pigeonburger
4d ago
Me I got diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after the vaccines and my wife had blood clots. For both we didn't even bother mentionning or ask doctors if there was any possible links with the vaccines, out of fear of being seen as "those kind of people", and doctors didn't inquire or propose it as possible reasons. Not saying either of us have had vaccine side effects, and there are plausible alternative explanations for both of us, but then again how do we know for sure it's not the vaccine? I wonder how many people have had side effects that were not being properly recorded because they knew that in blue environments it would code them as people to ignore and shun.
pigeonburger
9d ago
I'm glad Florida won it because I don't want any other canadian team to have won the Cup before our next one.
I don't think it's anywhere near a open and shut case that the vaccines stopped the pandemic, we don't have a counterfactual Earth to compare against, but as people got vaccinated we also saw the rise of less deadly variants. And of course, as more people still got infected they would build natural immunity. As for the prevalence of side effects, again we don't have much information to compare against, but the distinct impression I got from the public medical establishment during the pandemic is that if it were happening they would not have been honest about it because of how they took a mortage on their reputations to push the vaccines. There was no scientific curiosity, anyone trying to raise any alarms was not taken with even a slight grain of seriousness but immediately the public health establishments were looking for ways to discredit them. While that does not increase the trustworthiness of those making the claims, it does negatively affect the trustworthiness of those dismissing them without even looking at them.
Note, I'm not saying that the vaccines did nothing but caused deadly side effects, personally I think it probably had a mild effect in lowering the seriousness of infection for people who encountered COVID for the first time after the vaccine, and was probably generally safe and side effects no more prevalent or serious than other similar drugs, but I have no data either way that I would personally trust about this, so I wouldn't judge someone for coming to a different conclusion.
pigeonburger
11d ago
Personally, I've been hit by the thunderbolt before, but I think it's not an indicator of any kind of compatibility, but our biology's attempt at getting people who are failing to pair bond to reproduce regardless.
pigeonburger
12d ago
Tangent, but I always wondered if a big part of the persisting popular perception of Love at First Sight and True Soulmates and stuff like that is just couples/parents downplaying their struggles after the fact to strengthen their bond and/or to reassure their children. Maybe I'm an outlier, but for me attraction (in a romantic sense) was never a 0-to-100 flash of inspiration, it was always me gradually growing interested in a person as I learn about their life and language, not noticing it sinking in until at some point the realization hits out of left field.
Maybe some people really find someone where everything is effortless. Maybe those people also embody the work advice "if you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life". Maybe those people are lying to themselves, or maybe they aren't. I have to work at my career and I have to work at my marriage. I didn't make the maximum effort and maximum difficulty choices for both, but I'm not sure the unicorn effortless ones existed for either, at least for me.
pigeonburger
13d ago
It's just good PR. There's a lot of uninformed takes on AI out there. And there are some less uninformed takes that Big Tech would like to dispute. The Vatican has a large amount of influence on some people. Those people adopting the wrong opinions, from the perspective of Big Tech, could eventually trickle down into legislation, or at least into public attitudes. And as much as we would like to think PR should not be necessary, it's like lawyers; a world where it wasn't necessary to do PR would be sunshine and rainbows, but that's not the world we live in. If you don't do PR you're still going to be on the recieving of other people's PR (negative against you, or positive for them in cases where you are competing for scarce ressources like government investment or the public's discretionary spending).
I'll go the opposite the other commenters here. I'm started being in an international LD relationship about 6 years ago. I arranged for us to meet for a week within 6 months of starting the relationship. After that, COVID made meeting again difficult, but I arranged for her to come visit me for some months regardless. We were married before she went back home. She moved in permanently with me in 2023.
It's super basic bitch pop-psych but the most important thing to remember is that venting from a woman is not a prompt for you to fix an issue and absolutely not a prompt for you to try and dedramatise the issue. It's a prompt for you to say an "empty platitude" like "oh, that sucks, I hope things gets better". It's hard because your rational brain is telling you the issues can be fixed, or that she just needs a different perspective. Vast majority of the time, this is not helpful.
