Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 27 Dec 2021 @ 3:38am
Re:
"Everyone needs to have 3 days worth supplies for events like these and know how to safely use them."
If they were living in the middle of the wilds around the early 19th century, sure. Within the first world, in 2021? Not so much.
The only thing you imply here is that Texas, USA, is at such a deplorable state of infrastructure that the citizenry should expect and plan for it to catastrophically fail.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 27 Dec 2021 @ 3:31am
Re: Re: Re:
"They're pumping up gas in Siberia FFS that storm in Texas was like a summer breeze."
Fun fact about that - the gear they use in Siberia is rated for low temperatures. The power company in Texas, otoh, used the cheapest crap they could find for gear and didn't maintain it.
Cheap shit not rated for the environment and which hasn't been maintained will break. That's on no one but the purveyor of said gear and the body politic still willing to extend to that grifter a license to operate.
Another fun fact about the siberian temperatures today though - the permafrost is melting, meaning that a number of Gazprom's plants are wasting a third of their extracted power to artificially refrigerate the foundations of those plants, because the eternally frozen tundra is rapidly thawing into a muddy slurry.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 27 Dec 2021 @ 3:00am
Re: Re: Re:
"America wasn't always bad at infrastructure."
FDR put the US in the forefront of the world with his New Deal, not just building much of the US infrastructure still existing today but setting the standard enjoyed by both the US and the rest of the world for decades hence. Every american pining for the "good old days" when "america was great" is looking at a US relying on FDR's thoroughly socialist grand scheme.
Then came the 80's and Reagan, and every infrastructure platform american prosperity was resting on was taken off maintenance, every regulation gradually loosened, and the prosperity of the working class rapidly eroded.
No, the US wasn't always bad at infrastructure. There was a time when both parties were sane and a bill to perform emergency repairs on the nation would usually have bipartisan support.
These days I'm halfway convinced the GOP is deadlocking any attempt to fix the texas power grid just because even if they and their own children get frostbite it's all worth it as long as there's some Austin liberal freezing somewhere as well.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 27 Dec 2021 @ 2:50am
Re: Re: Re:
"...except that it used to work before they screwed with it."
As in "started letting the power company default on their obligations because regulations bad" you mean? Because that is far more likely to cause your power grid to fail than it "going green".
Here's the problem in a nutshell; Your local power supplier tries to get away with the lowest bidder, buys utter shit for gear, because the requirements they have to fulfill in order to be allowed to operate under state laws are ridiculous low. Then doesn't maintain it for about twenty years. First time it has to push the performance envelope, it breaks.
In good old socialist europe that company would likely lose its license to operate. In the US, Texas, they were instead given a pat on the back by the body politic so they could pull a repeat performance next time it got cold.
I don't know what to tell you other than it be high time to break out another old Texan tradition involving tar, feathers and a rail, then go pay your governor and former three governors a visit.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 27 Dec 2021 @ 2:31am
Re: Re:
"These are Bush era extremists, not necessarily Trumpers. The Qanons are just the rabble who post all the lunatic claims, but make no mistake, it started with Haugens and IJW, uniting the NCOSE type fringes."
It really didn't. This shit has been with the US since the first puritans left England, taking their calvinist beliefs with them. And it's been festering more or less in unchanged form all the way up to where modern communications enabled these pockets of rot to connect. Haugens may have been an influential mouthpiece - but there just isn't any single point of origin of this malicious creed to be found in modern times.
At the heart of it this is just another offshoot of millenialism - the idea of a golden age destroyed by <insert scapegoat here> with modern times a morass of decay, kept that way by <insert scapegoat here>, that a reckoning is coming <ragnarok, rapture, final battle> at the end of which the Chosen Few will live in salvation ever after and everyone else burns.
Nazism, various brands of christian churches and other religions, political movements like the jacobins...all tap into this mechanism, shoehorning the exact same template with the variables exchanged to fit the current audience. The nazis blamed jews. The puritans blame women and anyone "living in sin". This same recipe is behind most of what you bring up and pointing to any single person or organization is like focusing on a symptom of a much deeper and far more harmful disease - the contagious idea that as long as you adhere to the arbitrary set of standards you can claim you're better than everyone else.
"England also has Boris Johnson as a prime minister, and the clusterfuck that is Brexit - with elected representatives misrepresenting and then forcing a move that, based on what I can see from this side of the pond, the majority of people didn't actually want."
The UK has less problems with first past the post than the US - but that's a very low bar indeed, as you note.
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was always going to end up a winner. He's got the education from Eton and Oxford. He's more highly bred than a hilltop bakery with his paternal line solidly entrenched in politics and ancestry right out of old bavarian nobility. And he learned early on that as long as you make people laugh at you you can get away with anything. A different type of grifter than the thin-skinned Trump, beholden to narcissism, Johnson leans heavily into his clownish persona, going the distance to ensure the brits all view him as enthusiastic, bumbling, friendly and harmless. AS PM's go, the UK could -and has - do worse because by no means is he the idiot he portrays himself to be.
