BF2S Forums Pandemic thread

at this point i am fully convinced that half the population of the west have become impervious to facts. it doesn't matter what you present them with, they are convinced that covid (like face-masks, like vaccines, like 5G, like the round earth) are 'fake news'. i seriously see all these viewpoints and reality-denying tendencies joining up. there's like an aquifer of stupid underneath the internet where all the dumb facebook posts and dopey takes run off.

Last edited by uziq (2020-09-29 02:27:34)

a sizable slice of the population now seriously believe in 'pizzagate', that there's a satanic cabal of child-traffickers with a dungeon beneath a pizza restaurant in newark, NJ or something. i mean how do you even begin to explain to these people that, actually, covid-19 is a real virus and is measurably more harmful than flu? we are not even in the same universe. conspiracy thinking is akin to magical thinking. these people would more likely believe that aliens built the pyramids and that george soros is an evil commander of an intergalactic empire who has enslaved the human race to stop them using their third-eye vision to ascend to another plane, or something.

and perhaps you're right, it might have something to do with us basically returning to feudal levels of inequality and frozen mobility. the peasantry are returning to their superstitions and old wives' tales. but more likely it has something to do with the fact that a vast number of people now casually receive their daily 'news' and information from social networks which have been completely unbeholden to any truth criterion, or even any sanity criterion, really. the more sensationalist and provocative, the better it has been for facebook's ad metrics. now people's brains are potted like swiss cheese.

Last edited by uziq (2020-09-29 02:41:27)

you are literally part of the problem, dilbert. watching 'idiocracy' does not make you qualified to dismiss everyone. you are only in support of a very specific sort of 'expert' and of 'expertise' that aligns precisely with your own. dismissing all of 'arts and humanities' as some sort of evil cabal, with malefic intentions, out to scam the world, etc. is basically indistinguishable from the same efforts at de-legitimization that one finds in the 'anti-intelligence' crowd.

whether you like it or not, 'intelligence' is not solely synonymous with 'engineering degree'.

it's also funny that you can bemoan the idea of people no longer aspiring to education, but then spend half your time decrying x y z types of education.

of course i wholly agree with your point, but it would be nice if you weren't a hypocrite about it. it would be nice if working-class culture still embodied the centuries-long tradition of activism, self-improvement, reading and participation in culture, etc. they have been systematically closed out of that system, which is a generational tragedy.

Last edited by uziq (2020-09-29 03:10:08)

when have the arts crowd ever 'endlessly dismissed' STEM as 'grubby and worthless technicians'? i have literally never witnessed this culture or attitude in my life, including 4/5 years spent in actual humanities departments surrounded by waifs, aesthetes, poète maudits, etc. this is all completely projection on your part, dilbert. you have some weird inferiority complex or social anxiety/ire about arts people. trust me, people studying philosophy or literature seldom think about STEM. they certainly do not think it 'beneath them'. where they do think about it, it's to engage in interdisciplinary work in a spirit of collaboration, as with, for example, eco-criticism, crossovers between neuroscience and linguistics, bringing big data techniques to texts, etc.

i swear for years on this forum it was me pointing out this weird, insular (ingrown, really) attitude that all the engineering types displayed. the masters-of-the-universe, master-race type thinking that all engineers evince. 'our degree is uniquely difficult! we are a special class!' it was endemic on this forum during bf2s' peak. and, time and time again, i would say how strange it was that STEM graduates, especially in that weird bush years military hoorah phase, had this culture of chauvinism. arts and humanities graduates are nothing like the same thing. i have never met a single arts or humanities person in my working life who talks shit about STEM, either. why the hell would they?!? it's weird and aberrant enough, watching you engineers flex and preen at every given opportunity.

don't pretend that the rest of the world has the same chip on their shoulder as you do. people with non-STEM degrees are nowhere near as fixated on STEM as you are with the arts and humanities.

Last edited by uziq (2020-09-29 03:30:10)

If I can be bothered I'll go through your old posts.

