Whenever you hear “when I was your age” or “when I was a kid,” it’s usually followed by a stream of bullshit. This will be no different, but it’s how I remember things.
When I was a kid we had people who we all knew were not book smart. They weren’t stupid, they just weren’t that great at math and english and science. They didn’t go to college or want to go to college, they went to trade schools, or became chefs or carpenters, or worked in the mill or the mine, or became cops or plumbers, some went to the military, and what not. They had good jobs and a lot of them made a good bit of money- enough to afford several vehicles, take care of their family, go to Myrtle or Ocean City or Deep Creek for a couple weeks. Y’all know who I am talking about.
There were a ton of them in my town. Half the population were college professors who worked at the college, the other half were steel mill workers, worked at Koppers chemical plant, the mines, and so on. What happened to those folks? Now everyone is a youtube epidemiologist, or became a critical race theory expert on Prager U, or became a lawyer through google. I don’t get it. I would never in a million years go into my doctor’s office and tell them they are wrong. I have never told my plumber “You’re full of it- it just need a new wax seal I saw it on youtube.” I’d never argue with my mechanic or electrician. No one seems willing to acknowledge there are experts any more. Now we got gas well roughnecks telling people who spent 50 years researching vaccines they’re wrong. What happened to people staying in their lane of expertise?
Obviously it’s tied to the erosion of the middle class and social media and the internet. But can those two things just make everyone go berserk? And yes, I’ve read the Death of Expertise.
And another thing (LISTEN UP YOU DAMNED KIDS)- I am just so over all the bullshit. Obviously there was an explosion of it during the Trump years- or was there? Most bullshitters know they are bullshitting. I doubt Trump did or cared. Regardless, there is just so much bullshit out there it is maddening.
It would be one thing if someone just up and said “I don’t like wearing masks they are uncomfortable and I will not wear them.”
Fucking fine, typhoid Gary. That’s a valid opinion, and there is a lot of shit I don’t like doing. But recognize people have a right to refuse you entry into their homes and businesses and what not and deal.
But it’s not that. It’s just bullshit like “I won’t wear a mask because you can get CO2 poisoning” or “I won’t wear a mask because I have a medical condition” or “I won’t wear a mask because the CDC has not been clear” or “I will not wear a mask because they don’t work look watch me spray this hose through a mask it won’t stop water how is it going to stop a virus” or all the rest of the bullshit we heard. Or my favorite, “They just want to control us.” I can fucking assure you that Anthony Fauci does not want to control you. I guarantee if he had his way he would never even have to think about or talk to you. He’d rather be off with other smart people doing smart people sciencey shit. What he doesn’t want to be doing is spending his waning years dealing with persuasion scholars and marketing experts working on campaigns to get Jimmy Bob down at the Stop and Shop to wear a fucking mask.
Ehh to hell with it I am gonna have some chocolate milk.
terben
Also, get off my lawn!
FelonyGovt
It’s infuriating. Like all the people who are claiming they don’t need to say if they’re vaccinated because “HIPAA” (although they tend to spell it HIPPA or HIPPO). I remember when people respected expertise and education.
Cermet
Well, I’m sick of it too. I went and got a rescue Saint Bernard “puppy”; i.e. 7 months old and 90 lbs and almost up to my waist. Need a good companion dog and have kept many Saints so this will be fun since she is already house trained and extremely well behaved. So, I’m happy (and I daughter is too since she really misses our wonderful Saint that passed two years ago.)
satby
I was wearing my mask at the Farmers Market yesterday, and a young couple came by and bought a bar of soap, I think as an excuse to give me a hard time about it. She claimed she was a nurse, they both spewed the usual stupidity about “scary vaccines injecting unknown dangers into their bodies, scientists don’t all agree, masks don’t help, blah, blah, blah”. Whatever. She said her job is trying to force her to get a vaccine, so good. Get fired, get sick, die, IDGAF. But mind your own business about my mask, and keep your comments about me “living in fear” to yourself.
Baud
@satby:
I know you wanted their money, but I would have loved it if you called your soap “mRNA lavender.”
Yutsano
Dolly is too damn good for this planet. Seriously.
raven
@Cermet: Damn. We’re thinking about it too. Bodhi has only been gone 2 months but Lil Bit 10. There is a one year old English Springer Spaniel & Shepherd mix up for adoption.
Baud
@Yutsano:
God, I wish she would just let Biden give her the medal of freedom.
dr. bloor
The people in your second paragraph–the smart kids who you trust to rewire the house or repair the car your kids occupy–are not the same people in the third paragraph. When *I* was a kid–before you were–a number of smart kids decided early on that they were best at plumbing, automotives, fine woodworking, sales, whatever–and had no truck for college track nonsense. A number of other kids you knew with issues like AD/HD and dyslexia, who were smart and maybe aspired to college, were also smart enough to know that it didn’t match up with their skill set, and went on to equally successful careers raising happy families.
The guys in the third paragraph have always been with us, in all tiers. To stay in your frame, they’re the guys who probably won’t kill anyone due to ineptitude or negligence during the course of their careers, but everyone stays away from them at the saloon. They are also guys with academic credentials out their asses, like Doug Feith and D’Ouche Disouza. The internets haven’t helped, but these assholes have always been with us, and always will.
Baud
@dr. bloor:
They used to be more evenly divided between the parties. I think that diluted their power.
dilbert dogbert
Being an asshole on social media is “costless” to the asshole posting so you get a lot of assholes posting.
Economics 101
dmsilev
@satby: ‘I love the fact that the vaccine made me magnetic. No more wondering where I left my keys’.