The issue is that he rode into power on Nigel Farage's anti-EU campaign and is bound to that particular shit-show.
Don't get me wrong though - as a citizen of another EU member state I'm also inclined to think more member states ought to threaten leaving - because the EU might have been nice while it was still about the four freedoms and the combined marketplace but turned into a bureaucratic monster riddled with all the worst bits of US pork barrel politics and lobbyist regulatory capture the very second the commission obtained real power.
The UK somehow managed to do everything wrong with Brexit, setting themselves up for a situation where not only everything worked out with the EU will be gone but every advantage enjoyed by older treaties since the Schengen accords will be similarly gone. And that's going to hurt them for decades. Badly.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 27 Dec 2021 @ 1:32am
Re: Re: Re:
"yet"
Chinese peddlers will be happy to sell you overpriced schmutter in the form of foil-wrapped USB's or cheap plastics with old daoist spells formpressed into faux tortoise shell or jade plates. Guaranteed to bring great joss your way.
But their market regulations are a long sight stronger than those of the US, so why would they risk the local customs magistrate casting the evil eye towards them?
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 27 Dec 2021 @ 1:20am
Re: Re: Re: Re: A bit optimistic.
"They didn't do it out of the blue."
I'm more than halfway convinced the ivermectin idiocy is caused by a single troll somewhere cherry-picking studies to badly misquote and that just going viral because the nurgle cultist brigade are already prepped to accept any word salad they could use to justify their conclusion of "Vaccine baaad!".
"In dosage lethal to humans and no studies trying to show an effect on humans with tolerable dosage could be corroborated."
Like that old anecdote of how 4g of vitamin C daily would prevent you from ever having colds again. True enough, since that sort of OD will kill you.
"I mean we are talking about people who believe that after two centuries of performing elections it's easy to switch results on a national scale."
“It’s hard to quarrel with that ancient justification of the free press: “America’s right to know.” It seems almost cruel to ask, ingenuously, ”America’s right to know what, please? Science? Mathematics? Economics? Foreign languages?”
None of those things, of course. In fact, one might well suppose that the popular feeling is that Americans are a lot better off without any of that tripe.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.””
Isaac Asimov, "A Cult of Ignorance", 1980.
The problem lies with the american love for magical thinking. The US is just P.T. Barnum's promised land where so many americans grow up tethered to a faith any information they collate on their way through life just gets shoehorned as props to back the conclusion they want to see.
As you say there's a lot of historical reason to not believe Big Anything in that place; The Railroad Barons, Ma Bell, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Banking...corporations becoming Too Big To Fail. Americans are by and large reminded every day that no authority or influential entity has their best interests in mind.
Ironically this is all by their own choice to boot, since stomping on the "Big Success Story" of companies by enforcing regulation and ethics has traditionally been viewed by these same people as anathema - as a blow against the american "freedom to succeed". Something none of them ever will but every last one of them defends.
And the end result is that now they believe the Facebook rando over any actual authority on every topic.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 27 Dec 2021 @ 1:00am
Re: Re: Re: Re:
"I support no moderation for anyone, regardless of their political option. All I care about is that people with stupid arguments are called out for it publicly and there's record left of their stupidity."
No you don't. Not in any place where you yourself will be visiting.
The proof of that will be any open house party where that one guy decided to puke in the buffet, take a leak on the hortensias, or spend half an hour railing in an ever increasing voice about <insert inflammatory, often hilariously wrongfully recounted topic here> while the rest of the party tries to pretend the guy doesn't exist.
The response has never been to leave the offensive person be to spoil everyone else's evening. It's always been to show that personage the door and invite him/her to leave.
And that's really the same as on social media. Those places you normally frequent to meet with friends and relatives should not allow visitors who don't mind the most basic of manners. Because the very second FB stops moderating is the very second it loses - instantly - 90% of the audience.
And that is why even if the alt-right get everything they wish for all they end up with is the same tumbleweed-strewn landscape they have on Gab and Parler and an instant reimplementation of 230.
Notably worse, even. You want the first amendment gone for good? Force everyone to put up with the benighted fuckwits following Q and Dear Leader for one month. The next congress voted in will consist exclusively of people with a mandate from the people to add "...except when it comes to racism, bigotry and misinformation in which case none of this amendment applies." tacked to the end of 1A.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 27 Dec 2021 @ 12:40am
Re: Famous quote
Ah, Good old Lenin, eh?
But true enough, the more integrated the global markets become the more the specters of old guard communists appear like fscking prophets.
That said...the chinese "communist" party is anything but. If anything I'd describe China as a hybrid of feudalism and oligarchic bureaucracy. Same as it's been for millennia, with minor hiccups briefly bucking that trend.
I'd also claim current China's marketplace is way, way more free-market capitalism than the contemporary US one - which has lost any semblance of actual competition driving performance and efficiency.
