JulianRota
5d ago
Depends a ton on what sort of things you're interested in. IMO, most of the usual tourist stuff is kind of overrated, and there's advice from a million places on that anyways.
Like music? You can probably find a few concerts of any genre you find interesting. There's also a bazillion comedy clubs, and broadway theaters. Restaurants of any type of food you might be interested in trying. Irish bars staffed by actual Irish people. Politics? The Democrat party may own the city, but there's still a surprising amount of activity from any political position you can come up with. Trump Tower is still open to the public, you can just go in and eat at the restaurant or drink at the bar or gawk at the merchandise on sale. Some places like Washington Square Park are usually full of odd people doing odd things if you find that sort of thing interesting.
JulianRota
13d ago
I'd say I'm certainly open to hearing ideas and possibilities, but I'd like to hear something more specific than just we should go faster or we should skip trials. Which trials are we skipping, how are we dealing with the effects of skipping those trials? In my view, I've been trying this whole conversation to get out of you exactly what specifically you want to do, ideally something more generally applicable than, we did this specific bad thing during Covid, let's not do that. I mean, yeah, that's technically true, but how do you generalize that beyond, we should put better people in charge?
The mind boggles a bit trying to come up with general principles for addressing pandemics that would apply well to both of, let's say, Covid and Aids. If you can come up with some that don't just reduce down to putting better people in charge, by all means, let me know.
I am aware of what Human Challenge Trials are. Randomized Controlled trials are what we're already doing. I've got no problem with Human Challenge Trials, sounds like a good idea to me. It's at least a specific and actionable proposal. Liability might be a concern, but that ought to be solvable with waviers or some minor legislation. It's a relatively modest modification of current practice. It would likely result in full market availability somewhat sooner, though probably not dramatically so. The number of people accepted into such a trial would likely be modest. Though I gather you seemed interested in much more dramatic changes? Operation Warp Speed as it was actually executed produced far more dramatic timeline reductions just by bureaucratic optimization. Certainly nothing wrong with going even faster yet, but no need to forget what we actually did accomplish.
Another thing I'd note is that medical technology continues to advance incredibly fast. As far as I know, this was the first time in history we had a vaccine candidate ready for trials within weeks of the target viruses genome being isolated. That's freaking amazing! Can we come up with ways to get it verified and out to the public even faster than we actually did? Probably! But let's not beat ourselves up too bad, this stuff is all pretty new.
JulianRota
13d ago
Kind of related, I lean strongly towards the skeptical side, and found in support this video showing that one of those famous videos of supposedly impossible aircraft maneuvering and looking weird actually corresponds pretty well to being a perfectly normal jet aircraft being shot in infrared through a sophisticated aircraft tracking camera that we're looking at the raw feed of.
JulianRota
13d ago
I did not say that you had a lack of willingness to take responsibility for your own medical decisions. I said that you were taking upon yourself the ability to make medical decisions for everyone else.
I personally don't have or want the ability to make medical decisions for everyone else. The "everyone else", being the American People, have more or less voluntarily given the Federal Government that power through the existing democratic process.
I haven't really expressed much in the way of opinions about how things ought to be in this thread. I'm mostly just talking about how the system currently works and why it works that way, and what issues any potential changes to the system would need to address. That shouldn't be confused with actually advocating for the system to work in a specific way.
What are you talking about? This seems irrelevant.
Your other comment about the Glock lawsuit issue is kind of funny by itself, but also IMO serves to illustrate how the current state of the system is the product of how a bunch of things tie together.
For example, in the current system, all potential new drugs, even if created by some tiny team of independent scientists or university lab, are taken up by pharmaceutical giants to take to the market. They have the financial backing to take these drugs through the lengthy and risky clinical trial process, absorb the losses from ones that fail, and also weather any lawsuits filed by people unhappy with the drugs. They're mostly happy with the Government-run trial process partly because, if they get sued, they can say at trial that their drug went through those Government-monitored trials and was approved for sale by the Government.
