Okay, I’ve been saying for a while that the next turn of the culture will involve a revalorization of 70s-esque intergenerational sex with teenagers. And you’ve been like “konty, but how? we’ve so strongly stigmatized that!” and I just shrugged
Well, as time passes it becomes clear that is the mechanism, that we’ve encoded it with such stigma that people who came by after those 70s find it irresistible to appropriate for their own ends, try to pull too much weight with it, and have it all fall through.
Like, at this point in almost-2023, what is your first impression if I tell you someone is going off about pedophiles and groomers? Is it of “antis” saying something dumb and philistine, or is it of rightists saying something incredibly dumb intended to license violence in service of making society worse? Or just straight QAnon?
As that keeps up the reaction by anyone sensible will be to tune that out and take it as a mark of foul idiocy, which will come to include concern with things even 1998 might accept as constituting pedophilia or grooming.
When I get anons like this I just roll my eyes these days,
“Nice go-to smear. Would be a shame if someone were to… encode it with low-status valences”
this is the guy terfs idolize and is best friends with jkr btw
Genuinely why do so many innocent people get murdered in random shootings but nobody has ever just run up and stabbed this guy in the eye socket? Yeah I know chuds will try to martyr him but that’s still worth a world where he’s a corpse.
Would you? Why or why not? Other people also face those constraints, though they may not highlight them in their online presence.
Huh, based on a chat realized my energy problems might have been anemia and got some iron pills. That was definitely part of it – I started maybe 3 creatine scoops/day in the hole a few days ago but was getting up to 3/12hr and still off, but then taking a 100% RDV iron pill every 8 hours, after 2 I was maybe 5g down, enough to just roll with it.
But there doesn’t seem to have been much change from a 3rd and none from a 4th. So maybe anemia was this case’s new long symptom but plus a mild echo of the 2nd case energy stuff?
I dunno what that means, my bone marrow, my liver? Or maybe there’s something going that’s consuming red blood cells and I had drained iron replacing them? I dunno. Wild.
The thing where I keep having to solve these little riddles to maintain bodily function is getting tired, honestly.
as someone with a bachelor’s degree in english, i am inexpressibly tired of people telling me to get highly specific jobs that often require highly specific degrees. “just go write for a magazine!” you need a journalism degree for that. “just teach!” you need a teaching certificate, and also fuck you. “just go work at a tutoring place!” tutoring children with learning disabilities, which make up the majority of the clientele at those places, requires not only a teaching certificate but a specialized master’s degree. “just go work at a library!” you need a master’s degree in library science to be a librarian. it is actually a highly skilled and extremely competitive field. you don’t just “go work at a library,” you train for years in the vain hope that you will get one of handful of available jobs. “just go work at a library.” the nerve. the unmitigated gall. “just go work at a library.” ugh.
You don’t need a degree to write for a magazine, you need a portfolio and a professional network, which university journalism programs are entirely oriented around helping you get. I know people who dropped out of journalism school the instant they had these two things because at that point it was a waste of time and money and distracting from their career.
Many states and school districts have programs to let you earn a license while you teach (though often in a particular subject that may not be English). This is in response to a teacher shortage driven by bad pay, lousy work conditions, and an extremely hostile political climate, but you would encounter those things even if you went back to school first.
As someone who has stared down the beast that is the public library job hunt, and was the first to blink: the absolute majority of jobs in libraries do not carry the title “librarian” and do not require an advanced degree. In fact, librarian jobs are being eliminated in many places in a process called “paraprofessionalisation,” in which the job duties of lower-ranking and lower-paid employees are expanded in favor of replacing retired librarians. Anyway, most of my classmates in library school already worked in libraries and were getting the credential to angle for a promotion.
The brutal truth of higher education (particularly in the liberal arts) is that there is no amount of it you can submit to, no credential you can ever gain, that will get you to a point where people are going to reflexively defer to your elite status and just hand you the job you have “earned.” This is the promise of college, and it’s a lie; the only time it was ever credible was when scarce university education was a thinly veiled excuse to reserve jobs for the children of the wealthy and well-connected who were going to get them anyway.
I’m glad for both of the degrees I got and would happily go back and get them again, but if you let malaise push you back into school you’re going to come out of it just as unhappy and significantly deeper in debt. The way to feel adequately compensated and respected by your job is to join a union.
