You may have meant this lightly, but it's a completely thorough analysis.
Coming at it from a reductionist viewpoint, the other end of what you're doing, it strikes me that this study and the use being made of it is simply pure projection. Good old-fashioned "no, you."
Thank you. And I know I shouldn't still be surprised, but I am, a little at least. Leftism has seeped into everything to the point that conservative views are now **officially** pathologized. I appreciate the honesty but goddamn, you know? Just, goddamn.
In the reasoning for your brevity, you've hit on something (I imagine there's a name for it, but I don't know what it is) that math-types intuit easily. Wittgenstein wrote "The world [the universe] is everything that is the case." An obvious tautology, but one that needs saying.
Any idiot or charlatan can make up anything about anything. What can be said that isn't true is literally an infinite set. And we unfortunately seem to spend an inordinate amount of time rebutting them. If these things were merely errors, it wouldn't be a big deal because we are all capable of errors. But I get the disconcerting feeling that a large quantity of these things aren't honest errors and seem designed to keep us spinning our wheels while bigger lies goes unobserved, or at least unrebutted.
You betcha. Does anyone remember someone started a movement whose premise was that we should put clothes on all the animals because they should be ashamed to go about naked? After a while (I'm imagining well-intended people running around in the fields trying to catch every single bunny and put clothing on it) whoever started this nonsense disclosed that this was *actually* about was demonstrating that Americans are so stupid they'll buy *any* stupid story. (Was that in the 1950's? My father is who told me about this one.)
I don't know about stupid, but gullible, certainly. The thing is, our system works on a high degree of unverified trust. It has worked for us for a long time. And it can take quite a long time for people to realize their trust is misplaced. It is easier to lie to people than to convince them they've been lied to. To accept that they've been grossly misled means they need to go into dark places, and they're afraid of those dark places.
I'm not overly fond of the dark places myself, but once you've peered into them, you can't walk that back.
Agreed. And: Once you've peered and can't unsee what you've seen -- then where to take oneself to from there, given that one can no longer live in blissful, toxic ignorance, is a real challenge. Thx 4 writing in.
Holly I'm an English major grad and I'm continually astounded that my gut-instinct keeps getting proven correct about a wide variety of Covidian policy and declarations. It should not be the case that my observations keep winning the coin toss against the CDC. I don't even know how to do the math to come up with how unlikely that should be.
But to me, it's obvious from everything I've read about important concepts in western medicine that you can't force interventions, and you can't give people interventions without informing them about the risks, and if you don't know the risks (because you didn't actually adequately study them) then giving an intervention is malpractice, EVEN if it turns out to be a medically justifiable intervention in retrospect.
We have a path for novel, experimental treatments, and part of those treatments is the information that efficacy and safety are unknown, this is a roll of the dice, etc.
Fool me once shame on you, try to fool me twice and it's a much harder sell since once you've demonstrated yourself to be a liar you have lost my trust together with your credibility AND I do communicate with a lot of people.
I'm trying to think of a pithy, lighthearted way to say that you had me at paragraph one but i just can't muster the energy to read any more, without offending the effort that you probably put into this. I hope, guess, nay bet, that it wasn't _that_ much effort :)
Telling the truth usually flows much more easily than crafting one or more lies (and then remembering the lies in order to support them). So you're probably right.
RIght. I would guess Holly hasn't just gotten back from a 48 hour coast-to-coast excursion broken into three days of travel with the added concern of leaving a loved one alone during that time, and attacked this asinine nonsense with her normally clear headed gusto.
Btw, one of my favorite bands, Helmet, has a particular song, that has the following lyrics...
I'm not so good realizing
Who i can or cannot trust
It's best to keep what matters vague
With harmless lies i can adjust <-- Btw,I am not advocating this philosophy. I think the little lies matter as much as the big ones.
