a_conservative

I could stand to be more educated, so please give me something to educate me instead of calling me disingenuous.

I am willing to listen to arguments that explain how it is that the Democratic party has been able to shed it's incredibly racist history and instead push all of the accusations of racism onto Republicans. I've read these arguments a few times over the years, and I found them to be very tortured and to raise lots of questions.

Even though, you didn't offer any information to further your arguments, I will try to add one to further mine.

If the parties did switch somehow, how do you explain that Social Security act was passed in 1935 by a Democratic President, a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House.

Should I attribute the Social Security Act to conservatives?

I don't have a lot of time to think about this right now, but generally I do agree that the right is learning how to ridicule and using it more.

I'm curious about your association of slavery with conservatism. It's doubly strange since the Republican party is the one that fought the Civil war and supported desegration while many Democrats fought against it. The Democrat party had a former KKK member not that long ago.

I'm not saying that this should be used to invalidate Democrats or dismiss them out of hand or anything like that. I just think it is strange that modern day people aligned with the Democratic Party speak with a great deal of certainty that conservatives are racist.

I've heard and read the arguments for the party switch and I find them to be a bit tortured personally. But, civilized people can disagree about all of this, and I don't want to drag us into a partisan battle either.

Also, my sense of your post is that you are using left and right more along the lines of European usage of left and right. I'm using them more along the lines of American politics. While Europeans might say, "you Americans hardly have any true left at all". I'm more likely to say, "Where are the true conservatives in Europe"

Thank you for the post. I can hear the frustration in your writing. Or perhaps, it's my own frustration that I'm projecting on to you.

More and more, I'm wondering about the proposition that the "left vs right" battle we (broadly) tend to engage in is just a bunch of bullshit that we get caught up in. If there are puppet masters in the world, they surely are happy when we fight amongst ourselves.

I simply meant that my experience is that those on the right don't deploy ridicule as much when dissent is expressed. I'm not speaking to the individual issues you listed at all, of course we disagree on some of those and likely agree on others.

This is obviously subjective, but I have spent some time in 12 step groups. Addiction cuts across the normal divisions we have in life. It affects the poor, the rich, every political affiliation, and so on. It does get a person out of their echo chamber somewhat, at least the typical echo chambers a person may have been in. 12 step groups can be their own echo chamber.

I personally transitioned from left to right politically while in 12 step groups. I transitioned from left to right while being a part of a mostly left-wing family. I've seen the condemnation and the ridicule deployed against conservatives. I've deployed it!

At some point, I began to look back at what my own personal experience was with conservatives, and I saw that my ideas of conservatives didn't match up with my experience. The conservatives I had known, didn't talk about tolerance, but they certainly practiced it when a dissenting opinion was expressed.

As a thought experiment: Imagine your views on a core left issue changed. Say you had some personal experience with abortion that pushed you into a more conservative position on this particular issue. Can you tell the people in your life with whom you discuss politics with? Can you talk about it on your social media with as much gusto as you used to talk about your more left-wing positions?

Also, if you look around HN, it's not hard to find comments that are pledging their allegiance to certain ideas before then offering criticism. These comments typically look like this: "Of course, I believe __x__, __y__, and __z__, but I do wonder about this aspect of x sometimes"

Why do they feel like they have to pledge their allegiance to __x__, __y__, and __z__ before offering any criticism?

Republicans do have similar echo chambers. My personal experience, as someone who has moved from left to right but still hangs out in a lot of left leaning circles, the right tends to be more tolerant of dissent.

It's getting harder to remember life before the internet, but it was largely similar. Different pockets of people had different beliefs and tended to choose an echo chamber.

As you said, the circles are bigger now.

The other difference is that media is so less centralized now, the circles are further apart. The centralized main stream media applied a certain amount of social pressure itself that sort of kept the circles from straying to far into "forbidden thoughts". This has largely been destroyed by the internet.

I'm a CRDT newbie, but I'll take a stab, hopefully someone can correct me if I'm getting it wrong.

