Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
1yr ago
Business confidence Index is already a thing. Don't know how reliable it is as a predictor, however.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
Potentially lockdown conditions caused more of a pentup energy/less access to other activities that'd otherwise serve as a natural distraction.
France saw the closest thing the world got to a general uprising against lockdowns in it's colonies.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
Tophattingson
1yr ago
After being burned too many times by claims like this my default is to reject them until demonstrated otherwise. A lot of bombastic claims about climate effects have been passed through seven layers of modelling, each causing more dubious results than the last.
Modelling co2's effect on radiative forcing? Go ahead. Modelling radiative forcing's effect on temperature? Fine. Modelling temperature's effect on rainfall. Maybe. Modelling rainfall's effect on crop yields? You're getting too far from hard data now. Modelling crop yield effects on economic migration? Fuck off.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
Biden has already announced he's going to work around the student loan decision AND smack "defect" as hard as he can on the deal which ended the payment moratorium. But this one doesn't provide easy outs and lower courts do accept the First Amendment as something to consider.
Is there even any mechanism to punish the president or any relevant legislatures if they keep repeatedly enacting something already shown to be unconstitutional?
Tophattingson
1yr ago
So there was no criminal penalties being threatened for me leaving a location? Strange. I seem to quite clearly remember the law saying exactly that.
100,000 books sold is very good. 2000 is mediocre. That's the range of the books discussed in the article. For reference any book that sells a million copies is going to likely land in the top 10 most sold books in a given year.
If the billion dollar marketting for these books is a fact, then the article fails to explain where that number comes from. That's why I've said it's alledged.
So, two years on, how are things going for the galaxy’s least heteronormative entry in the franchise after a BILLION dollar marketing campaign?
We’ll let the Bookscan figures speak for themselves:
If it weren't for the alleged billion dollar marketing campaign those would be decent sales for these books. Like, what figures were they expecting? The average traditionally published book gets in the low thousands of sales (and the median, worse). All the books listed here range from very good sales to mediocre but still acceptable sales. We can't tell the exact deals offered, but at a fairly typical 10% royalty per book, Daniel José Older would have gotten $39k from Midnight Horizon, and at the rate he writes he'll be making a fairly decent income from this. (I don't know the exact details of what sort of contract you'd get for this work, however. I imagine writing books for an established franchise like this will involve more payment up front, less royalties.)
Tophattingson
1yr ago
and to anti-lockdowners, I guess, "when they didn't ask our opinion"? "When it wasn't in response to anything I personally did"? Maybe you can clarify.
Arbitrary imprisonment is defined by imprisoning people who have not committed or are not suspected of committing a crime. This is because totalitarian regimes can always present a reason to imprison someone that correlates with an external reason. They are a political dissident, they disagree with the government, they are nebulously dangerous etc. The problem is that these reasonings are illegitimate deployments of the state's power, clearly being used only to perpetuate it's power rather than for the purposes we allow the state to imprison people (some combination of protect/rehabilitation/justice for victims).
The word invokes "literally no correlation with any external reasons other than 'we said so'"
Lockdowns are still this to me. There was no correlation with any external reason. There was no evidence base for lockdowns prior to them being carried out. There is still no evidence base for lockdowns. Therefore I do not believe states did lockdowns for the reason they claimed they did so.
The majority of non-libertarian conceptions of the state, and even many libertarian ones, view legitimate states as a transaction. We give up some things in return for an organisation that will, ultimately, serve us in return. Taxes are expected to pay for services from the government, not simply fatten the president's wallet (that we specifically call the latter corruption or embezzlement should hint at that). Police are expected to protect civilians from criminals, not protect the government from disagreement. Prisons are expected to house criminals, not political opponents.
In 2019, someone who doesn't want the government to put everyone under house arrest on a dubious whim was called a person. In 2020, they're called a libertarian.
I hate them for all the other reasons too. I simply add one more reason. I do not think it would be productive for me to drop hundreds of examples of specific lockdown harms though if you do want specific examples I can provide them.
We had norms against what happened in 2020 for a reason (if you think they were not norms, find me pre-2020 lockdown advocates). Arbitrary home imprisonment of the entire population is not a power that the public typically granted the state. It is not a power that a state can safely have access to. Even if they used it correctly in 2020 it would be dangerous, but the actual course of events demonstrates it's danger: A state powerful enough to imprison everyone is powerful enough to fabricate the reason why it's doing so. Evidence: They did it for covid. Because of this, there is no safe way to grant a state this power even if there's a hypothetical virus/pandemic/whatever that would warrant doing so.