So anyway, why would two Harvard arts grads pen something as nasty and damaging as 'Fresh Prince'?
Didn't they know what they were doing?

uziq wrote:

a sizable slice of the population now seriously believe in 'pizzagate', that there's a satanic cabal of child-traffickers with a dungeon beneath a pizza restaurant in newark, NJ or something. i mean how do you even begin to explain to these people that, actually, covid-19 is a real virus and is measurably more harmful than flu? we are not even in the same universe. conspiracy thinking is akin to magical thinking. these people would more likely believe that aliens built the pyramids and that george soros is an evil commander of an intergalactic empire who has enslaved the human race to stop them using their third-eye vision to ascend to another plane, or something.

and perhaps you're right, it might have something to do with us basically returning to feudal levels of inequality and frozen mobility. the peasantry are returning to their superstitions and old wives' tales. but more likely it has something to do with the fact that a vast number of people now casually receive their daily 'news' and information from social networks which have been completely unbeholden to any truth criterion, or even any sanity criterion, really. the more sensationalist and provocative, the better it has been for facebook's ad metrics. now people's brains are potted like swiss cheese.

It's about segmentation in and the shrinking of our social circles as well. Our neighbourhoods are divided by income level. Good universities are increasingly generational in their attendance. The occasional high flyer from a low-income, low-education environment will often leave that place not to return. For those left behind the world of high politics and business is out of reach, out of sight and not understood. It follows that experts and leaders in far away places are not trusted. Of course, this is inflamed by social media, how it is abused today and people's increasing reliance on the internet. It's not all neatly divided either as seemingly intelligent and educated people fall prey to the social media BS as well... look at Dilbert and his engineering degree from imperial yet the depressingly ridiculous views he holds wrt identity, race, international relations.

I suppose the fact that most people just aren't critical thinkers doesn't help, combined with the fact that the chaos and increasing complexity of our world is now on full display through the internet. Making sense of it all isn't easy and many seem to fall back into conspiratorial thinking and even superstitions. Leaves the question of whether the elites should make a better effort in their communication & exert some more control on the new media landscape and/or if 'the peasantry' is indeed stuck in toxic cultural attitudes or otherwise irresponsible in their consumption and production of information...

yes, boris johnson, the paradigmatic, typical 'arts type'. you really are teh smartest boi eVa!

once again you completely misunderstand the current composition of no. 10. cummings et al are assembling a team of big data types and scientists, and are trying to dismantle the bureaucratic apparatus, including reorganizing whitehall, the foreign office/international development, etc. the 'mandarin' class made up of well-educated humanities types are the ones being targeted by cummings and his team of crackpot mad-genius scientists.

like how badly can you willingly misread a situation? you are clueless.

Last edited by uziq (2020-09-29 04:29:30)

Pretty sure Elon Musk would have made a working app by now, not still be bumbling around six months later.



Should be about an afternoon's work for your average engineer to sketch out the specs, maybe a week to get it working.

Meanwhile in Whitehall

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-09-29 04:32:31)

dilbert: hates steve jobs for his leadership pretending at abilities.
also dilbert: look! elon musk is the best human ever! he designed spaceships! he's taking us to mars! i bet he could fix the pandemic, too!

uziq wrote:

but now it's the fresh prince's fault? oh wait, the writers were jewish ...

So you think two very highly educated New York jews got their heads together and wrote something which, with the benefit of some perspective, now looks exactly as if it was designed to crush the aspirations of generations of young New York fringes blacks?

Don't work or study, just listen to hip-hop, work on your rap-rhymes and witty retorts and bunk off to play basketball whenever you want, you don't want to be a Carlton now - you da man!

I mean, isn't this the exact problem Macbeth and thousands of teachers are having to deal with every day with black kids?

They could only have done better if they'd convinced then it would be 'cool' to jump off bridges, it could all be a real-estate gambit for all we know.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-09-29 06:49:21)

Re: NYC

About 300,000 children returned to classrooms for the first time since March as the city’s test positivity rate edged upward.

This will end poorly but parents need that free childcare to go back to their shitty low wage jobs. There is just no other way to do things in the richest country in the world.

Our universities reopened and the case totals they are posting is as large as entire countries. 130,000 at least according to NYT. The universities had no choice but to reopen. They are all indebted and need that cash to continue flowing.

I feel so guilty for being somewhat sanguine about how decades of institutional rot and dysfunction have lead to total failure in western nations while the nation's we considered lesser manage this crisis efficiently.

I genuinely worry about my parents and older relatives. I worry about the older relatives of all of my friends too. If someone like me can worry so much about the elderly relatives of casual acquaintances and internet people, what does that say about the people who are willing to sacrifice people to reopen the economy?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-in … here-covid

neat visualisation of the 1,000,000 death toll.