Constantignoble's interpretation of my post is right. I feel like you're reading right past what I'm actually saying and putting the worst meaning you can think of on it. Honestly, I think you're inventing my position for me on the fly. It's too easy to argue with a position I don't actually hold!
I'll repeat once again that I don't think it's funny that people are willingly ingesting toxic substances. I never even implied
toyot posted:the people trying to heal themselves today are all rightwing scum who deserve their organ failure...
they're all qanon scum who weren't worth burdening a hospital worker for
That's something you created out of thin air, and I explicitly disavow this mentality. Everyone who is sick or wounded should be given medical attention without judgement.
Another thing you're making up is this idea that the people taking ivermectin, hydroxycloroquine, or whatever other quack fake "treatments" are sick desperate people who are grasping for any possibility of healing themselves, innocently hear of these supposed cures, and naively take them. The reality I'm trying to point out and you keep dodging in your replies is that there is a very clear direct link between these "treatments" and ultra right wing, fascistic settler ideology, specifically Qanon and related Trump era movements.
Nobody is taking ivermectin naively. As was pointed out above, regular distribution methods are now tightly controlled. People who seek out and successfully obtain this stuff aren't just doing it because they believe it's the best medical option for them, they're doing it because they've been indoctrinated into a highly reactionary system of beliefs. Once again, this does not mean that they are unworthy of help or compassion. But it's not meaningless either.
The first important consideration is who is susceptible to being indoctrinated into this system of beliefs? What is the class background that dominates and molds this ideology? It's the Trump voting labor aristocrat whitey. The other side of the white coin that cruelly laughs at them. It's not the most marginalized and vulnerable people in society; it's the failing "white working class" upset that a coherent covid response requires them to sacrifice something for the common good for the first time in their life. Do they deserve to suffer? No, I don't think anybody deserves to suffer, but the natural consequence of poisoning yourself is that you get poisoned. If the circumstances of your birth and background all led you into the Qanon cult and truly believing that the poison will heal you then that's absolutely tragic but the consequence remains the same. It's not a moral argument. If I had the power to change the whole sequence of events that led them to there of course I would but I don't because it would require liquidating the labor aristocracy as a class.
The second important thing is the content of this system of beliefs. Namely, the belief that the believers are the REAL oppressed minority. The belief that the coastal liberal elite making jokes at their expense and suppressing "the real cures" is tyranny. You are reproducing this reactionary ideology under the guise of a concern for the common person, and framing opposition to it as a moral failing. You're also discarding inconvenient material facts about the benefits of the vaccines, the dangers of the virus, and the responses of countries that were (at least relatively) successful in fighting the spread of COVID to try to reinforce this reactionary belief.
toyot posted:you think the 'wellbeing of the collective' is best served by everyone being vaccinated
everyone who can be, yes, for the benefit of everyone else, including those who can't be vaccinated.
now, i know you included a bunch of qualifications immediately after that bit i quoted, and you may think it unfair of me to ignore them, but in my defence it was a stream of dog shit nonsense i'm not about to get down and roll around in with you. sorry to disappoint!
lol at the idea that i've moved on with life as normal. you don't know the first thing about my life. you're completely full of shit, lashing out at others with a holier-than-thou attitude as a defensive mechanism, lest anyone discover your real life doesn't live up to this persona you project. maybe that plays well on twitter but i'm not buying it, buddy, and i sure as hell won't be complicit by coddling you and pretending your posts have any merit.
toyot posted:and i did wait for FDA approval, like i said, and got vaccinated right after it was approved. i successfully avoided covid for nearly two years, then got covid symptoms a few weeks after full vaccination.
this doesn't seem accurate to conversations we've had or even stuff you may have posted about before - I'm specifically talkng about you mentioning that it was likely you caught the rona early on in it's inception, you know the variant that the vaccine was built for? not the delta variant (or whatever other variant) that you probably got. btw, do you know what variant you got? no? then shut the fuck up.
One of the great innovations of capitalism is precisely the deskilling of work. Capitalism took the task of commodity production away from the artisan classes, which can actually be associated with this "labors" concept, and gave it to the proletariat by breaking each complex production production process that an artisan would need to understand fully into simpler, self contained parts that workers could be trained on more quickly.
Through the social practice of production, the proletariat as a whole does accumulate the technical expertise necessary to run the society, and it's true that this expertise is an invaluable tool for revolution, but it should be seen as just one of the tools, not the primary aspect of the proletariat's revolutionary potential.
