Re: Song of the Day
 

Omicron didn't originate in China and may never have developed had the original not been allowed to run rampant around the world.

There are very real practical questions whether we could have locked down hard enough to kill the thing off - which led the experts to conclude we shouldn't try - but that does change the fact that we never tried.

But places like China and elsewhere in SE Asia that tried saw it go away until they were reinfected by others that didn't. (Of course, this is not an endorsement of everything China has done).

Re: Song of the Day
 

You are the most offended person I know. Between the woke libtards complaining about perceived transphobia and the MAGA dunces complaining about CRT in math books, your hair is ALWAYS on fire. Now you’re so offended you want to go out and beat some people up? Sit the fuck down, snowflake, and quit your fucking whining. Nobody cares about your endless grievances.

Re: Song of the Day
 

I'm irritated. There's a difference. We irritated are a different breed, responding not to perceived slights but to generally dumb behavior, or things that are corrosive to a more enjoyable or amusing discourse.

When I'm reading something that's provocative, I enjoy that it causes me to think. Maybe it causes me to disagree with it, or reconsider what I'd previously thought about the subject. If comments follow the article and they debate its merits or lack thereof, that banter is welcome.

But when someone responds with, "I'm offended," or worse, then seeks to ban the author of that which offended them, they've added nothing. All thinking ceases and the argument becomes a grievance and possibly a blunt exertion of power to shut down something or someone.

"I'm offended" is not thoughtful but emotive. It's like saying "This makes me sad," or "This makes me happy." Does this add anything to the conversation? Congrats. You've emoted. And the content value of that ejaculation is: 0.00.

But yes, I think I should be able to Will Smith most of the offended. But I also think that if they find my denigration of them or irritation with them offensive, they can do the same to me. Quite honestly, allowing people to beat the shit out of each other might be the cure for stupid behavior.

Re: Song of the Day
 

Must you always be so negative? Why not acknowledge and credit when Sebby shows growth? I mean, he worked "gravitas" into that rant. That has got to be worth something?

Re: Song of the Day
 

Being offended is “emotive” but being irritated is “thoughtful”? I’m not buying it. The only difference is that, instead of saying, “This makes me sad”, you are saying “This makes me angry.” Irritation is an emotion. Adds nothing to the conversation. Congrats. You’ve emoted.

Re: Song of the Day
 

Even with MRNA vaccines, the virus still spreads. They don't prevent acquisition, but they decrease time with it and rick of death from it.

There was no reality, ever, in which any nation (other than an island that intended to shut itself off from the rest of the world forever) could have locked down, waited for a vaccine, and then reopened and avoided spread of the virus. The endeavor is so flawed I find it amazing to be even having this discussion.

The only viruses we've managed to contain in the fashion you are advocating were MERS and Ebola. Why? Because they are very difficult to transmit from person to person. The virus most like Covid, SARS, spread significantly but had a limited lifespan in part because it was also far more difficult to transit than Covid.

Re: Song of the Day
 

I am curious as to whether a one whole-earth three weekend lockdown would have ended it.

Re: Song of the Day
 

Being irritated at something dumb is thoughtful. You're pointing out the dumb, which is an insistence on higher thought. An insistence on logic over emoting.

Would you say Lewis black is emoting in his routine? No. The frustration is not personal. The frustration is general, at a lack of competent, rational thinking.

I am not above emoting, but that's limited to things like our pernicious justice system. There, at the unfairness of that shitshow, yes I get offended. But again, it's not personal. You'll never hear me say, "That upsets me," or "that makes me feel [insert]" without offering a valid factual basis for the reaction. Without that, who cares how I feel? If I don't have a concrete critique of that to which I'm responding, I've nothing to say. If all I have is to say "That upsets me," I see no reason to speak.

Re: Song of the Day
 

Nope. Irritation is an emotion, regardless of what you are irritated at. When you say you are irritated, you’re just telling us your feelings. You’re irritated? What do you want, a hug?

Re: Song of the Day
 

Maybe you want to read that thread again, because you're missing the point. You and Elon both think Twitter should just let anything go because so what if a few people are offended. The issue is not that a few people get offended. The problem is that lots of people get hot and bothered and start doing things IRL that have real-world consequences.

Re: Song of the Day
 

What does that prove? Since we do not live in a world where every government could do what China did even if it wanted to, wasn't that inevitable?

Re: Song of the Day
 

A country that shuts down and gets vaccinated saves a lot of lives, which is the real point. Yes, no one can indefinitely avoid the spread of the virus. But that doesn't mean so many people need to die. People are dying right now in China because so many old people didn't want to get vaccinated. They did a great job of buying time, but didn't use that time as well as they might have.

Are you kidding? Ebola is *not* hard to transmit. But it is much more lethal and generally scares the shit out of people, so they take it quite seriously. All of the conservatives who have discovered principled reasons that the government shouldn't have public-health powers to combat COVID felt exactly the opposite when Obama was the President and Ebola was a thing. They did not give a single shit about individual civil rights -- they wanted everyone who might spread Ebola to be locked up.

