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[Starver]

[...]because your area (in a narrow sense), statistically, has probably gotten the virus under control by then.

Reminds me (not directly related to the point you're making) of the Anti-Lockdowner argument going round (based on selective, and now old, data no doubt) that various locked-down US states (NY among them) had more cases than those that didn't (some now do), 'hilariously' flipping the implied causation.

Makes me wonder how much they believe their own propoganda, or the handy talking point handed to them, or are they entirely conscious but hope others don't notice. Of course, their 'top 5' are(/were) Blue (and tend to be highly metropolitan) and 'bottom 5' Red (and tending highly rural), so they had another point to make (while missing at least one other factor).

[wierd]

In another thread, somebody rhetorically asked why people do these kinds of things--

My answer is still the same.

Any time a circumstance forces a radical, and uncomfortable change in the routine behavior of a person, the desire to continue in the familiar pattern overwhelms the rationality of adopting the new one, to the point where the person will start to harbor mistaken notions that the circumstance is a farce, "A Lie", "A Hoax"--- so that they can then deny that circumstance, and resume their normal, comfortable routine. Those harbored notions may erupt into full-on denial, and that happens pretty regularly.


See for instance, Climate Change.  There is a dangerous reality that global atmospheric CO2 concentration is nearly as high now, as it was when there was constant volcanism in the age of the dinosaurs, when the average global temperature was balmy and hot all over.  That reality demands that people stop excessive energy consumption, stop driving big, loud land yachts, use less plastic, actually recycle their trash, etc...  But that means not driving a land yacht that goes VROOM and makes them feel powerful, it means not burning electricity on things that are familiar and comfortable (like edison style lightbulbs), it means not just tossing any old thing in the trash, like they used to. 

And of course, the biggest argument is that "It's a LIE!"

Same basic trend here-  COVID is a dangerous reality that if you go outside and rub elbows with people indiscriminately, you run a substantial risk of getting yourself and other people killed via a highly infectious disease.  That means you dont get to go to the pub. It means you dont go out for pizza. It means you dont go to the movies, or the park.  It means you stay indoors, and avoid socialization.

People don't want that reality.  They want the reality where they could do all those things freely without consequences. As such, like with climate change-- "It's a LIE!"

Throwing gasoline onto that fire, are demographics like the GOP here in the US, that bolster those dangerous behaviors, because retaining the status quo of what WAS, is what makes them (and their real constituency) wealthy. 

EG-- Keep those gas guzzlers-- dont switch to a Tesla, or use less plastic--- The automotive and petrochemical industries (that we are heavily invested in, but shhhhhhh) need your business! It's totally OK to disregard the scientists-- there's "Lack of consensus", and "Their models are faulty." (as demonstrated by our "totally legit, nothing to see here while I pass this bag of money under the table " "scientists" who made the dissenting papers. They are totally legit! Keep spending! It's OK! Honest!)

OR, in the more modern version--

"Go to the beaches, Reopen the economies-- Contagion rate is down! We "Flattened the curve" so its all good now! Those things the CDC and WHO said are a bunch of BS! Trust us! It's OK!"


Denial of harsh, unwanted realities is one of the major coping strategies humans attempt to employ when placed under stress or duress.  It is a psychological defense mechanism-- The sense of personal identity is threatened by the required change in behavior demanded by the reality.  EG-- for the social butterflies out there, the imposed isolation of COVID is a direct attack on a core feature of their individual psyche.  How a person will respond to that varies, but denial is a very common one.

https://www.verywellmind.com/defense-mechanisms-2795960


It is also a very toxic and dangerous one, with real consequences for other people.  This is why it should not be pandered to for purely political reasons, but politicians seem to be straight up psychopaths more often than not-- and are only too eager to exploit whatever hot-button they can use to stay empowered.

See also, Trump and his non-stop deluge of literal bold-faced lies about COVID, and his attempts to discredit Fauci, right at the end of an election year.

[dragdeler]

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[Starver]

I think you need to expand on that. Do you mean like "Fusion power is 20 years away. It has always been 20 years away" or "We now know what happened over the last few years, so our prediction range for the end of the century are now in a more constrained track" or "We didn't know about/understand the Häagen-Dazs Effect in relation to chocolate sprinkle density, but now our models incorporate this factor" or what?

[dragdeler]

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[wierd]

The flipside of that, is that you have widespread coral bleaching, plant and insect extinctions at an insane pace, almost no glaciers anymore, antarctica is birthing icebergs like mad...


Yeah, the models were doomy and gloomy in the 70s, and have stayed there-- but the doom is already here.  The clathrate gun fired bruh.

[dragdeler]

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[feelotraveller]

As long as you say 'Cimate Change' and not 'Global Warming'.

[kaijyuu]

Yet another cautionary tale.

Trust science over politicians, people.

[Starver]

If you want to go back to earlier predictions, don't forget to look in on Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), as a notable non-religious[1] Prophet Of Doom whose prognostications didn't account for later devopments.

I think it was in the '70s when there were serious scientific thoughts about Global Cooling, and science (as it is wont do do, and quite rightly) has absorbed new data about causes and effects since then. One celsius degree[2] of change is bad enough and some of the "what happens if that happens" predictions aren't yet so bad as imagined, while other (unanticipated?) things actually are worse.