Looking back on my decision to get vaccinated, I believe it was one of the most unnuanced, irrationally rigid decisions I've ever made. And that includes toddler-age choices like throwing a tantrum in public. I was so miserable wearing the goddamned mask everywhere (especially at work) that I would have done damn near anything to not have to wear it anymore. With nothing but hope, I took a novel medical treatment, with less understanding than I really should have had, for a disease I was at minimal risk for. The whole time just hoping my administrators would let me take off the fucking mask while I was teaching. They didn't. It was completely illogical to expect they would. I repeatedly look back on those choices and wish I would have more nuance in my thinking and clung a little less rigidly to the hope that things would go back to normal.
The fact that many places still insisted on ineffective nostrums like masks even when people were vaccinated is one of the things that really really irritates me. The fact that even now the people who said/enforced these things have never actually apologised properly is worse. I note that I am far from alone in this view.
In fairness to my former employer, this was in late 2020 and early 2021 (they aren't exactly blameless, but it was more the inertia of the decision they made in the summer of 2020 rather than a dogmatic commitment to masking), and as far as I know they did lift masking requirements for the next school year (though I never verified that). Still, it didn't change the fact that the requirement did make me miserable, and it did impair my decision making, which led me to a choice I now wish I hadn't made.
I cannot imagine having to be masked all day at a job. Masking only really affected me in one way: there's a local guy who has such skill as a massage therapist that one session with him reduces my shoulder pain by half for anywhere from one to two weeks. I was seeing him occasionally. I stopped when he decided on permanent masking, because it's hard enough to get naked and let a guy (he's gay, which is the only reason why it's PTSD-tolerable for me) rub my shoulder, much less to do so with restricted breathing. The latter makes it PTSD-intolerable. Every time it was required of me, mostly at the local hospital having tests or in the waiting room of my doctor's office, I found it to be an extreme irritant. I bought a couple of cloth masks made out of lace on Etsy, which got me nasty looks in public but were the closest I could get to mask freedom. I am reasonably sure that if I had to mask constantly at a job I'd have ended up leaving for another job or filing for disability. All that to say, I don't blame you. I'd have seriously considered doing the same if I had any reason to think it would get the face burka off my face.
Thank you for saying so, Holly. I'm fortunate enough to have some good friends who I've talked to at length about it as well, and I don't blame myself for it anymore either. But if you'll permit me a comparison to the story from your Responsibility of Healing article, I did something stupid: I took on a (then) unknown risk of vaccine injury for relatively little health benefit and an irrational hope that somehow if I did it my life could back to normal. I had both the experience and knowledge background to know that deferring this vaccine until I had more information would have been better for me, but my impaired decision-making led me to a stupid choice. The fact that my stupid choice hasn't resulted in a vaccine injury is my good fortune, but that's not something to depend on.
It's been humbling because I've always prided myself on being someone who keeps his head even when things are difficult, but in this case, I failed to do so. It's understandable why I did it, and the real blame lies with the people who imposed the rules on me, but if I would have been injured by the vaccine it would have been my problem and my responsibility, and I would have had to have lived with the knowledge that if I could have avoided the injury if I'd been thinking more clearly. It's something that I'm glad I know about myself now: I can be pushed by chronic discomfort into a mindset where I make choices I wouldn't otherwise make.
In any event, the main point I wanted to make was that, in my case at least, the choice to get the vaccine required that I be in a mental state that involved less nuanced thinking. I'm certain I'm not alone. The gall of these fucking people to claim that it was more nuanced thought and increased problem solving ability that led to the choice to get vaccinated rather than inhibited decision making due to immense social pressure is infuriating. At a weird meta-level this "study" is just another form of social pressure to get vaccinated: "Good problem solvers get vaccinated." Like you say: bullshit on so many levels.
My private discussion group includes a math professor who read the essay last night and cracked up. "It's so stupid that it doesn't even matter how badly they mangled the math, all the premises are bullshit to start with." Yep. It really is.