Quite a few of the Covid vaxx-skeptical were concerned that the PREP Act rules made everyone associated with manufacturing, distributing, and administering the vaccines immune from lawsuits. They do have a point... but how could you possibly release a new vaccine that fast, or even faster yet, without that legal immunity? How would you convince the pharma companies to go ahead and release without that, when part of the reason why they exist and are structured as they are is to manage that risk? Or would you go for much broader legal immunity? Like it or not, lawsuits are a great way to throw sand in the gears of a new drug release.
That's one reason why I'm skeptical about your vague ideas to apparently cut more restrictions and go even faster yet. Which is why I'm asking in order to try and nail things down more specifically:
Let's start with just the basics. In a pandemic...
I'm not actually asking about an ideal system for handling pandemics. I don't think that's possible. We've got 20/20 hindsight for Covid now, of course, but if you were making a system for all pandemics, you'd have to handle Covid, plus Aids, plus Ebola, plus everything else that's come down the pike, plus whatever the next pandemic may be, which none of us can predict.
What I'm actually asking is your ideal system for how to go from what some scientists think is a promising new drug to something that the average person can buy or be prescribed to treat some disease or condition. How do you think that should work exactly during normal times, and how should it be changed during a "pandemic", whatever we might define that as?
I skipped over the "HCT/RCT debate" question because I honestly have no clue what that is. A few google searches didn't provide much insight. What is this debate?
JulianRota
15d ago
It's not a matter of cherry-picking. It's simply stating that things are clearly good or bad.
I think it is. A possible reasonable alternative system is, no Government agency exists to approve medical treatments, instead, several independent organizations (possibly including a Government one) make recommendations based on their own criteria, but individuals are free to take what they want. In such a system, those one or more organizations are already set up, and people are used to making their own decisions and taking responsibility for them. I believe that basically nobody thinks that way now. I don't think you can just overnight in a crisis switch to the regulatory framework of that system and expect people to change their thinking overnight. It is perhaps telling that no country in the world currently works like this.
A lack of willingness to take responsibility for my own medical decisions is not my opinion at all. I am fine with doing this myself, but it is my belief that 95% of American citizens are not prepared to do this. This is based on observations of how they actually behaved during the actual Covid period. Which gets me to what I really want to object to:
This is one of the most common failure modes, perhaps even a typical mind fallacy. Because you think, in your situation, that you wouldn't want to take it, you think that no one would want to take it (or you think they'd have obviously wrong preferences, since they don't match up with your own).
Please refrain from putting words into my mouth or assuming what I think. I already said I would personally be fine with taking responsibility for my own decisions. I think it's the American people, and the people in pretty much every other country too, who are unwilling to do this. You may disagree that they think like this, or dislike it, but don't tell me what I think personally.
If we did allow people to take any treatment without testing, warned them hundreds of times that it was untested and anything could happen, and it turned out to be a disaster with hundreds of thousands of casualties, I would be any amount of money you care to name that they would all scream their heads off at the Government for allowing it to happen, vote them out of office, probably storm the gates of all the Pharmaceutical companies and lynch people, etc. Roughly 10 people would say, oh well, they did warn me it was untested, guess it's on me. If watching how people behaved during Covid didn't convince you of that, then I don't know what to tell you.
We're also talking pretty vaguely here, why don't you spell out exactly how you envision your ideal system working?
JulianRota
15d ago
I'm not sure if we've talked about this lately, but do we have any thoughts on what should be done with the Russia-Ukraine war at this point? Seems like as good a time as any to consider grand strategy, with Trump soon to take office in the US.
It's a little surprising that it's still going. It seems pretty clear to me at this point that Russia / Putin has no intention of stopping anytime soon. The sanctions regime that has been put in place seems to have caused them to return to self-sufficiency as much as it has hurt them. I'm doubtful that further attempts to sanction them harder will have any greater effect. The Ukrainians seem to have had impressive determination, especially during the first few months, but they don't seem to have the practical ability to eject the Russian troops, even with extremely generous donations of Western arms. I'm doubtful that's possible at all without large-scale Western intervention. There's also the possibility of allowing them to make more deep strikes into Russia with longer-ranged weapons, but I'm doubtful that anything along those lines can hit hard enough to either seriously disrupt their logistics or their will to fight, at least not without, or maybe even with, so many high-end western arms that it's basically obvious it's the US striking them directly, with all of the potential consequences that could entail.
