Man, the idea that I would want my friends visiting town to get an AirBNB instead of asking to stay with me is just so foreign... of course I want my friends to stay with me when they're visiting! I mean like yeah it'd be pretty different if I lived in a studio apartment so we had to share a room, but given that I do in fact have my own room and can give a visitor a pair of guest keys, to have a friend sleeping on the couch in the living room has much more upside than downside.
Hiring a therapist instead of talking to a friend mostly seems pretty foreign to me too. Of course part of that is that I often don't want just emotional support but ideally useful advice, and often useful advice requires actually having a good sense of the personalities of the people involved. Going to an outsider does have the advantage of not being biased by knowing people involved, but IMO the upside from having personal knowledge of the situation is *usually* bigger than the downside of any bias (not always unfortunately >_> ). But finding friends who I can talk to about things who then also know the people involved can be pretty difficult...
Didn't read the UK thing all through. But the real de facto ban in the UK has been the one applied by the Tories to onshore wind, now being relaxed by Labour. Nuclear is an expensive distraction.
Plants and animals actually do emit ionizing radiation, although the amount is trivial: about 0.012% of naturally occurring potassium consists of the radioactive isotope Potassium-40. There is even a semi-humorous unit of radiation exposure called the "banana equivalent dose" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose ) which is defined as the radiation exposure caused by eating one average sized banana.
But yeah, the book's claim (if reported accurately) is indeed nuts.
Pretty sure I remember people making jokes about Siegfried and Roy being gay when I was a kid in the 90s, but I don't remember them being out and a quick Google search suggests they weren't. Feels like a case where the fight against stereotyping has to take an L.
The one about drunk driving in the UK is interesting. I'm from Britain and passed my driving test in maybe 2002? I've also spent my whole life living in places with high traffic, whether city or countryside. Drunk driving always seemed such a widely held taboo that I was stunned to discover how common it was only a couple of decades earlier. (I was also surprised, if you don't mind me saying, to find how commonplace it seems to be in many parts of the USA).
It definitely feels like social norms were the strongest factor in this. Realistically, I doubt I ever would have been caught if I'd driven after a few beers, not drunk but over the limit. I've certainly never been pulled over for a random spot check or anything. But I would have felt like I was a *bad person*, and worried that my friends would judge me.
I think the linked article underplays the effect of advertising, although it does mention it. In the 90s and 00s the UK had a series of very effective PSAs about driving (drunk driving and just dangerous behaviour like not looking properly before turning into a road). They were generally highly realist, like documentary footage, and the common theme was "Here you are on your normal commute, tum-tee-tum, BAM YOU JUST KILLED A PERSON". A lot of people talked about how shocking/moving these were, and I'm convinced they were a huge part of the change in attitudes.
>they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.
One should be careful to not over-emphasize the fascism aspect of Orwell's statement, of course. This continues to be an important, underrated lesson for liberals- if they can avoid that trap. Many do not and lapse into Russell conjugations.
You wonder if video games and Internet fights are substituting for the drums, flags, and loyalty-parades. If so, it may actually be an improvement, even if it doesn't feel like one.
The psych-hospital thing I had heard about a LONG time ago. Rather disappointed to hear it's still happening, though not really surprised. I know a medical specialist in residency who has told me the one thing all the private groups are telling them is "we won't sell out to private equity". I'm sure you've read by now how private equity is buying out rural emergency rooms and providing shitty care at elevated prices.
Posting for status explains Teixeira, but an alternative explanation for Musk and Rowling is that being billionaires simply allowed them to do things they wouldn't otherwise do and prevented them from facing consequences for their actions. While I'd be the last person in the world to claim Musk doesn't love attention, apparently he had already started to drift right after a rift with a kid of his who went socialist at school and more criticism of him by the media as he got richer, and buying Twitter was a fairly effective single point of attack on the left--it was a big social media platform used predominantly by lefties to spread ideas and launch cancellation attacks that wasn't making a lot of money and therefore was subject to a hostile takeover by someone with enough assets. (It's not as if he was going to buy Facebook or Tiktok.) It wasn't a good investment financially, but it did weaken one huge progressive vector of attack. OK, it cost him $20 billion...but this is a guy who *still has $20 billion*. Similarly, any author who says the sorts of anti-trans things Rowling does would face cancellation and her books would no longer be sold by mainstream companies...but as one of the very few authors who sells enough to recoup her costs, she can get away with it. Sure she'll never work in a white collar job again, but she's a billionaire--she doesn't need to!