(Honestly, I shouldn’t joke about this. People do actually believe it, and it has frightened some away from getting their shots. Sigh.)
Baud
Professional badminton is insane.
dr. bloor
@Baud: Baud! 2024: A shuttlecock in every pot!
mvr
Last paragraph longer than one sentence in the above rant is a bit of a classic.
M. Bouffant
Testify, Brother Cole!
I may just go out & get some chocolate milk, too.
Kelly
If only we could offer a deep fat fried vaccine at state and county fairs we could have the recalcitrant folk immunized in no time.
Chief Oshkosh
Ran into a slew of God botherers today, saying that it’s ok for auntie to come visit even if she ain’t vaxxed. They said auntie is 80 and survived this long and so she’s tough and pre-blessed and that God will provide. They’re big on having a personal relationship with Jesus, so I told them that I, too, have a personal relationship with Jesus and that when he and I were enjoying conversation over a couple of cups of coffee this morning, he told me that he was so glad that his father, you know, THE LORD FUCKING GOD, he was so glad that Daddy had provided all those Big Brains down there on Earth, you know, HIS FUCKING CREATION, provided all those Big Brains who figured out how to make not ONE, not TWO, but THREE fucking vaccines, THE HOLY FUCKING TRINITY OF VACCINES, they’d figured out how to make AND DRISTRIBUTE the HOLY FUCKING TRINITY OF VACCINES to all of his children. So yes, it’s great that THE LORD GOD ALMIGHTY HIMSELF did indeed provide for Auntie Fuck-Up. I know this is all true because Jesus told me so.
Baud
@Chief Oshkosh:
Heh.
Patricia Kayden
“I will not wear a mask because they don’t work look watching me spray this hose through a mask it won’t stop water how is it going to stop a virus”
This has me rolling!! ? But I’ve actually heard similar arguments.
Sigh.
raven
The dog we are looking at is Mose, therefore
Mose Allison Young Man’s Blues Mose Allison
Oh well a young man
Ain’t nothin’ in the world these days
I said a young man
Ain’t nothin’ in the world these days
In the old days
When a young man was a strong man
All the people’d step back
When a young man walked by
But nowadays
The old man got all the money
And a young man
Ain’t nothin’ in the world these days
Tony Jay
What this always brings me back to is that awesome sci-fi event of the 1980s V (it was too awesome and I will cut you if you point out its many period failures) which had, you should recall, the alien Visitors moving to advance their nefarious aims by convincing the rest of humanity that the world’s scientists had been involved in a long-term conspiracy to hide the cures for many diseases, including cancer, to keep their funding streams alive. Which they did, by exploiting Earth’s TV News and Press outlets to expose the ‘evidence’ of this conspiracy and then promoting pogroms against the global scientific community.
At the time, I found it hilarious that the writers would expect viewers to swallow such a ridiculous conceit. People wouldn’t believe that ‘scientists’ were a sinister 5th Column! It was, I thought, a heavy handed attempt to parody the Nazi scapegoating of Jews with a sci-fi gloss, and was certainly not to be taken seriously enough to detract from the awesome awesomeness of having a prime time alien invasion saga splashed across the small screen.
I was wrong, and those writers were prophets. People totally would turn against scientists and science in general if their favourite TV pundits told them those scientists were laughing at them and that science was a conspiracy to make them feel dumb.
Jane Balder’s Diana would totally win the GOP Primaries as well.
satby
@Baud: I almost snatched the bag back and threw their money back at them.What stopped me was they stayed bizarrely polite while spouting that dreck.
dexwood
@raven: We lost two great dogs five months apart. Ike in December of 2006 and Wilson in May of 2007. I swore I’d never have another, that I couldn’t face another loss. Five weeks after Wilson was gone I told my wife I could no longer face coming home to an empty house, to a house without a dog. Within a week, Dexter Dog chose me. We brought that magnificent creature home. Truly one of the best dogs ever. Scary intelligence, a sense of humor it seemed, loyalty unbounded. He died from a bone cancer that had spread to his lungs in 2016. Woody and Ollie enliven our home now.
Eta: five months changed to 5 weeks in 4th sentence
Elizabelle
@raven: I hope Mose works out for you. What kind of dog?
Mose is a great name.
Baud
@dr. bloor:
I feel Shuttlecock Diplomacy should be a thing.
WaterGirl
@raven: Gorgeous dog! Go for it, raven.
satby
I hear this at least weekly, and not just from redneck fans of TFG. When I point out that new people get cancer every day and so a cure would be even more lucrative you can almost see the “Norman coordinate” meltdown as they digest that thought. I hate living in a red state.
mrmoshpotato
@satby:
Sorry, ma’am, Spirit Halloween doesn’t give out nursing degrees with their costumes.
Baud
@mrmoshpotato:
There are a ton of wingnut nurses.
Another Scott
“Where you stand depends on where you sit.”
Back when I was a kid, there were about 5 TV stations out of Atlanta, and the UHF stations rarely came in well. Walter and Chet and David and John told us what the important national and international news was every day. Just about everyone got at least one newspaper. Information was curated for most people, and people figured “if it’s on TV it must be true”.
Fast forward 4-5-6 decades.
Some 20-something in St. Petersburg or Monrovia or Ho Chi Minh City or Provo can post anything they want and it can show up on something that I might come across if The Algorithm decides to show it to me. Everyone can say anything, claim any evidence they want, never have to indicate their motivations or expertise or anything at all.
If you don’t read news from experts, then you won’t get expert opinions.
If you’re told by people you trust – and that those around you trust – that X is Y because it helps your tribe, then you’ll eventually end up believing it.
