JulianRota
7d ago
Finished reading And The Band Played On. It didn't really change my views about anything, but it revealed a few aspects that I find interesting.
When I got to the last quarter or so of the book, it started to feel to me like it was an excessively negative or doomer take on the situation. Like, okay, things were pretty bad early on, but we're finally making some real progress, can't we acknowledge that? But nope, it's just negative takes, so we'll just blow by the actual progress and find some new negative aspect to focus on.
Were they correct to slow-walk the response at first? If you look at the actual death toll over the first few years after it was recognized that AIDS exists and is a communicable disease caused by a pathogen, it's pretty low. Only 618 deaths in 1982. 5596 in 1984. It wasn't until 1983 that somebody first calculated that the mean incubation period was likely to be in the neighborhood of 5.5 years, which would infact imply a tremendously increasing death toll over the next decade, which did in fact come to pass. And that of course is just one statician's opinion. How long for that to be accepted to be true by the whole scientific community? How many times has a single or small handful of scientists claimed that something they were working on would be super terrible in the future, so we should invest a ton in it now, which would incidentally be very good for them personally, but turned out to be overblown? I bet it's more than a few. Note that Covid-19, which we responded to far more vigorously, blew right by those early-1980s AIDS death counts in a matter of weeks. The fact that homosexuality was so broadly disliked didn't exactly help, but it doesn't seem super unreasonable that society as a whole didn't jump instantly to fight a disease that doesn't seem to hit all that many people.
It seems likely that a lot of the spreading took place long before there was any recognition that AIDS existed at all. This makes it pretty tough to construct an even vaguely plausibe counter-factual where AIDS is stopped from spreading.
The book seems to poo-poo the idea that it isn't necessary for the Federal Government to allocate extra money to AIDS research, these Federal medical institutes already have plenty of money and are already free to allocate as much of it as they want to anything their scientists find interesting. I think this idea seems pretty reasonable. If AIDS is so important and so dangerous, why can't they infact reallocate money away from other things and into AIDS research? Why does everything need even more of our tax dollars thrown at it? Yeah some scientists will bitch and moan that their pet projects are no longer high enough priority to get funded, but so what. As far as I know, the corporate world cuts off lines of research that aren't sufficiently promising all the time and tells the affected scientists to suck it up. I don't think it's all that terrible for the Government to do the same.
Another aspect that seemed interesting was just how wildly promiscuous at least some members of the gay community are and how opposed many of them are to any suggestion or attempt to cut down on that lifestyle. There was tremendous pushback against things like closing down bathhouses and discouraging gay orgies. It's interesting how all of the poor arguments we complain about today about how doing anything at all mildly negative for any "oppressed group" for any reason, including to try to prevent those people from spreading and dying of an actually lethal disease, is obviously a step on the road to genocide against them. I guess the internet isn't actually that special and there's nothing new under the sun.
JulianRota
12d ago
I think focusing on deportation number is missing the point. AFAIK, all realistic plans include most illegal aliens leaving on their own, because driving your own car with your own stuff back is better than being snatched up at random with whatever you have on you at the time and dumped back in Mexico or wherever.
JulianRota
14d ago
I don't know a ton about the for-sale or streaming industry, but I can say that cover bands that do live performances seem to be pretty common and popular. It's a pretty good deal for everyone. If you want to see an actual big-time popular band, you probably have a wait a long time for them to go on tour, pay out the nose for tickets, especially ones that aren't terrible, navigate the hassles of going to and from some huge venue that might be far away, paying for overpriced food and drinks to maybe parking too, etc. Cover bands play the same songs, even a bunch of popular songs from various artists of the same genre, and usually do it for cheap tickets at smaller local places that are easier to go to and have much more affordable food and drinks, and do it regularly. If you just want to jam/dance/mosh/whatever to your favorite songs and aren't that concerned about exact musical quality or seeing the actual band in person, it's arguably a better experience.
JulianRota
17d ago
Have we brought up yet the possible effect on Republicans of the lack of movement of the black vote by any reasonable means? If the conclusion is that blacks will vote Dem by >90% pretty much no matter what they do, possibly up to making them practically immune from prosecution and given unlimited money, then it naturally follows that their votes should be suppressed somehow rather than attempting to earn them.
