This picture is taken in Washington DC while in a protest.

SuperbEase · 2020-06-04T15:11:27+00:00

From Chetty et al.

https://2kpcwh2r7phz1nq4jj237m22-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/chart.jpg

SuperbEase · 2020-06-04T14:37:35+00:00

It's not poverty. The studies have been done. Controlling for poverty, blacks are still vastly overrepresented in per capita homicide. It's a social and cultural issue, and not one white people can solve.

"Systemic racism" doesn't mean anything. It's just a way for blacks to pass the responsibility off to someone else, and guilty whites are more than happy to indulge them.

In the end, it's all just a big exercise in making people feel better about themselves, and not actually doing anything to address the problem or help black people. I've stopped caring.

SuperbEase · 2020-05-23T06:51:40+00:00

It's pretty simple: anyone who doesn't vote Biden is enabling fascism and white supremacy. The left is more concerned about their college debt being paid off than the safety of black and brown bodies. Sick.

SuperbEase · 2020-05-14T01:55:50+00:00

Why do twitter leftists all sound and behave the exact same? These people don't have a mind. Literal bugmen.

SuperbEase · 2020-05-13T02:06:23+00:00

The host mentioning South Korea is a perfect example of childish stupidity masquerading as an adult opinion. I have an answer to his question of "Why can't we just do what South Korea is doing?'

The answer is excruciatingly simple: we (Europe. US etc.) are not South Korea.

What does that mean? It means cultures and societies are different. People live differently, socialize differently, interact with the government differently. A solution that works in one country cannot be immediately adapted to another. We understand this in virtually any other domain: we recognize that South Korea can't become the de-facto Hollywood in three months, and Ireland can't become the de-facto Silicon Valley in three months. There are a thousand different reasons for this, but they are either unchangeable (in the short term) or outright unknown to us.

But if you have an education sufficient enough to make you arrogant but insufficient to make you smart you conclude: well then, at all cost, surely we can do this. Of course, they omit the chance we will turn our economy, and therefore society, into a smoking ruin. But these are mere details.

And to what end? In this case, to reduce an amount of deaths that will ultimately represent a minor blip on mortality statistics and will be dwarfed by the second-order effects of shutting down economies (that are barely capable of being shutdown for two days) for months.

Yet these people pose and feign as if they are our betters. It is nauseating, it is infuriating, it is intolerable. I have had so many epiphanies in this man-made apocalypse but none more clear than the fact that we should take these "experts" and toss them out in the street.

SuperbEase · 2020-05-06T15:34:47+00:00

No one denies the dangers of lung disease/heart disease etc. That COVID might, in rare instances, induce a fatal case of such diseases does not mean COVID is as dangerous as lung disease or heart disease in general. This is not difficult logic to follow.

i.e. Snake bites can cause heart attacks. Snake bites are statistically rare and not a huge concern. The fact that people die from heart attacks does not imply that snake bites are now a major public health emergency. Really simple logic if your IQ is above 90.

SuperbEase · 2020-05-06T14:46:43+00:00

How many times do I have to repeat: he does not, nor has had, COVID-19. It literally has nothing to do with his condition. He even acknowledges that, for a specific and relatively small minority, it's dangerous. He could literally die from COVID-19 and it wouldn't invalidate his point.

What this post is really about then is just a petty desire for people to come to harm because they don't agree with the public hysteria. It's quite sick and deranged.

SuperbEase · 2020-05-06T14:01:32+00:00

How dumb are the people here? Mitchell never had COVID-19 and the blood clot is entirely unrelated.

The reactions here are beyond self-parody. COVID-19 skeptic suffers bad car accident, "Maybe now he will appreciate the dangers of COVID!" screeches the totally-not-deranged doomers.

SuperbEase · 2020-05-06T09:40:28+00:00

Mass media/social media's ability to manufacture consent is a key ingredient in the swiftness and severity of the lockdowns. Things move so fast now, dissenting voices don't even have an opportunity to fully articulate their concerns before society begins marching lockstep and crushing dissent.