The problem is the people that replaced Walter and Chet and David and John. They have great power, but refuse any responsibility. As long as what they say increases “clicks” and “engagement” and drives up quarterly earnings, and as long as those are the only metrics that matter, then we’re going to be in this leaky boat.
Cui bono?
Cheers,
Scott.
The Thin Black Duke
@Baud:
Rule 34.
Michael Cain
Open rant, right? I blame dirt-cheap billion-op-per-second processors and software. Down the road from me is a successful small steel mill that’s been around for decades. Today they produce small runs of any of 350 different exotic alloys on demand, up to 50 in a given month. The people around the furnaces do what the computer displays tell them. The big bucks are for the college-educated metallurgists who do QA. Also R&D: they produce tens of thousands of miles of train rail each year, most of it also exotic, with service lives that Andrew Carnegie would have deemed impossible, and it gets better every year. By number of jobs, the steel industry there is across the yard from the mill at the company fabricating sections for wind turbine towers (using boring low-carbon steel brought in from Portland by rail). Everyone knows that at some point software will take over forming and welding that, too.
raven
@Elizabelle: Springer-Shep mix. We’re thinking he’s too big. Bohdi was 50 lbs and this dude is 47 now. With my physical issues we have said we need something smaller. That leaves us with the breeder issue. There are zero cockers in any rescue and buying one is so horrible. ugh
mrmoshpotato
@Chief Oshkosh:
??? Well done!
StringOnAStick
I’m just waiting for some asshole to confront me about my my mask; my husband has leukaemia and I will throw that card down, hard. Yes, he’s at Stage zero and it’s a chronic, not acute form but that doesn’t matter and my decision to give a shit about the people around me is none of their damned business.
On the positive side, I just canned 6 quarts of chilli sauce and I am now processing the 12 pints of chutney after spending hours peeling and chopping everything for it yesterday.
satby
@mrmoshpotato: I went to nursing school, but left a few months before finishing with the mutual agreement of the mother superior; and hospital program diploma credits didn’t transfer. So I became an EMT, and other stuff. But nursing students aren’t a particularly smart bunch. I lost track of the times I had to explain to my classmates that the 206 bones of the body did not include a penis bone.
Ken
Only one that comes to mind is the hair, and it’s not fair to blame the show for the country’s collective madness.
Especially after she disjointed her jaw and swallowed a live guinea pig at her first campaign rally.
MagdaInBlack
@raven: That’s a face I’m already in love with ❤️
raven
@dexwood: And we don’t “come home” we’re just here!
raven
@MagdaInBlack: I know this, we are NOT going to see him until we are sure about the size.
Chacal Charles Caltrop
@Cermet: good for you! My brother raised his daughter with a Bernese mountain dog that was so gentle that when the kids really annoyed her (trying to ride her like a pony, yanking her tail, etc) she’d just softly put her mouth around your hand and look at you as if to say, “if I were a biting dog I’d bite you but I’m not so just imagine I’m biting you right now” and my brother would tell the kids to be nicer to the dog. We miss her.
Leslie
@Kelly: There’s a post making the rounds on FB that says, “We’re going to have to wrap the vaccine in cheese, aren’t we?”
That, or bacon.
Suzanne
A lot of this is sexism and racism, of course. I work a lot with the construction industry, which is rapidly diversifying and educating, but still has a lot of legacy straight white dudes with only a HS diploma and maybe some trade school. You would likely not be shocked by how little they like being told what to do by women architects or minority engineers. They also resent the “office guys”, who lead the projects for the contractors, but are often hipster white dudes with college degrees and who haven’t actually built anything since high school shop class, or are the type that make bespoke furniture in their well-appointed home workshops.
Elizabelle
It’s the ascendant rightwing. Anything smacking of caring about “community” — right there, you have the beginning of commun -ism.
The leftwing antivaxx morons and the rightwing “you can’t make me, nyeah nyeah nyeah” are likely about to meet in the circle of a Venn diagram.
Anyone in patient-facing healthcare (including nursing homes/rehab centers/assisted living) who won’t take a vaccine: fire their asses. No way they should be around the vulnerable in a pandemic with a “novel” coronavirus. This one springs all manner of surprises on us.
Maybe we could bring in a bunch of people from all over the world — “shithole countries” // especially — and give them special 3-year work visas as care assistants. They get a vaccine (as does everyone in their family and their circle), and they can provide better care for our vulnerable elderly and patients.
You won’t take a vaccine and you’re in the military? You are out. You are a threat to readiness. Be a two-fer, since the military and law enforcement employ too many rightwing nut jobs. Use this to filter a percentage out. Law enforcement: turn in that badge and gun. More than one way to protect the community you allegedly “protect and serve.”
[FWIW, in my Virginia county, the police and fire department were incredible in staffing the mass vaccine clinics, along with the National Guard and — 3 cheers for school nurses! I am not against law enforcement, just against the thugs and deadbeats who are employed therein and do not belong.]
IMHO, people were not this outrageously selfish before. They just were not. Or, maybe it is that we just did not hear about it. But I do think rightwing propaganda, with all the emphasis on “rugged individualism” (what a load of crap) has given these shabby-ass people the idea that they can get away with this behavior. That they’re the ruling class.
Time for them to grow the fuck up.
Ken
I’m sure somewhere, scientists are working on a fix.
Hmm, wikipedia informs me that the other apes do have a baculum, so it may be as simple as one non-functional gene. Now where did I put that address for the National Science Foundation…
dexwood
@raven: Well, yeah, understood. I’m retired, too. That would make it worse for me, all day in a house without a dog. The horror.