The empty platitudes might feel empty to you, but if you actually love her then they are not empty if you're saying them to help her feel better.
I'm led to believe it should come naturally if you truly capital-L Love someone?
Hahahaha! No. If I were to ask any man I know in a long-term straight relationship I will get the same lament; "it's like we're talking a different language". It's a miracle humanity managed to pair bond for so long. Marriage (and serious relationships that are indistinguishable from marriages) are hard, it's not a capital L Love issue; it's a two completely different human beings with different lives, histories and wildly different brain chemistry are trying to get on the same page to act as one. Both people need to learn to at least understand the other's language, and ideally talk it at least a bit.
pigeonburger
14d ago
See also, Trump literally said they weren't going to enforce it for farm and hotel labour.
That has been reversed now.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/06/16/trump-farms-hotels-immigration-raids/
pigeonburger
14d ago
I've been in rooms full of serious mainstream journalists talking between colleagues about the crisises of their profession and there is no introspection happening. Their solution to the trust crisis is to debunk disinformation harder. There is no realisation that the rise of "disinformation" (of the "alternate perspective the journalist doesn't like", "someone made a mistake handling facts" and "random guy on the internet wrote outright falsehood" kinds) is purely an effect of their own actions.
pigeonburger
18d ago
Yeah, I imagine that's the bulk of what they do. And all the time spent shadowing the Chinese subs, US sonarmen get better at identifying them, and more sound from the particular screw on these boats' propeller gets recorded and then processed to help algorithms pick it up from noise.
I wouldn't be sure about either one of Russia and China. I can't find any indication it has changed since then, but it was late Soviet policy to operate its SSBNs from "bastions", highly guarded areas in friendly waters. The noisy environment this created made the comparatively less stealthy Soviet SSBNs stand out less than they would on their own. On their own, they would have an SSN shadowing them, ready to sink them within minutes of war being declared.
China's SSBNs are pretty crude designs for now, decades behind the west. Though of course, they iterate quickly and can be expected to catch up quite fast, assuming they're getting some help from Russia which is not as far behind the west. And that they have homegrown SSBNs at all is no small feat. But considering how noisy they are, they would not feel comfortable operating them outside of safe areas either, meaning they are believed to also operate on a "bastion" doctrine.
pigeonburger
18d ago
I think it's because it's the only governing body on the planet that is ideologically bound to engage in total warfare against an opponent that dominates it in every way, so that losing in ways that creates a PR nightmare for their opponent is the only possible victory they can get.
pigeonburger
18d ago
The work not being done until the wages raise to a level where workers are willing to do it is not a market distortion, it is the market working as intended.
Illegal immigrant workers are the market distortion; international borders (not market forces) that have very stark difference in cost of living on one side compared to the other create the incentives for people to go work for way below local market rates. Not that I'm arguing for open borders, but that is one situation where governments create bad incentives (by not having an open market with a poorer neighbors) for reasons that can be desirable for other reason than economic, and where it should also work to compensate for it (by policing illegal immigration properly to counter the incentives they've created).
pigeonburger
19d ago
People sometimes survive absolutely unbelievable stuff because bodies just happened be in just the right way. And sometimes they die because their body has a mild shock in a very unlucky way.
pigeonburger
21d ago
Yes, that's what is counterintuitive: of course a car is deadlier, but we get more angry at cyclists anyway.
And herein lies the big reason as to why the pro-choice side has to fight using misleading arguments; they have actually very good, defensible arguments, but they're technical, philosophical and feel bad to say. Like pointing out there's no easy answer as to when consciousness or life begins. It feels like you're telling pregnant women their fetus isn't a real human. At that point you might as well tell pet owners their pets don't love them, they just want food.
It feels much better when you frame it as defending some highly sympathetic but non-central cases like rape victims than as denying a maybe-baby's humanity.
Same with the "it's my body", " I can chose whether to have a medical operation"/arguments, technically correct and mix it with the previous argument and it's convincing to people with ethics brain. Doesn't code as nice and empathic.
