Beautiful đź’š
Author Archives: Egg Syntax
How Many Microcovids Would You Spend on a Burrito? | WIRED
This is a just for fun article on the folks who put together the microcovid risk calculation website.
Before QAnon, Ronald Reagan and other Republicans purged John Birch Society extremists from the GOP – The Washington Post
Although Welch had been an early donor to Buckley’s National Review in the 1950s, Buckley had come to believe that Welch’s feverish rants threatened the conservative movement’s credibility and its future.
“Buckley was beginning to worry that with the John Birch Society growing so rapidly, the right-wing upsurge in the country would take an ugly, even Fascist turn,” John B. Judis wrote in his 1988 biography, “William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives.” Buckley told Goldwater, according to Judis, that the John Birch Society was a “menace” to the conservative movement.
But Goldwater had a problem — much like the one that Republican leaders face today, as many of their voters embrace QAnon conspiracy theories and President Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. Goldwater wanted to distance himself from the conspiracy theories, but he feared alienating his base.
“Every other person in Phoenix is a member of the John Birch Society,” Goldwater told Buckley and Kirk. “I’m not talking about commie-haunted apple pickers or cactus drunks. I’m talking about the highest cast of men of affairs.”
Peter Turchin’s cycles of history and the dangers of the next decade
Peter Turchin has an extremely interesting end at least somewhat empirically backed theory of historical cycles. It’s hard to know whether it’s true, but he’s taken seriously by some smart people (recent piece in The Atlantic, Slate Star Codex review of his book). Here’s a recent piece on why current division is likely to get worse, and what we can potentially do about it.
We predicted political upheaval in America in the 2020s. This is why it’s here and what we can do to temper it.
Merkel among EU leaders questioning Twitter’s Trump ban – POLITICO
The head of EU diplomacy, Josep Borrell, wrote in a blog post that Europe needs “to be able to better regulate the contents of social networks, while scrupulously respecting freedom of expression. It is not possible for this regulation to be carried out mainly according to rules and procedures set by private actors.”
Manfred Weber, chairman of the EPP group at the European Parliament, concurred, telling Brussels Playbook: “The EU mustn’t let Facebook and Twitter decide what’s within the boundaries of the acceptable on their platforms.”
“We cannot leave it to American Big Tech companies to decide how we do and do not discuss, what can and cannot be said in a democratic discourse. We need a stricter regulatory approach,” Weber added.
https://www.politico.eu/article/angela-merkel-european-leaders-question-twitter-donald-trump-ban/
We Need a New Media System – Matt Taibbi
I agree with everything Taibbi is saying here, although I have no idea whether there’s a realistic path to get there. I’d sure as hell subscribe to the kind of media outlet he describes.
If you work in conservative media, you probably felt tremendous pressure all November to stay away from information suggesting Trump lost the election. If you work in the other ecosystem, you probably feel right now that even suggesting what happened last Wednesday was not a coup in the literal sense of the word (e.g. an attempt at seizing power with an actual chance of success) not only wouldn’t clear an editor, but might make you suspect in the eyes of co-workers, a potentially job-imperiling problem in this environment.
We need a new media channel, the press version of a third party, where those financial pressures to maintain audience are absent.
The Roleplaying Coup
There have been hundreds, maybe thousands of articles written already on last Wednesday’s storming of the Capitol. Most of them have been predictable; some have been titillating or interesting or occasionally insightful. I’m sure we’ve all been reading a lot of the same ones. This is the only one that’s felt worth coming back to, though:
This was not theater, because a play is a safe and riskless activity, but it was roleplaying, which can be decidedly more dangerous for the participants—five people have died in these events. The “coup” ended, appropriately, when the main plotter was banned temporarily from social media. It was not a coup in the real world, but it was experienced as one by those taking part. More interestingly, those shocked by the events in the Senate were no less captured by the fantasy and might still believe that a real coup was attempted and defeated. In Washington, you can apparently now have the full “coup” experience in just a few hours. The action takes place in a kind of virtual reality, where terrible accidents can and do happen, but more tragic consequences to the political regime and the viewers at home are somehow prevented.
Does this mean that the Capitol extravaganza was trivial or unimportant? Not at all. In some strange way it was more significant than a real coup. A coup would at least make sense, while the almost complete replacement of serious politics by subterranean fantasy and roleplaying induces a sense of vertigo. Our traditional way of relating to the world has increasingly collapsed. Nothing seems real, and doubts persist about what to think or say in the face of this new situation. In the Senate debate that preceded the chaos, Ted Cruz was heard shouting to his colleagues: “Be bold. Astonish the viewers.” Prophetic words. We were astonished.
Why Markets Boomed in a Year of Human Misery
I’ve been wondering (and worrying) about this; I’m glad to get a plausible explanation for what’s going on.
The central, befuddling economic reality of the United States at the close of 2020 is that everything is terrible in the world, while everything is wonderful in the financial markets.
It’s a macabre spectacle. Asset prices keep reaching new, extraordinary highs, when around 3,000 people a day are dying of coronavirus and 800,000 people a week are filing new unemployment claims. Even an enthusiast of modern capitalism might wonder if something is deeply broken in how the economy works.
To better understand this strange mix of buoyant markets and economic despair, it’s worth turning to the data. As it happens, the numbers offer a coherent narrative about how the United States arrived at this point — one with lessons about how policy, markets and the economy intersect — and reveal the sharp disparity between the pandemic year’s haves and have-nots.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/upshot/why-markets-boomed-2020.html
We Had the COVID-19 Vaccine the Whole Time
I hadn’t realized that the Moderna vaccine had been fully developed by January 13th of 2020. This is a pretty interesting look at how we could have a vaccine ready for deployment much sooner next time.
None of the scientists I spoke to for this story were at all surprised by either outcome — all said they expected the vaccines were safe and effective all along. Which has made a number of them wonder whether, in the future, at least, we might find a way to do things differently — without even thinking in terms of trade-offs. Rethinking our approach to vaccine development, they told me, could mean moving faster without moving any more recklessly. A layperson might look at the 2020 timelines and question whether, in the case of an onrushing pandemic, a lengthy Phase III trial — which tests for efficacy — is necessary. But the scientists I spoke to about the way this pandemic may reshape future vaccine development were more focused on how to accelerate or skip Phase I, which tests for safety. More precisely, they thought it would be possible to do all the research, development, preclinical testing, and Phase I trials for new viral pandemics before those new viruses had even emerged — to have those vaccines sitting on the shelf and ready to go when they did. They also thought it was possible to do this for nearly the entire universe of potential future viral pandemics — at least 90 percent of them, one of them told me, and likely more.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/moderna-covid-19-vaccine-design.html
Talking to In-laws Can Be Hard. In Some Languages, It’s Impossible. – The New York Times
Avoidance speech is also practiced by speakers of some of the Bantu languages of southern Africa, including Xhosa and Zulu. Married women are forbidden from using their father-in-law’s name, or any word that has the same root or similar sound.
Bantu speakers often get around this restriction by borrowing synonyms from other languages spoken nearby. Some linguists think that is how click consonants found their way into Bantu speech: in words borrowed from Khoisan languages, which use clicks extensively.
In parts of India, a daughter-in-law is not allowed to use words that begin with the same letters as her in-laws’ names, requiring her to use a parallel vocabulary.