Eric NNY
My grandfather retired from the Koppers Chemical plant in Petrolia, PA.
mrmoshpotato
@satby: That shit’s infuriating.
“I can say the most monstrous, racist/sexist/xenophobia/homophobic/just plain stupid ignorant bullshit if I’m polite about it, and no one can get angry at me.”
lowtechcyclist
I was staying at the Holiday Inn Express in Easton, MD (on the Eastern Shore; we were there for a hot-air balloon festival) this weekend. Each morning, there’d be 20-30 people eating breakfast downstairs at any one time, all unmasked of course.
When I went down to pick up breakfast for my wife and me and take it back to our room, I wore my mask. Nobody hassled me, I’m glad to say, but I was prepared to tell anyone who did that it made an excellent snowflake detector.
StringOnAStick
@Patricia Kayden: Masks stop being effective at blocking microbes when they get wet, so that moron is proving nothing about a mask not being able to stop water. Everyone in dental or medical knows this, it was on my damned state dental board exam!
Cermet
@raven: So very sorry for your loss – it is so difficult. But getting a new dog certainly helps – never to replace the original feelings – but a chance to create new ones. Good luck and hope that works out!
Starfish
@Baud: @satby: There should definitely be a magnetism soap that will make you magnetic and a 5G soap.
satby
@raven: if you cast your net wider on petfinder, or check with a breed rescue, I’m sure transportation can be arranged if you find a heart match.
MagdaInBlack
@raven: ?? I get that.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud:
I know, and I’ll never cease to be absolutely baffled by that fact.
Medical science is why you have this job!
Cermet
@dexwood: Glad to hear!
Starfish
The stupid has leaped into the real world with Billboards like this.
Also, today’s “people being stupid on the internet” thing was “dur hur hur, you parents worried about your unvaccinated children are stupid because more kids die in car wrecks, and you let them ride in cars.”
JPL
@raven: Too cute!
Suzanne
@mrmoshpotato: I hate to say it, but a lot of nurses are D-U-M dumb. I had to explain to my aunt, who was a wonderful nurse and retired as a CNO, that a MRI cannot read your thoughts.
Kay
@dr. bloor:
Agree. I think we could start with everyone valuing the work of others, no matter what it is.
Cermet
@raven: Not unlike Saints – they are difficult to find as rescues and extremely expensive otherwise; so I waited, and frankly, got extremely lucky. Very much hope the same occurs for you.
mrmoshpotato
@satby:
BWHAHAHA!!!
Another Scott
@StringOnAStick: +1
One can cut steel with water, also too, of course.
Too many people are too credulous because they value tribalism over actually learning anything about how the world actually works. :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Tony Jay
@satby:
It’s truly a triumph of ideology over intellect. Science grants are somehow a corruptive influence that render all ivory-tower know-it-alls untrustworthy, but ‘experts’ in the pay of corporations who just so happen to report findings that benefit the people buying them hookers and blow? Don’t be so cynical. They’re just wholesome truth tellers who reject the heavy hand of totalitarian consensus.
Modern conservatism just breaks things. It’s a truly dangerous fad.
Cermet
@Chacal Charles Caltrop: Sorry for the lost; big dogs are a special breed that require willingness to accept a shorter life span. But they are rewarding in ways that make that shorter time so very special – like brother’s your Bernese.
Tony Jay
@Ken:
Hell, that was the moment I decided she was the woman for me.
lowtechcyclist
@Chief Oshkosh:
There’s an old story, fairly well known in fundagelical circles, about a guy whose town gets flooded, and he’s up on his roof to stay above the flood waters.
Guy in a rowboat comes by. “Hop in, I’ll get us both out of here.” “No, I have faith in God. I’m counting on him to rescue me.”
Next, a guy pulls up in a motorboat, already has a few passengers, but has room for one more. Same offer, same response.
Finally, the guy on the roof is all the way up on the roof line as the waters rise. A helicopter flies overhead, sees him, and drops a ladder. “No, I have faith, God’s gonna rescue me.”
So he drowns. And at the pearly gates, he tells God, “look, I had faith in you. Why didn’t you rescue me?” And God replies, “I sent you a rowboat, a motorboat, and a helicopter. What more did you need?”
So when I think of the fundagelicals counting on their faith to protect them from Covid, I think of this story, only this time the ending is, “I sent you masks, social distancing guidelines, and finally an extremely effective vaccine. What more did you need?”
Kay
I read this essay by a shy person once, he wanted to be better at conversing with people, and he came up with a kind of universal response when someone would tell him what they did for work- “that sounds like a hard job”. People would be like “YES! It IS hard! No one even realizes!” His new best friend :)
From there I think you’re less likely to become an internet vaccine expert, based on your extensive Twitter studies. I don’t know for sure but I think less likely starting from that place. Respect what people do.
raven
@Cermet: I’ve had dogs since 1970 so I know the drill.
dexwood
@Cermet: Wish you many happy puppy days, even on the what did I do days.
realbtl
@raven:
Nice but I prefer Everybody’s Crying Mercy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fUoEIA6414
dmsilev
@Ken:
http://www.grants.gov for a general clearinghouse, fastlane.nsf.gov for NSF in particular.
Hope that helps. Good luck with the proposal.
Suzanne
@Kay:
Yes. But then it gets very quickly into resentment about how much people make, and the “wrong people” making more money. I have had multiple people tell me that I don’t deserve to make as much as the dudes who hang the drywall in the buildings I design. That isn’t a statement about wanting everyone to make more. That isn’t even a statement about drywall person being undervalued. That’s a statement about wanting to lower the status and financial position of women and people with degrees.