And that, essentially, is the problem. If China was communist then their markets would look like those of the old USSR and the country's potential consumer base not affluent enough to be attractive. Since it's not western companies instead bend over backwards in order to kiss the Pooh Bear's ring so they can stay in that market.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 23 Dec 2021 @ 5:27am
Re: Re: Re:
"Thanks for the compliment. I do in fact confess to being a paid shill at one time many years ago. And, as a US citizen, who could know better about the comparison?"
Well, I had to point out that the issue the west currently faces is that criticizing China isn't like going after the USSR. As you underline, above, the problem is that China foreign policy may be exploitative but still produces a better win for an impoverished african nation than any other on the table. Zero interest on the loan? A significant chunk of resources they wouldn't have been able to utilize at all? Genuine world-class education or vocational training for the have-nots?
The real collateral is of course the foreign policy of the nation (Taiwan assumed to be a PRC "autonomous district", for instance). And that the people taught will grow up thinking of the middle kingdom as the center of the world.
And that's the problem, of course;
Want to complain about how Chinese citizens suffer oppression, poverty, lack of choice? Yeah, most americans have no hill to die on on that score.
China builds KZ camps in Xinjiang and Tibet? Remind me about Gitmo and Abu Ghraib again.
China imprisons dissidents? Right, and there are some 2 million permanent convicts in the US prison population, all under conditions fully equivalent to old style slavery.
Problem is, factual reporting often ends up sounding like a 50-cent army members these days. Especially in comparison to current US standards.
I'm no fan of whataboutism and the atrocities in Xinjiang and the lack of political freedom in China is a huge damn problem - but the usual method of leveraging the superiority of the home team lacks traction.
Concerning Africa...well, the US and the EU both had the option of going in with better deals than China is offering. Still do, in fact. This is the price of being the cheap bum in foreign politics.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 23 Dec 2021 @ 4:52am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I reiterate - "You know, the same the US used to get out of a number of middle-east countries in exchange for similar deals."
Or the USSR, for that matter. The difference being China is subtler about what they're doing. The yoke not as visible nor heavy. No soldiers in alien uniforms walking the streets, no military bases taking over the borders.
On the contrary, the bait is delicious, the hook fine enough to not even sting...unless the country tries to strain its leash at which point pain sets in.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 23 Dec 2021 @ 4:35am
Re: This isn't rocket science
"We do notice and take down for copyright violations. There is no reason that we cannot implement a similar regime for false information."
Pointing at the worst shit-show in modern legislation, worldwide, and saying "Let's do it like that" might not be the cure we're looking for, just sayin'. Having thousands of bots spamming youtube with fake DMCA request is bad enough, really.
"The nut jobs are willing to pack the courts and pass blatantly unconstitutional laws. Meanwhile, the normies are just sitting on their hands."
The problem here being that the US system is built specifically to be unstable. In europe we do have hate speech laws which have been implemented without massive amounts of collateral damage.
But then again, in Europe I also don't have to worry a police officer would rob me of my wallet, car and desktop PC in civil forfeiture or shoot up my lawn and call it "regrettable, but hey, QI". We don't have 2000 companies specializing in union busting, or workplaces comparable to indentured serfdom. No one will even dream of starting a tort over the dumbest possible of reasons and SLAPP is unheard of - because our courts of law aren't performance theater.
The problem is that US law execution and procedure relies on principles which are absent any sanity checks beyond the wallet depth of the person with the biggest team of lawyers.
Hence any exception you care to write into your constitutional rights for good, proportional and valid reason will be abused to hit you a hundred times as hard, anywhere. Especially with a lot of lucre riding on every successful tort.
"The nut jobs are willing to pack the courts and pass blatantly unconstitutional laws. Meanwhile, the normies are just sitting on their hands."
Yeah, and the democrats are really going to have to learn to fight dirty. Like it or not this is a war, because when the GOP base sees it as a war that's what it's become. And the aggressor always sets the minimum bar of what is acceptable. You either match their methods or you cave. And so far the democrats just keep caving.
That means they need to pad the courts and start hammering the republicans right back. Like that californian democrat lawmaker trying to pull a gun control law using the same methodology as the new texas anti-abortion law, for instance.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 23 Dec 2021 @ 4:12am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"And I have no problem with that. Setting higher standards and raising the bar for discourse and debate through ensuring that more assholes and liars suffer actual legal consequences would be a marked improvement over what we have now."
Numerous countries in the EU have hate speech laws - like Sweden and Germany with a blanket ban on public discourse judged as incitement against demographic.
Problem is, this shit works in Europe but can not work in the US where the execution of law is based on precedent and one bad judge can turn a measured legal response to hate speech made by nazis and bigots into a complete shit-show which targets anything a suitably law-savvy grifter feels is convenient.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 23 Dec 2021 @ 3:02am
Re: Re: Re: Re: BUT no problem w gov't taking my body to inject
"You're awfully optimistic in thinking that the US will ever get this under control."