From the perspective of an American, it's felt for a while like maybe it's time to wind down this conflict, or at least our involvement in it, as far as providing arms and assistance. Are we really accomplishing anything but getting more Ukrainians killed to little effect? And okay yeah, Russia is not our friend, but it's probably only to the United States' benefit to push them so far.
Does anyone have any different opinions? Does anyone see any realistic potential of forcing Russia back without a large-scale escalation that I'm doubtful Americans will accept? The European powers may be more determined to push Russia back, but do they have much practical ability without the US?
JulianRota
17d ago
First off, I agree that, in my overall estimation of the disease and results, the vaccine mandates were a terrible idea.
In the larger picture, I want to agree with the overall Libertarian idea that it would be nice if we could both have individuals not be legally barred from taking any drug a company felt like selling at their own risk, clinical trials conducted and evaluated by one or more independent entities, and individuals can choose to pay attention to or ignore the recommendations of any of those trial entities on their own when deciding which drugs to take. But for better or worse, we're so far away from that world in the way our society currently runs that it's just not viable to cherry-pick one or two things from that world and try to just apply to them to ours.
The mandates certainly exacerbated the problem, but I think even without them, allowing such a vaccine to be let out into the world with no trials at all would still potentially be a monumental disaster. Who would take such a vaccine in a world with no mandates at all by anyone ever, including private entities free to choose their own policies? The Covid-maxxers, of course, the ones so radically terrified of it to be hiding indoors, wearing multiple masks, etc. They would jump to take it as soon as possible, as many millions of people did in fact do once they were released. And what then if it turned out to be far more dangerous than Covid itself, or even helped it spread faster, as quite a few drugs have in fact been discovered in trials to actually do? Now that would be one hell of a mess.
In any case, I don't know much offhand about animal drug approval process. A little googling turned up that the FDA claims to regulate regular drugs and medical devices for animals, but not vaccines for them, which apparently falls to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They seem to have a FAQ page about it. I found a PDF of "New Firm Informational Packet for Live and Inactivated Vaccines", and the process listed there sounds broadly similar to the process for human drug and vaccine approval. I'm guessing it's probably somewhat faster than the approval process for human drugs, but not dramatically so.
JulianRota
18d ago
There's a lot about the COVID response that could fairly be described as insane, but I don't think the vaccine testing protocols were one of them. They are required to conduct multi-phase randomized double-blinded clinical trials to prove safety and efficacy, just like every other treatment marketed to the general public. For the COVID vaccines, the process was considerably accelerated by things like permitting the planning and organization of later trial stages before the results of earlier stages were fully analyzed and approved, which consists of things like setting up all of the trial sites, recruiting the necessary trial subjects, manufacturing and distributing the doses, etc.
It's possible to argue that the trial requirements should have actually been weakened. But considering the plans to effectively force virtually the entire population to take the vaccines right away, the new technology several of the vaccines used, and the widespread skepticism and resistance that was in fact present for the vaccines despite the standard testing protocols being followed, I think that's the last thing in the world we'd want to do. Pharmaceutical history is littered with the corpses of promising medications that turned out to have horrific side-effects and/or little to no efficacy against the thing they were supposed to be treating when they were actually properly tested. The backlash against the whole industry was bad enough as-is, just imagine how much worse it would be if one or more of the vaccines did in fact prove to be seriously dangerous.
JulianRota
19d ago
Still reading Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.
Curious thing - I often try to guess what's going to happen next in books or movies based on how far through them I am. It's usually pretty effective, even for non-fiction books. But here I am 45% through the book based on my Kindle, and I don't really know where this book is going for the next half of it. They've already covered the Good Friday agreement, where most such books end, and have been going on a while about post-GFA issues, agreements and legal battles regarding how to handle people who were "disappeared" and people who may or may not have been involved in such acts. Apparently, despite the amnesty provisions, you can still be prosecuted for at least some crimes committed during the Troubles years, including for being confirmed to be a member of illegal organizations like the IRA.