This is what drives the disgust for expertise that John is noting. It’s that the “wrong people” are succeeding even slightly more at this game.
It’s frustrating because it’s unsolvable. None of us, short of the very few most committed communists, envision a future in which everyone is really and totally equal. Even if the Dems passed every bit of wealth distribution legislation we could write, some people are always going to have more money or social status. If the problem for a lot of people is not that they don’t have enough but just that they aren’t at the top of that heap, then we are screwed.
raven
@realbtl: oh yea
Cermet
@raven: Sorry, didn’t mean to imply anything
Catherine D.
@Chief Oshkosh: Obligatory ?
Suzanne
@lowtechcyclist: I found out yesterday that one of my HS classmates, part of my social cohort at the time, is hospitalized and doing really badly with Covid and he had to be ventilated yesterday. We’re 41. He’s a smart dude. It’s really, really sad.
Bluegirlfromwyo
@satby: My mother taught nursing (LPNs and RNs) for 20 years. We heard some wild stories about her students at the dinner table.
Starfish
@dmsilev: Do you think BJ Dick Mayhew will help him with that proposal?
realbtl
@raven: Re: dog size. I’m 72 and have always had 50-ish pound dogs, currently a 12 yo Weimaraner. I’ve already decided on an upper limit of 30#. I had to have my son load my last Weim into the car for her last trip. The other thing is I want older dogs. Don’t want to leave one w/o his long time friend just in case.
raven
@Cermet: Oh not at all, I took no offense. I just meant I’ve been through it and look at all the great dogs I’ve had and thing “one more”!!
Chief Oshkosh
@Catherine D.: Ha! An oldie but a goodie.
mrmoshpotato
@Suzanne:
Oh those hot, buff MRI machines and the dirty thoughts they invoke… ?
Bluegirlfromwyo
@Suzanne: Yep. IMO, it’s part of the pushback on Fight for Fifteen that doesn’t get enough notice. My wingnut hairdresser told me flat out that she didn’t want people in fast food to make more of a wage because they didn’t deserve it. Understand what they mean by “deserving” and you will understand (and likely be replused by) a lot of the conservative mindset.
raven
@realbtl: I’m the same but my bride is 63 and she may be even more of a dog lover than me! I delayed back surgery because I was having to horse Bohdi around in a sling for him to be able to poop. It would be easy to jump the gun on this pooch but we really did set that same weight limit as you.
Frankensteinbeck
Look, if you people need a 100lb pet that’s utterly chill and friendly with everyone and everything, just get a capybara already.
Starfish
@Frankensteinbeck: Does that mean we would get capybara posts on the front page? Tamara is a sucker for animals. Do you think we could convince her that she needs a giant Australian rodent?
Chetan Murthy
John,
Considering these youtube epidemiologists, I wonder how many of their *parents* [elders, more generally] are unvaxxed ? I would guess, not that many. In short, I think it’s mainly performative. They don’t actually -believe- these things they spout; hell, they don’t actually believe anything in particular. Truth, falsehood, it’s all irrelevant.
What matters is the exercise of power. That’s why it matters to them whether they can force other people to doff the mask, eschew the vaxx, reopen the school without adequate ventilation. It’s about the exercise of power.
Same as it ever was.
Kay
@Suzanne:
Those people are assholes and they exist in all social classes. I’ve been following the “Cyber Ninjas” – the awful people who are supposedly auditing Arizona and they went in there knowing not the first thing about election systems or how votes are tabulated so they incessantly question what is ordinary process. Over and over and over. They give the people who do that work no credit. They arrived on scene with that attitude and I bet it extends to each and every interaction, from the dry cleaner to the plumber to the architect. Everything is “easy” and “obvious” and everyone can do everyone elses job using just “common sense”. It’s arrogance.
Citizen Alan
@Tony Jay: Both V miniseries were awesome. But they had to go back to the well one last time, and make an ongoing series that was just terrible.
mrmoshpotato
Fixed. I otherwise endorse your scheme…I mean, plan.
dexwood
@Frankensteinbeck: Is there a rescue site link you’d be kind enough to suggest? I’d have the neighborhood talking about my morning walks.
Suzanne
@Kay:
Yes, absolutely. But it is also meanness, or as Adam Serwer would point out, cruelty. It is not trying to make a better world for others. It is about restoring a world that, just coincidentally, disadvantaged women, minorities, nerds, LGBT people, etc etc etc. Anti-intellectualism is rooted in envy of money and social status.
Mary G
@raven: Mose is perfect. Bring him home. Raven, Lil Bit and Bohdi are cheering you on. Maybe.
I keep looking on Petfinder where they used to have poodle mixes, because the housemate’s mildly allergic to her mom’s Chihuahuas, but I guess people are also looking and I keep losing out. Then the rescue hits me up for donations every other day like the pols do.
Xavier
@Kay: And paying appropriately!
Citizen Alan
@mrmoshpotato: Yes, but do nurses actually study science to the same level as doctors? Or is a big percentage of it just learning how to operate monitors and respond appropriately when they start beepings, plus knowing how to inject drugs in the exact quantity the doctor says.
raven
@Mary G: He’s too big for us.
Nutmeg again
@Cermet: So Hey Cermet– Not that you asked, but I’m going to try and save you some major bucks down the road.. Growth plates on giant breeds like Newfies and Saints DO NOT CLOSE until they are about 18 months old. So, what does that mean? There is a big-ass gap between the end of one leg bone and the beginning of the next one. Think hips ($4000 + to repair) elbows ($2500 + to repair) and etc.