Rich friend, poor friend: yeah, basically. As a closeted-kinky upper-middle-class person who's afraid of the financial ramifications of divorce, I have essentially given up on having close friends or sustained romance. If I get married, they can divorce me and get half the assets I've saved (and then I'll be stuck working to support *them*), cross-class friendships are always tinged by the whole "I can buy you anything you want, so why don't I?", and anyone I date has a good chance of being after my money. I can only try to hook up and maintain FWB as ethically as possible. This is a statement of agreement; with my income, I cannot expect sympathy. But at least I can get (almost) any book I want.
Also from Chinese Doom Scroll's response to me, which I think many of your readers would enjoy:
"The Three Kingdoms period [the subject of a famous novel I read a little while ago], in particular, is exceptionally well known for the amount of gay fanfiction it has produced though, so it's actually primarily popular with the yaoi fanbase which is mostly female."
I've thought about the prominence of gay people in the arts. Some thoughts:
1. The arts take long hours (bad for raising kids), pay shit (bad for supporting kids), and are very uncertain (bad for everyone), so if you want a family, you tend to avoid them. So the arts will attract people who can't or don't want to form families--historically, that meant a lot of queer people.
2. There may be a sense in which being queer leaves you less tied to a given gender identity and thus more able to inhabit the imaginative worlds of both men and women.
3. A bit more un-PC, but gay men had a feminine artistic sensibility and weren't required to get married the way women were. So it worked well for them, relatively speaking.
I initially thought the Pale King was a Cthulhu Mythos reference too! There's actually a book, The King in Orange, by an occultist who has actually-reasonable-sounding explanations for Trump. I enjoyed the bit about meme magic failing as a magical operation the second time around.
Man, the idea that I would want my friends visiting town to get an AirBNB instead of asking to stay with me is just so foreign... of course I want my friends to stay with me when they're visiting! I mean like yeah it'd be pretty different if I lived in a studio apartment so we had to share a room, but given that I do in fact have my own room and can give a visitor a pair of guest keys, to have a friend sleeping on the couch in the living room has much more upside than downside.
Hiring a therapist instead of talking to a friend mostly seems pretty foreign to me too. Of course part of that is that I often don't want just emotional support but ideally useful advice, and often useful advice requires actually having a good sense of the personalities of the people involved. Going to an outsider does have the advantage of not being biased by knowing people involved, but IMO the upside from having personal knowledge of the situation is *usually* bigger than the downside of any bias (not always unfortunately >_> ). But finding friends who I can talk to about things who then also know the people involved can be pretty difficult...
Didn't read the UK thing all through. But the real de facto ban in the UK has been the one applied by the Tories to onshore wind, now being relaxed by Labour. Nuclear is an expensive distraction.
Whoa, the thing about Chinese vs. Western horror really makes me want to find some Chinese horror to appreciate
Some of the old Twilight Zone episodes had that feeling...
Paywall-free link to the article about the guy who solved mine roof collapses:
https://archive.is/IkoPs
Plants and animals actually do emit ionizing radiation, although the amount is trivial: about 0.012% of naturally occurring potassium consists of the radioactive isotope Potassium-40. There is even a semi-humorous unit of radiation exposure called the "banana equivalent dose" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose ) which is defined as the radiation exposure caused by eating one average sized banana.
But yeah, the book's claim (if reported accurately) is indeed nuts.
Pretty sure I remember people making jokes about Siegfried and Roy being gay when I was a kid in the 90s, but I don't remember them being out and a quick Google search suggests they weren't. Feels like a case where the fight against stereotyping has to take an L.
The one about drunk driving in the UK is interesting. I'm from Britain and passed my driving test in maybe 2002? I've also spent my whole life living in places with high traffic, whether city or countryside. Drunk driving always seemed such a widely held taboo that I was stunned to discover how common it was only a couple of decades earlier. (I was also surprised, if you don't mind me saying, to find how commonplace it seems to be in many parts of the USA).