And yeah, I understand. I really do. Chronic discomfort of this particularly dehumanizing nature, covering the face, is both physically and psychologically difficult. I have some maddening stories about people refusing to repeat themselves or write things down (despite the hearing aids I still often need to read lips, especially of men not in my good range). The whole world went to hell and we're not back yet.
Speaking of maddening, I find it incomprehensible that health insurance covers all kinds of caca del toro, but not hearing aids! It's awful to know that you, Holly, can't yet afford to get the best appliances to restore your hearing.
right now, I am functionally deaf because I caught a very bad virus in early February which turned into sinus and ear infections along with bronchitis. Got antibiotics and the active infection seems to be gone but my ears are still so fluid-filled that I would estimate I am operating at no more than fifty percent of my hearing capacity. People have to speak close to me, and towards me, for me to be able to hear and understand them. This has certainly made me extra patient with those who have hearing difficulties.
I've checked with deaf friends who use hearing tech and the best I've ever seen from private insurance was 20% reimbursement. It's simply not a thing. Which sucks, yeah.
I hated the masks. I don't have trauma-induced PTSD, but I DO have asthma + claustrophobia. When I started flying again in 2021, masks were still required. I ended up modifying surgical masks by cutting the elastic off of some and using that elastic to elongate the straps on the masks I would actually wear. Long hair covered most of the straps from inspection by others. This allowed me to have the bottom edge of the mask hang pretty loosely so I was getting some straight air-flow and didn't feel like my access to fresh air was 100% obstructed. And no one noticed---yay! I would also wear a regular mask as I went through security just in case.
Here in Japan it has become almost mandatory (no laws but also lots of social pressure) to wear a face burka in public spaces and even on crowded streets outside (which is ridiculous and which IS explicitly not recommended by the government, which recommends mask inside only).
Many companies seem to require people in the office to wear the stupid thing all the time. I'm extremely glad I work from home and live in the countryside where enough people aren't stupid enough to wear masks all the time that we do too. I don't have your PTSD etc. issues but I can't stand wearing the thing for more than an hour or so
I got jabbed because it was the only way I was going to be able to fly into Germany to see my girlfriend. And as far as masking goes, boy howdy does it suck to have to stay masked for 18 hours of travel... Blah.
I really liked this one. And: Want to respond to "Meta-cognition (the ability to accurately think about your own thinking)" -- languages (and language-groups) don't necessarily map neatly one to another, and Semitic languages (Swahili, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.) have an "intensive" form of something one not only does but causes oneself to do -- these verbs begin with the "M" consonant. (The honest self-examination of prayer. which is like checking oneself all over for ticks after camping, is one example; poetizing, with its intensive scrutiny of scrutiny itself, and what a person who does that is called, similarly is another). I don't see that in English, but now that you mention it, maybe in some cultures something like that is more of a thing. Is that what you had meant? I may be too much in that to be able to accurately know.
I bet if the stance had been one that the test-designers had liked and even admired, "rigid" would have been re-phrased as something like "strong" or "principled" or whatever they are calling much more irrational stances than that, these days.
Feb 28, 2023·edited Feb 28, 2023Liked by Holly MathNerd
I am vaccinated and once boosted. I got the shots mostly so I could make international trips that would otherwise be impossible but which I needed to do. I decided that it was almost completely certain that the vaccine would not harm me but that the financial impact to me of not travelling would harm me. As it turned out being vaccinated gave me a ton of additional financial incentives (here in Japan) which helped even more but that was mostly serendipitous
This choice had absolutely nothing to do with whether I thought the wuflu would harm me (I'm positive that it would not beyond perhaps a day of fever or so) nor whether I had had the wuflu or not (I'm pretty sure not).
However in general my opinion of the vax is like Holly's - if you are old and/or have comorbidities then you should take it and if neither then probably not. With a tweak that I think that if you definitely had the wuflu you should not have bothered with the vax.
