Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[CGVT]

The majority of people get more conservative as they age and have kids. The generation most up in arms about social change today was dropping acid and throwing Molotov cocktails at Chicago cops in 1968.

Exactly

They were saying the same shit about colleges and the downfall of civilization as we know it 40+ years ago when I went to college.

It's real now, though

[lineygoblue]

The people who were dropping acid and throwing Molotov cocktails in Chicago back in '68 are now today's college professors, judges and politicians.

Maybe that's why I only got to be a truck driver. I shoulda dropped acid when I had the chance ...

[CGVT]

There's still time...

[foxhopper]

CGVT never quit and look how well he turned out. He pretty much hates everything and everybody.

[iam416]

The majority of people get more conservative as they age and have kids. The generation most up in arms about social change today was dropping acid and throwing Molotov cocktails at Chicago cops in 1968.

Whether they're up in arms or not, the revolution is still marching on. And it's all been based on the same fundamental premise -- the US is an irredeemably awful country.

But, look, if you want to look at social changes in the past generation that seemed inconceivable in 2000, then let's go. You can pretend all you want and pooh-pooh all you want, but it's moving forward. And now the revolution is officially cloaked in race -- literally EVERYTHING is via intersectionality and "institutional racism". So you can't oppose it without being a racist. That's EXACTLY where we are.

In a generation you may even be up in arms over it.

Pooh-poojh all you want, but a generation ago I'm not sure that we'd have thought that kneeling for the national anthem would be commercially viable; that Mount Rushmore would be a racist symbol; that the NYT would run OpEds on how bad George Washington was; that it'd be bigoted to say that dudes shouldn't play women sports; that leading voices of the D party are advocating guarnanteed income, a $40T Green New Deal, $X Trillion in Reparations, ending fossil fuel use, free college for illegal immigrants....

Those are the people who are going to run the country starting in roughly 6 months. That's bullet train we're on.

[Hannibal]

The majority of people get more conservative as they age and have kids. The generation most up in arms about social change today was dropping acid and throwing Molotov cocktails at Chicago cops in 1968.

That's not the generation that's up in arms about social change today. That's the generation leading us into oblivion. Who do you think sits on the boards off all of these Fortune 500 companies that support BLM? Trump was the spark that ignited the alt-Right but his fellow boomers mostly hate his guts. The country is loaded with 70 year olds who will be voting for the Cultural Revolution this fall.

On the flipside, look at all of the influential writers, censored youtubers, and leaders of the dissident right. The overwhelming majority of them are young. A few of them are middle aged. Almost none of them are old. But they tend to be a minority among their age group and they are soon to be demographically overwhelmed.

[iam416]

Re Covid, from an article today:

Also on Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control released new data on the likelihood that far more people have been infected with COVID-19 than have presented symptoms. The newest statistics suggest that the number of Americans infected could be anywhere between two to 13 times higher than the cases that have been reported.

“These data continue to show that the number of people who have been infected with the virus that causes Covid-19 far exceeds the number of reported cases. Many of these people likely had no symptoms or mild illness and may have had no idea that they were infected,” Dr. Fiona Havers, who led the CDC study, told the Times.

On one hand, that’s bad news, because it means that many more asymptomatic people have been feeling fine and not feeling any need to stay home, especially as more states and localities have begun to reopen. Some percentage of people who were carrying the virus asymptomatically likely have been staying home, but surely not all the time, and not all of these people have been wearing masks, avoiding work, etc., leading them to spread the virus unwittingly.

But on the flip side, the good news about high numbers of asymptomatic cases is that they drive the fatality rate down. For every unreported case out there where the infected person never has any symptoms and doesn’t die of the disease, it means the actual death rate of COVID-19 is just a bit lower than we thought. And there are potentially millions of those people out there.

That more or less comports with what researchers have found in largescale studies conducted over the last few months. As the Wall Street Journal put it in a report on the topic yesterday afternoon, “The percentage of deaths among people with confirmed infections is higher than the percentage of deaths among infections overall, researchers say, because so many milder and asymptomatic Covid-19 cases go missed.”

It makes perfect sense. And while it doesn’t mean that we should stop worrying about the virus entirely, it’s important to keep in mind as cases slowly tick up, especially in southern and southwestern states.

Most studies so far have put the death rate somewhere in the realm of 0.6 percent. The study from February that looked at data from China and the coronavirus outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship estimated a fatality rate of 0.6 percent. In a paper from March, researchers at Imperial College London estimated the fatality rate in China at 0.66 percent. And, per the Journal, “An analysis of 26 different studies estimating the infection-fatality rate in different parts of the globe found an aggregate estimate of about 0.68%, with a range of 0.53% to 0.82%,” though that analysis has yet to be peer reviewed.