It definitely feels like social norms were the strongest factor in this. Realistically, I doubt I ever would have been caught if I'd driven after a few beers, not drunk but over the limit. I've certainly never been pulled over for a random spot check or anything. But I would have felt like I was a *bad person*, and worried that my friends would judge me.
I think the linked article underplays the effect of advertising, although it does mention it. In the 90s and 00s the UK had a series of very effective PSAs about driving (drunk driving and just dangerous behaviour like not looking properly before turning into a road). They were generally highly realist, like documentary footage, and the common theme was "Here you are on your normal commute, tum-tee-tum, BAM YOU JUST KILLED A PERSON". A lot of people talked about how shocking/moving these were, and I'm convinced they were a huge part of the change in attitudes.
>they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.
One should be careful to not over-emphasize the fascism aspect of Orwell's statement, of course. This continues to be an important, underrated lesson for liberals- if they can avoid that trap. Many do not and lapse into Russell conjugations.
Just a heads up: it looks like the "Current generative AI tools ..." link is broken.
Sorry, should be fixed now.
You wonder if video games and Internet fights are substituting for the drums, flags, and loyalty-parades. If so, it may actually be an improvement, even if it doesn't feel like one.
The psych-hospital thing I had heard about a LONG time ago. Rather disappointed to hear it's still happening, though not really surprised. I know a medical specialist in residency who has told me the one thing all the private groups are telling them is "we won't sell out to private equity". I'm sure you've read by now how private equity is buying out rural emergency rooms and providing shitty care at elevated prices.
Posting for status explains Teixeira, but an alternative explanation for Musk and Rowling is that being billionaires simply allowed them to do things they wouldn't otherwise do and prevented them from facing consequences for their actions. While I'd be the last person in the world to claim Musk doesn't love attention, apparently he had already started to drift right after a rift with a kid of his who went socialist at school and more criticism of him by the media as he got richer, and buying Twitter was a fairly effective single point of attack on the left--it was a big social media platform used predominantly by lefties to spread ideas and launch cancellation attacks that wasn't making a lot of money and therefore was subject to a hostile takeover by someone with enough assets. (It's not as if he was going to buy Facebook or Tiktok.) It wasn't a good investment financially, but it did weaken one huge progressive vector of attack. OK, it cost him $20 billion...but this is a guy who *still has $20 billion*. Similarly, any author who says the sorts of anti-trans things Rowling does would face cancellation and her books would no longer be sold by mainstream companies...but as one of the very few authors who sells enough to recoup her costs, she can get away with it. Sure she'll never work in a white collar job again, but she's a billionaire--she doesn't need to!
Rich friend, poor friend: yeah, basically. As a closeted-kinky upper-middle-class person who's afraid of the financial ramifications of divorce, I have essentially given up on having close friends or sustained romance. If I get married, they can divorce me and get half the assets I've saved (and then I'll be stuck working to support *them*), cross-class friendships are always tinged by the whole "I can buy you anything you want, so why don't I?", and anyone I date has a good chance of being after my money. I can only try to hook up and maintain FWB as ethically as possible. This is a statement of agreement; with my income, I cannot expect sympathy. But at least I can get (almost) any book I want.
Also from Chinese Doom Scroll's response to me, which I think many of your readers would enjoy:
"The Three Kingdoms period [the subject of a famous novel I read a little while ago], in particular, is exceptionally well known for the amount of gay fanfiction it has produced though, so it's actually primarily popular with the yaoi fanbase which is mostly female."
I've thought about the prominence of gay people in the arts. Some thoughts:
1. The arts take long hours (bad for raising kids), pay shit (bad for supporting kids), and are very uncertain (bad for everyone), so if you want a family, you tend to avoid them. So the arts will attract people who can't or don't want to form families--historically, that meant a lot of queer people.
2. There may be a sense in which being queer leaves you less tied to a given gender identity and thus more able to inhabit the imaginative worlds of both men and women.
3. A bit more un-PC, but gay men had a feminine artistic sensibility and weren't required to get married the way women were. So it worked well for them, relatively speaking.
I initially thought the Pale King was a Cthulhu Mythos reference too! There's actually a book, The King in Orange, by an occultist who has actually-reasonable-sounding explanations for Trump. I enjoyed the bit about meme magic failing as a magical operation the second time around.