That's the additional argument I present. Simply tallying up the costs of lockdowns vs the costs of covid creates the impression that there could be a good lockdown in the right circumstance. I disagree because I think the risks of a state that can do a lockdown are far greater than any benefit they could create, as demonstrated by what happened in 2020. The best schelling point to protect against this, and the one we used pre-2020, is to prohibit arbitrary imprisonment. I am distraught that we have since abandoned this protection.
sovereign citizens
Sovereign citizens believe they are following the law albeit it's a law that does not actually exist. They think there's magic legal cheat codes that let them ignore certain laws. I'm saying fuck the law if it's like this. Those are very different positions.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
It's use as a political weapon became even more overt with vaccine mandates, which were used to punish if not outright purge political dissidents.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
An adult who switches from ambivalence to extreme hostility to authority as a result of an external event doesn't have a mental illness. That's the normal affect for perceived wrongs from authority.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
Putting Belarus above Ukraine in 2020 in terms of human rights just due to Ukraine being influenced by Western COVID-policies, and implementing lockdowns, while Belarus' leader doing absolutely nothing and advising his people to drink vodka in order to protect themselves from COVID leads to some interesting paradoxes. You'll get African dictatorships above Denmark.
Interesting? Yes. Paradox? No. Tanzania did rank above Denmark for human rights in 2020. It's pretty hard to be worse for human rights than imprisoning everyone. I guess Pol Pot's omnicide attempts are clearly worse, to give at least one example?
God created all people in his image, and your belief in God and your obligation before other human beings is not dependent on whatever left-wingers or establishment in your country do or say. I'm not religious, but I'm a moral universalist, and death of Russians, Ukrainians, and Americans is equally tragic. American right-wingers, who often emphasize their religiosity, do not consider suffering of people in Haiti, Russia, Ukraine, China, or wherever — explicitly.
I think my comments preferring places as far-flung as Sweden and Tanzania to my own country (and countrymen) should make it clear that I do take a universal approach.
Catturd2 is a piece of shit, but I still will have moral obligation to save him if I'll see him drowning. Radical in-group ethics is evil, but I understand that some people might disagree.
The difference here is that I was metaphorically drowning and, worse than merely not being helped, the majority of people around me hoped I'd drown harder. There is a point at which charity becomes doormattery, and caring for people who overwhelmingly wanted to harm me is the latter.
And yes, I donate much of my salary to charity, so I put my money where my mouth is.
I would donate more to charity if I felt there were charities that were reasonably working towards their goals. I was much more likely to donate to charities pre-2020, before most of them revealed themselves to be nigh-fraudulent by refusing to challe nge lockdowns. To provide an anecdote from when this place (or was it /r/slatestarcodex, don't quite remember) was back on reddit, we once had someone approach the subreddit soliciting donations for a charity that operates on a native american reservation to help with malnutrition. We quickly found out, after some questioning, that the cause of their economic plight was not just generic poverty, but that the government of the reservation had imposed lockdowns on it. The charity refused to challenge the actual cause of the malnutrition. Me and some other people basically said we'd donate to an org willing to help with the actual problem if such an org exists but the proposed charity ain't it.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
I object to being falsely imprisoned.
Do you really even have to ask? Seriously, I don't understand how this can be so mysterious? What next, will you ask why Uyghurs don't like reeducation camps?
Due to me largely being a single-issue anti-lockdown guy at this point, I guess in the US I'd fall in with the "dissident right" even if I disagree with them on the majority of social issues. To give an example, I back LGBT rights in about the way you'd expect from a progressive but I can't back progressives in their current form because the end result of lockdownism is everyone, including LGBT people, equally having no rights. You can't claim to support LGBT rights and simultaneously criminalize sex).
So Russia... Fuck Russia. They too are a lockdownist regime, and I equally want Putin's head displayed on the end of a pike as I do the average prog. The place I differ is that I also want most western leaders heads lined up alongside his. Hence my stance on the war is that I hope both sides lose. Both sides losing probably requires that Russia lose first, because I don't see a route where a Russian victory leads to uprisings against Putin but a Ukrainian victory probably has Zelensky get turfed out in a few years if recent Ukrainian history is anything to go by.
There is a hypothetical world in which Russia are indeed liberating Ukraine from it's vile regime. The problem, of course, is that this isn't the actual circumstance. Belarus would have a slightly better case to make, as one of the few countries that avoided lockdowns, I'd at least give Lukashenko the time of day if he invaded Ukraine in 2020 to liberate Ukrainians from their regime - it would at least be a coherent cause. Even if Russia invaded the UK, I might defect to them just for the opportunity to get justice for the crimes that the British regime has committed against me, but it would be no more than pure opportunism on my part. But what exactly can Putin claim to liberate Ukraine from? From one corrupt lockdownist oligarchy to another? How utterly pointless.
Of course they'll have prepared a long list of grievances with "elites" that are intended to persuade you that whatever happens in the US is much worse than repressions in Russia or China.