The “drag queen story time” thing emerging in libraries pushed by librarians trying to establish themselves as a graduate-educated lawyer/doctor/minister(/accountant/realtor/teacher?)-type profession with a guild consciousness in response to elite overproduction is one of the funnier subplots going
“Covid is airborne!” - that the virus is spread through exhaled aerosols, not airborne moisture droplets or surface-tainting “fomites”. A point they were genuinely more right on than authorities early on that still has some application – that only N95-type masks or respirators reliably stop transmission, not fabric or paper surgical masks. However, largely an ingroup signal at this point, they seem to believe that authorities not pointedly declaring it apropos of nothing causes or constitutes failure.
Corsi-Rosenthal Boxes: a DIY air filter made of box fans and furnace filters, because above. They love these things and are always frustrated that schools and public places won’t welcome wild-eyed maniacs trying to set up their own homemade science fair projects everywhere.
CO2 testing: they carry around little CO2 monitors and are always tutting about how high the readings they get are, less in their own right than because it’s a clear sign of a poorly ventilated space where exhalations are not being cleared. Once again, makes them look like maniacs.
“SARS-CoV-2”: they kind of performatively always call Covid this, even using more characters of a tweet. I dunno if the intention was to differentiate the syndrome from the virus, or if putting it in the SARS lineage was supposed to draw on residual associations there, but by now it mostly seems like flaunting yourself as savvy.
Something there but iffy
That danger and damage increases with multiple infections. It is true that Danger(Case1 + Case2) > Danger(Case1), which means that Case2 (and subsequents) has some nonzero risk, but they often act like Danger(Case1) < Danger(Case2), which I don’t see as well established at all.
Pretty convinced
The danger of Covid now lies largely not in the initial “acute” respiratory infection, but in the chance of later “long Covid” progression to other organ systems, that may render the sufferer vulnerable to later mortality. Damaged heart muscles lead to later heart attacks; blood vessels to strokes & aneurysm; immune systems to later infection (as seems to be making this winter an atrocious pediatric respiratory infection season, or made Jair Bolsonaro an infection piñata). I myself can attest to later blood pressure swings that cause fainting. That this explains much of the increase in “all-cause mortality” above and beyond that attributed to Covid itself since the beginning of the pandemic.
Not convinced
Immunity from prior infections or immunization does not durably reduce the severity of future ones. This is out of keeping with the experience of other coronaviruses already in regular human circulation and mutating into new variants, which after caught repeatedly throughout life become trivial. My own experience has my current infection (somewhere from my 4th to 6th, producing symptom “echoes” of the “long” portions of 1 and 2) as the worst since 2, but 2 was much less harsh than 1 and 3-current was nothing. I suspect this might be a stronger case against the background of a generally decreasing trend of severity. Also it might be the case that immunity wanes so subsequent cases are easier if they occur before it wears off (and leaves new immunity of its own), in which case attempts to stop any particular case with masking, isolation, or air treatment might make population-level health worse by lengthening average time between infections past acquired immunity duration.
“Schools should have been reworking their ventilation systems for anti-viral effect!” My father was the solicitor for our school district, in which capacity one of the things he worked with was contracting. At one point the district upgraded ventilation systems in maybe a third of their secondary schools at once. From scoping through passing a bond, soliciting and evaluating bids to work completion (when the construction market was slack enough for contractors to hire labor and buy materials cheap) was 8 years. In a small subset of schools, that already had ductwork at all, in a rich school district where the bond passed on the first try. To attempt this for every school building in the US – let alone other public places – would likely exceed the national HVAC construction capacity for decades. The only precedent I can think of, the drive to rework hospital ventilation systems against Legionnaires, affected far fewer buildings and institutions that were then fairly flush with income streams atop the healthcare economy, still required extensive federal subsidy, and was ongoing decades later.
Bunch of Twitter users in different areas of focus who spent the last decade furious that things were going their way but not as far or as fast as they wanted and performed that fury as a way to whip things on harder dealing with the new situation that things are going to be going against them for the next 15 years at least and they no longer have any traction on the situation about as well as you’d expect
So yeah, that phase is over, we’ve cleared Charybdis, now we gotta try and slingshot off past Scylla, shift our stance to defend rightward. I mean, my circle on here is disproportionately trans Jews.
Bunch of Twitter users in different areas of focus who spent the last decade furious that things were going their way but not as far or as fast as they wanted and performed that fury as a way to whip things on harder dealing with the new situation that things are going to be going against them for the next 15 years at least and they no longer have any traction on the situation about as well as you’d expect