After a quick reading the "CRDTs go brr" and the wikipedia page, I think CRDT gives us a mathematical strategy for resolving conflicts. It doesn't mean that the end result will make sense.

The Wikipedia article gives an example of merging an event flag represented by a boolean variable. So the var in this case means that "someone observed this event happening". So the rule for merging this var from different sources is simple, if any source of data reports the var as true, the merged result should be true as well.

The implication is it matters what the data represents, not just whether it is a boolean or a string, etc.

I'm guessing that a colloborative notes field, or a "did someone call this customer" boolean might benefit from a CRDT more so than keeping track of bank account values.

Can you point to a good introduction to Conflict-free replicated data types (CRDT)?

It's crossed my (short attention span) radar a couple times and seems interesting. I really love the idea about being able to use it, but also "forget" about it while developing.

Does "leaky abstraction" apply here? If you constrain things enough, can a dev really use it and forget about the details?

I think we are saying the same thing- we can shed way more heat than just about any other land mammal. This results in more endurance, because other animals have to take a break to cool down. I imagine that cunning and endurance would go a long way towards a primitive hunter catching their dinner.

Interestingly, dogs and probably other animals have evolved strategies to keep the brain cooler than the rest of the body. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/836587/

Now I'm thinking about other animals that travel long distances. Butterflies and birds sometimes travel ridiculous distances. Do they have to deal with heat dissipation issues? Maybe having smaller brains help here, since cooking the brain seems to be the main issue.

from https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=217044

> The team discovered that the insects use their wings to sense the direction and intensity of sunlight—the main source of warmth or overheating—and to respond with specialized behaviors to prevent overheating or overcooling of their wings. For example, all species studied exhibited a relatively constant “trigger” temperature of approximately 40oC (104oF), turning within a few seconds to avoid overheating of wings from a small light spot shone upon them.

Nature is mind-blowing!

Thank you so much for this reply. For me personally, as I get older and gain experience, I become less ideological about the world and more pragmatic. It makes sense that both good and bad research can take place in either industry or academia.

Thanks again for your comments in this thread. They were very enjoyable to read and lessened some cynicism I've been mired in lately.

This article and your comment are inspiring me to walk more. I do walk some, maybe 10 miles a week or so. I almost always feel better mentally and physically when I walk.

It's such an ancient activity for humans. It's interesting to look at the Bible and see how often it records people walking, or to think about how much hunter-gatherers walked. Humans have been walking for many thousands of years.

Walking also seems integral to the high heat dissipation and endurance that humans have compared to other animals. We can walk for insane distances. A cheetah might be able to out sprint us, but can it cover more distance at a slow and steady pace? I doubt it.

Can you tell us more? This sounds oddly fascinating.

Thank you for sharing this! It brings to my mind the tension and conflict between Robin Williams and the Fields' medal mathematician in Good Will Hunting.

It sounds like you still do get to do science. I suspect that you may be having a bigger impact on the world now than you would have had as another science professor. Can you offer any comment on this? Am I off base?

Billions of doses of Ivermectin have been taken by humans.

https://www.merck.com/stories/mectizan/

This is straight up flame bait that adds nothing to an otherwise reasonable discussion.

I didn't say you wanted to abolish the 2nd amendment. Your now flagged post stated making people feel vulnerable will lead to more regulation. Or that's what you hoped would happen.

People make choices about how they will respond to feeling vulnerable. Some people rely more on authority, for example, wanting more gun regulations. Some people will opt to go get a carry permit or purchase a weapon to protect themselves.

My point is that you are hoping that people who have already chosen the self-protection strategy will switch to the authority strategy for dealing with vulnerability. This might happen in a few rare cases, but it seems like you don't understand gun culture or conservatives in general.

Making people feel like targets will persuade them to give up self-defense?

So the choice is get the vaccine or "act like Typhoid Mary"? Can you hear how extreme your argument is?

Edit: Typhoid Mary is an interesting case. She spent decades in quarantine. She broke quarantine at times and infected people. It's a very interesting article, even more so with the extreme rhetoric in this thread.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon

Many ignore that the authorities always have guns. The only question is whether the civilians are able to have them too!