The most notable form of repressions over the last few years were lockdowns, affecting billions. When it comes to how brutal these are, there isn't some vast difference between Russia and the West. Even China has typically behaved more courteously towards those protesting lockdowns than Western regimes have done. And if democracy is meant to be the difference, I wonder what exactly is supposed to be the difference between Putin's machinations and media control to win his elections, and western "mainstream" parties winning via similar censorship and violent attacks on dissidents? We no longer need to speculate. The paper trail of censorship of opponents of lockdowns has been traced back to governments.
But why do some on the dissident right actively support Putin rather than take my burn it all down including Russia approach? I don't think it's quite enemy of my enemy is my friend. It's more appeal to an outside power. Like cosmic intervention. Desperately hoping they'd swoop in to save the day. Just like far-left dissidents wanted the USSR to do during the cold war, or e.g. anti-Putin protesters in Russia sometimes want NATO to do. It's a cry for help because they do not see any way to depose their regime without external assistance. Which I reject, because I don't think Putin would replace their regime with what they want. Sweden, though? They can nuke me whenever they feel like it. Drone me harder Tegnell.
Fair enough. But then please don't take a high moral ground. You are just as evil as "elites".
The social contract to not act in maximally selfish ways is broken, and the dissident right have a good claim that they aren't responsible for breaking it.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
As is usual I disagree with all the major factions involved. The most likely place to find any risks associated with COVID vaccines is in the delivery mechanism and how this necessarily functions differently from the virus, not in the spike protein.
For Pfizer that delivery mechanism is a payload that codes for the spike protein encased in a lipid nanoparticle. This causes two differences from how getting covid works. The first and most obvious is the lipid nanoparticle itself. The second, much less frequently noted but probably more important, is that the lipid nanoparticle can deliver the payload to a different distribution of cells than OG covid. This is enough to put forward a plausible hypothesis for a very wide range of side effects, though the key word here is hypothesis.
To make a comparison to something that's probably more clear-cut, the AstraZeneca heart issue risks (which US anti-vaccine commentary missed because that vaccine was never deployed in significant numbers in the US) are likely caused by how it's delivery mechanism, an adenovirus viral vector, interacts with the Coxsackievirus and adenovirus receptor, which is expressed in cardiac muscle and involved in all sorts of heart problems including myocarditis.
There's some reason to think scientists involved would have known that their gain of function research was being done in a way that intentionally loopholed restrictions against doing so. And, if a lab leak is indeed the cause, then many of them have also participated in efforts to cover it up. Any prosecutions should focus on these rather than, say, the level of safety procedures in the lab, because intentional malice is a greater concern than mere human error or inadequate consideration of risk.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
What is the anti-molecular biology wing of the Motte? Genuinely confused here.
**Actual science, not the sort of science "represented" by Fauci.
At least the proximal origins paper seems to finally be falling out of favour, about 3 years and 3 months after Fauci appeared to have laundered it through proxies.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
(2) there were two separate introductions to the market weeks apart of two separate lineages of SARS-CoV-2.
Doesn't this make the argument that the outbreak started with a spillover from animals at the market much less likely rather than more? That there was a distribution of covid within wild animals that split into two lineages before being transferred to humans? Fine enough. That both those lineages happened to transfer over to humans at the same place a few weeks apart, instead of literally anywhere else in the country? That seems spectacularly improbable. A far simpler hypothesis for why this could happen is that both lineages were circling in humans prior to the market and that the market being the epicentre is what caused the detection of the second at the market too. It also makes the lab leak hypothesis more likely, as a lab leak being repeated due to the same undetected problem with safety causing two distinct leaks is more probable than two outbreaks starting in close proximity by sheer random chance.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
The linked meta analysis has a null result for N95 masks. If you're going to argue that there's a mask out there known to work you'd probably need to point to some kind of respirator.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
It was quite strange seeing industries that should have very strong familiarity with how masks work or don't work (painting with aerosols, asbestos removal etc) suddenly jettison that when covid came along. Thankfully I'm yet to witness anyone decide a surgical mask is good enough for those.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
why people who apply razor skepticism to anything approaching a mainstream view would be so inanely credulous of random shit grifters say on the internet is beyond me.
In my case it's quite simple. The mainstream had the power to falsely imprison me with lockdowns and did so repeatedly through 2020 and 2021. The random shit grifters did not and largely wouldn't want to. To make things slightly less personal, the amount of damage the failings of the mainstream does is orders of magnitude greater than anything their opponents can do.
Tophattingson
1yr ago
Some more claims I did a double-take on, having never heard them before: [...] that masks are entirely ineffective in preventing the transmission of COVID-19?