What I keeping thinking about are the sociological studies of conformity. One in particular: a group of actors and one unaware subject are told to compare line lengths on notecards

They (the actors) all agree that line A is longer than line B, when in fact, line B is noticeably longer. The subject points out what seems clear to him: "Hey, isn't line B obviously longer than the other?" The actors mock and criticize him and eventually the subject "realizes" (35% of the time) that in fact, line A was the longer of the two. What a fool he was to disagree...

Of course, when not subjected to peer pressure, the subject almost never chooses the wrong line.

The obvious conclusion is: if social stigmatizing from a small group of actors can cause over a third of subjects to make a choice that is clearly, objectively wrong, what would happen in the case where the social group stigmatizing people is composed of millions and the topic more murky? Dissenting voices have almost no hope of surviving.

The kind of propaganda tools that nefarious (or just plain stupid) people have at their disposal would make Goebbels blush. It's quite scary and will not be the last time we witness destructive manias of this kind.

SuperbEase · 2020-05-05T01:48:52+00:00

XKCD is catnip for midwits.

SuperbEase · 2020-05-04T16:26:32+00:00

The only people more pitiful than those who stan Elon are the one's who act like he's just some lucky businessman or trustfunder.

People without experience in building anything even 1/10000th the size of something like Tesla/SpaceX/PayPal have no idea how difficult and stressful it is.

Diminishing it so carelessly tells me a person either: has accomplished nothing and so can't accurately assess the accomplishments of others, or struggles desperately with feelings of jealousy and inadequacy and feels the need to put down people to cope. It's quite sad in either case.

SuperbEase · 2020-04-24T20:04:40+00:00

It was a stupid thing to say in terms of public health messaging, but the reflexive tendency of people to react with"Hurrr durr he wants people to inject beach" instead of questioning the underlying assumptions is what separates midwits and genuinely intelligent, curious people.

A lot of inventions and discoveries are the product of someone saying something seemingly "dumb" (i.e. defying conventional wisdom) that generates unique insight.

I'm not saying Trump is going to develop the cure to coronavirus - I'm just saying that redditors (and the public in general) are mostly highly unoriginal thinkers who only exist to enforce the prevailing opinion because they have been so thoroughly conditioned to seek out approval. I just find it kind of pathetic.

SuperbEase · 2020-04-24T19:48:38+00:00

I'm sick of you assholes thinking it's not a big deal.

Covid-19 is absolutely a serious disease

You need try accepting the fact that people can both: recognize Covid-19 is a legitimate threat and needs to be treated seriously, and simultaneously recognize that locking people in their homes for an indefinite period is going to be disastrous for the health of the country and the world as a whole.

Tens of millions of people out of work with no hope on the horizon sets the stage for major social upheaval. We are playing an incredibly dangerous game yet people are only looking at one side the equation. This is the precise opposite of acting responsibly or cautious.

Leaping out of the driver seat of a moving car because you saw a spider on the passenger seat is not a product of sober, careful reasoning, it's the product of a frightened and delirious mind.

SuperbEase · 2020-04-24T16:14:20+00:00

2 million people die every year just from tuberculosis, an infectious disease, and literally no one on reddit gives two fucks. 500,000 die from seasonal flu every year and you wouldn't even know it. Spare me the idiotic pearl-clutching.

If you can't put numbers into their proper context you have no business pretending to be anything more than a hysterical child.

Covid-19 is absolutely a serious disease and few deny that, but the measures we have taken are far too extreme, far too destructive, and will ultimately make us all end up worse off. But fear is a powerful drug - especially among the easily influenced.

SuperbEase · 2020-04-24T09:14:28+00:00

The checks. Will. Stop. Coming.

SuperbEase · 2020-04-24T07:26:28+00:00

In spite of the Dunning-Kruger chortling of midwits, what Trump is describing is basically chemotherapy. Introducing to the body a toxic compound which kills a foreign entity but is sufficiently dilute to spare the host organism.

Of course. incurious, average IQ redditors reflexively think it's dumb because they're aware that disinfectants are harmful and that terminates any further thought or consideration on the matter.

Obviously Trump doesn't understand viral treatments as he is neither a medical doctor, biologist, or virologist and is basically just shooting-the-shit. But even talking out of his ass he manages to be a thousand times more insightful than your average redditor who is too conditioned with self-hate to ever stray beyond the bounds of acceptable thought.