Oh, it will. Eventually. It's just that the various covid variants are going to pinball around the nurgle and Trump congregations until enough of them have died off even those dimbulbs start realizing that Dear Leader's little loyalty test is killing them.
Best case...I mean, worst case scenario, the 25-30% still subscribing to the fascist playbook and invested in being morons end up dead at the end while saner people who vaccinated and abided by basic medical guidelines get a future bereft of the malicious nincompoops who'll no doubt all be happy to die as long as it means "the libs" get stuck paying for the burial.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 23 Dec 2021 @ 2:53am
Re: Re: Re: Re: BUT no problem w gov't taking my body to inject
"...there's numerous charts going around that prove that not only do many more unvaccinated vs. vaccinated die right now, but there's a large discrepancy between red and blue states."
One of the side effects of which is that in coming elections a number of borderline red states and counties are going to end up blue due to alt-right morons doing a lot more dying or getting too ill to go vote.
I have a really, really hard time not to declare the enhanced die-off of this group of dangerous lunatics a solid silver lining...
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 23 Dec 2021 @ 2:27am
Re: Re: Re: Re:
"Any party? Like two sides of the same counterfeit coin..."
It works for most of Europe. Not sure what I can tell you if you mean to imply this is yet another way the US can't hack stuff the rest of the world figured out a century or more ago.
Mind you, getting ranked choice rather than first past the post in effect would help with the two-party idiocy you guys, the UK and Australia are still stuck in.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 23 Dec 2021 @ 2:24am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Big problem here
"You're against babies being allowed to live."
Last I checked what amounts to a wart on a woman's uterus lining isn't a "baby".
But thanks for demonstrating you don't grok the difference between a sapient organism and a pea-sized conglomeration of cells.
The only clarification taking place here is that you're opposed to women owning the right to their own body. The same principle sex traffickers live by.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 23 Dec 2021 @ 2:17am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: it will happen
"Do you seriously believe that there is absolutely no other current medical/pharmaceutical treatment for Corona except for the "vaccine"?"
That's what the death toll tells us, yes. There is no medicine for most viral infections. Only toxins meant to disrupt the body's replication mechanism in more or less selective ways.
"-monoclonal antibodies are not a fairy tale"
You mean the expensive and resource-intensive attempt to create the end product of vaccination?
"-there's at least 2 anti-Corona pills awaiting FDA approval (one is already approved)"
None of which has a demonstrated effect beyond enriching Big Pharma. But go ahead and pin your hopes on the magic pills still under development while observable evidence shows we have a highly effective preventative in the form of a vaccine.
It just beggars belief that the US is 800k needlessly dead down the hole mainly because moron anti-vaxxers and Trumpists decided to make defying medical science an observance of Faith.
"Most of the same people that are Pro Choice are also against choice when it comes to Corona medications and treatments."
Let me know when pregnancy becomes a contagious and life-threatening to other people.
This is not us pro-choicers being idiots, it's you morons failing to grasp context, basic logic and common sense. Again.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 23 Dec 2021 @ 1:59am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: it will happen
"This is not universally true."
No, just to 99%. Go look at any covid ward. You will for the most part find zero vaccinated people among those ill enough to merit hospitalization. For more proof of this, go count the vaccinated among the 800 000 americans dead to covid.
"Hence, we need to attack Covid-19 with any and all safe and effective medications"
No such exist.
Let me break this down to you; A virus makes use of the body's normal replication mechanism. ANY medicine impeding the transcription and replication of virus particles in a cell must do so by fucking with the cell's normal behavior.
That means any antiviral will be toxic and have undesirable and often unpredictable side effects.
Vaccination, otoh, simply gives your body's normal immune system a wanted poster and lets it do its job.
So that's the first part; Vaccination as a preventive measure is far more effective and far less harmful than trying to actually cure an already extant viral infection.
As for curing it's general medical practice to use the minimum amount of treatment possible - both because all medicine has side effects and because interaction with individual metabolisms is unpredictable.
TL;DR?
We do not have any safe ways to fight a covid infection.
What we have is a vaccine which is, cheat sheet in hand, considered safe and effective. We have basic precautions we can take - wash your hands, avoid crowds, and if you must socialize, keep your distance and wear a mask.
And we have 800 000 dead of whom the overwhelming majority point to not being vaccinated as a leading cause of risk in this pandemic.
Kindly stop it with fucking trying to avoid basic statistics and common sense in these desperate attempts to pretend the doctors don't know what they're talking about.
On the post: Texas Regulators Learned Nothing From February's Carnage, Prepare To Repeat The Cycle
Re:
"Everyone needs to have 3 days worth supplies for events like these and know how to safely use them."
If they were living in the middle of the wilds around the early 19th century, sure. Within the first world, in 2021? Not so much.
The only thing you imply here is that Texas, USA, is at such a deplorable state of infrastructure that the citizenry should expect and plan for it to catastrophically fail.