It's also rather curious that apparently they still to this day can't figure out for sure what the deal was with poor Jean McConville. It's confirmed that the IRA murdered her and "disappeared" her, but they still to this day claim she was an informant working for the Brits, with radio equipment found in her apartment, who was warned once to stop collaborating before being murdered. Meanwhile, the authorities still claim they don't know anything about here being any kind of informant. But nobody can confirm for sure which one is true.
JulianRota
21d ago
I've got a Windows 10 desktop, a custom build. I'm still pretty happy with that. Microsoft hasn't done anything I find too obnoxious yet. My setup is apparently not compatible with Windows 11, which I'm not that enthusiastic about anyways. I legitimately have no idea what I'm going to do if Microsoft ever does truly EOL Windows 10. I'd probably have to buy mostly new hardware to get Win 11 compatibility, which I'm not very enthusiastic about, or try another full switchover to Linux, which I'm also not enthusiastic about.
I also have a moderately high-end Chromebook for a personal laptop. I'm quite happy with that right now. IMO, the Manifest V3 being terrible thing is mostly ridiculous ultra-nerd rage. I installed uBlock Origin Lite, and it's just fine. You have to enable "complete" filtering mode on a few sites for it to work properly, but that's no hassle. It has a few less features than "full", but I never used those anyways. My impression is that V3 is more about a legitimate desire to lock down more tightly what extensions can do, which is probably necessary considering how many extensions have gone abusive, rather than an evil plot by the big ad giant to shut down really good ad-blocking. Same thing as the old plain C extension interface IMO. Everyone wailed and moaned about how terrible it was when I think Chrome first went over to prioritizing Javascript-based extensions. But eventually everyone came around to the viewpoint that the C extensions system was a security and compatibility nightmare that could never be fixed, and it's not really a good idea to give extensions that much power anyways.
Anyways, enough of a rant on that. I've never seen issues like you're describing on my Chromebook. Might be because it's a higher-end model, I think like $600 or $700 or so. I do like my nice high-res screens. I don't know if the somewhat higher price kills your motivation entirely, but I think the low-end hardware might be more of what's behind your issues than the OS. You might get the same sort of issues at that price point no matter what OS you use. It's still cheaper than Apple hardware, and more capable too - mine has a touchscreen and a 360-rotation hinge so it can become like a big tablet. More storage space available makes the Linux environment work better too.
I do have an Apple laptop for work. It's okay I guess. Apple seems to want to lock you into their world a little too hard for my tastes though. It's mostly avoidable on MacOS devices, but I don't really see enough of an upside to pay the premium for their hardware.
Naturally along those lines, I'm not much into iOS devices, so I use Android phones, which I'm also mostly happy with. Well, I'd like to have better Adblock experience for mobile, but nothing much else does any better, and I never liked using the web on mobile that much anyways. I've played with the custom ROM stuff off and on, but I gave it up as IMO they're all too janky and unreliable. It's more important to me that my phone be as close to 100% reliable as possible rather than have the latest and greatest of everything and best features etc.
I did try Linux on the desktop for a while. I gave that up also, as I found it too finicky and prone to random breakdowns and malfunctions on updates. Yeah, I can fix the problems, eventually, but I'd rather my personal computer Just Work than be a puzzle to solve every few months. I think that was around 10 or 15 years ago though, so it's possible it's better now. I wouldn't bet on it though. Try it out if you want, but be prepared for that kind of pain on a regular basis. Both Windows and ChromeOS have great Linux environments that IMO give you the best of both worlds.
JulianRota
1mo ago
I had a feeling that sentence would come back to bite me, especially since I actually wrote a movie review of '71 on the old sub about 3 years ago. I've also seen Derry Girls (feels a bit forced IMO, but okay), and read Bandit Country. Sounds like a lot of other potentially interesting things to read too, and thanks for the anecdote.