Re: Song of the Day
 

Being emotional does not preclude being thoughtful. In your world, when people with whom you disagree (and invariably to your left) say they are offended about something, you say they are emotional in a way that means they are incapable of rational thought, and that gives you license to disregarded whatever they are saying. When you disagree with someone, you are emotional about it, but of course you are always capable of rational thought, definitionally it would seem. When someone to you right with whom you disagree says something, emotional or otherwise, you describe them as stupid, and so it doesn't matter whether they are emotional or not.

All sorts of people get emotional, but when people to your left do it, that's when you call it out, as a way to avoid engaging with their views.

Re: Song of the Day
 

I mean, no? There was no way of knowing for sure how the thing would mutate or whether vaccines or other treatments or practices would be developed to stop the spread.

Re: Song of the Day
 

(1) Without the benefit of hindsight, do those things make it any *more* likely that China's lockdowns were going to be able to work indefinitely? No.

(2) With the benefit of what we know now, re-infection from other countries was inevitable, and pretending to forget what we've learned doesn't change that.

Re: Song of the Day
 

Probably but since no one did it … here we are.

Re: Song of the Day
 

That's not Twitter's responsibility. That's not anyone's responsibility except for the nuts doing crazy things IRL.

The duty to "Combat misinformation" should not belong to platforms. They should be allowed to ban what they deem abhorrent or with which they do not desire to be associated. But they should not be compelled to act as "information quality control" for some ever shifting definition of society's best interests.

If people want to believe nonsense, that's on them. If they act badly as a result, we have law enforcement to address that.

This idea of pre-emptive avoidance of bad behavior via manipulation has a Huxley/Orwell stink to it. A kissing cousin intellectually to China's "Social Credit" policy. I think invoking Orwell is a Godwin's Law violation of sorts (not Huxley, who I think isn't appreciated enough), but here, that smell is so pungent its apt.

Re: Song of the Day
 

Their views are rarely rooted in circumspect thought. Often, they are driven by and entirely derive from feelings.

Feelings are fine for relationships. But one's feelings, which are inherently subjective and frequently not tested via rigorous application of logic and assessment of whether such feelings should be foist upon society at large, are not the stuff on which sane, sober policy decisions should be made.

And this is not aimed at the left. The right is every bit as emotive. They've been whining about "losing their country and culture" for years now. And it's simply not true. Things change. That's constant. Their culture is a throwback. And historically the country was and has always been more a melting pot than a lily white Mayberry.

Their feelings made them gullible targets for Trump who then ran the country in complete unreality for four years and split the damn place down the middle. All based on myths, on feelings.

ETA: I suspect you would assert that we can stop people from being rubes, being slaves to their feelings, by moderating the content to which they are exposed on places like Twitter. That is a facially credible solution. It’s also authoritarianism lite. That is manipulation of the crowd.

Of course, certain actors (states, corps, etc.) have manipulated the crowd for as long as there have been crowds to manipulate. But to advocate for it so nakedly as is being done today is both scary and counterproductive. It is scary because it is an arrogant and dystopian concept. It is counterproductive because, as we can see, the people sought to be manipulated will simply lose trust in the platforms and instead follow even more aggressively the messages of people like Trump.

Re: Song of the Day
 

Which Orwell book are you referencing? Coming Up For Air? Keep the Aspidistra Flying? Down and Out In Paris and London?

I can’t think of a single thread that will tie those three.

Or do you mean Animal Farm and 1984? Because if that is what you mean than you are as poorly read as Ty himself.

Re: Song of the Day
 

What policy decisions are made on Twitter?

Re: Song of the Day
 

Why I Write Some editions include “A Hanging.” You’ll get everything I said in one place perhaps, in under 100 pages.

Re: Song of the Day
 

Most.

Re: Song of the Day
 

So when you say “Orwell” you mean 100 pages of provably 10,000 he wrote, and none of what the mob (hi Ty!) thinks of as Orwellian?

Do you not see how you are either poorly read, or not a good advocate for your point?

Re: Song of the Day
 

It's cute that you have your own ideas about who should be responsible for such things, but so do governments, and what Twitter and other internet companies have found is that they need to do some policing or the governments decide to step in.

eta: BTW, that idea is core to the Twitter thread I shared that kicked off this exchange, and then I repeated it, but you still seem to have missed it completely, so I am repeating it again. Each time shorter, to help you follow. Maybe you got emotional on this topic and had a hard time dealing with the logical arguments being made?

Re: Song of the Day
 

I was describing the stuff you say, not the stuff other people say. Lots of people have feelings and emotions. Very few people don't. The way you react to them has everything to do with the substance of their political views, relative to yours.

Re: Song of the Day
 

The default to "you're missing the point" is old, Ty. The point you're referencing cannot be missed. My point, which is in response to it, is that no platform should be engaged in such policing, period. Whether compelled by posters on it, or by the govt. If I was not explicit, or expansive, enough, my position includes (necessarily, but apparently this may not be obvious to you) the argument that under no circumstance should a platform or the govt be engaged in culling content to weed out "misinformation."

