you're just pretending you don't know what the phrases "per capita" or "case fatality rate" mean. Or pretending that you don't know that an older population will always have a higher death rate than a younger population, because that's what "life expectancy" means. Or pretending that you don't know that one can easily end up with worse health outcomes from contracting a moderately severe illness in a developing nation vs. contracting a very severe illness in a developed nation, because of differences in the standard of medical care. Or pretending you don't know the difference between "an otherwise healthy person contracts an extremely lethal disease and dies" vs. "an old person who has been in out of hospital for years as their body slowly breaks down picks up an opportunistic infection which finishes them off (when a young healthy person would have shrugged off the same infection without even needing to be hospitalised)". I mean, you obviously do understand all of the above. No one thinks a disease which only kills 1% of people it infects is more lethal than one which kills 10%. To spell it out, in case it wasn't already abundantly clear:
- Case fatality rate and infection fatality rate are the key metrics for gauging how lethal a disease is. Covid has killed 7 million people, but there have been at least 7 hundred million confirmed cases, meaning its case fatality rate is 1%. Its infection fatality rate might be 0.5% or even lower. By contrast, 90% of people who contract HIV ultimately die from it, generally because of an opportunistic infection they're unable to fight off because they're immunocompromised.
- Per capita death rates also matter, just like when comparing murder rates between countries. The global population has increased by 2.5 billion people since the start of the HIV crisis. Had there been 7 billion people on the planet in 1981, the death toll from HIV would have been proportionately higher.
- As above, but also consider the fact that the total population of the most at-risk demographics for HIV (homosexual males, heroin addicts etc.) is vastly smaller than the total population of the most at-risk demographics for Covid (old people mainly, plus immunocompromised people). In 2020, there were 735 million people aged 65 or older. In 1981, I doubt there were more than 200 million homosexual males and heroin users in the entire world.
- Older people are more likely to die than younger people - this is what the term "life expectancy" means. All things being equal, an older country will have a higher all-cause death rate than a younger one. At the start of the HIV crisis, the median age in the US was just shy of 30 years; at the start of Covid, it was 37. If the world population had been younger in 2020, the death toll from Covid would have been far lower. This is plainly demonstrated by the fact that many countries which had unusually low rates of Covid deaths per capita also have median ages far below the global average.
None of what I'm saying is controversial or in dispute: this is all extremely basic medicine. When ranking how dangerous diseases are, we take all this into account, which is why no one would take you seriously if you claimed that AIDS is less dangerous than pneumonia, even though pneumonia kills around 4 million people every year - because, duh, in many if not most cases pneumonia is just the straw that broke the camel's back, the illness that finally finished off an old person (or indeed a person with AIDS!) who was bound to die soon anyway, and even for old people the case fatality rate is less than 50%.
From the person who is so gung-ho about "female" only having one meaning, you sure seem eager to redefine words all of the sudden.
I cannot believe my gender-critical opinions are now being used as ammunition with which to rubbish my apparently controversial claim that "diseases which kill a higher proportion of those infected with them are more lethal than those which kill a lower proportion". I look forward to the day when I tell someone that murders/100k of population is a more accurate gauge of how violent a country is than absolute number of murders, and they scoff and tell me how can they believe that, coming from someone who thinks Trump isn't Literally Hitler™?
Straight up, the important question: do you really think Covid would have had the same death toll if we had never imposed any restrictions, never asked anyone to mask up, etc.?
The meta-analysis from Johns Hopkins estimated that NPIs probably prevented 0.2% of Covid deaths, which seems near enough to zero as to make functionally no difference. It's a rounding error.