The parallels with our current culture war are part of what makes it interesting. They did seem to also have the "politicization of everything" effect - ordinary citizens who aren't particularly political for either side having to worry about the politics of the people and businesses they interact with to do mundane day-to-day things.
JulianRota
1mo ago
Non-fiction I'd say. Is Troubles Fiction even a thing?
That is the sort of thing I'm more interested in, thanks!
I have read about things like that going on. It seems to be a great truth that, if you as a rebel group do a sufficiently good job at booting out the Government and getting people not to trust them, then you now become the Government. People will start coming to you to resolve petty disputes and enforce order, whatever they consider that to be, and if you do a decent job at it, then you're just that much more powerful.
I'd read about the militias on both sides often spending a lot of time extorting businesses, and often even cooperating with each other on who got to shake down who, despite being technically at war with each other. Also at least the outline of reorganizing the RUC into PSNI, supposedly now with more Catholics. The efforts to integrate the schooling sounds very interesting too, though I don't know where to read much about that. It seems like the separated schooling must have been a big factor in keeping the communities split apart enough to create such a conflict in the first place.
JulianRota
1mo ago
Reading Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland as part of an overall obsession with the Troubles.
FWIW, I'm still very interested in the subject, but haven't read that much about it in a while. I feel like I've had my fill of books about the leadership structure and decision-making of the various militias and Government departments, and what happened in all the big-name incidents. What I'd really like to read more about is the less prominent stuff, the experiences of the "little guys" on all sides and lowest-level fighters, the backstory of the lesser-known but more routine happenings that deeply affected the lives of the people involved (or ended them, of course). So far, this book seems to deliver!
JulianRota
1mo ago
I think any such "vibe" is from clueless journalists and tech "influencers" over-predicting things either from simple total naivety or deliberately making out-there proclamations for more attention.
I think the main issue is more fear of unfriendly regulation and legal liability, and of bad publicity leading to the same. This manifests in several ways. First off, there will probably never be a personally-owned self-driving car. They're so complex and in need of constant maintenance and updates and being in perfect condition for the self-driving stuff to work right that nobody would ever be willing to sell one to an individual. Second, all the companies that run them are being very conservative about expanding their programs. Going too fast into new situations has too much risk of something bad happening. Third, the companies have a huge amount of control over who they let use them and where they let them go. They pretty clearly make careful use of this to not allow them to be used in any situation they think might be risky. And also keep all of the details about how they're doing that behind closed doors.
There's also the physical plant issue. Even if we had a perfect self-driving car ready for mass production today, it would still take decades to replace substantially all of the cars on the road in the entire country.
JulianRota
1mo ago
Finished JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. The second half is more about his experience at Yale Law and how the social connections he made there provided him tremendous opportunity for advancement, along with various musings on what societal and/or policy shifts might be beneficial for his "hillbilly" communities. Nothing super innovative I suppose, but it is interesting to see the issues these communities have getting more attention.
It could also be considered interesting for what isn't in it. There's hardly a word about any sort of substance abuse by Vance himself, not any drug use or heavy drinking, aside from a brief mention that his urine might not pass a drug test when his mother tries to get some clean urine from him to pass her own drug test. Nothing about any sorts of petty crime either. Also nothing about any romantic or sexual interest or behavior aside from meeting and getting with his now-wife.
The positive and charitable take on this is that it's a book that's supposed to be about the economic and social problems of his community and how he overcame them, not a dramatic tell-all. There's also the cynical take that it was written with at least a hope, if not expectation, that it would lead to a bigger career in politics and so anything that anyone might find offensive or scandalous was left out. He does write a lot about how the social contacts and advice he received at Yale opened a lot of doors for him, so it seems pretty reasonable to assume they continued opening doors to making contact with high-level conservative political influencers and launching a skyrocketing political career.
JulianRota
1mo ago
On 1, not to be too much of a downer, but to at least temper expectations, IME it's been extremely rare to nonexistent to have groups of friends based around an apartment complex. It might happen if the majority of people there are all in some new life situation, like just got to college, or just moved to a new city for their first professional job. If everyone is in very different life situations and already has their own group of friends and family, it's pretty much not happening.