On the post: Texas Regulators Learned Nothing From February's Carnage, Prepare To Repeat The Cycle
Re: Re: Re:
"They're pumping up gas in Siberia FFS that storm in Texas was like a summer breeze."
Fun fact about that - the gear they use in Siberia is rated for low temperatures. The power company in Texas, otoh, used the cheapest crap they could find for gear and didn't maintain it.
Cheap shit not rated for the environment and which hasn't been maintained will break. That's on no one but the purveyor of said gear and the body politic still willing to extend to that grifter a license to operate.
Another fun fact about the siberian temperatures today though - the permafrost is melting, meaning that a number of Gazprom's plants are wasting a third of their extracted power to artificially refrigerate the foundations of those plants, because the eternally frozen tundra is rapidly thawing into a muddy slurry.
On the post: Texas Regulators Learned Nothing From February's Carnage, Prepare To Repeat The Cycle
Re: Re: Re:
"America wasn't always bad at infrastructure."
FDR put the US in the forefront of the world with his New Deal, not just building much of the US infrastructure still existing today but setting the standard enjoyed by both the US and the rest of the world for decades hence. Every american pining for the "good old days" when "america was great" is looking at a US relying on FDR's thoroughly socialist grand scheme.
Then came the 80's and Reagan, and every infrastructure platform american prosperity was resting on was taken off maintenance, every regulation gradually loosened, and the prosperity of the working class rapidly eroded.
No, the US wasn't always bad at infrastructure. There was a time when both parties were sane and a bill to perform emergency repairs on the nation would usually have bipartisan support.
These days I'm halfway convinced the GOP is deadlocking any attempt to fix the texas power grid just because even if they and their own children get frostbite it's all worth it as long as there's some Austin liberal freezing somewhere as well.
On the post: Texas Regulators Learned Nothing From February's Carnage, Prepare To Repeat The Cycle
Re: Re: Re:
"...except that it used to work before they screwed with it."
As in "started letting the power company default on their obligations because regulations bad" you mean? Because that is far more likely to cause your power grid to fail than it "going green".
Here's the problem in a nutshell; Your local power supplier tries to get away with the lowest bidder, buys utter shit for gear, because the requirements they have to fulfill in order to be allowed to operate under state laws are ridiculous low. Then doesn't maintain it for about twenty years. First time it has to push the performance envelope, it breaks.
In good old socialist europe that company would likely lose its license to operate. In the US, Texas, they were instead given a pat on the back by the body politic so they could pull a repeat performance next time it got cold.
I don't know what to tell you other than it be high time to break out another old Texan tradition involving tar, feathers and a rail, then go pay your governor and former three governors a visit.
On the post: State Department Report Repeats Talking Points From Group Who Wants To Ban All Porn
Re: Re:
"These are Bush era extremists, not necessarily Trumpers. The Qanons are just the rabble who post all the lunatic claims, but make no mistake, it started with Haugens and IJW, uniting the NCOSE type fringes."
It really didn't. This shit has been with the US since the first puritans left England, taking their calvinist beliefs with them. And it's been festering more or less in unchanged form all the way up to where modern communications enabled these pockets of rot to connect. Haugens may have been an influential mouthpiece - but there just isn't any single point of origin of this malicious creed to be found in modern times.
At the heart of it this is just another offshoot of millenialism - the idea of a golden age destroyed by <insert scapegoat here> with modern times a morass of decay, kept that way by <insert scapegoat here>, that a reckoning is coming <ragnarok, rapture, final battle> at the end of which the Chosen Few will live in salvation ever after and everyone else burns.
Nazism, various brands of christian churches and other religions, political movements like the jacobins...all tap into this mechanism, shoehorning the exact same template with the variables exchanged to fit the current audience. The nazis blamed jews. The puritans blame women and anyone "living in sin". This same recipe is behind most of what you bring up and pointing to any single person or organization is like focusing on a symptom of a much deeper and far more harmful disease - the contagious idea that as long as you adhere to the arbitrary set of standards you can claim you're better than everyone else.
On the post: DEA Gives Former Marine Back $86,900 Cops Took From Him During A Nevada Traffic Stop Caught On Body Cam
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Shades of Gulag Archipelago
"England also has Boris Johnson as a prime minister, and the clusterfuck that is Brexit - with elected representatives misrepresenting and then forcing a move that, based on what I can see from this side of the pond, the majority of people didn't actually want."
The UK has less problems with first past the post than the US - but that's a very low bar indeed, as you note.
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was always going to end up a winner. He's got the education from Eton and Oxford. He's more highly bred than a hilltop bakery with his paternal line solidly entrenched in politics and ancestry right out of old bavarian nobility. And he learned early on that as long as you make people laugh at you you can get away with anything. A different type of grifter than the thin-skinned Trump, beholden to narcissism, Johnson leans heavily into his clownish persona, going the distance to ensure the brits all view him as enthusiastic, bumbling, friendly and harmless. AS PM's go, the UK could -and has - do worse because by no means is he the idiot he portrays himself to be.
