rolfmoo
1yr ago
Six months later, turns out it makes people infertile.
That's still a good deal for over-65s! You could have rolled it out to all of them and still nearly eliminated the pandemic death toll. That's my whole point - sure, it wasn't worth rolling out an experimental vaccine to everyone at once, but it was obviously worth it for the most vulnerable.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
Really quickly by the criminally murderously slow standards of medicine, yes. But they were developed in January 2020 and took most of a year to be rolled out, while the bodies continued to mount up in the meantime, for "safety". Safety from the illness they prevent just doesn't appear on the balance sheet.
You should have been able to volunteer to take the risk of an untested vaccine in January, after the "well it doesn't kill monkeys" stage - if you're 85 that's a good idea! We could have had mountains of human data fast at very low expected risk, spun up vaccine distribution months earlier (the insanity surrounding that is a whole other rant) and nipped the whole thing in the bud.
Once you have mRNA vaccine synthesis, having a pandemic at all is a fucking embarrassment for the human race.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
Probably not as much damage as, you know, the COVID pandemic. The null action also costs millions of lives and trillions of dollars!
rolfmoo
1yr ago
I don't think it's true that hideous modern architecture is just the genuine aesthetic vision of a different culture. Most people hate it, Texan or Californian: it's the taste, or apparent taste, of a small number of highly privileged people (architects and their sponsors).
rolfmoo
1yr ago
I'll happily take that trade! Pure mathematics is nice, but I'll trade it for all the other beautiful things in a heartbeat. Political views: dissident SJW/liberal, strongly pro-trans-rights, anti-racist, pro-freedom of speech, pro-vaccine/anti-lockdown.
I never understood why building ugly things was supposed to be a left/liberal position. It's not the highly-privileged architects who have to live in the damn things.
And yes, aesthetics are technically subjective, but this is one of those weaselly things. Perhaps there really are architects who deeply appreciate the local Concrete Abomination and find it transcendentally beautiful and aren't just saying that as part of a complicated signalling equilibrium! People are weird sometimes! But the public in general overwhelmingly prefers beautiful things in the polls, and they're almost never built any more.
It's an undemocratic injustice foisted disproportionately on marginalised groups by a predominantly-white elite. Tear down the brutalist monstrosities and replace them with cathedrals for social justice.
(Also, they're ugly as sin and I hate them.)
rolfmoo
1yr ago
The UK has an ongoing COVID inquiry. It's probably not going to come to much, but the general consensus I sense now was that the lockdowns and the general pandemic strategy were a bit foolish, yet another error of the Tory government.
It's no longer verboten to criticise the lockdowns, as it was for years. I still haven't heard a remotely sane answer for why vaccines had to be agonisingly slowly tested while the bodies piled up, because mumble mumble bioethics consent, but the whole population could be placed under house arrest on a whim, but there you go.
Realistically, there's not going to be a huge revelation. It's just going to quietly fade away, at best they'll be generally seen as a mildly bad response, and we'll forget all about it.
+1 for my general belief that the lockdowns were motivated more by panic, and monkey-see-monkey-do-ing China, than any actually coherent policy.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
I'm not clear on how this differs from "I could be happy in Heaven despite knowing there are people in Hell because my mind would be rewritten to consider this justice". A divine entity reshaping you like that could make you think of anything as justice. How would you tell the difference between this, and the Hypothetical Reverse God who condemns all Christians making you think you perfectly deserve misery?
...Also, I can't help but notice that this whole "without these specific rituals and beliefs, you suffer forever" business feels a lot more like an idea maximising pressure to spread it than the kind of thing you'd expect from the Almighty. It seems very petty, very suspiciously human, for an entity with the majesty and sheer greatness of God to hold that kind of a grudge.
Who am I to teach God mercy? Well, I don't have a torture-dimension for my enemies, so I have that going for me. I sort of feel like the Almighty should be able to outdo me here, rather than the opposite.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
This would be true if all the odds were independent, but obviously the odds are not independent. This group isn't pulling at random from the whole population, or even from a certain statistically-distinguished fraction of the population. It's a group of people who congregated around a common interest, and selection effects there can be very powerful indeed.
Also, it's an April Fools joke.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
Literally exactly zero isn't necessary - it just has to be a rounding error, like "it happened because the CCTV camera just happened to explode while all the guards were sneezing" or whatever, as opposed to the current rate of "who cares".
rolfmoo
1yr ago
If you genuinely can't afford to keep an orderly prison of X inmates, you need to allocate more resources or imprison <X inmates. I am not persuaded that a male raped is less of a horror than a female raped.