IME, you can't form and sustain an actual group of friends by any individual's sheer will. Everybody who would be in the group has to actually want to be in a new group and make at least some active effort to keep it going. I've seen more than a few "groups" that one or two people seemed really invested in fade into nothing because nobody else was really that into it.
By all means try to be social to those around you. But probably a more realistic expectation is to maybe make one or two actual friends. Try a bunch of other activities as well. You may either find an already-existing group you might be accepted into, or maybe make one or two individual friends at several things and convince some of them to all get together regularly. And don't be too surprised if nobody you meet in many such activities seems to have much interest in being actual friends with anybody else there, including you.
JulianRota
1mo ago
Interesting, I didn't know that! I'll have to take a closer look at how his career progressed.
At the point I'm at, I've been thinking, this is a pretty good autobiography, but I haven't yet seen anything that I would expect makes anyone think, wow I really want this guy to represent me in DC. Though I see it starting to go in that direction already with my last day's reading.
JulianRota
1mo ago
Maybe! I've lived in or visited several big cities, and never seen or heard of things like that though. It seems more plausible to me that things might be more like what Maiq described in what I guess you could call "dead cities" - the medium-small cities that used to be thriving, but all of the industries that were there left for various reasons. Most of the decent people with good life potential also left due to the lack of good jobs long before things got bad. The resulting downward spiral leads to a pretty bad place.
But then, those places are not exactly havens of progressivism, and I don't think any blue-affiliated people are going to decide to move there, which was the point of this whole thread.
JulianRota
1mo ago
I live in NYC, and I've never heard of anyone living like that. I've lived here for about 8 years, and I know of exactly 1 instance of somebody I personally know being affected by street crime, and that was just a phone snatching. Maybe some women carry pepper spray, but I've never noticed it. IMO, carrying pepper spray indicates that things are pretty safe because it's not very effective against much. I do know lots of people, men and women, young and old, who have no concerns at all about walking around alone late at night, even drunk. I've never heard of anybody telling people everything they're doing in case "something happens".
I'm not really sure if car break-ins are much of a problem honestly, mostly because very few people have them, and if they do, they mostly park them in expensive private parking garages. It does seem a little surprising I guess, but I would think I would have heard of it happening at least some if it was actually common.
It is fairly common for people who want to have kids to move out, but that's more because it's quite expensive to get a large enough space, not because of concerns about crime. There definitely are a lot of kids of all ages around, including in strollers and being walked around. Enough that it's reasonably common to be mildly annoyed by someone wheeling a baby stroller around in a place that seems kind of inappropriate, like inside a crowded store.
JulianRota
1mo ago
Reading JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. It's a much shorter book, I'm halfway through already.
I'm not sure if there was much in the way of ghostwriting or assistance on this, but if it's not much, then it's remarkably good writing for a sitting politician.
It reminds me a little of Sowell's Black Rednecks, White Liberals, which put forth the idea that quite a few of the dysfunctions affecting black culture were actually copied from the white hillbilly culture.
JulianRota
1mo ago
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.
JulianRota
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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.
Finished Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. Curiously, it did actually end only a few dozen pages after I was like, wait, where is this book going for the next half. I guess it does actually have a massive amount of footnotes and citations etc.
Now reading Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles. This one focuses more on the internal workings of the British Army and how they (mis)handled the situation. It calls out more directly how they failed to respond to Loyalist terrorism.
This book raises one other point so far that I found very interesting and hadn't actually read anywhere else. They claim that the early Provisional IRA, prior to Bloody Sunday, the Falls Road Curfew and other notable incidents, when the membership was still very low and public support in the Catholic community for them much more slim, did actually undertake operations to deliberately provoke the British Army into more heavy-handed responses in the hopes of creating those sorts of incidents in order to increase public support for their tactics and goals and grow their own membership. That's not exactly something you read much about in accounts more sympathetic to the PIRA, and I'm curious to see what if any evidence they have for this.
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