Not my opponents actually, I'm not on any side in this. But pro-choice is pretty much tautologically against the compromise I gave, because the "choice" in the name of their movement is the mother's, not a police officer's, a doctor's or an ethics panel's choice.
They might take a compromise on timing, but not on reasons, because those are no one's business than the mother's.
pigeonburger
25d ago
Oh, okay, I musunderstood you
pigeonburger
26d ago
No, it's the Democrat aligned media that try to make a big deal of Republican controlled legislatures that try to (futilely) put the genie back in the bottle and require age verification for access to porn.
But there's more than two sides to this, I'd point out. There's a large contingent, maybe even a plurality, that believes that being born from parents who didn't want you sucks, that ideally children should only be born from parents that want them, that wouldn't care to defend considering a fetus a human being at the moment of conception, but ALSO wouldn't care to defend it only being a human being at the moment of birth. That contingent feels intuitively, even if they cannot articulate it with nice convenient lines, that there is a difference between an abortion days after conception and an abortion days before expected birth.
That contingent might be easier to compromise with. In fact, compromise is what they want, and usually get. Taking off the table some few but highly sympathetic exceptions might make them willing to go for a more restrictive compromise.
pigeonburger
26d ago
I'm sorry man, that sucks. I didn't even have that traumatic of an experience and I still could not muster to do better for most of my adult life.
I wish I had better advice for you than what you've been probably hearing. I hope you can get over at least the personal aspect of it; as for the world, it tends to be at least a bit kinder to men when we get older.
pigeonburger
26d ago
Interesting, this does seem to explain something I've noticed recently in how little purchase the "War on Porn" that the left and mainstream media seem to be trying make into a big thing has. Considering how many guys watch porn, you'd think they'd defend their access to it passionately, but it doesn't seem to get any reaction from the public. And I doubt that it's because the public at large has untangled the media's spin and can tell that it's not something to panic over, the public is rarely that sophisticated.
pigeonburger
26d ago
I think the pro-life people, particularly the religious who form a majority of them, don't tend to view the question tactically. If a position was imposed that reduced abortion rates without bringing it to zero, they'd still be happy, but they cannot themselves argue for a mere reduction because if they did they imagine themselves being tormented in the afterlife by the ghosts of the unborn fruits of rapes asking them "Wasn't I also a precious human being worth fighting for?". So for them, it has to be a total ban. This might change in the future if the pro-life position gets taken up en-masse by people who have another basis than religion for it; after all, natalism is not inherently religious.
Rape and extreme health risks with regards to abortion are some of the clearest examples of motte-and-bailey arguments I know of. The best way to spot a motte-and-bailey argument is to see if the person is satisfied if you were to grant them the motte. In this case, imagine abortion was 100% completely legal up to any point in the pregnancy for rape cases and for significantly higher health risk than usual pregnancies, and 100% illegal for family planning purposes. If necessary, imagine an omniscient arbiter were able to make sure no rape victim gets dismissed and no one could get away with falsely claiming rape just to get an abortion.
I think a majority of pro-life people would be overjoyed. Even though they might have preferred a full ban, what they want, to save what they percieve as life, is in accordance with the arguments they put forth, so any decrease is good. Pro-choice people would be almost uniformly against, because extreme cases like rape and risky pregnancies are not the reason they are pro-choice, family planning is (but it's a harder sell, especially to family and duty minded conservatives). So in that case, guaranteeing absolutely no rape victim or no risky pregnancy is forced to term is not worth giving up on family planning.
*EDIT: In fact, I suspect that they would be unhappy in ways they could not reasonably explain themselves if full right to abortion were granted to rape and high medical risk cases on top of current compromises. Truthfully because they could not then use these as a shield to expand family planning rights, but I can easily imagine half-assed excuses as to why the medical establishment (or the omniscient arbiter) has no right to judge whether a woman has really been raped, only she can know!
It's not that men can't cook, I can actually cook great (by standards of men my age, though my brother is actually much better). But I also don't take much care of myself and if there's no one I'm accountable to and for, I'll probably go for least effort solutions (fast food, or junk frozen meals).
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