The revolutionary power of the proletariat doesn't come from the technical skill, knowledge, or achievements of each individual proletarian; it comes from the social role in production that the class as a whole plays. After all, the bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, and lumpen can, and often do, train themselves in these skills but how skilled in their field an engineer or scientist is has nothing to do with how revolutionary they are. Labor is not merely an activity, it is a social relation. The position of the proletariat within this social relation is why they are revolutionary.
zhaoyao posted:if anyone has recommendations regarding where a hobbyist could get / how to make a good growth medium for cyanobacteria macrocolonies please let me know
what sort of scale are you looking at? I have a biologist friend who's into that kind of stuff but I don't really have enough knowledge to know what to ask
zhaoyao posted:if anyone has recommendations regarding where a hobbyist could get / how to make a good growth medium for cyanobacteria macrocolonies please let me know
yeah, no problem, first select where you want your cyanobacteria to grown, then, and this is the tricky part, you're going to need a couple thousand hogs
karphead posted:got a talking to at work that i smell like weed too much
karphead posted:got a talking to at work that i smell like weed too much
When I first started smoking weed coincided with the time I was also really heavily involved in taekwondo and every time I would go to practice after cheeching it up earlier I would get paranoid that I was somehow sweating/secreting a weed emulsion that everyone could smell
The world in 10 years is going to be so fucking bizarre lmao
pogfan1996 posted:For teenagers today, it’s a major social faux pas to not share your location with your friends on your phone at all times.
i have a pretty small sample size but this isnt true in my limited experience. snapchat has been trying to push this with their heat map but has been largely failing. maybe you just know weirdos.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
tech giants slowly and successfully obscuring file systems worries me — both for its own sake (which I view broadly as an anti-literacy/deskilling campaign), and also for the way it slots so perfectly into the attitude of profound incuriosity inculcated by our ruling ideologies
Edited by Constantignoble ()
maybe comp literacy is roughly at par with previous generations' and i'm just biased because professors i know have been complaining about the very disconnect described in that article. it seems like something to keep an eye on regardless, i think, if anyone knows of any longitudinal studies or w/e
Edited by Constantignoble ()
posted from my olpc
Constantignoble posted:i don't know about the specifics above, but i will say that i've seen a lot of educators commenting that in the last few years they've seen a dropoff in basic computer literacy in students. between cloud apps and the interfaces of mobile/tablet devices (which is to say, mostly between the efforts of google and apple), users don't have to think in terms of the file system. this can yield results as simple as "my kid has to rewrite her essay because she's using a local word processor for the first time after a life of google docs, and did not know what the 'save' button was for"; it can also lead to real pedagogical difficulties that begin with incompatible mental models
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
tech giants slowly and successfully obscuring file systems worries me — both for its own sake (which I view broadly as an anti-literacy/deskilling campaign), and also for the way it slots so perfectly into the attitude of profound incuriosity inculcated by our ruling ideologies
when i was doing tutoring we would sometimes help students with researching information for assignments and a lot of them did seem to really lack an understanding of how to do a search on quite a basic level. it was a bit surprising to me because i tend to associate things like typing a question into google with much older people who never really learned computers. i think a few people have noted that younger people don't seem to have much awareness of how to pirate things either, which seems like it's connected to the ubiquity of streaming services and so on.
serafiym posted:seems more like the barrier to using computers is being lowered rather than any kind of "de-skilling."
i've been thinking it over and i'm less sure myself one way or the other. if nothing else, i'm very interested in the things that people who had one degree or another of "analog childhood, digital adulthood" are able to take for granted that the supposed "digital natives" Gssh was referencing often never learn.
i'm certainly not above being a bit peeved when a new update to something changes its interface in a significant way — that some arbitrary decision in some office somewhere now requires me to rewire my extended mnemotechnic systems yet again. and the de-emphasis of the directory structure might just be something like that (if a bit more conceptual) playing out on a grand societal level
if i were trying to articulate the deskilling narrative right now, i think i'd probably focus less on the "objective skills being discarded in the name of simpler user experience" per se, and more on the context in which this is happening — inner workings of basic operations of some of our most important tools growing more opaque under the auspices of capitalists linking arms with the repressive state apparatus, etc.
like, if we'd already transcended class, i don't think the idea of people needing to learn less and having more autonomy on what they focus on would trouble me at all
Edited by Constantignoble ()
i read the verge article and it kinda read like a complaint about how students these days wont even tidy their bedrooms - i guess if university professors want to lament that their undegrads have messy desktops and are shit at using computers for scientific research thats fine but i was teaching students chemistry the other day and, aged 14-15, many of them did not know what a chemical reaction was.
that being said i also agree with Gssh and Constantignoble that the "reification" of technology into an opaque box is actually bad.