But in reality, I think it's just a problem of incentives - it might not be as simple as "fine prisons $1million per prison rape and watch the problem disappear", but qualitatively the problem is that to my knowledge nobody with any power actually loses anything per potential prison rape.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
Prisoners having sex, especially unprotected sex that leads to childbirth, also isn't a thing that should happen. If it does, there are already procedures for state care of children of unfit parents.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
this issue becomes legally significant when there are laws that apply differently to "men" and "women."
Another excellent reason why there shouldn't be such laws.
Frankly, I'm not even sure there should be sex-segregated prisons in the first place. A prison is a place where privacy is suspended and the rule of law can and should be total. The rate of prison rape should be zero.
In reality, of course, people don't really care about prison rape and abuse when trans people aren't involved. "Don't drop the soap" is a harmless jest, unlike all other rape jokes. But the possibility that a trans person might perpetrate such a crime?
I'm extremely sceptical of the notion that the law should discriminate on the basis of sex or gender at all (isn't Justice blind?), but this particular controversy is missing the key issue.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
I'm arguing in favour of the vaccine. It has a much better safety profile than a lot of things - it's just because it happens to take the form of medicine that we want a frankly ridiculous safety standard.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
Absurd safety standards for medicine are the norm. Lots of things with side effects and uncertain cost-benefit profiles (like lockdowns themselves!) are acceptable when if they happened to take the form of a pill or injection they'd be ten different kinds of illegal.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
Ideas for the key cities (London, Paris, Florence, Rome) including sites and excursions
On Rome - the Colosseum, the Forum, and the Vatican City are tourist traps that are nonetheless more than worth it, and indeed are practically compulsory. Regarding the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel is nice to see if possible, but frankly overrated and almost not worth the significant hassle of getting in, whereas I found the interior of the Basilica of St Peter an underrated highlight of the city. Less well-known but worthy sites run into the dozens, but one that stays with me is the Capuchin Crypt.
Florence is among the most consistently beautiful places simply to walk through. The best part of the main cathedral is the outside - the interior is a crowded disappointment by comparison, but that doesn't matter when the outside is there. I personally found the dome climb good fun and fascinating in engineering terms, but it's often a bother to organise and queue for and can be claustrophobic: the bell tower offers an equal or superior view for less bother. (It is worth seeing Florence from above - consider also Piazzale Michaelangelo for this). Fiesole is a nice day-trip if you have time.
Modern-day Naples itself is frankly unpleasant. Its surroundings are glorious. My advice would be to stay in one of the nearby towns and go into Naples and parts of the Amalfi coast by train or whatever. Whatever you do there, devote a day (starting in the early morning to avoid tourist hordes) to Pompeii. It's IMO the best possible way to appreciate those roots in classical antiquity.
rolfmoo
2yr ago
NB: I apologise if this reply seems harsh - I've tried to avoid that but see above on why I don't think straight about this.
I think this exemplifies my problem, really: it's all talked about in vague terms that can make the frighteningly insane sound perfectly reasonable.
Never mind "temporary suspension of civil liberties to save lives", which covers almost anything: how long and how bad for how many? If saving those 500000 people costs two weeks of no nightclubs, OK, I'm listening; if it costs a decade of China-style welded-indoors lockdown, no deal, molon labe etc.
But this was just never discussed. It wasn't a matter of "we'll consider these restrictions if they're projected to save at least this many lives", it was "your fundamental civil liberties are gone, you want to know what our cost-benefit analysis is, it's fuck you that's what it is".
And there's certainly no admission of failure now. If as it turns out they were crazy all along, that's critical evidence against them for the future, and I at least reserve the right to say "I told you so, clearly nobody involved in this fiasco should work in their field ever again". But it's just quietly dropped for the next Current Thing like the world didn't go insane for a few years!
rolfmoo
2yr ago
What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify?
Covid lockdowns. Vaccines? Very sensible. Vaccine mandates? Extreme, but I can imagine taking that position on the balance. But the idea of total loss of the most fundamental freedom - in my country, needing an excuse just to leave my house? I find it very hard to have any more sophisticated response than "fuck you and fuck your excuses", and on some deep emotional level that I can't shake it feels like everyone went completely insane at once on just this one issue.
It's especially weird because I'm pretty woke on most things. But in this case the mainstream feels totally insane and its viewpoint feels totally opaque to me, and inspires that kind of rage-and-panic reaction (which is not a pleasant thing to nearly constantly feel for more than a year).
rolfmoo
2yr ago
Those with power do as they will, and those without complain about violations of rights and freedoms
This is not the trajectory of world history over recent centuries. You do in fact have more rights and freedoms as an average modern American than as an average citizen of almost any premodern civilisation. All of this apparently gritty cynicism about how it's all about power and rights don't real is just historical denialism.
rolfmoo
2yr ago
You... do know this is primarily a reactionary forum and is consequentially going to have a right-wing skew
You were the Chosen One, /r/TheMotte! It was said that you would destroy the screaming tribal shit-flinging, not join in! etc. etc.