The issue is that he rode into power on Nigel Farage's anti-EU campaign and is bound to that particular shit-show.
Don't get me wrong though - as a citizen of another EU member state I'm also inclined to think more member states ought to threaten leaving - because the EU might have been nice while it was still about the four freedoms and the combined marketplace but turned into a bureaucratic monster riddled with all the worst bits of US pork barrel politics and lobbyist regulatory capture the very second the commission obtained real power.
The UK somehow managed to do everything wrong with Brexit, setting themselves up for a situation where not only everything worked out with the EU will be gone but every advantage enjoyed by older treaties since the Schengen accords will be similarly gone. And that's going to hurt them for decades. Badly.
On the post: 'Anti-5G' Jewelry Found To Be... Radioactive And Dangerous
Re: Re: Re:
"yet"
Chinese peddlers will be happy to sell you overpriced schmutter in the form of foil-wrapped USB's or cheap plastics with old daoist spells formpressed into faux tortoise shell or jade plates. Guaranteed to bring great joss your way.
But their market regulations are a long sight stronger than those of the US, so why would they risk the local customs magistrate casting the evil eye towards them?
On the post: 'Anti-5G' Jewelry Found To Be... Radioactive And Dangerous
Re: Re: Re: Re: A bit optimistic.
"They didn't do it out of the blue."
I'm more than halfway convinced the ivermectin idiocy is caused by a single troll somewhere cherry-picking studies to badly misquote and that just going viral because the nurgle cultist brigade are already prepped to accept any word salad they could use to justify their conclusion of "Vaccine baaad!".
"In dosage lethal to humans and no studies trying to show an effect on humans with tolerable dosage could be corroborated."
Like that old anecdote of how 4g of vitamin C daily would prevent you from ever having colds again. True enough, since that sort of OD will kill you.
"I mean we are talking about people who believe that after two centuries of performing elections it's easy to switch results on a national scale."
The problem lies with the american love for magical thinking. The US is just P.T. Barnum's promised land where so many americans grow up tethered to a faith any information they collate on their way through life just gets shoehorned as props to back the conclusion they want to see.
As you say there's a lot of historical reason to not believe Big Anything in that place; The Railroad Barons, Ma Bell, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Banking...corporations becoming Too Big To Fail. Americans are by and large reminded every day that no authority or influential entity has their best interests in mind.
Ironically this is all by their own choice to boot, since stomping on the "Big Success Story" of companies by enforcing regulation and ethics has traditionally been viewed by these same people as anathema - as a blow against the american "freedom to succeed". Something none of them ever will but every last one of them defends.
And the end result is that now they believe the Facebook rando over any actual authority on every topic.
On the post: Robert Reich Loses The Plot: Gets Basically Everything Wrong About Section 230, Fairness Doctrine & The 1st Amendment
Re: Re: Re: Re:
"I support no moderation for anyone, regardless of their political option. All I care about is that people with stupid arguments are called out for it publicly and there's record left of their stupidity."
No you don't. Not in any place where you yourself will be visiting.
The proof of that will be any open house party where that one guy decided to puke in the buffet, take a leak on the hortensias, or spend half an hour railing in an ever increasing voice about <insert inflammatory, often hilariously wrongfully recounted topic here> while the rest of the party tries to pretend the guy doesn't exist.
The response has never been to leave the offensive person be to spoil everyone else's evening. It's always been to show that personage the door and invite him/her to leave.
And that's really the same as on social media. Those places you normally frequent to meet with friends and relatives should not allow visitors who don't mind the most basic of manners. Because the very second FB stops moderating is the very second it loses - instantly - 90% of the audience.
And that is why even if the alt-right get everything they wish for all they end up with is the same tumbleweed-strewn landscape they have on Gab and Parler and an instant reimplementation of 230.
Notably worse, even. You want the first amendment gone for good? Force everyone to put up with the benighted fuckwits following Q and Dear Leader for one month. The next congress voted in will consist exclusively of people with a mandate from the people to add "...except when it comes to racism, bigotry and misinformation in which case none of this amendment applies." tacked to the end of 1A.
On the post: Details Leak On Apple's Secret $275 Billion Deal With The Chinese Government
Re: Famous quote
Ah, Good old Lenin, eh?
But true enough, the more integrated the global markets become the more the specters of old guard communists appear like fscking prophets.
That said...the chinese "communist" party is anything but. If anything I'd describe China as a hybrid of feudalism and oligarchic bureaucracy. Same as it's been for millennia, with minor hiccups briefly bucking that trend.
I'd also claim current China's marketplace is way, way more free-market capitalism than the contemporary US one - which has lost any semblance of actual competition driving performance and efficiency.
And that, essentially, is the problem. If China was communist then their markets would look like those of the old USSR and the country's potential consumer base not affluent enough to be attractive. Since it's not western companies instead bend over backwards in order to kiss the Pooh Bear's ring so they can stay in that market.