So– no running, moderate walking (like 10 minutes or less), NO tumbling or roughhousing. Food–moderate amounts of protein. Don’t jack it up or they develop too fast and don’t lay down the bone they need to hold up all that wonderfulness safely.
I’m sure there is plenty more at a good Saint website, off forsure at Newfie ones.
Oh My!! good luck, enjoy, and save your towels!! You fall in love with the big goofballs like nothing else (just ask TaMara)
PS…don’t even ask how I know the cost of doggy ortho repairs off the top of my head…. I have sent several vet’s kids to college, I think! worth it, but, ah, giant eye roll.
zhena gogolia
@raven:
Bodhi and Lil Bit are on the calendar this month.
There’s also a Chihuahua named Daenerys. So cute. I don’t know whose that is.
realbtl
@raven: I’ve been slowly acclimatizing myself to small dogs of my daughter and some other friends., did not used to like but they can be cute as hell.
Though I sometimes call them alleged dogs. : )
Catherine D.
@realbtl: Oh, I hear you! My 60 lb dog died on July 4 2018 during a heat wave. My knees are toast, so I couldn’t dead lift him off the floor. I had to roll him onto a sheet, drive the car up the lawn as close to the front door as possible, and drag him out of the house. It was just a leetle bit traumatic.
And then Cornell lost his body. They were really lucky I didn’t want his ashes.
A Ghost to Most
Temporal fracture headache, or Horvathian brain tick?
mrmoshpotato
@Citizen Alan: That’s irrelevant to my point. Hospitals, urgent care clinics, pharmacies*, etc all exist because of medical science, and working at one but pooh poohing medical science is insane (in the membrane and insane in the brain).
*Bring on the “Actually, that’s chemistry…” crowd.
sab
@satby: Evey state has different requirements for nurses. Some have associates degrees ( 2 year,) some have bachelor’s dgrees ( 4 year) and some have STNU certification (State Tested Nurses Aide) that have no degree but think of themselves as nurses.
My GSD had a CGC and acted like she had earned a Utility degree.
Kay
@Xavier:
Absolutely – pay approprietly- but don’t make rate of pay the only measure of the worth. One good thing that came out of the pandemic is people were like “I am wholly dependent on the UPS driver” :)
I love that sort of shake up.
I go into this convenience store by my office once or twice a week and it’s always understaffed and that is a hard job! They sell gas, lottery tickets, beer, whole premade meals, they take deliveries, restock, inventory, all kinds of phone cards and shit, the phone rings constantly (who calls convenience stores and why?) – those women could run the world.
debbie
@dmsilev:
Are you familiar with this testimony from an anti-vax nurse?* It was the only moment that surpassed the esteemed Dr. Tenpenny’s testimony earlier that day.
(* The actual punch line is at the very end. “Um, no it doesn’t.”)
debbie
@raven:
He’s a real cutie!
Suzanne
@Kay: Here is Tyler Cowen commenting on the fact that the median male wage was higher in 1969 than it is today:
I don’t think it is an accident that anti-intellectualism flared up once women started succeeding to a greater degree in education and professional life.
Chetan Murthy
@mrmoshpotato:
Indeed: one might (only *might*) imagine that the doctor, having advanced training, might think to himself [b/c it’s always a fucking *man* innit] that he can “think for himself” and conclude that covid ain’t no thang [he’d be wrong]. But a nurse [assuming that nurses are not trained as deeply in all the “science”] ought to understand that they’re following orders, are cogs in a system, and ought to damn well respect that system that trained and employs them.
As it turns out, neither of them is actually trained in “science” but rather, they’ve both been trained in different levels of “ingest, digest, and regurgitate”.
raven
@realbtl: thanks!
Betsy
@Chief Oshkosh: I know a couple just like poor Auntie. They were pastors of a local church, my neighbor’s auntie and uncle. The Lord will provide, and they need not cancel church, and they were going to do everything just like they were told to do by perhaps a supernatural being. And they both got Covid and they both died of it, within days of each other. They were old, but not that old. And the whole family is sad and the whole church is sad.
But somehow I don’t think their church folks are sad in quite the way that they ought to be sad. It’s this whole “we love suffering because it means that Jesus loves us” idea.
Ksmiami
@Suzanne: and that’s why I’ve turned mean against them. I hope they sicken and die and leave the world just a little bit better by their absence.
trollhattan
So, Mormon then.
Chetan Murthy
@Betsy:
It goes all the way back to the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Essene pre-Christian cults. Adversity, and holding faith thru it, were prized and proof of being among God’s Chosen. Imbeciles.
trollhattan
@debbie: TBF keys stick to me all the damn time. It’s a puzzle, I tells ya.
Mary G
@Suzanne: Wow, scary. I got a lesson in the difference in kinds of intelligence the first time my mom left my PhD father with a photographic memory in charge of me and he almost set the kitchen on fire trying to make breakfast. Putting bread in and pushing the lever on the toaster, throwing a dish towel over it and shoving it under the cabinet to have room to pick bits of shell out of the scrambled egg, all while reading the LA Times was proof of that.
Luckily I am much more like my mother and six year old me pulled the plug and used the cord to drag the whole stinking burning mess into the sink and we splashed a lot of water everywhere, then went out to eat. I enjoyed the whole incident tremendously because I got to order pigs in blankets at the restaurant and stay home from school to help
hide the evidenceclean up.Daddy was permanently banned from everything flammable anywhere and stuck to getting ice out of trays for evening cocktails.
Chetan Murthy
@Mary G:
What was Dad a PhD in? One presumes, not, y’know, chemistry or biology? Maybe …. math? philosophy? english lit?