My original view was that I wanted to have the Astra Zeneca vax because that (and the J&J) was based on science that I mostly understood and was an evolutionary approach to new vax genetech. For some reason the AZ people and/or regulators were also much more clear about side-effects of those vaccinated with it and therefore they lost mindshare to the mRNA vaccines where the side-effects were not so clearly reported. So far as I can tell the AZ side-effects are no worse than the Pfizer or Moderna ones but the reporting of vaccine issues with the mRNA vaccines has been so poor and now politicized that I cannot be sure.
The one thing that this has absolutely done is completely and utterly reduced my personal trust in "Big Pharma" and the various national regulators of it. Just like Holly said somewhere earlier about wanting an older white male doctor, I want older drugs. Short of some kind of otherwise untreatable fatal condition I will not take recent treatments because I no longer trust that their safety trials are actually valid
I mean, you've only grown every bite of food you're going to eat today yourself with your own two hands. What the fuck do YOU know about problem-solving?!?!??!
Yes I'm in favour of a Covid vaccine. When one is created, I'll consider it. The stuff peddled by Pfizer is not a vaccine. Followers of Bret and Heather will already know this and why it is so.
Okay, I had Covid, I'm "vaccinated" more than the non-vaccines they are fixated on. Getting Covid is functionally the same as getting vaccinated or pfizerjabbed. Come at me with questions like this stupid "study" and I'll game you for England.
I've seen better designed studies done by 1st Semester freshmen!
When this reared its ugly and the powers-that- be and the sheeple started losing it, I'd already gone back to the 'flu pandemics of 1918 and 1957 to scope the possible range of threat and concluded if you didn't lose it and panic, there wasn't one.
Not one that was going to do anything like the End of the World levels of damage the loonies were hawking.
We were a century and fifty years on in medicine from the last two dangerous outbreaks of respiratory disease and SARS-CoV-1 had turned out to be a nothing-burger when met sensibly. It was that dangerous no one ever got off their arse to create a vaccine for it in eighteen years. The loonies had been screaming about the sky falling all my life and sod-all came of their daft prophecies. See 'Scared to Death' for a prolonged bout of shaking of the head.
We already knew viruses had a hard-time with sunshine and it quickly proved this one was no different; in fact it was peculiarly eight times more fragile. The liner Lusitania, built pre-WW1 could exchange all the air in the ship NINE TIMES OVER in an hour. The country with the most air-conditioning in the world and situated in sunlit latitudes was going ape-shit bonkers about something the sun fixed outdoors and we'd had a technological fix for indoors for over a century?
"White riot, we wanna riot, we wanna riot of our own" seemed to be a cast-iron prophylactic - no sunlight; all packed together marching; and still no super-spreaders, see?
I was watching a doc following the deployment straddling this time of the carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth last Sunday. This is in the middle of the ocean and is fully NBC equipped. The sailors are running round in cloth masks! FFS!!!
I simply don't know why anyone fell for the Faucist garbage in the first place. Even if it was what they said it was; as lethal as 1918 even; there was no need to go deep-end bonkers about it. Our grandparents took '57 in stride. I bet this is the first most of you have heard of that 'flu. It was dangerous; it was about on a par with this in lethality; and no one has even heard of it!
I haven't read the piece I just wanted to re-iterate that I love your small-font but bold-face disclaimers. Obviously we're different individuals but I think I understand exactly why you do them, particularly the low-key frustration that seems to inform some of them :D
Nailed it... from a fellow non-vaccinated and knowing what I know.. extremely grateful for that.
I will never regret not having taken that jab myself, nor allowing my teenagers to be jabbed. Never.
You may have meant this lightly, but it's a completely thorough analysis.
Coming at it from a reductionist viewpoint, the other end of what you're doing, it strikes me that this study and the use being made of it is simply pure projection. Good old-fashioned "no, you."