Bullshit and manipulative lies have been with us forever. If people are susceptible to them, well, that's the price of living in a country that values free expression. And that price includes me having to suffer the behaviors of the deluded and manipulated. I'd much prefer that over policy makers or corporate sorts determining what is and isn't appropriate for people to read.

Re: Song of the Day
 

No. Edify me, wise one who writes in riddles.

Re: Song of the Day
 

I don't have true "political" views. That's the point. I'm about as vanilla a moderate as you can find.

My only view is that people who think they know what's best for me and everyone else really, truly suck. All of we boring folks can sit around and horse trade over policies and reach consensus (give a little here, get a little there). We can be reasonable. But those who complain and those who seek to enforce their rules on the rest of us (and the Venn diagram of those two is nearly a circle... every malcontent assured he's got a law or regulation that'd make things perfect, as he defines it) are, basically, irritants.

Most of the people who really want to enforce what they think is best (their political views) are acting on feelings. Chiefly, arrogance and self-righteousness.

I fully understand the cancer I describe above cannot be extracted. That it is human nature for certain among us to desire power over others and to demand that their grievances be addressed, rather than working on their own to get around the problems that lead to to those grievances. We will never get rid of those who wish to be referee (and therefore should be disqualified from it) or wish to play to the referees. But that doesn't mean the observation shouldn't be made.

Re: Song of the Day
 

I want you to find a mirror, look at it intently, and read these words slowly and clearly, over and over again.

Thank you! No need to report back! Ta ta!

Re: Song of the Day
 

Sure. Sounds great for its stock price.

Which they have done. What are you on about?

Re: Song of the Day
 

This is as helpful as saying that no one should go to prison for a crime they didn't commit. Yes, we "should" have governments that don't try to convict innocent people. But in the real world, the one that we live in, prosecutors are sometimes more interested in getting a conviction than in getting at the truth. If you are an individual subject to that kind of government regulation, you change your behavior because of what the government might do. For Twitter and other online businesses, the same is true. It doesn't do any good to say the government should leave them alone -- it's not going to happen.

Setting the government aside, the idea that platforms should not cull "misinformation" is just incredibly wrong. For example, eBay is a platform. People list things on it. If they are lying about what they're selling, eBay wants to to weed out that "misinformation" because, duh, fraud. If you're defrauded on eBay, you don't go back, and governments start to care, so eBay has a super legitimate interest in doing that sort of culling.

(Now pretend you're a government. Fraud and libel are not OK in meatspace. You're going to pretend they're OK when they happen online? Uh, no.)

This is basically the point that thread is making. Online platforms back into content moderation for reasons like the one I just described, not because they are interested in taking sides in political disputes. They very much don't want to take sides in political disputes.

Re: Song of the Day
 

Yes, we've been here before. You like to pretend that everyone else does politics, but what you believe somehow transcends politics. We all understand that's BS.

Like Hank, I don't usually respond to the same post twice.
 

So now we know who is behind the NYT Pitchbot.

Re: Song of the Day
 

The question for twitter is very commercial - what kind of a product do they want to offer?

I happen to like a product that is not full of all kinds of bots and where people follow the relatively few simple rules of the forum. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-an.../twitter-rules I think Twitter has discovered the hard way that enforcing its few rules and keeping bots contained are really essential to what they do. Somewhere Kate Klonick did a history of rules on social media that is quite good and that tracks how the big platforms discovered that the bro-culture free-for-all sucks and creates a hellscape that becomes a truly bad product, and how they learned to love the light-handed content moderation they all now do, because it keeps them alive and functioning.

If you or Elon want a different product, there is always Truth social (oh, wait, no, they banned people the day they opened up for saying mean things about Trump and Trumpers). Or maybe Parler (answering the question of whether if a racist screams in forest and no one hears him, is he truly a bigot?). Or, if all else fails, invite Elon on to lawtalkers with you.

Re: Song of the Day
 

I've no objection with culling bots and marketing spam within Twitter. Where it gets sticky is culling a doc who questions vaccinations, or a newspaper running a now verified story about a politically relevant person's laptop.

That's massaging facts, controlling narratives, attempting to craft consensus. Somewhere, the ghost of Edward Bernays must be laughing like Monty Burns.

Re: Song of the Day
 

Enjoy Parler then.

We have seen again and again that you are a victim of disinformation, and believe some truly bizarre shit that's been fed to you.

Re: Like Hank, I don't usually respond to the same post twice.
 

btw, this had me laughing a good laugh.

Re: Like Hank, I don't usually respond to the same post twice.
 

That wordle situation is very distressing.

Re: Like Hank, I don't usually respond to the same post twice.
 

I don’t often 2, but 2.

Re: Song of the Day
 

Okay, several questions- I assume your dog got Covid? How did you know? A human test? Also, any idea how em got it? You and fam didn't have it, right?