By the best standards of evidence available, masks do nothing for covid-19. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6
Some people caveat this by saying the evidence against is weak. My response to this is that if you're going to force billions of people to do so, you should have strong evidence in favour, not weak evidence against it. The default position for medical interventions should be that they don't work until proven otherwise. Others argue against the findings on the basis that masks necessarily must work because physics, on the grounds you don't need to do a scientific study to determine if a parachute works. This is called unfalsifiability, and is the classic sign of pseudoscience. Regardless if we did do a study on parachutes and got a null result that would actually be very good evidence against parachutes.
Stuff like this means we need to caveat any claim that Kennedy has wacky beliefs / conspiracy theories with the fact that his political opponents hold the similarly wacky (but in practice far more destructive) belief / conspiracy theory that masks work for covid.
It's a bit worse than a footnote. Schooling is obligatory. You can't avoid having your children wearing a degrading symbol of submission to unjust authority (and one that increasingly looks like it harms your health) simply by not interacting with the schooling system because that is also illegal.
Further, it's part of a wider pattern that would need a whole book to comprehensively document. But to try to keep things as brief as possible, covid-sceptic backbencher MPs from the governing party repeatedly asked to be provided with cost-benefit analyses for restrictions. These were not provided, generally on the basis that it would be too complicated to provide a cost-benefit analysis (Effectively admitting they have no utilitarian justification for restrictions as they never bothered doing the work). On rare cases where cost-benefit analysis was done, such as with vaccinating children, if the numbers went against what the government wanted to do anyway the relevant institutions were overruled.
A world in which advocates of lockdowns backed them on the basis of a utilitarian calculation where personal liberties fell on the losing side looks very different than the one we actually got. For instance, by actually having an argument to present in favour of their policies, advocates of lockdowns would have spent less time and funding on slandering their opponents as substitute. I would still find them disagreeable, as abandoning personal liberties have huge second and third order effects that make the world more dangerous, but it would at least be comprehensible, and a far better debate than was actually had. However, utilitarian and cost-benefit analysis is not the argument that supporters of lockdowns advanced. Cost-benefit analysis was generally done by sceptics to try to understand or even steelman government decision making in the absence of them providing their own reasoning. That's what I did back in March-May 2020, and it was only when I realised that reasoning from the government was not forthcoming because it didn't exist that I went full anti-lockdown.
Decision-making during covid can't be comprehended through a lens of people making the least bad decisions possible. Rather, only by identifying an ideological commitment to restrictions for the sake of restrictions do the restrictions we got make any sense.
Edit for more considerations:
Regretfully committing human rights violations in a desperate effort to stop covid would resemble the ideas of proportionality such as in the Siracusa principles: Doing the absolute least violation of human rights possible to avert the bad outcome. To give examples:
The severity, duration and geographic scope of any derogation measure shall be such only as is strictly necessary to deal with the threat to the life of the nation and is proportionate to its nature and extent
And
The principle of strict necessity shall be applied in an objective manner. Each measure shall be directed to an actual, clear, present, or imminent danger and may not be imposed merely because of an apprehension of potential danger.
This is not what we saw with the response to covid in the UK. At every level restrictions that were absent any evidence of effectiveness were imposed, which immediately violates the idea of doing the least bad thing possible. Even a single restriction existing for a vapid reason like "Sturgeon did it" would sink any claim of proportionality, but the number of restrictions that fit that category are quite extensive. To list some more examples:
Reintroduction of masks in winter 2021, regarded to be Boris retaliating against the general public for the crime of noticing partygate by some of his own backbenchers.
Masks in general, considering they lacked evidence of efficacy, still lack evidence of efficacy, and thus can never be a proportional violation of civil liberties.
Matter of public record that including children in rule of six had no rationale but was done anyway. It's likely that the entire rule of six thing has no rationale - inside baseball is that it is "six" because Gove thought it sounded better for sloganing than "eight".
Lack of policy to deal with covid tests that are determined to be false-positives following a more reliable PCR test, instead continuing to make children isolate despite not having covid, because doing so would be contradicting earlier statements about whether false-positives are a thing.
General lack of evidence that outdoor spread is a significant source of covid transmission compared to indoor spread, despite restrictions excessively targetting outdoor spread and arguably encouraging indoor spread.
That vaccines don't work to prevent transmission, which was at best a wild assumption made without evidence and then used to coerce people into being vaccinated against their judgement. And then to bring in vaccine mandates.
That children are harmed less by covid but harmed more by many restrictions, repeatedly ignored, violates proportionality
Like I said, needs a book to go through all of these.
The careful consideration of even minor interventions with negligible potential harms like this by medical ethics always struck me as admirable. As for why this was discussed for dementia patients and not parenting, I think medical ethics simply cared way more about the details of what they were doing. There's nothing fundamental stopping a similarly detailed childraising ethics field from existing, but it just doesn't.
All this makes it even sadder that medical ethics completely jumped the shark in 2020 and thoroughly discredited itself as a field in doing so.
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