On the post: How China Uses Western Influencers As Pawns In Its Propaganda War
Re: Re: Re:
"Thanks for the compliment. I do in fact confess to being a paid shill at one time many years ago. And, as a US citizen, who could know better about the comparison?"
Well, I had to point out that the issue the west currently faces is that criticizing China isn't like going after the USSR. As you underline, above, the problem is that China foreign policy may be exploitative but still produces a better win for an impoverished african nation than any other on the table. Zero interest on the loan? A significant chunk of resources they wouldn't have been able to utilize at all? Genuine world-class education or vocational training for the have-nots?
The real collateral is of course the foreign policy of the nation (Taiwan assumed to be a PRC "autonomous district", for instance). And that the people taught will grow up thinking of the middle kingdom as the center of the world.
And that's the problem, of course;
Want to complain about how Chinese citizens suffer oppression, poverty, lack of choice? Yeah, most americans have no hill to die on on that score.
China builds KZ camps in Xinjiang and Tibet? Remind me about Gitmo and Abu Ghraib again.
China imprisons dissidents? Right, and there are some 2 million permanent convicts in the US prison population, all under conditions fully equivalent to old style slavery.
Problem is, factual reporting often ends up sounding like a 50-cent army members these days. Especially in comparison to current US standards.
I'm no fan of whataboutism and the atrocities in Xinjiang and the lack of political freedom in China is a huge damn problem - but the usual method of leveraging the superiority of the home team lacks traction.
Concerning Africa...well, the US and the EU both had the option of going in with better deals than China is offering. Still do, in fact. This is the price of being the cheap bum in foreign politics.
On the post: How China Uses Western Influencers As Pawns In Its Propaganda War
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I reiterate - "You know, the same the US used to get out of a number of middle-east countries in exchange for similar deals."
Or the USSR, for that matter. The difference being China is subtler about what they're doing. The yoke not as visible nor heavy. No soldiers in alien uniforms walking the streets, no military bases taking over the borders.
On the contrary, the bait is delicious, the hook fine enough to not even sting...unless the country tries to strain its leash at which point pain sets in.
On the post: Robert Reich Loses The Plot: Gets Basically Everything Wrong About Section 230, Fairness Doctrine & The 1st Amendment
Re: This isn't rocket science
"We do notice and take down for copyright violations. There is no reason that we cannot implement a similar regime for false information."
Pointing at the worst shit-show in modern legislation, worldwide, and saying "Let's do it like that" might not be the cure we're looking for, just sayin'. Having thousands of bots spamming youtube with fake DMCA request is bad enough, really.
"The nut jobs are willing to pack the courts and pass blatantly unconstitutional laws. Meanwhile, the normies are just sitting on their hands."
The problem here being that the US system is built specifically to be unstable. In europe we do have hate speech laws which have been implemented without massive amounts of collateral damage.
But then again, in Europe I also don't have to worry a police officer would rob me of my wallet, car and desktop PC in civil forfeiture or shoot up my lawn and call it "regrettable, but hey, QI". We don't have 2000 companies specializing in union busting, or workplaces comparable to indentured serfdom. No one will even dream of starting a tort over the dumbest possible of reasons and SLAPP is unheard of - because our courts of law aren't performance theater.
The problem is that US law execution and procedure relies on principles which are absent any sanity checks beyond the wallet depth of the person with the biggest team of lawyers.
Hence any exception you care to write into your constitutional rights for good, proportional and valid reason will be abused to hit you a hundred times as hard, anywhere. Especially with a lot of lucre riding on every successful tort.
"The nut jobs are willing to pack the courts and pass blatantly unconstitutional laws. Meanwhile, the normies are just sitting on their hands."
Yeah, and the democrats are really going to have to learn to fight dirty. Like it or not this is a war, because when the GOP base sees it as a war that's what it's become. And the aggressor always sets the minimum bar of what is acceptable. You either match their methods or you cave. And so far the democrats just keep caving.
That means they need to pad the courts and start hammering the republicans right back. Like that californian democrat lawmaker trying to pull a gun control law using the same methodology as the new texas anti-abortion law, for instance.
On the post: Robert Reich Loses The Plot: Gets Basically Everything Wrong About Section 230, Fairness Doctrine & The 1st Amendment
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"And I have no problem with that. Setting higher standards and raising the bar for discourse and debate through ensuring that more assholes and liars suffer actual legal consequences would be a marked improvement over what we have now."
Numerous countries in the EU have hate speech laws - like Sweden and Germany with a blanket ban on public discourse judged as incitement against demographic.
Problem is, this shit works in Europe but can not work in the US where the execution of law is based on precedent and one bad judge can turn a measured legal response to hate speech made by nazis and bigots into a complete shit-show which targets anything a suitably law-savvy grifter feels is convenient.
On the post: Federal Court Says Destroying Someone's House To Apprehend A Fugitive Might Be A Constitutional Violation
Re: Re: Re: Re: BUT no problem w gov't taking my body to inject
"You're awfully optimistic in thinking that the US will ever get this under control."