Thank you. And I know I shouldn't still be surprised, but I am, a little at least. Leftism has seeped into everything to the point that conservative views are now **officially** pathologized. I appreciate the honesty but goddamn, you know? Just, goddamn.
In the reasoning for your brevity, you've hit on something (I imagine there's a name for it, but I don't know what it is) that math-types intuit easily. Wittgenstein wrote "The world [the universe] is everything that is the case." An obvious tautology, but one that needs saying.
Any idiot or charlatan can make up anything about anything. What can be said that isn't true is literally an infinite set. And we unfortunately seem to spend an inordinate amount of time rebutting them. If these things were merely errors, it wouldn't be a big deal because we are all capable of errors. But I get the disconcerting feeling that a large quantity of these things aren't honest errors and seem designed to keep us spinning our wheels while bigger lies goes unobserved, or at least unrebutted.
You betcha. Does anyone remember someone started a movement whose premise was that we should put clothes on all the animals because they should be ashamed to go about naked? After a while (I'm imagining well-intended people running around in the fields trying to catch every single bunny and put clothing on it) whoever started this nonsense disclosed that this was *actually* about was demonstrating that Americans are so stupid they'll buy *any* stupid story. (Was that in the 1950's? My father is who told me about this one.)
I don't know about stupid, but gullible, certainly. The thing is, our system works on a high degree of unverified trust. It has worked for us for a long time. And it can take quite a long time for people to realize their trust is misplaced. It is easier to lie to people than to convince them they've been lied to. To accept that they've been grossly misled means they need to go into dark places, and they're afraid of those dark places.
I'm not overly fond of the dark places myself, but once you've peered into them, you can't walk that back.
Agreed. And: Once you've peered and can't unsee what you've seen -- then where to take oneself to from there, given that one can no longer live in blissful, toxic ignorance, is a real challenge. Thx 4 writing in.
I believe King Solomon addressed that fairly succinctly. ;)
Yes. I like your word "gullible" better.
Holly I'm an English major grad and I'm continually astounded that my gut-instinct keeps getting proven correct about a wide variety of Covidian policy and declarations. It should not be the case that my observations keep winning the coin toss against the CDC. I don't even know how to do the math to come up with how unlikely that should be.
But to me, it's obvious from everything I've read about important concepts in western medicine that you can't force interventions, and you can't give people interventions without informing them about the risks, and if you don't know the risks (because you didn't actually adequately study them) then giving an intervention is malpractice, EVEN if it turns out to be a medically justifiable intervention in retrospect.
We have a path for novel, experimental treatments, and part of those treatments is the information that efficacy and safety are unknown, this is a roll of the dice, etc.
Yeah, why not tell us the truth.
Fool me once shame on you, try to fool me twice and it's a much harder sell since once you've demonstrated yourself to be a liar you have lost my trust together with your credibility AND I do communicate with a lot of people.
I'm trying to think of a pithy, lighthearted way to say that you had me at paragraph one but i just can't muster the energy to read any more, without offending the effort that you probably put into this. I hope, guess, nay bet, that it wasn't _that_ much effort :)
Telling the truth usually flows much more easily than crafting one or more lies (and then remembering the lies in order to support them). So you're probably right.
RIght. I would guess Holly hasn't just gotten back from a 48 hour coast-to-coast excursion broken into three days of travel with the added concern of leaving a loved one alone during that time, and attacked this asinine nonsense with her normally clear headed gusto.
Btw, one of my favorite bands, Helmet, has a particular song, that has the following lyrics...
I'm not so good realizing
Who i can or cannot trust
It's best to keep what matters vague
With harmless lies i can adjust <-- Btw,I am not advocating this philosophy. I think the little lies matter as much as the big ones.