And NPIs were not costless actions: they caused thousands of additional deaths both in the short-term (suicides, drug overdoses and other deaths of despair) and long-term (many health services deemed "nonessential" were shut down for extended periods of time during Covid, meaning there are tens of thousands of people in the world right now who have cancer and don't know it, or who know it and would have received treatment for it several years earlier if not for the hysterical overreaction to Covid). It's rather telling that the only country in the EU which never imposed a lockdown, Sweden, actually ended up with fewer Covid deaths per capita and fewer excess deaths per capita than the EU average, suggesting that whatever effects lockdowns etc. have can be completely dwarfed or negated by local factors (population density, climate, age of population etc.). I think most of the deaths from Covid were baked in as soon as it left Wuhan, and even if NPIs prevented a few deaths on the margin (or, more accurately, allowed a few old people to live a few extra months before something else finished them off), they did not come close to passing a cost-benefit analysis.
But can you acknowledge the very basic idea that at least one (1) extra person would have died?
This is such an obnoxious and emotionally manipulative way of phrasing a question. Governmental policies are supposed to pass a cost-benefit analysis. "One person who would've died didn't die as a result of this policy, ergo it's a roaring success" is a standard which literally any government policy in the world could meet with ease, ergo it's meaningless.
I don't really see much of a meaningful distinction between "Covid was too infectious to be controlled" and "it is possible to control Covid, provided your country is a geographically isolated island nation without land borders and you keep your borders shut indefinitely". It's so telling that "zero Covid" types always fall back on the examples of Australia and New Zealand to demonstrate that of course lockdowns work at controlling Covid (and it's just a complete coincidence that both countries are geogprahically isolated island nations without land borders). Show me an example of a country which isn't a geographically isolated island nation with land borders which was able to control Covid with vaccines and NPIs. I'm going to assume you can't. Given that most countries are not geographically isolated island nations without land borders, it seems perfectly reasonable to argue that, for 90%+ of countries on earth, Covid is too infectious to be controlled.
And insofar as you're labelling the decision to reopen the Australian borders a "conservative" one, we both know full well that if Anthony Albanese (Labor party) had taken office a few months earlier, he would have made the same decision. In point of fact, Albanese did take office in May 2022, and did not immediately reverse the previous administration's decision to reopen the border. New Zealand reopened its borders a few months after Australia did, a decision made by a Labor prime minister (who was previously, consistently praised for her aggressive response to Covid and "girlboss" energy throughout the Anglosphere), and saw the same dramatic spike in Covid deaths. Are you just defining "conservative" policies as any policies which do not pursue the minimisation of Covid deaths as a terminal goal, at the expense of all other considerations? Or are you only interested in discussing the relative rates of Covid deaths when you can blame conservative decisions for them, and studiously ignoring progressive politicians who make almost identical decisions in almost identical circumstances?
If elderly lives are worth radically less, why does murdering someone in their 80s carry the same penalty?
I never said elderly lives are worth radically less. You claimed that Covid is more lethal than AIDS, but this is obviously untrue for the simple reason that it is much easier to kill a sick elderly person than a young healthy person.
it took a year just to work out that it was sexually transmitted, and you couldn't just post that information on a website because the internet didn't really exist
TIL the Internet was the first ever medium for disseminating medical information. In point of fact the CDC (among other bodies) ran massive nationwide campaigns throughout the 1980s intended to raise awareness of the disease and how to avoid catching it, as did various governmental bodies in the UK. There was a very brief window, only a few years, in which a person who'd contracted AIDS could legitimately plead ignorance and say they didn't now better.
With AIDS, avoiding it would have required not having any relationships for the next decade or two
Or, you know, wearing a condom.
With COVID, you were asked to wear a mask and avoid big parties for a few months.
Yes, we were asked to do that. But even getting massive buy-in from the public on both counts had virtually zero demonstrable impact on the rate of transmission of the virus. China was unable to control Covid even using vastly more punitive measures (like literally locking people inside their apartment buildings) than any Western government, even in 2022 after 90%+ of their adult population had been vaccinated. I mean, even in your preferred example of Australia, even while their borders were shut, people still died. Or are you claiming that Australia really could have gotten its Covid death rate down to zero if literally everyone had always worn a mask outside the home?
Failure to do so placed everyone around you at risk.
Well, no: it placed every old and immunocompromised person around you at risk. Most people are neither, and Covid poses little more threat to them than the flu.
Have you had anything published? Or do you just mean sharing things among your friend group?
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