This place is way to the right of me in some directions I find really weird, but I'm still here because it's supposed to be a place for the grown-ups in the room, where you don't get targeted for a difference of opinion. If it's going to just be another reactionary forum with a slightly higher average IQ for a while, what's the point?
rolfmoo
2yr ago
I believe in the logic of evolutionary psychology more than I believe self-reported contentment questionnaires.
Then you believe in something very shaky.
A lot of people find puppies cuter than babies. Hell, on a deeper level, people aren't physically repulsed by condoms. Evolution just isn't capable of psychological engineering that precise: you're not a deeply robustly programmed creature of family, you're a hacked-together mess of impulses and inclinations and psychological systems that boot from the limited information of the genome to a giant mess of crappy wetware compute.
rolfmoo
2yr ago
I am only begrudgingly tolerant of it for religious reasons for freedom-of-religion purposes
For an adult, yes. If you are full-grown and compos mentis and you positively insist on having bits of you chopped off, well, it's your body and your life. But I don't think you have the religious freedom to do it to someone else, especially if that someone else is a helpless child.
I don't think it's an urgent issue. Comparisons with rape and the worse forms of FGM are excessive. But I do think it's wrong.
rolfmoo
2yr ago
They might be hoping to reframe the whole issue. Nobody blames Photoshop when people make fake naked pictures of celebrities: maybe by making it a tool like Word and Excel, they're hoping that people will see it as neutral in whatever it's used for. I doubt this will work (if Photoshop were released today, would naughty pictures be blamed on Adobe?) but they might be willing to take the risk, gambling on Office's existing image as a neutral suite of tools.
rolfmoo
2yr ago
There is a not-totally-insane argument that marginally raising the sanity waterline of the culture war is an altruistic cause in and of itself. As the old saying goes, the worst thing they can possibly do is say "no", so if it's not very costly in labour terms it's worth a try.
rolfmoo
2yr ago
I have a novel hypothesis / wildly unfounded cloud-yell on this: we are seeing a shift away from stories and towards content.
Let's take your Star Wars example. Original Star Wars was supposed to be a childlike fairy tale, and there's nothing wrong with that (see C.S. Lewis). But it had some kind of coherent sense and consistency. It had the Hero's Journey. Its creators imagined a world and told a story of what happened within it.
Contrast Modern Star Wars. What is it supposed to be? It's certainly not a fairy tale, and it's not even really much of a story: there's no internal consistency. Characters don't really do things for reasons: Luke Skywalker almost murders a child not because there's any way that makes sense, but just because the Mentor needs a Dark Secret. Rey wants to redeem Kylo Ren not because she has any personal motive to do so, but because we need a Redeemable Villain. The world doesn't exist as a fictional setting: stuff just happens, the First Order appears out of nowhere, the Republic vanishes, now the Final Order exists, now it doesn't.
What it is is Star Wars content. There are people on a screen with lightsabers and blasters and spaceships - are you not entertained?
Just so with current-Phase Marvel. Does anything about Thor: Love and Thunder make a lick of sense? Does it have a solid plot? No - but look, Thor is here! And Valkyrie!
It's not really about it being for children. There are plenty of good stories for children: some of the best stories are age-agnostic. Great literature is not necessarily particularly highbrow or intelligent: Shakespeare and Homer were optimising for making good stories, not for showing off how clever and grown-up they were.
But it is really reminiscent of the rise of streaming as a phenomenon: when you watch a stream, there's no narrative, no coherent set of ideas coming together, just stuff happening. It's easy to procrastinate with it and to have it on in the background because it's not a story, it's just stuff. And so with a lot of modern cinema. No stories, at best a couple of Big Moments (that you can React to and talk about on Twitter!) strung together with content.
I think there is a hopeless/nihilistic/no-heroes streak in some parts of contemporary culture, but mostly surrounding climate activism. (It's a narrative that flatters my prejudices to suggest that it's a cautionary tale about distorting the truth for rhetorical power "for the greater good": the exaggerated claims that global warming will end the world, rather than just be very bad, didn't galvanise people to action but created a kind of numbing despair.) "Only we are the heroes" might be a better phrasing of the problem.
For what it's worth, the old Expanded Universe novels were exactly this. Luke's New Jedi Order is founded on a much healthier basis and succeeds in bringing together a new Republic and creating some of the greatest Jedi in history... and also runs into some spectacular disasters, because solving problems is hard actually.
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