But, its a helluva song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1p1NlICSps
Looking back on my decision to get vaccinated, I believe it was one of the most unnuanced, irrationally rigid decisions I've ever made. And that includes toddler-age choices like throwing a tantrum in public. I was so miserable wearing the goddamned mask everywhere (especially at work) that I would have done damn near anything to not have to wear it anymore. With nothing but hope, I took a novel medical treatment, with less understanding than I really should have had, for a disease I was at minimal risk for. The whole time just hoping my administrators would let me take off the fucking mask while I was teaching. They didn't. It was completely illogical to expect they would. I repeatedly look back on those choices and wish I would have more nuance in my thinking and clung a little less rigidly to the hope that things would go back to normal.
The fact that many places still insisted on ineffective nostrums like masks even when people were vaccinated is one of the things that really really irritates me. The fact that even now the people who said/enforced these things have never actually apologised properly is worse. I note that I am far from alone in this view.
(longer version of this comment is here - https://freethepeople.org/try-saying-sorry-first/ )
In fairness to my former employer, this was in late 2020 and early 2021 (they aren't exactly blameless, but it was more the inertia of the decision they made in the summer of 2020 rather than a dogmatic commitment to masking), and as far as I know they did lift masking requirements for the next school year (though I never verified that). Still, it didn't change the fact that the requirement did make me miserable, and it did impair my decision making, which led me to a choice I now wish I hadn't made.
I cannot imagine having to be masked all day at a job. Masking only really affected me in one way: there's a local guy who has such skill as a massage therapist that one session with him reduces my shoulder pain by half for anywhere from one to two weeks. I was seeing him occasionally. I stopped when he decided on permanent masking, because it's hard enough to get naked and let a guy (he's gay, which is the only reason why it's PTSD-tolerable for me) rub my shoulder, much less to do so with restricted breathing. The latter makes it PTSD-intolerable. Every time it was required of me, mostly at the local hospital having tests or in the waiting room of my doctor's office, I found it to be an extreme irritant. I bought a couple of cloth masks made out of lace on Etsy, which got me nasty looks in public but were the closest I could get to mask freedom. I am reasonably sure that if I had to mask constantly at a job I'd have ended up leaving for another job or filing for disability. All that to say, I don't blame you. I'd have seriously considered doing the same if I had any reason to think it would get the face burka off my face.
Thank you for saying so, Holly. I'm fortunate enough to have some good friends who I've talked to at length about it as well, and I don't blame myself for it anymore either. But if you'll permit me a comparison to the story from your Responsibility of Healing article, I did something stupid: I took on a (then) unknown risk of vaccine injury for relatively little health benefit and an irrational hope that somehow if I did it my life could back to normal. I had both the experience and knowledge background to know that deferring this vaccine until I had more information would have been better for me, but my impaired decision-making led me to a stupid choice. The fact that my stupid choice hasn't resulted in a vaccine injury is my good fortune, but that's not something to depend on.
It's been humbling because I've always prided myself on being someone who keeps his head even when things are difficult, but in this case, I failed to do so. It's understandable why I did it, and the real blame lies with the people who imposed the rules on me, but if I would have been injured by the vaccine it would have been my problem and my responsibility, and I would have had to have lived with the knowledge that if I could have avoided the injury if I'd been thinking more clearly. It's something that I'm glad I know about myself now: I can be pushed by chronic discomfort into a mindset where I make choices I wouldn't otherwise make.
In any event, the main point I wanted to make was that, in my case at least, the choice to get the vaccine required that I be in a mental state that involved less nuanced thinking. I'm certain I'm not alone. The gall of these fucking people to claim that it was more nuanced thought and increased problem solving ability that led to the choice to get vaccinated rather than inhibited decision making due to immense social pressure is infuriating. At a weird meta-level this "study" is just another form of social pressure to get vaccinated: "Good problem solvers get vaccinated." Like you say: bullshit on so many levels.
My private discussion group includes a math professor who read the essay last night and cracked up. "It's so stupid that it doesn't even matter how badly they mangled the math, all the premises are bullshit to start with." Yep. It really is.