Global 'Warming' was a while ago looked to being rebranded as 'Global Weirding' given the extremes flucuate all over the place (the other year, Trump regurgitated the old "If the Earth is warming, why so much snow this winter?" deflection and/or misunderstanding), but it seems not to have stuck.  (@ninja: yep, "Change" seems to be the current word, but more rapid "Weather Oscillation" around a tenuous and moving climate-median is possibly more obvious day-to-day.)

Note that proteins happily live at "body temperature" (though some of them may start to break down/malfunction at "high fever" temperatures, in human terms, and looking at all creatures that are endothermic, ectothermic or mesothermic across various differing climes might have a differently tailored suite of inbuilt tolerances, both upper and lower) so until it becomes sufficiently close to that to overcome inbuilt physiological dumping of your core generation of heat (and externalised strategies like finding a handy mud-wallow to bathe in) you can probably only suffer insofar as comfort, rather than literal cooking. One degree of external temperature shift tends to be manageable on the biological level unless you are already at the edge of your range/cannot dynamically adjust (e.g. cloud-forest clouds "lifting off" the last few hilltops that had become 'island refuges' for the creatures who used to live in the misty valleys between).

Glaciers have been notably in retreat since the 1850s (after a few centuries of cooler times, that may have extended them a little, but still warmer than seen in much of the earlier parts of human history), with a hiatus/small (re)reversal in the mid-to-mid-late C20^th, and by now it's looking like a number may have been 'extinguished' and the trend is not looking like it'll slow down anytime soon, to a degree[3] it's hard to find precedence for.


But that's well off Covid business.


[1] Well, he was religious, at least as much as needed to be a Curate, but his Trap/Spectre was more a secular study, given the times.

[2] i.e not "one degree celsius", which is technically a point rather than a shift. e.g. 18°C ± 1C° = 17-19°C, as what should be the typical usage, though people don't realise that.

[3] Or "to a rate of degrees"?

[Starver]

Yet another cautionary tale.

(Ouch. PinkNews site is another of those places that seem to overload with scripting/redirection. I kept on finding myself completely different articles every time I tried to accept its cookie-policy, and only one full-quit of my browser. Got there eventually, though. Didn't mind reading the other stuff, but most News sites do this. And almost every 'news' site, I find. Just sayin'.)

[kaijyuu]

That article calls him transphobic, but never elaborates where or how, though.

He reposted various transphobic memes.

It's just an excuse to put him there though; the site sometimes grabs for straws to put up eye catching articles. There are tons of other transphobes but they didn't die in a newsworthy way.

[Starver]

I just had the longest talk with a RL person (not in my general family co-bubble, and longer than most of them) that I've had in a long time, while waiting for a public transport service, a couple of hours ago. Quite a lot of similar things between us, from family situations up to and including listening to BBC radio.

But then that "long time" stretches way back before Lockdown. Oh, and I suppose I talked a lot to the man behind me in the (two hour) queue for the barber, a couple of weeks ago, so maybe that's the main factor.


As to cheese the size of a large paperback, that'd last me two or three days, if I don't hold back.

[nenjin]

The sky isn't falling again. Most people just tried to ignore the increasingly large chunks of it raining down over the last 3 months. We were told back in March this would last the whole year but most people just didn't want to believe it.

I had a similar conversation with a grocery store cashier a few months ago. "Things will never be normal again" he fretted. And my response was "No, this is the new normal. A year ago we didn't live in a world where this could happen. Now we do."

G'damn though. I'm still amazed at the number of people at the grocery store no longer wearing masks. (I wear mine at the grocery store but that's pretty much the only place I do, because it's the only place I'm in an enclosed space with more than 5 people.) What also gets me is sheer inconsistency of it. I regularly see families where the kids are wearing masks and the parents aren't, or the parents are wearing masks and the kids aren't. People with their masks off under their noses. People who have masks, but are dining in at a restaurant with their masks around their necks. People who have masks, and decide to sit around in a coffee shop NOT WEARING THEM.

It's like, do people just not fucking understand how this works? If you're a "Covid is a scam" mouthbreather, at least you're internally and externally consistent with your beliefs and actions, stupid and destructive though they may be. But if you're wearing the mask to go in to a place.....maybe take your food to go? Otherwise what is the goddamn point of it?

Maybe this is the Great Annihilation, where nature has decided to weed out people that truly don't give a fuck.

Part of me has to wonder what Asians in big cities think of the US attitude toward covid and mask wearing. Wearing masks has been a thing for them for decades.

[Greiger]

Probably just reinforces the stereotype of americans being stubborn, stupid, and only caring about themselves.

This might be old news but I just learned that because of Florida's spike in cases we will no longer be sending our tests to the CDC at all, and are instead sending them for Washington D.C. to run.  EDIT: You know, from a government run organisation with at least a tangential interest in public health, to a group operated by a known liar who has a clear interest in making sure the information is obscured?  EDIT2: Ok seems thats everywhere, not just Florida.  Welp looks like Trump is making good on his promise that the coronavirus will just disappear.  Probably going to have the most lethal flu season ever though.

 Why does this feel like its being done to allow the data to be faked?  Because it feels like data is going to be faked.