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counterNihilist @counternihilist.bsky.social · 7h

Faith No More - Epic?

counterNihilist @counternihilist.bsky.social · 22h

I would love at least the middle ground to happen, to reduce at least some death and slow the rate of wide scale post-infection disability, but it still isn't good enough and it's wrong to pretend it would be.

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counterNihilist @counternihilist.bsky.social · 22h

Until we have effective means of transmission reduction and treatments that don't need to involve masks, then yes, it at best a trinary between masks+literally anything else (effective), universal sub-micron air filtration+ventilation (better than nothing but at best 30-40% effective), and nothing.

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counterNihilist @counternihilist.bsky.social · 22h

This is the thing pragmatists frequently want to omit from their calculus--there is no social progress without left radicals holding the moral line, and science is inherently left radical. We are pragmatists, it's just our goal isn't compromise but effective recognition of reality and its stakes.

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counterNihilist @counternihilist.bsky.social · 23h

Just because it is inconvenient and doesn't have popular support doesn't mean it isn't scientifically or morally correct. It is trivially easy for 99% of people, and a majority of experts in charge of policy, to be disastrously wrong.

counterNihilist @counternihilist.bsky.social · 23h

If it is least reliable it's only because we don't treat not-masking as the moral failing it actually is. Physically speaking it is the only reliable means of preventing COVID transmission behind total quarantine. Vaccines were proven to be ineffective at reducing transmission when Omicron hit.

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counterNihilist @counternihilist.bsky.social · 23h

Influenza death rates have also been unneccessarily high for over a century because people dropped mitigation efforts too early during the flu pandemic of the 1910s, because people were tired of masking.

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Jessica Ellis @baddestmamajama.bsky.social · 23h

It is not endemic. Endemic means predictable rate of spread and regional containment. Because covid continues to mutate, the wave patterns are random, and spread I global, covid meets none of these criteria. The WHO declared it no longer a “global emergency,” not endemic.

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counterNihilist @counternihilist.bsky.social · 23h

It's really underexamined how easy it is for 99% of people to he objectively wrong about important things, with real material impacts for being wrong. And this probably applies to me too for some things! But I think if we were all aware majority opinion != correct we'd absorb new information better.

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Karl Jacoby @karl-jacoby.bsky.social · 2d

Proud papa moment: my son J published a letter in the @nytimes.com today (in print tomorrow) on the need to think our definitions of autism.

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counterNihilist @counternihilist.bsky.social · 1d

And the reason for that is they are as much of a mouthpiece of the administration's (both Trump and Biden's) narrative about public health as they are a research and coordination org, and there has never been political will to transform public health norms and infrastructure to meet the current need

counterNihilist @counternihilist.bsky.social · 1d

Ongoing research prior to and since the end of the federal emergency is showing that we are not safe, but from the start the CDC has been extremely bad at informing us how the virus works and what the stakes are, now that the bigger danger is what happens in the post-acute phase of infection.

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counterNihilist @counternihilist.bsky.social · 1d

Governments generally hate destabilizing change outside of their control, and a pandemic is extremely destabilizing. They have an incentive to restore public spending, labor relations and entrenched industries to pre-pandemic levels regardless of whether it's safe.

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counterNihilist @counternihilist.bsky.social · 1d

The problem is the CDC and mainstream news has been hedging on what information to disseminate from the start against the possibility that major infrastructural, economic and social change was warranted, at what they presumed are politically impossible levels.

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counterNihilist @counternihilist.bsky.social · 1d

There is plenty of published research confirming all the specific ways that COVID is still a major threat and population-level damage is continuing right now, for otherwise healthy-seeming people in addition to those visibly disabled.

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Jessica Ellis @baddestmamajama.bsky.social · 1d

And take, I don’t know, five seconds to consider that the people you dismiss as “scolds” might be another group of human beings fighting for equitable access to society, which traditionally it hasn’t looked super great to be against.

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counterNihilist @counternihilist.bsky.social · 4d

Quote this with the first four Horror movies that come to your mind that are 10/10s for you. No cheating. Just the first four that pop into your head.

- Session 9
- Mandy
- The Descent
- Alien

soOolient 🎃 @solient.bsky.social · 4d

Quote this with the first four Horror movies that come to your mind that are 10/10s for you. No cheating. Just the first four that pop into your head.

- Alien
- The Thing (1982)
- Underwater
- does Annihilation count?

Brakka Quilltusk @brakkaquilltusk.bsky.social · 4d

Quote this with the first four Horror movies that come to your mind that are 10/10s for you. No cheating. Just the first four that pop into your head.

- Alien.
- The VVitch.
- Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning.
- Wes Craven's They.

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counterNihilist @counternihilist.bsky.social · 5d

It being inconvenient doesn't mean it's okay to stop--you keep it up until you have a near guarantee everyone's weaponized body is disarmed. We never even got close to that state, so we should all mask vax AND distance until we do reach it.

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counterNihilist @counternihilist.bsky.social · 5d

Here's the fucking thing. Most people get that respecting others' autonomy is a good thing. Pandemics fuck up our sense of that because suddenly respecting others' autonomy means treating our own bodies like biological weapons. It is no longer passive, it is active, and thus inconvenient.

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Rudy wants revolution. @rude1.blacksky.team · 13d

I hear and see your concerns. Over the weekend, a couple users hosted on Blacksky's PDS were banned from the Bluesky app and thus the Bluesky API servers. This was a weakness of our system I've been aware of and hoped we had more time to address before any kind of public incident. 1/11

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David Forbes @davidforbes.bsky.social · 14d

Whenever anarchism — or any idea more radical than the status quo — gets dismissed as unserious, it's worth remembering the current system runs on things like "we put all the money on a scam machine that tells rich dipshits they're god."

Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · 14d

"The hundreds of billions of dollars companies are investing in AI now account for an astonishing 40 per cent share of US GDP growth this year... In a way, then, America has become one big bet on AI."

America is now one big bet on AI

It’s seen as the magic fix for every threat to the US economy

www.ft.com

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no bonzo @nobonzo.bsky.social · 16d

our melody is louder than a shout

An illustration. In the foreground, two figures sit on a downed tree and embrace. There is a gasoline can and two spicy cocktails in the ferns surrounding them. They look down at a valley which has a prison on fire in it. There is a decorative leaf border around the whole illustration. Text at the bottom reads Our Melody is Louder than a Shout and has a circle a.

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counterNihilist @counternihilist.bsky.social · 18d

It's a potential challenge to their right to unilaterally define hate speech. Like the ADL is willing to be leveraged but they probably don't even want to deal with its near-term existence at all.

counterNihilist @counternihilist.bsky.social · 19d

I use OneDrive for exactly one thing--I have a batch script that symlinks a couple of game saves so they sync between two different machines, because Steam doesn't support cloud save for them. With the backup reminders it's starting to not be worth it.

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William Gillis 🏴 @rechelon.bsky.social · 19d

Because conservative freakouts since 2017 have completely warped the media landscape, I want to compile a thread of some contemporary instances of fascist violence against antifascists that were hugely influential on everyone I know 🧵

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