jkf
1mo ago
shit why do I only remember intimidating black men.
Haha not sure -- I admit to have heard of Herman Cain, but not prior to him dying of covid and being relentlessly mocked by all the good people -- Powell certainly counts, I'm surprised that I hadn't heard of his passing. Maybe there were some inconveniences there for the bloody-shirt wavers given that he was not only fully vaccinated, but also apparently "had multiple myeloma, ... surgery for prostate cancer ... and, more recently, Parkinson's disease."
No idea who Tommy Lister is, but if you were a fan prior to covid he counts -- as I said I'm Canadian so know more hockey players than intimidating black dudes.
When it comes to celebrities they seem to have mostly hidden in beach houses and such.
But they (virtually) all got it eventually, right? Same as everyone else.
jkf
1mo ago
You can say haha fuck you doctors lose your careers but you do run the risk of having people die unnecessarily
That is the place I have been driven to, yes -- I stand by it. Maybe next time the doctors won't be so chickenshit and will stand up for the right thing.
I think it makes sense for a higher initial inoculation (like being trapped in a train or city bus with a sick person) to result in more severe illness than walking past someone on the way into a grocery store and catching a whiff.
I think different doses were tested in the challenge trial, and don't recall that correlation being noted -- the thing about viruses is that the replicate really fast and exponentially. So a couple of infected cells becomes a couple of zillion not much more slowly than a couple of thousand would. But even if this were the case, I am not a literal woods-dwelling hermit -- I know lots of people in cities, some of which were noted hotspots. I myself was in a couple of those cities right up until travel was made difficult in Spring 2020. I did not get covid until for another year or so, and none of those city denizens died; none of them went to the hospital.
How many celebrities could you name, if pressed? I think I could name hundreds, many of whom are pretty old and live in big cities; the only one I could name offhand who is said to have died of Covid is John Prine. This also seems inconsistent with the idea that it was ever an extremely dangerous thing.
jkf
1mo ago
It doesn't need to be a generational plague to overload the medical system, which it did to some extent. If we ever get a generational plague again we are absolutely fucked.
So be it -- if the medical system wants me to care about it, it needs to not jerk me around. Sorry-notsorry.
Rural probably does it though, most of the people who had a bad experience were in the city - likely due to close proximity etc, which probably also is why it's way more of a blue tribe concern.
You think that proximity makes infection severity worse? Frequency, sure -- but I don't think I've heard anyone assert that IFR is worse in cities before.
If the generational pandemic only kills people in the city (not including my relatives there apparently, who were fine) I am ambivalent at best. Most of our current national issues are driven by overcrowded cities, and 'plague' might be close enough to 'natural attrition' for me...
jkf
1mo ago
It's right there on page 1 -- non-fentanyl-involved ODs are flat.
I haven't been to Seattle lately, but just north in Vancouver there have been lightly enforced open-air drug-marts for decades. I think Portland too? Decriminalization is just a recognition of the de facto situation -- as such it doesn't really change things much. Actual legalization such that the drug supply is not left in the hands of brutal smuggling gangs might help -- but I think it's probably too late now that the hardcore opiates users are hooked on fentanyl in particular, and actively prefer it to other less finicky opiates. This intractable situation came about entirely because fentanyl is easier/cheaper to smuggle -- which is a direct result of the War on Drugs.
jkf
1mo ago
Decriminalization has been a disaster. The overdose death rate increased by 2,400% between 1980 and 2020. The data cuts off, but it's even worse now.
It's impossible to untangle recent decrim efforts from the recently increased popularity of fentanyl if you are looking at OD rate as a metric -- it is just much easier to OD on, and I'd argue that the popularity (which we are probably now stuck with) was a direct result of the WOD enforcement regime.
jkf
1mo ago
Rural-ish Canada -- lots of friends & family in the big city though. I don't even know anybody who lost a relative to this. One guy at work (which is remote and had a lot of people in hard-hit areas) had a dad get pretty sick, but he recovered AFAIK.
Virtually everybody got sick at some point though, so I'm not sure that location makes much difference? I don't recall any attempts to correlate infection severity with population density.