JulianRota
18d ago
I believe that most things that effectively reduce the impact of each particular politician have the net effect of transferring power to what we would call the "deep state", all of the unelected aides, assistants, bureaucrats, etc that actually stay in the same jobs for long times. This is usually in reference to tougher term limits, but I think it would apply to dramatically shorter terms too.
There is tremendous power in having long experience in a system, knowing what has and hasn't worked in the past, all the ins and outs of all the little rules, who knows how to do what, etc. The more we limit the amount of time actual elected politicians spend in office, the more we transfer that power to their unelected aides who actually know how to get things done, and can slow-walk anything they don't like while accelerating anything they do.
I don't think any "tools" can fix that problem, because it's about power. Tools that actually increase a politician's power effectively versus the system will never be built, because it's not in anyone's interest to make it easier for any newcomers to accumulate power. Power is only effectively increased at the expense of other people with power, who can't be expected to cooperate in the process.
JulianRota
19d ago
I don't think anything is likely to happen tonight or tomorrow, assuming nothing massively and obviously wrong happens.
Risk might possibly go up significantly in the weeks and months after, depending on who is deemed to have won, by how much, etc.
JulianRota
19d ago
FWIW, usually the justification has been that the margin of victory of the winning candidate in most races is much higher than the total volume of mail-in votes, so it doesn't actually matter. At least besides the pseudo-religious justification of having those mail-in voters believe that their vote "counted".
It remains to be seen just how many more mail-in votes (legitimate or questionable...) will take place in this election.
JulianRota
20d ago
It does indeed have the thing where, yeah the overall culture is super blue tribe, but there's just so many people overall that, no matter what weird thing you're into, you can find some other people into it. So it's not that bad, but still, you can't help but notice that most random people you meet will be somewhere between mildly and rabidly against my political opinions.
I do sometimes wonder if, along FiveHour's point, I may be just too contrarian and independent overall, or at least not quite rabidly red enough, to really fit in in a deep red area.
JulianRota
20d ago
Nope! NYC is very captured by Blue Tribe. Most of the ones I meet IRL are NPC-level, spewing mindless hatred. The Motte is probably the only place where I can at least sometimes have reasonable debates with reasonable Blue Tribe-rs that isn't immediately drowned out by mindless shouting.
Better for life? That's a tricky question. It could be thought of as bad that so many people seem to hate your guts if you lean Red. But on the other hand, it means you have an automatic connection with anyone else who does too. It feels like it makes things more fun in a way. In theory it could be good for debates, but I meet very few blues who are intelligent and knowledgeable enough to debate issues and actually have the temperament for it.
Will I move somewhere eventually where most people are more ideologically similar to me? Beats me. As I've gotten older, I've gotten less willing to make big pronouncements for the future, since I have no idea what my situation will be or how I'll feel 5 years from now. I don't think there's been any point in my life where I could have made accurate predictions that far out, so there's not much point in trying.
Naturally, all bets are off if something really out there happens, like an actual national divorce with states and regions breaking away from the United States, or actual secret police hunting down ideological dissidents for long sentences in reeducation camps. I still don't think anything along those lines is really likely to happen in my lifetime, but I no longer dismiss the possibility out of hand. Maybe like 5 or 10 percent chance.
JulianRota
26d ago
I think it's mostly the former. Possibly there are a few creative writing exercises on there, but I'm doubtful there's anything organized like that going on about it.
Nobody is going to go to that much effort to spin up male attention just for kicks. If somebody was doing something like that, it'd be for money, and there would be pretty clear tells. Links to OnlyFans accounts or other paid fetish porn sites easy to find, use of accounts that were purchased for higher karma or otherwise artificially karma-boosted by lots of unrelated low-effort posts in mainstream subs, lots more active engagement with male "fans". Not to mention being quarantined by Reddit would be a death-knell for such an operation, to be avoided at all costs or abandoned if unavoidable, rather than a mild inconvenience with some upsides, which is how it seems to be treated. Plus, people doing marketing-like things mostly just aren't all that creative. Go on any porn sub on Reddit, you'll find OnlyFans links behind almost every profile. That's what spinning up male attention looks like.
It smells to me a lot more like a group of fantastically weird people who are mostly self-aware about how weird they are who have built a small and out-of-the-way community to discuss their weird thing than some kind of artificial operation. Perhaps not all that different from this forum here infact.