And yeah, I understand. I really do. Chronic discomfort of this particularly dehumanizing nature, covering the face, is both physically and psychologically difficult. I have some maddening stories about people refusing to repeat themselves or write things down (despite the hearing aids I still often need to read lips, especially of men not in my good range). The whole world went to hell and we're not back yet.
Speaking of maddening, I find it incomprehensible that health insurance covers all kinds of caca del toro, but not hearing aids! It's awful to know that you, Holly, can't yet afford to get the best appliances to restore your hearing.
right now, I am functionally deaf because I caught a very bad virus in early February which turned into sinus and ear infections along with bronchitis. Got antibiotics and the active infection seems to be gone but my ears are still so fluid-filled that I would estimate I am operating at no more than fifty percent of my hearing capacity. People have to speak close to me, and towards me, for me to be able to hear and understand them. This has certainly made me extra patient with those who have hearing difficulties.
I've checked with deaf friends who use hearing tech and the best I've ever seen from private insurance was 20% reimbursement. It's simply not a thing. Which sucks, yeah.
I hated the masks. I don't have trauma-induced PTSD, but I DO have asthma + claustrophobia. When I started flying again in 2021, masks were still required. I ended up modifying surgical masks by cutting the elastic off of some and using that elastic to elongate the straps on the masks I would actually wear. Long hair covered most of the straps from inspection by others. This allowed me to have the bottom edge of the mask hang pretty loosely so I was getting some straight air-flow and didn't feel like my access to fresh air was 100% obstructed. And no one noticed---yay! I would also wear a regular mask as I went through security just in case.
Here in Japan it has become almost mandatory (no laws but also lots of social pressure) to wear a face burka in public spaces and even on crowded streets outside (which is ridiculous and which IS explicitly not recommended by the government, which recommends mask inside only).
Many companies seem to require people in the office to wear the stupid thing all the time. I'm extremely glad I work from home and live in the countryside where enough people aren't stupid enough to wear masks all the time that we do too. I don't have your PTSD etc. issues but I can't stand wearing the thing for more than an hour or so
"Face burka." I like that description.
I got jabbed because it was the only way I was going to be able to fly into Germany to see my girlfriend. And as far as masking goes, boy howdy does it suck to have to stay masked for 18 hours of travel... Blah.
Yeah. Trans-continental flights suck
I mean, at 6'5" and 240 lbs they were no picnic *before* Covid, but the masking really made it a supreme grind.
I really liked this one. And: Want to respond to "Meta-cognition (the ability to accurately think about your own thinking)" -- languages (and language-groups) don't necessarily map neatly one to another, and Semitic languages (Swahili, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.) have an "intensive" form of something one not only does but causes oneself to do -- these verbs begin with the "M" consonant. (The honest self-examination of prayer. which is like checking oneself all over for ticks after camping, is one example; poetizing, with its intensive scrutiny of scrutiny itself, and what a person who does that is called, similarly is another). I don't see that in English, but now that you mention it, maybe in some cultures something like that is more of a thing. Is that what you had meant? I may be too much in that to be able to accurately know.
I bet if the stance had been one that the test-designers had liked and even admired, "rigid" would have been re-phrased as something like "strong" or "principled" or whatever they are calling much more irrational stances than that, these days.
Exactly.
I am vaccinated and once boosted. I got the shots mostly so I could make international trips that would otherwise be impossible but which I needed to do. I decided that it was almost completely certain that the vaccine would not harm me but that the financial impact to me of not travelling would harm me. As it turned out being vaccinated gave me a ton of additional financial incentives (here in Japan) which helped even more but that was mostly serendipitous
This choice had absolutely nothing to do with whether I thought the wuflu would harm me (I'm positive that it would not beyond perhaps a day of fever or so) nor whether I had had the wuflu or not (I'm pretty sure not).
However in general my opinion of the vax is like Holly's - if you are old and/or have comorbidities then you should take it and if neither then probably not. With a tweak that I think that if you definitely had the wuflu you should not have bothered with the vax.