The CDC is using that report’s fatality-rate calculations as its own estimate when planning for the future of the pandemic, settling on .65 percent as of earlier this month. That death rate is about six times greater than the seasonal flu. As has been the case for months now, the most that we can do is watch and wait.

Way, way back when this thing started I remember opining that a fatality rate around 0.5 wasn't something that I was going to be scared to death over. It wouldn't be good, but such is life. What scared me was the 2-3% fatality rates that were being thrown around -- or even higher.

If we're truly at 0.6% -- and I think that's definitely in the ballpark -- then we're going to get through this ok, vaccine or not. When applied to the US population, it's still a huge number of deaths -- even if assuming only certain percentage gets infected. But, I've been around the 1-2M death range for awhile now. I tend to think it's probably more in the 250,000-1M range now. Not good, but not certainly not devastating.

In terms of a flu comparison, it's not even an order of magnitude higher -- it's "only" 6X (approximately). Again, not good, but the mortifying concern was an exponentially higher IFR as compared to the flu.

[Da Geezer]

[QUOTE=CGVT;n1697366]

Exactly

They were saying the same shit about colleges and the downfall of civilization as we know it 40+ years ago when I went to college.

It's real now, though


[/
Nonsense. I was there and I didn't see any Molotov cocktails. Not sure about acid.

What I remember most was the cops coming out of the vans like they were hitting the beach in Normandy, swinging their billy clubs. Saying 1968 was anything like now is offensive to me. In 1968 the youth were marching against actual racism (like "colored toilets" in much of the South) and against the war in Vietnam. I wonder how these snowflakes who think conservative speech is "violence" would have responded to receiving a draft notice requiring them to go into the army and potentially die in Vietnam.

Churchill said, " If you are not liberal when you are young, you have no heart. If you are not conservative when you are old, you have no brain".

[AlabamAlum]

Colored toilets officially ended in 1964. And those existed outside of the south until then, as well. Most promptly complied. They were reported otherwise. No racist wanted the Feds in over a water fountain or bathroom.

[Hannibal]

I think that there's probably some truth to the fact that each generation scorns the behavior of their successors in some way, usually that they don't adhere to the same set of values. The flipside of that wisdom is that no empire or country lasts forever, so there probably is something to the belief that future generations will squander what previous generations have built, and that the generations after that will pay a miserable price. And let's face it, history is proving the cranky old men of 1968 to be right about the Woodstock crowd..

[Hannibal]

I remember hearing when I was 14 years old about how "today's kids are lazy", and I rolled my eyes at it a lot. But people weren't looking on Gen X with horror when we were in our mid-20s because we weren't out getting cross sex hormone treatments, lecturing people about using correct pronouns, trashing our country en masse, and calling on the government for free stuff.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Geraldo says Ghislaine Maxwell is a victim of “woke culture” and questioned why she should be investigated for “25 year old crimes”

One, makes me wonder if Geraldo spent some time on Pedo Island

Two, can I cancel Geraldo? Please?

[lineygoblue]

Geraldo is an excellent example of someone that changes their views as they age. He was close friends with The Beatles, and especially John Lennon, who was a huge liberal and pacifist. Today, Geraldo speaks for a lot of conservative causes and is regularly on Fox News expressing them.

[iam416]

I find it telling that the response to the Leftist craziness isn't that "it's wrong" but rather that "you're worried about nothing." The people who want to defend Wokeness and America is Evil and, ultimately, a complete socialist reordering -- those people can't defend it on the merits so they just slyly pooh-pooh it as it could never happen oblivious to the history of the world.

[Hannibal]

I find it telling that the response to the Leftist craziness isn't that "it's wrong" but rather that "you're worried about nothing." The people who want to defend Wokeness and America is Evil and, ultimately, a complete socialist reordering -- those people can't defend it on the merits so they just slyly pooh-pooh it as it could never happen oblivious to the history of the world.

This. Many of them secretly want it. In CGVT's case, not so secretly. Many of them legitimately don't want it, but are terrified of being called a "racist", or they view "racism" as such a cardinal sin that they would rather watch their country burn than be on the same side as the White Nationalists. Various -isms are the only true sins in thew world and therefore all other considerations are secondary. This is how you end up with the British police aggressively policing speech on the internet while ignoring immigrant child rape gangs. This is how you end up with 15 FBI agents investigating a garage pull in the United States.