JulianRota
26d ago
Yes, there are whole subreddits full of them. /r/Rapekink for example. Yeah I have a thing for digging up weird corners of the internet where utterly bizarre stuff happens.
Evidently, there is such a thing as "rape baiting", where women who actually want to be raped, for whom role-playing isn't enough, go out seeking to be raped. They have a whole FAQ on it, trade tips on how to do it most effectively, and share stories of their most successful attempts!
There's also a lot of women posting there about what happened to them and how they feel about it. Many seem to be struggling, not quite sure how to feel about it. Things like, not liking it, but also not wanting to think of themselves as victims, not seeing it as the worst thing that could possibly happen to someone. I can see going to a place like that when you don't really want the fawning sympathy treatment but aren't quite sure what you actually think about it.
I have no clue what percentage of women overall think or feel along these lines. Even coming up with a way to measure it accurately seems difficult. But there's enough written about it that I don't think it's all fake or like 0.1% or anything like that.
JulianRota
27d ago
What do you mean by "going 100 per cent"? Are you just pedaling very fast? The exact ideal pedaling cadence varies between individuals, but you should probably be in the ballpark of 90rpm max, no matter how hard you're working. On an actual bicycle on the road, you use your gears to keep your pedaling in the range you're most comfortable while going faster and exerting more force. On a stationary trainer, you should be able to increase the resistance to get the workout you want without pedaling excessively fast. If your trainer can't increase the resistance enough to put you at the effort level you want without pedaling way too fast, then that is an equipment problem that needs fixing.
You might want to try and find a spin class at a proper gym to try, at least once, just to see how you compare to everyone else and get some input on what's really wrong.
Suggestions for how to do interval training and times and intensities aren't really something I know enough about to give advice on. It probably depends a lot on exactly what your goals are - general cardio performance versus actually being competitive at some particular type of racing.
JulianRota
28d ago
This sounds super weird to me. I did entry-level competitive cycling on a college team for a few years, and have never heard of that being a problem for anybody. Even with plain flat pedals and ordinary shoes, your foot shouldn't ever slip off. Maybe you're trying to pedal way too fast or have some kind of weird foot motion or position or something. The axis of your toes on your foot should be roughly directly above the axis the pedal rotates on.
Pedals with straps to hold your foot on are indeed a thing, as are various types of "clipless" systems where your shoes lock in and only come out with a specific twisting motion, but they're only really beneficial for allowing you to exert force on the pedals on the upward stroke. If your foot is coming off the pedals, you should fix whatever issue is causing that before you do an equipment change.
JulianRota
29d ago
I tend to think that analysis of why the media behaves the way that they do can't be separated from the Internet sucking all of the money out of advertising. The days of major news media sources paying generous salaries for skilled, intelligent investigators with deep knowledge of some beat and at least some sense of ethics are gone, maybe forever, with the drive to the bottom for advertising money.
The only thing that brings in enough money to keep the doors open is clickbait-level reporting and commentary catering to whatever the current audience wants to believe. Anyone not prepared to do that mostly gets driven out, since there's damn little money for anyone else. Even the ownership seems to be mostly people who primarily want to either protect themselves from too-harsh criticism or use them as a weapon to attack their enemies, and so is willing to accept losses or much lower profits than a disinterested investor would expect.
JulianRota
1mo ago
It sounds like it could be used to disprove any internal assessments.
It certainly could! But Sharp Knives and all that.
I think it's trivially obvious that many people believe false things about themselves, some of which are helpful and some harmful. If I think a belief I have about myself may be preventing me from doing things that would be good for my life, I think it's worth spending some effort to test if that belief is really true or not. If it does turn out to be true, then I've suffered some minor discomfort or something for the sake of proving to myself that it actually is true. If it turns out not to be true, then it's like I've unlocked a new power or something.
The same with ideologies to follow and things to identify as. One of the things I like about the Rationalist sphere of thinking is it provides the tools and thought patterns to recognize when what I'm thinking about following is an ideology rather than a fact. Ideologies were mostly created to make whoever created them famous or to connect a group of people together, not for my objective benefit. I am perfectly free to decide that an ideology is not to my benefit and reject it.
JulianRota
1mo ago
I know that that particular behavior (willingness to start conversations with very weakly connected people or total strangers) is very abnormal and most would consider it extroversion. However, most other people I know seem to be much further towards "extroversion" in other ways than I am, yet seem to me to be strangely unwilling to do that.