Like I said, I'm not quite prepared to believe that the whole thing was made up, but these experiences are just not consistent with a generational plague. And I can't really blame people who are prepared to connect those dots, given the verifiable lies that ~everyone believes due to government reporting/propaganda yet I know to be 100% false. (basically anything to do with the truckers, for starters)
jkf
1mo ago
Yeah your circumstances aren't conducive
What do you mean? I'm mid genX, my peers are spread from around 40-60 and my (still living) parents and aunties and uncles and shit are like 75-85. I've got one grandpa still trucking in his late 90s. You are not talking to some zoomer here.
If covid is not a serious threat to my middle-aged (charitably; some of us are passing our prime) peers nor my Boomer+ relatives, who's circumstances exactly would be conducive?
I'm not saying that I quite believe this to be the case, but if again if I trust only what I can directly observe (which is becoming both more sensible and more common these days) -- that is what I'm left with.
jkf
1mo ago
You seem sincere, but to give the devil his due -- why should I believe you? My covid experience was 'wake up feeling like shit, find that the horses are out, drag myself through fixing the fence for a couple hours then go back to bed -- sore throat but more or less fine the next day, 100% better by start of day 4'. I do know people that had it somewhat worse than this, but nobody died or came close to it. (for reference, like most of my friends I am solidly middle aged, and my previous-gen relatives are early boomers if not older)
Naively, it seems surprising that nearly everyone I know had this deadly disease, and many of them barely noticed it, and nobody even went to the hospital. If medical authorities hadn't lied about everything else, I might assume that their figures are accurate -- but that is not the world we live in.
I am far from alone in this situation -- I fully realize the conspiratorial thinking required here, but if I accept only evidence that I'm 100% sure of veracity-wise, that is what I am left with.
jkf
1mo ago
No it was not just another flu. Etc. etc.
Lived experience comes to the fore here though -- roughly everyone has by now experienced covid for themselves, and for many people it was in fact just another flu. (not even a particularly bad one, for me & mine)
When you are confronted by an environment where it's become clear that doctors, governments, and media have been lying to you more or less constantly for the past few years, lived experience is perhaps the only thing that you truly can know about covid -- and if you yourself shrugged covid off in a couple of days, the logical conclusion seems to be 'this was NBD'. Which if one thinks about it too much can lead to some unpleasant & uncharitable conclusions as to why the aforementioned liars made such a big deal about it.
jkf
1mo ago
Honestly it turns fries into one of the easiest things you can make -- with homecut potatoes and appropriate oil choice they are reasonably healthy IMO -- I've got some pork fat in the freezer and will try with lard once I render it!
jkf
1mo ago
You can make the case with the burger but the deep frier part is not plausible. Cleaning up a deep frier and the fine mist of oil it will deposit all over your kitchen are a lot of work, there are substantial efficiencies of scale for deep frying.
Wat? It lives in the pantry and I bring it out if I want fries; if you're mostly doing potatoes the oil only needs changing from time to time. I deep clean it maybe annually.
The thing has a lid; there's no 'mist', fine or otherwise. Are you thinking of an industrial unit? You are correct that this would be a bad idea -- the $50 Walmart ones work fine for domestic quantities.
I mean I'm too tired to cook sometimes too, but when I am (and don't want to order pizza or something) a cheeseburger is exactly what I make:
- Slap 1/3-1/4 lb of beef in hot pan or on grill; squish with flipper
- Cut bun; spread some mustard/mayo/butter/whatever on there
- Slice cheese and onion
- Turn beef; squish a little more and put cheese on it
- Wait 2 mins
- Put onion slice on bottom of bun
- Put beef on onion
- Put some lettuce on beef
- Put top of bun on lettuce
This seems like way less work than going to McDonalds, and takes less than ten minutes? If you want fries with that you need to think ahead and plug the deep frier in ~15 minutes before starting the above and add "0. Throw fries in deep frier" to your steps. Cutting up a potato first is fast enough for me (and much healthier), but those frozen fries work fine if you want to optimize for speed.
(EDIT: I see downthread you are vegan (but still think cheeseburgers are delicious), so substitute one of those frozen patties for the beef stuff and don't use butter -- even easier, and the black-bean ones are pretty good (although almost but not quite entirely unlike a burger))
jkf
2mo ago
"Small piece of chocolate" (like one or two of the tiny squares; 10% of a bar) after a meal that might not be immediately satiating seems to result in fewer net calories for me than eating more of whatever I was having for lunch; a bit of a 'one weird trick' but maybe the (small) blood sugar bump is helping here?
jkf
2mo ago
I think the lawfare and literal conquest by fire of the churches are doing the job well enough.