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@satby:
My answer is in the breach and ready to ram home.
Simply stated, it’s this:
”My grandmother lived to be 99 – you wanna know how? Minding her own fucking business.”
Betsy
@satby: What right-wingers like best about liberals and sane people is their peaceful equanimity in the face of sociopathy. High-quality social interaction with nice folks. And you can say anything to ‘em, even insult and taunt them if you’re not openly aggressive – and the nice, level-headed libs will bite their tongues.
This is just like the way the right wingers get to live in a nice society, with science, and liberal people who do things right and care about other people, and believe in civics, and keep the systems running for their sorry sociopathic asses.
The Pale Scot
@Tony Jay:
That’s an hypothesis alright. If the PTB aren’t in league with ETs+ ruining the biosphere to enslave Earthers, would they be doing anything different?
& Did ja see B doing the Stooges routine with an Umbrella?
Amir Khalid
When I saw the post headline, a song came to mind.
gwangung
Actually, I do find perservering through adversity to be admirable.
But not when it’s self-inflicted.
trollhattan
@Kay: For example, the drywall dudes who installed at the Surfside Condos should have earned more than the architects and engineers, obviously, plus the inspectors and regulators who came later. It’s just science.
Suzanne
@Ksmiami:
I don’t know if I would say that I’ve “turned mean”. But I don’t see people with ideas like these as worth bringing into the Democratic coalition, either. (Nor do I want to personally consort with anyone like this, either.) I still want to pass policies that make their lives better. But I have zero interest in restoring their social status. If they want to get on board the political train I’m riding, they need to change, because I don’t want the Dems to meet them where they are.
raven
The wing nuts are going to stroke out with this huge Mexican crowd at the US-Mexico Gold Cup Final
ET
Anything after “I don’t want to wear a mask” is just someone trying to look for a socially acceptable excuse because at heart they know they should wear one and not doing so because they don’t want to makes them look (because they are) selfish fucking assholes . And most people don’t want to think of themselves as selfish fucking assholes and don’t want anyone else to think that as well. This is a salve to their egos.
Ksmiami
@Suzanne: there’s no meeting fascists half way- there’s only defeating them and their ideological illness
Bluehog
Obviously it’s tied to the erosion of the middle class and social media and the internet.
… or, Fox News, Fox News, and Fox News.
FlyingToaster
10 years older than you, dude, and completely fucking tired of it.
In today’s nonsense, WarriorTeen went up to her friend’s house and got the scoop on one of the two unvaccinated classmates — she’s decided she doesn’t care about protecting anyone else, and she hates needles. My daughter is calling her a sociopathic bitch.
Plus a friend of the (visited kid’s) mom who is borderline antivaxer, using the Provincetown outbreak as a result.
Let’s see: ~900 cases of tested, vaccinated folks in the outbreak, <500 symptomatic (chest cold), 7 hospitalized for low pulseox. No ICU cases, no ‘vents. All of the sequenced samples are confirmed Delta variant. That says that the vaccines are like 99% effective against severe illness for the variants, and ~50% against symptomatic illness. Better than the flu vaccine most years, and this isn’t even for the fucking actual virus they got vaccinated for.
I’m waiting to hear from school, but I can abso-fucking-lutely guarantee that it’s going to be masks indoors, separate entrances for elementary and middle schoolers, and staggered dropoffs.
I wish it would include mandatory weekly testing for the 2 8th graders who aren’t vaccinated, but I am not the God Empress of Middle School Parents so I lose… Already planning on dropping kid two blocks from school in the am and making them ride the T bus home on regular days (we’ll pick up on late days, because I do actually want afterschool activities to return, dammit).
If I’m never there, it’s impossible to engage me with their craziness.
dr. bloor
@Chetan Murthy:
As a chemist, Daddy definitely would have been a baller.
Betsy
@Suzanne: so much of this would go away, I think, if people had basic security about healthcare, housing, decent schools, being able to send their kids to a higher-Ed school (be it technical or vocational or academic)so they know their kids will do OK. because after you have dental insurance, and food security, and a safe neighborhood to live in, what the hell else do you really need? Except maybe you know a good dinner and a family vacation a couple times a year?
It’s like that story about the law professor in Chicago who was pulling down a cool half million a year and yet he and his equally remunerated professional wife whined about how poor they were because after they sent their kids to a good school district ($) and paid private dollar for all the other life-security stuff they needed, which are just basic guarantees in any normal civilized country, they felt poor.
A lot of the “class envy” that Republicans talk about is really just desperate people who can’t get ahead no matter how hard they work, and zero social safety net to speak of, and Amon the middle and upper middle class everyone committing a lot more private resources than would be necessary to do public risk management of the same basic needs.
Nutmeg again
@raven: great markings! looks like such a cutie
namekarB
Hmmmm, I hope you did not purposely say such a hurtful thing. But actually a big part of nursing school is biology and physiology. Like learning not only the names of every bone, muscle, organ and nerve in the body but what each does and how they are interconnected. And then there are courses on how different medications work in the body and how they act or react to other medications. Have you ever dealt with a life and death blunt force trauma wound? Yeah, they teach that in nursing school and a whole lot of other things too long to list here.
Tazj
@Citizen Alan: Nurses aren’t required to take the same science courses doctors usually do for their undergraduate degrees and pre-med courses are more difficult. Doctors usually take inorganic and organic chemistry, biology and physics along with other courses in science like cell biology. My husband, a physician, hated biology and I loved it! For my undergraduate degree in Nursing I took classes in chemistry, microbiology, biology, physiology, pathophysiology and anatomy. I also had to take required courses in psychology and studied French literature in college because I took French in middle school and high school for 6 years. I took Russian in college for fun.