For example, most other people I know tend to have what I call more words than me. They seem to have much greater capability to extend conversations indefinitely, to just keep on talking and talking and talking. I was never very good at this. Usually any conversations I start tend to peter out fairly quickly unless the other person is actively interested in maintaining it and puts in effort towards that.
I also desire to spend substantial amounts of time basically quiet and alone, doing something like reading or watching movies and videos on the internet. Some other people I know seem to be much more active, constantly up and about doing things.
So then am I introverted or extroverted? How about all those other people I know with different combinations of traits? Beats me. That's why I find the whole thing not very useful, to the point of saying it basically doesn't exist, and might even be actively harmful in some cases. I think that what people normally think of as those traits are actually a cluster of dozens of personality characteristics that aren't necessarily related to each other at all, and several of them are closer to being skills that can be learned or moods and emotions that someone may feel more of or less of at any particular time for any number of reasons than fundamental traits that cannot be changed.
I cannot really know or claim to speak for what any particular person thinks and feels. But I do think that quite a few people who are self-proclaimed Introverts are actually just psyching themselves out. Perhaps when they were young, they did not yet know how to conduct themselves in social settings or had false beliefs about what other people were thinking of them. Perhaps they were convinced of an ideology that they were Introverts, that this was not a temporary feeling or mood or lack of a skill that can be learned, but instead made it part of their identity and chose to revel in it. What if it's not actually a fundamental unalterable trait? What if such a person decided to believe instead that they could learn how to socialize and how to at least sometimes get themselves into a mood to take pleasure from it? I say this not to condescend to you or any other particular person, but because it's exactly what I did myself.
Driving a car was initially pretty scary. But I learned to do it and got comfortable with it eventually. I certainly wasn't always any good at any sort of socialization. I'm far from perfect or any kind of expert at it even now, but I have managed to get somewhat better and more comfortable with it, at least sometimes.
JulianRota
1mo ago
My model is more like, most people have a modest number of close friends (who may or may not be family). Everyone has widely varying levels of skill and inclination when it comes to starting and maintaining conversations with people and moving brief connections towards actual friendships.
Myself, I maintain maybe like a dozen or so pretty close friendships and another few dozen somewhat more distant friends who I know and see semi-regularly but don't actually get together with that often for various reasons. I am usually pretty good at going to a bar or party where I know nobody or only a couple of people and talking to a bunch of people. Most of the time, I forget about whoever I was talking to not too long after. Moving those brief conversations towards actual friendships is considerably harder, at least to me. Maybe some people are better at that part, I don't know. People I consider actual friends tend to come from situations where you tend to be around the same few people regularly without either side explicitly planning to get together with those specific people, like by being regulars at a bar or working together or being members of some kind of club or other regular group activity.
Perhaps that behavior looks to other people at that sort of event like what you've described as an extrovert. But they don't know that I actually only maintain those few dozen closer friendships with people I've known for years. I'm inclined to believe that most people we see acting like that are doing the same thing. So am I Introverted or Extroverted? I don't know, so I don't find the distinction very meaningful. Maybe those other people you see who appear to be doing that are just having a little fun their way and actually do have their own dozen or so really close friends.
So in my book, you're not actually Introverted, just normal.
JulianRota
1mo ago
Maybe, but have you ever met any actual people who would meet those definitions?
I don't think I've ever met or known anyone who I know to be extroverted by that definition. Though to be fair, maybe it would be hard to know because by definition such a person would be very difficult to get to know well enough to know that they're actually doing that. But then who are the people who actually know for sure that someone they know is behaving like that?
I like theory-crafting as much as the next possibly vaguely autistic Mottizan, but I've also gotten somewhat self-conscious about the tendency to build imaginary castles that aren't demonstrated to correspond to actual people or real-world situations.
JulianRota
1mo ago
I think it's accurate in that the words are generally used in a sense of declaring people to be at the extreme ends of the spectrum, when probably under 1% of the population is really that far in either direction. Words like "shy" and "gregarious" are in my opinion more useful as the way they are used seems to describe a moderate tendency more than an absolute or extreme case.
Maybe OP doesn't agree, but they described themselves as an Introvert and then described enjoying an activity that a person meeting the strict definition of an Introvert would not enjoy.