If an attacker is stopped before it happens, we don't really know if it would have been a rape or a mugging or an assault.

Don't take my post as fact, please research this and come up with your own opinion. Let it simmer a bit in your mind. You can call me crazy later, just let it percolate for a little bit first!

Here are my thoughts (or hypotheses, if you will):

Guns are a very political topic. There are narratives in place on both sides of the aisle. Most news is reported in service to the narratives that outlet supports.

Do the news sources you consume ever tell you about about defensive gun usage? In any context? These stories aren't hard to find if you look for them.

I'm unlikely to get a covid vaccination at this point, so let's use me as an example.

Will I be able to earn a living?

Will I be able to travel freely?

Can I go to the store?

Shall I be able to live where I do now or perhaps I should be put into some sort of camp?

What exact benefits of modern society should be withheld from the unvaccinated?

> A growing portion of society is getting tired of these plague spreading herman cain nomination recipients demanding their 'freedom' to spread disease to others.

This is the heart of the issue. How will vaccine skeptics and believers co-exist? I guess we could segregate by vaccine status. What do you see as the solution to this problem?

HN is full of conjecture and rich discussion on lots of topics. It is better to let people share anecdotes and opinions without ridiculing them.

It depends on who you ask! If you ask the mugger, he will likely say that you did have a choice.

This comment really hit me hard, Rayiner. I'm sending good thoughts and prayers to you and your family and every family with small children.

Reading another massive thread on HN about covid and vaccines. We are all drawn to it like a moth to the flame, trying to hash all of these differences out. I hope some good can come out of all of this.

I see a lot of comments making the assumption that reduced capacity is solely from extra patients seeking treatments.

There's another possibility, decreased hospital capacity due to vaccine requirements for the staff.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/more-than-150-houston-hosp...

I mostly agree with you, but what about the company's autonomy? This isn't coming from the company, it's coming from OSHA. What will the penalty be for companies who don't comply?

I wonder how long there won't be a legal penalty? Biden was visibly and audibly angry when talking about the unvaccinated. I caught a clip of a late night talk show host laughing about denying healthcare to the unvaccinated. The audience laughed. There is some serious demonizing going on right now.

edit: I realize now that I drifted from the original comparison with abortion rights. Although, I don't think the person seeking the abortion is prosecuted either (in most cases).

I'm not claiming that they aren't vaccines. Words change definition to follow usage. However, Merriam-Webster literally changed their definition of vaccine in the past 6 months or so. [0][1]

My argument is that by including these injections under the term vaccine, they are getting a halo effect from past vaccines that isn't warranted. Questioning vaccines is the lowest of the low, almost unthinkable, but these "vaccines" aren't like the old ones.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vaccine

[1] https://archive.is/XGfdr

For me personally, it's decreased general trust. I don't see the establishment as having a lot of credibility at this point.

Bad smells that make me distrust: Changing definitions of the word vaccine, so that the Covid 19 injections can be considered a vaccine. It becoming impermissible to question the vaccine. If you tell me there isn't room to doubt, then my response to you is bullshit. I've been a skeptic my entire life, and it has served me well. If I'm wrong this time and I die because of it, so be it.

> this sentiment holds very little water when it's coming from people who speak out against a vaccine mandate but choose to stay quiet on things like abortion rights.

Arguments around hypocrisy cut both ways! Consider how weak pro-choice arguments sound right now to people who don't want to be forced to take a vaccine. I'm assuming we will never ever hear "My body, my choice" as a pro-choice argument ever again, it would be absurd at this point.

Also, I wonder how much of this is a left vs right political debate. Most of the conservatives I personally know are vaccinated. It's possible that there are silent dissenters among the progressives that can't really speak up because they will be ostracized.

This is flame bait and extremely insulting.

Trust is indeed at issue here, but in my opinion, it's more about a lack of trust in authorities rather than trust in the "wrong talking heads". However, this is all conjecture on both our parts.