Stupidity is not a social construct
My Quote Of The Year is from Freeman Hunt:
Doesn’t anybody say ‘Fuck off’ anymore?
The best books I read this year were
Fiction: Prelude to a Certain Midnight, Gerald Kersh. A mordant novel of murder, from the 40s.
Non-fiction: The Club, Leo Damrosch. Johnson, Boswell, Smith, Burke, and friends in 18th century London.
I didn’t watch a lot of movies but the best was Ford vs Ferrari.
As a society we must not sacrifice children's welfare - sterilising them, medicalising them for life and taking away adult sexual function - to satisfy the interests of a community of adults.
He seems to gloat at the harshness. Here. Of course, he makes an exception for his son.
Trump is no better on the drug war of course.
An update from The World Socialist Website, following the Bret Stephens article.
Aimed at propping up the 1619 Project, the statements from Sulzberger, Baquet and Silverstein have only added new layers of dishonesty.
An early chess problem, simplicity itself.
White to play and mate in 2
I'm not telling!
A little bit of chess problem history, with some nice problems.
Herbert Grasemann, 1950
White to play and mate in 6
I don’t agree much with his politics, but Glenn Greenwald is one of the very few reporters I trust. He shreds the feeding frenzy here.
I didn’t think I could be shocked by anything in US politics anymore. I was wrong. That's literally, literally, a Democrat campaign event. That's really the candidate beating a woman to death in effigy.
My point is that you cannot do "science" without knowing & rigorously applying statistics & you cannot do statistics without knowing & rigorously applying mathematical statistics & you cannot do mathematical statistics without knowing & rigorously applying probability theory.
It's pretty incredible that the same movement celebrating George Floyd can't tolerate other historical figures we admire who have done terrible things.
Several comments above make the argument I call The Covidiot Creed. Here it is in concentrated form:
“Predictions were high. Now deaths are low. The lockdown was never needed.”
It exists in a slight variant
“Predictions were high. Now predictions are low. The lockdown was never needed.”
Here is one of the examples above from M Jordan
“ Neil Ferguson’s model that really kicked off Britain’s and the US’s social distancing panic was a flat-out lie. His “model” spewed out 2.2 million US deaths, 500,000 Brits. As soon as this swayed Boris Johnson, he lowered his British death projections to 20,000. ”
Here is another, subtler example, from ST
“This panic was wildly overblown so they could run around like little Hitlers ordering shutdowns and telling people to hide in their homes.”
We can argue whether almost 2000 deaths a day are overblown of course, but it is certainly a lower figure than the original projections, and so ST concludes the measures take were just budding Hilterism, unconnected to that reduction.
Of course the Covidiot Creed is entirely wrong. Here is what actually happened
Predictions were high death counts *unless we increase social distancing.*
We increased social distancing, in many cases with lockdowns.
The worst case did not happen, and new predictions *based on keeping the social distancing* were lower.
Social distancing saved lives.
There are other problems with the Covidiot Creed. Deaths are not low, they are just not as high as they might have been. Projections are not really low since they only go a few months, they are just not as high as they were. And the lower ones all assume the measures will continue.
But this absurd and dangerous Covidiot Creed is all over this blog.
