It's like "This Is Fine" and How To Destroy Angels had a baby.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
It's Over
Tags: big brother, conspiracies, doomed, mpegs, plague
Current Music: How To Destroy Angels -- The Space in Between ♬
16 Responses:
If I read the trends correctly, California cases are now at the same level and increasing at a rate and of almost exactly two years ago.
If not higher, which is why we missed out on the "hot vax summer" we were promised. Sure would suck if we lost all our indoor mask and vax mandates at the same time - oh wait...
Back in March my University decided to make masking optional. I was dismayed that most of my co-workers, who I had thought better of, instantly stopped wearing masks and started acting like I was a lunatic for continuing.
In any case I hoped we could at least make it to the end of the semester, and we almost did, but now it's finals/graduation week and there's a massive outbreak in my department. An outbreak that seems to be in large part from a super-spreader event that was a departmental sponsored end-of-year thing at a bar.
I had to move a final exam to be remote because 15% of the class was quarantining with active cases and I bet a large number were also just not showing symptoms.
I had to do this all at my own discretion too, because administration is still in denial and stopped tracking cases, and they're still planning on having packed graduations with family members all shoved inside a poorly ventilated hockey arena. And they are having 4 of these because they are having all the people who missed out on graduation the previous 2 years back. I can't imagine this is going to end well.
This is orders of magnitude worse than anything that hit us in the previous 2 years, but everone's all LOL who cares. It's just mind boggling.
I've got a child in grade school. The school district has done just about everything I could ask for in-person learning - constant masking, social distancing, weekly testing of all students, fully-vaccinated staff, etc.
This week, my kid's class suffered a huge outbreak. 1/3 of the kids tested positive, the teacher tested positive. Now my whole family is sick, despite being vaxxed and boosted.
Not intending to disparage the vaccine in an way, just emphasizing that being vaccinated has not ended the pandemic in the way so many people think it has.
*any* way
there's also an outbreak at my kids school, this particular one possibly from a mask-optional "Weird Al" concert this past weekend
state funding for testing in schools runs out May 15th though, so after that we won't even know if there are outbreaks, which I guess is one way of solving the problem
Well shucks, Trump invented that solution, give credit where credit is due.
/me sighs
To be scrupulously fair, human performance in this pandemic has been about par for the course, basically what you should expect from overclocked monkeys.
Also, human performance in this pandemic is maybe another bit of evidence that "progress," as widely conceived, is not something that happens with human behavior. We are, in other words, shitty and stupid in much that same ways that we have always been shitty and stupid, and there appears to be no prospect of our becoming less stupid or shitty in the future.
In particular, the notion that humans in any great numbers have internalized the ways of knowing that allowed the contemporary world to be built, that notion is goofy. Most people have not internalized those ways of knowing, and a sizeable fraction of it resist such internalization with the greatest fierceness.
I remember reading a science fiction novel as a child. In the far future world of the novel, the mathematical education of children included "grammar-school calculus." There will never be such a thing, because humans who can learn anything about calculus before about the age of 14 are so rare that they might as well not exist. And because there will never be grammar-school calculus, the median person will never learn much about the STEM way of seeing the world.
We could theoretically have more success with teaching general critical-thinking skills which are not so dependent on working entirely with abstractions, but because so many of the people with power are dependent on the median person not having any ability to think critically, efforts in this direction are routinely derailed.
In summary, life sucks. Then you die.
There are few things I find more pointless and irritating than navel-gazing stuff like this. Any screed that refers to people as "humans" has about the same intellectual rigor as ones that refer to women as "feeeeeemales".
Performance during this pandemic in Japan is not the same as in the US. By your "scrupulously fair" theory, which of those sets is more "human"? Nice just-so story you got there, shame if some nazi eugenicist shit got into it.
"Herp derp we're all just animals, man" -- save it for the novelty rock songs and 3am post-bong-rip insights.
And then:
The same is true, in spades, for numeracy although the evidence is harder to find and we are less far up the curve.
Or, you know, 80 years ago the number of people who could program a computer, or even who knew what programming was, was tiny – a few tens, perhaps? Today, I don't know: hundreds of millions? Including children well under ten. And programming is not easier than elementary analysis (and yes, I can program and I've tutored people in analysis).
Your comment is just the worst, most offensive, kind of junk science.
It is a fair cop to point out that Japan's reaction to COVID was a lot more sensible, with much better results for the Japanese, than that of almost any other society on Earth. I could make an argument that this makes it the exception that proves the rule, and that the interesting question is why this particular batch of overclocked monkeys did so much better than the rest. Because the Japanese response was highly atypical. No other human society came close to their discipline and effectiveness.
Also, "nazis could use that as ammunition" is not an argument.
It's possible that you're mostly objecting to my characterization of people collectively as irredeemably shitty and stupid, and I admit that this is harsh. Also that it is not the whole story. But I insist it is part of the story.
PS the WYSIWYG comments editor works much better than I anticipated.
Say less please.
Obligatory "novelty rock song", inspired by Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock, and the film 2001: A Space Odyssey:
The book/film pairing isn't so odd when one accepts that the end of the film depicts something that "happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world".
I just saw How To Destroy Angels for the first time.
This is strong! A particular scene caught my attention, that appears repeatedly through the whole footage. There is the cataclysmic scene, and from time to time, a normal-looking scene with the same characters, sitting on a couch as a fire starts.
That suggests to me that both are the same scene: one that describes how it looks visually (people chilling on their couch like every end of the day), and another that shows what really happens inside.
This looks typical to what happen when denying a problem until it leads to a crisis: divorce, burn-out, emotional break-down, political conflicts, or letting a pandemic propagate and let's see when it becomes dangerous.
The shocking images displayed here seems here to shock, or more positively, trigger a reaction.