They won't be able to make a repeat of it, but 'because covid', observers were made to keep a 3m distance from the actual counters, and accused of 'making the workers feel unsafe' if they tried to ask about anything in PA for sure. (there was a court case about it, which the RNC or whoever won and got an order to let the scrutineers scrutinize -- once the counting was more or less done)
GA I don't want to relitigate, but "we're stopping counting because of <definitely not a water main break>, you may as well go home" coupled with restarting the count a couple hours later seems well outside the spirit of that reg.
jkf
2mo ago
Partisan scrutineers being allowed to meaningfully inspect the counting process is kind of a big one.
'just' a progressive meme undersells it a little I think -- there's a very real attempt to whip up anti-Catholic sentiment for social engineering reasons, and going after some Unitarians in bumfuck SK wouldn't advance this goal.
In reality the parameters of the project were determined by the (largely Liberal) government of the day -- so if anyone should be getting the hate it's like Robert Borden or something. This does not serve the agenda either, which is why old John A gets so much demonization despite being removed from power around the time the residential school system got really fired up.
jkf
2mo ago
"If" -- the whole cost-benefit thing is a real problem if the drones only cost $300 but you need 100 soldiers @ whatever salary to get your one kill.
jkf
2mo ago
Neither the Russians nor Ukrainians see it that way -- I wouldn't say it's a great attitude, but it's extremely lindy. You also still need a hundred-ish guys to drive the drones, so it's not like it makes your army needs smaller -- just allows cowards to participate in the bloodshed I suppose.
jkf
2mo ago
Humans are actually cheap and expendable -- the fact that the US military does not consider them so is an historical aberration and there's no guarantee that it will extend to modern warfare -- as we indeed see if we look at the attitudes of both sides in the current Ukrainian conflict. (They are also pretty good at killing civilians so long as you dehumanize them enough first; see both current major conflicts, but particularly Israel. Not sure what that has to do with anything though; humans still need to fly/deploy the drones)
How cheap do you think these drones can be that 'hundreds' of them will be a good tradeoff for a single muddy conscript? I think you've been infected with FOOM/AI doomer rhetoric. What would you specifically do to get from the current state of the art to the point where sending humans into the combat zone is suicidal?
jkf
2mo ago
Adding up the number of leaders her flacks convinced to endorse her would be actually fair, but "a couple dozen dudes who floated to the top of the most notoriously corrupt union in the world endorse Kamala Harris" doesn't have much of a ring to it.
jkf
2mo ago
In the not-so-distant future, the drones will be much smaller, much more intelligent, and much cheaper. Imagine trying to defend yourself against 10 bullet-size drones flying towards your face with a small but lethal explosive charge at the tip.
Setting aside that payload is sharply limited by battery capacity and the current form factor about as good as it's likely to get (and therefore you might as well worry about being attacked by nano-replicators or some other sci-fi thing), some kind of net-gun with IR sights would probably do the job just fine?
jkf
2mo ago
Yes, "cultural Marxism" is a thing whether you call it that or something else; are "Cultural Marxists" actually trying to bring about a revolution of the proleteriat and the True Communism That Has Never Been Tried? Mostly not.
The people who fit this description in the strongest sense believe that the Cultural aspect has superseded the OG economic analysis of Marx; mostly they probably don't think about that at all, or maybe endorse some sort of MMT in which debt doesn't matter and therefore needn't stand in their way. Not sure how much they think about their desired end-state either, but my impression is that it looks less like a dictatorship of the proletariat and more like a dictatorship of them personally -- maybe we can switch the name to "Cultural Stalinism"?
Endorsed -- be aware that everyone in Canada (other than people from Toronto, who will smugly inform you that 'it's a World Class City') has felt the same way since roughly 1965:
Not sure about cocaine (or LSD I guess -- neither are prescribed very much), but prescription versions of all the other popular ones are already way cheaper than the street versions. (not including marijuana of course, since it's roughly as hard to grow as lettuce and various regulations tend to make the official versions more expensive to produce than the ways the black market has already figured out)
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