JulianRota
1mo ago
I suspect that the whole Introvert/Extrovert thing basically doesn't exist. It seems to me that pretty much everyone wants to be social and around other people sometimes and quiet and alone at other times. There's some variation on exactly how much of each and at what intensity any person wants, but virtually nobody is at the extremes suggested by the Introvert/Extrovert framing.
There does seem to be more variation in desire to plan and organize events. Relatively few people seem to have the desire or inclination to create a plan, even a really simple and vague one like, let's all meet at a bar at roughly some particular time, and invite a bunch of people to it. But at least those relative few seem to be really into it, so it's good to have them around. Many others seem to be happy to show up to an event that somebody else organized, but have little interest in organizing things themselves.
JulianRota
1mo ago
I'm still reading And The Band Played On. Probably want to hold more extended commentary until after I finish it, but I am pleasantly surprised so far that it's not at all a dunk against Reaganist budget thriftiness specifically. Nobody looks particularly good in this story, and it seems that the gay community itself and the Federal administrators behaved far more irresponsibly. It's definitely interesting to compare the reaction to the rabid panic associated with Covid-19.
JulianRota
1mo ago
This seems more like a shallow dunk than an attempt to acknowledge the terrible job pretty much every Westernized government did at responsibly balancing the right of ordinary people to go about their lives versus the actual increased risk to the actually significantly more vulnerable population, rather than pandering to overblown fears stoked by social media culture and letting a bunch of low-information healthcare officials with no accountability to the actual population play tin-pot dictator.
I'd also like to know - many people have stoked fears about supposed healthcare "collapse", but did any healthcare systems anywhere actually do anything that could be described as collapse during the entire Covid era? Exactly what does a "collapse" look like, what are the real consequences of it? I mean things that actually happened, not somebody speculating about what could happen. I think this is a "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" thing - if no healthcare system anywhere actually "collapses", then we're being too restrictive and over-cautious, and we should ease up until there are a few.
JulianRota
2mo ago
I've never been a real heavy voter, I write a lot more than I vote, and I don't write as much as some. I suppose I feel like I don't enjoy the process of considering "does this comment deserve an upvote or not, does it deserve it more or less than some other comment", and such things. I probably do less than a dozen votes a month I guess. I kind of suspect there's a lot of heavy voters who write little to nothing as well.
I tend to upvote things that really stand out enough to think, I'm glad somebody made that point. Sometimes I upvote things that I think got beat up too hard or aren't popular enough to get a lot of upvotes due to the actual position being argued being not that well liked here. I don't really downvote much, even if I'm disagreeing with somebody, unless what they're saying is really over the top low-quality, though that often gets modded too.
I'd more tend to leave judgement to the masses in any argument I'm in. That's whose sake I'm really arguing for anyways. Getting at least some votes either way is a nice sign that somebody is at least seeing the discussion. I tend more to just not continue if I think the discussion is too low-quality to bother and nobody is watching rather than throw a bunch of downvotes around. Or of course if we end up basically agreeing and it doesn't feel like there's more worth saying.
JulianRota
2mo ago
They're probably voting for an expression of values and a meme-length description of what they want to do. Which is exactly what probably at least 90% of all voters on both sides of every election everywhere does. I don't think any of those Democrat voters could articulate exactly what Project 2025 is and why they think it's bad either.
I'd love it if the great majority of the voter base voted based on thoughtful consideration of actual policy positions, but it's just not realistic. If you want to win in any system resembling democracy, you're going to have to accept that there's more than a few idiots and nutcases on your side.
I get the same non-24-hour cycle thing, for a long time it seemed like my body wanted to live on a 25-ish hour cycle. This mostly manifested in being unable to fall asleep when I wanted to, despite being woken up by an alarm at a consistent time. It seems to be mostly cured since I started taking Melatonin about 2-3 hours before the time I wanted to go to sleep. Now I mostly sleep pretty well at around 6-7 hours a night. I don't believe the Walker take that everyone must have 8 hours a night no matter what and you're doing something bad if you don't.
Alcohol has weird and complex effects on my sleep cycle depending on exactly when and how much I drink.
I have been doing mostly-Keto for weight reasons, which I started a number of years after I started using Melatonin. I hadn't heard of the sibling's claim that it also affects the non-24-hour sleep cycle thing, but it seems plausible.
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