My original view was that I wanted to have the Astra Zeneca vax because that (and the J&J) was based on science that I mostly understood and was an evolutionary approach to new vax genetech. For some reason the AZ people and/or regulators were also much more clear about side-effects of those vaccinated with it and therefore they lost mindshare to the mRNA vaccines where the side-effects were not so clearly reported. So far as I can tell the AZ side-effects are no worse than the Pfizer or Moderna ones but the reporting of vaccine issues with the mRNA vaccines has been so poor and now politicized that I cannot be sure.
The one thing that this has absolutely done is completely and utterly reduced my personal trust in "Big Pharma" and the various national regulators of it. Just like Holly said somewhere earlier about wanting an older white male doctor, I want older drugs. Short of some kind of otherwise untreatable fatal condition I will not take recent treatments because I no longer trust that their safety trials are actually valid
Socio-Cognitive Polarization, SCP?
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/
If I could hit the "like" button a thousand times, I would! *Standing ovation!* *APPLAUSE!!* I'll be dying on this hill with you my friend!
I mean, you've only grown every bite of food you're going to eat today yourself with your own two hands. What the fuck do YOU know about problem-solving?!?!??!
I'm just a hillbilly 😉
Yes I'm in favour of a Covid vaccine. When one is created, I'll consider it. The stuff peddled by Pfizer is not a vaccine. Followers of Bret and Heather will already know this and why it is so.
Okay, I had Covid, I'm "vaccinated" more than the non-vaccines they are fixated on. Getting Covid is functionally the same as getting vaccinated or pfizerjabbed. Come at me with questions like this stupid "study" and I'll game you for England.
I've seen better designed studies done by 1st Semester freshmen!
Your comment here is another angle I considered for why their questions were stupid, but my rant was long enough already. :) Thanks!
When this reared its ugly and the powers-that- be and the sheeple started losing it, I'd already gone back to the 'flu pandemics of 1918 and 1957 to scope the possible range of threat and concluded if you didn't lose it and panic, there wasn't one.
Not one that was going to do anything like the End of the World levels of damage the loonies were hawking.
We were a century and fifty years on in medicine from the last two dangerous outbreaks of respiratory disease and SARS-CoV-1 had turned out to be a nothing-burger when met sensibly. It was that dangerous no one ever got off their arse to create a vaccine for it in eighteen years. The loonies had been screaming about the sky falling all my life and sod-all came of their daft prophecies. See 'Scared to Death' for a prolonged bout of shaking of the head.
We already knew viruses had a hard-time with sunshine and it quickly proved this one was no different; in fact it was peculiarly eight times more fragile. The liner Lusitania, built pre-WW1 could exchange all the air in the ship NINE TIMES OVER in an hour. The country with the most air-conditioning in the world and situated in sunlit latitudes was going ape-shit bonkers about something the sun fixed outdoors and we'd had a technological fix for indoors for over a century?
"White riot, we wanna riot, we wanna riot of our own" seemed to be a cast-iron prophylactic - no sunlight; all packed together marching; and still no super-spreaders, see?
I was watching a doc following the deployment straddling this time of the carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth last Sunday. This is in the middle of the ocean and is fully NBC equipped. The sailors are running round in cloth masks! FFS!!!
I simply don't know why anyone fell for the Faucist garbage in the first place. Even if it was what they said it was; as lethal as 1918 even; there was no need to go deep-end bonkers about it. Our grandparents took '57 in stride. I bet this is the first most of you have heard of that 'flu. It was dangerous; it was about on a par with this in lethality; and no one has even heard of it!
Please accept my humble and awed applause.
I haven't read the piece I just wanted to re-iterate that I love your small-font but bold-face disclaimers. Obviously we're different individuals but I think I understand exactly why you do them, particularly the low-key frustration that seems to inform some of them :D