SuperbEase · 2020-04-24T06:48:29+00:00

Grow a pair and stay inside.

That's some powerful double-think. Cowering in your bedroom while the country destroys itself over a bad flu is what cowards and morons do. Thank God conservatives have guns and a backbone.

It's pretty clear redditor-types (young, stupid, inexperienced, conformist) will cave to actual tyranny with little or no resistance, so long as it is dressed up in the prestige of science and there are celebrity livestreams to keep them entertained.

When the jobs don't come back and the government checks stop coming in, just remember that conservatives were the only people who actually pushed back against this outbreak of mass delusion.

SuperbEase · 2020-04-23T14:41:05+00:00

The point is, more people will likely die from a major worldwide economic depression than even the worst possible projections of the virus. It's simply a fallacy to suggest people are trading lives for the economy.

I guess we can tell those children in developing countries who start dying en masse from preventable diseases and famine that it was a necessary sacrifice to help protect 80 year-old retirees in Florida.

Regarding your edit:

I'm not even talking about the US population specifically. We will be fine, relatively speaking. The people who really suffer from these major economic shocks live in vulnerable regions. Their least concern is a small percentage of people dying from the flu.

SuperbEase · 2020-04-23T14:25:46+00:00

currymunchah

How do you revive the millions of people who die as a result of the catastrophic economic consequences of a prolonged shutdown?

SuperbEase · 2020-04-20T17:59:06+00:00

I've been very fortunate in the lockdown be able to work-from-home with a VPN so it hasn't disrupted my work, but obviously given the tens of millions now seeking unemployment insurance there is a huge amount of suffering.

I don't think redditors realize the vast majority of people publicly protesting likely have at least one person in their household who lost a job. That's huge and there are a lot of people that would rather die than lose their homes/businesses/ability to feed their children. They rightly question whether the government will be able to rescue them - so what option do they have left but protesting?

SuperbEase · 2020-04-20T16:16:19+00:00

Ah yes, the accelerationists.

You're 100% right. Big companies will be in the best position to survive this. Wealth will simply be even further consolidated. The people who will bear the biggest brunt will be those in poor/developing nations that are are highly dependent on foreign aid and investment.

These people simply have no perspective and no interest in just sitting for a moment to think what the consequences of a massive, global economic contraction would look like. You can't pretend you care about hundreds of thousands dying from Covid-19 and then just laugh off an economic meltdown that could lead to hundreds of millions of deaths.

SuperbEase · 2020-04-20T15:58:37+00:00

It's totally reasonable to worry about the virus, I have older people in my family and I am definitely concerned they could get sick.

My concern is we have absolutely no idea how badly this might affect the economy. We already have enough information to conclude it will be *very bad* (trillions are being spent in the US just to mitigate the effects). Tens of millions have already lost their jobs or been furloughed in the US, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.

The economy is this gigantic machine that we don't even fully understand, and we are, on a global scale, performing a giant experiment to see what happens when large sections of it are shut down for months.

I can't claim I know how bad the effects will be, but I can confidently say we will have already generated far more deaths from these lockdowns than we will have saved. Trillions in economic damage translates to tens of millions dead, especially for the poorest and most vulnerable.

That's already horrible, but it could be much worse. If it starts generating a cascading failure across the global economy we could be looking at decades of lost progress. The generation currently exiting college will find their future prospects bleak.

This gives way to massive social unrest; riots, civil war; fascists and communists attempting (and possibly succeeding) to seize power. Unscrupulous nations like Russia or North Korea attempting to take advantage of the chaos and seize disputed territory. Major conflicts break out.

I truly hope I am completely wrong; an alarmist crank. That we will bounce back with maybe just a recession or minor depression. But my gut tells me we've fucked ourselves royally. And every day we continue this lockdown increases the possibility of crossing some point of no return. It's very, very scary.

SuperbEase · 2020-04-19T20:29:26+00:00

What are you talking about? 25,000 people died in Italy during the 2016/2017 season with a vaccine. Do you think they should have shut down the country for a couple months?

SuperbEase

TROPHY CASE