Oh, it will. Eventually. It's just that the various covid variants are going to pinball around the nurgle and Trump congregations until enough of them have died off even those dimbulbs start realizing that Dear Leader's little loyalty test is killing them.
Best case...I mean, worst case scenario, the 25-30% still subscribing to the fascist playbook and invested in being morons end up dead at the end while saner people who vaccinated and abided by basic medical guidelines get a future bereft of the malicious nincompoops who'll no doubt all be happy to die as long as it means "the libs" get stuck paying for the burial.
On the post: Federal Court Says Destroying Someone's House To Apprehend A Fugitive Might Be A Constitutional Violation
Re: Re: Re: Re: BUT no problem w gov't taking my body to inject
"...there's numerous charts going around that prove that not only do many more unvaccinated vs. vaccinated die right now, but there's a large discrepancy between red and blue states."
One of the side effects of which is that in coming elections a number of borderline red states and counties are going to end up blue due to alt-right morons doing a lot more dying or getting too ill to go vote.
I have a really, really hard time not to declare the enhanced die-off of this group of dangerous lunatics a solid silver lining...
On the post: The US Gov't Paid For Moderna To Develop Its Vaccine; But Moderna Wants To Keep The Patent All To Itself
Re: Re: Re: Re:
"Any party? Like two sides of the same counterfeit coin..."
It works for most of Europe. Not sure what I can tell you if you mean to imply this is yet another way the US can't hack stuff the rest of the world figured out a century or more ago.
Mind you, getting ranked choice rather than first past the post in effect would help with the two-party idiocy you guys, the UK and Australia are still stuck in.
On the post: The US Gov't Paid For Moderna To Develop Its Vaccine; But Moderna Wants To Keep The Patent All To Itself
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Big problem here
"You're against babies being allowed to live."
Last I checked what amounts to a wart on a woman's uterus lining isn't a "baby".
But thanks for demonstrating you don't grok the difference between a sapient organism and a pea-sized conglomeration of cells.
The only clarification taking place here is that you're opposed to women owning the right to their own body. The same principle sex traffickers live by.
On the post: Not How Any Of This Works: Pandemic's Wrongest Man Sues Twitter For Kicking Him Off The Platform
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: it will happen
"Do you seriously believe that there is absolutely no other current medical/pharmaceutical treatment for Corona except for the "vaccine"?"
That's what the death toll tells us, yes. There is no medicine for most viral infections. Only toxins meant to disrupt the body's replication mechanism in more or less selective ways.
"-monoclonal antibodies are not a fairy tale"
You mean the expensive and resource-intensive attempt to create the end product of vaccination?
"-there's at least 2 anti-Corona pills awaiting FDA approval (one is already approved)"
None of which has a demonstrated effect beyond enriching Big Pharma. But go ahead and pin your hopes on the magic pills still under development while observable evidence shows we have a highly effective preventative in the form of a vaccine.
It just beggars belief that the US is 800k needlessly dead down the hole mainly because moron anti-vaxxers and Trumpists decided to make defying medical science an observance of Faith.
"Most of the same people that are Pro Choice are also against choice when it comes to Corona medications and treatments."
Let me know when pregnancy becomes a contagious and life-threatening to other people.
This is not us pro-choicers being idiots, it's you morons failing to grasp context, basic logic and common sense. Again.
On the post: Not How Any Of This Works: Pandemic's Wrongest Man Sues Twitter For Kicking Him Off The Platform
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: it will happen
"This is not universally true."
No, just to 99%. Go look at any covid ward. You will for the most part find zero vaccinated people among those ill enough to merit hospitalization. For more proof of this, go count the vaccinated among the 800 000 americans dead to covid.
"Hence, we need to attack Covid-19 with any and all safe and effective medications"
No such exist.
Let me break this down to you; A virus makes use of the body's normal replication mechanism. ANY medicine impeding the transcription and replication of virus particles in a cell must do so by fucking with the cell's normal behavior.
That means any antiviral will be toxic and have undesirable and often unpredictable side effects.
Vaccination, otoh, simply gives your body's normal immune system a wanted poster and lets it do its job.
So that's the first part; Vaccination as a preventive measure is far more effective and far less harmful than trying to actually cure an already extant viral infection.
As for curing it's general medical practice to use the minimum amount of treatment possible - both because all medicine has side effects and because interaction with individual metabolisms is unpredictable.
TL;DR?
We do not have any safe ways to fight a covid infection.
What we have is a vaccine which is, cheat sheet in hand, considered safe and effective. We have basic precautions we can take - wash your hands, avoid crowds, and if you must socialize, keep your distance and wear a mask.
And we have 800 000 dead of whom the overwhelming majority point to not being vaccinated as a leading cause of risk in this pandemic.
Kindly stop it with fucking trying to avoid basic statistics and common sense in these desperate attempts to pretend the doctors don't know what they're talking about.
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