As a nurse you don’t just don’t read numbers off a machine you also have to understand what they mean, doctors don’t want you to be calling them about everything but want you to be able to realize when things are starting to go downhill. You are responsible for the medications you give and you must understand their side effects and how they interact with other medications. Certain medications must be added to IV’s but can’t be run with certain IV fluids or they precipitate out. When I first worked at a hospital I had to reconstitute antibiotics and mix them myself. Doctors prescribed wrong medications or the wrong dose, and I had to call and have it corrected. Most of the time the pharmacy caught errors but not always when orders were written in a hurry or IV fluid had to be mixed on the floor. Try drawing up meds during a code when a doctor is screaming at you.
I once had a parent tell me that my job as a pediatric nurse was that of a glorified babysitter and sadly this wasn’t a uncommon sentiment.
I understand that people have dealt with nurses who were horrible, I’ve dealt with more than a few myself (though many more doctors) and all of us aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed (myself included) There are also too many right wingers in the profession for my liking. However, the job of a nurse entails more than you know. Though I don’t think nurses should never be criticized especially the one Satby dealt with, I think they deserve more respect than this thread is giving them.
David Anderson
@Starfish: nope, I do policy, not clinical
Mary G
@Suzanne: I turned 65 and have way more money in IRAs and a 401k than I ever expected to and am trying to do a series of improvements/deferred maintenance to my house and so many fucking times I call a company and get a guy who wants to talk to my husband or significant other and doesn’t seem to hear me when I say it’s my house; I am single; only my name is on the title; no, I don’t have a wife either. I don’t know if they’re playing dumb because they don’t want to work for a woman or if it’s just not computing.
And yes it’s totally unfair that I got through college almost completely with scholarships for tuition (I had one $800 loan that was forgiven without me asking for it) and my dad’s Social Security was exactly enough for room and board and I got a job in 1980 with a lousy salary but gold plated benefits that gradually went away as the salary went up, but helped me tremendously with the company car and all. I want millennials and GenZs to have what I had but I’ve stopped feeling personally bad about it because I voted for the most liberal candidate in every election and it’s my cohorts who fell in love with cocaine and money that fucked up.
namekarB
@Tazj: You said it better than I did.
Suzanne
@Betsy:
I am less convinced that this is true. There’s a lot of people who were really happy when women were dependent and minorities were forced by economic circumstance to serve them.
Once again, I quote Rachel Bitecofer:
“Now, IDK if its just that I’m one of fewer academics that come from the real, unpolished, bottom 50% world, and not the romanticized bullshit painted by J.D. Vance of working-class America- the real one where people have 3 kids from 3 different women and get angry when 1 of them is reticent to let them visit their kid when they get out jail. AGAIN. In THAT working class, sexism, racism, xenophobia, and bigotry run rampant: and not only are these “isms” prevalent, there is a belief that they shouldn’t have had to be buried (see how that relates back to their culture war champion?) That the old days were far superior bc they could just call someone a f&g or slap their female co-worker in the ass is they were in the mood. There was a hierarchy, a caste @Isabelwilkerson notes, and they were at the top of it. Everything else might be a shit sandwich, their job, their house, their marriage, their debt, but that hierarchy & their place at the top of it- as Wilkerson notes in her book, that shit was SOLID. And now its gone. And do you know who took it? The Democrats.”
Cheryl from Maryland
@Baud: Thanks to Title Nine, my college added athletic teams for women. One of them was badminton, and I was on the team. After watching the Olympics, our coach taught us this hot new backhand serve used by the Asian Olympic teams. It was and is killer.
Betsy
@Chetan Murthy: It flared up with the Calvinists. Look at the Boers and the Cape Fear scots, for two longstanding examples. Both loved misery and being busted out on the hardscrabble homeplace with their miserable women and miserable dogs.
Wasn’t there aome wingnut railing to the masses last week about how he loves people who get up and go to crappy jobs? Preaching to that choir.
namekarB
@Mary G: Ayup. My neighbor (retirement community) is a single black woman. House painters arrived and without introducing himself asked if he could talk with the owner. Oh yeah, she lit him up before running them off her property. Then got a different paint contractor
Betsy
@Suzanne: I hear what you are pointing out. I guess I never understood hierarchy or wanted it and so that whole attitude confuses me! But it sure is out there.
Mary G
@Chetan Murthy: Theology and Philosophy plus ClassicGreek, Roman, and Aramaic. The usual Jesuit stuff. He was particularly clueless because as the oldest son in a Very Catholic family he was sent to boarding school for future priests at the age of 11 where they had house elfs like Hogwarts who took care of everything invisibly and all thru college he lived with priests who had Irish housekeepers who did the same. When he left the church for my mother their first and probably last big fight was when they were trying to make a budget and he didn’t believe that you had to pay for gas and electricity. He was sure he would’ve heard of such a thing at the age of 42.
Suzanne
@Mary G: Isn’t it amazing how many men never learned so many basic-ass life tasks? Their mothers never taught them that stuff.
My mom was my Girl Scout troop leader for a while. She taught us all basic auto maintenance, among other things. I remember taking “Life Management” in junior high, which is what they called Home Ec. There were only two boys in my class. My mom asked me at one point what we learned, since I told her we didn’t really do much cooking or sewing. I told her we learned how to balance a checkbook, how to read a nutrition label, how to do CPR and basic first aid. Everyone should have taken that class.
pluky
@Starfish:
Capybaras are South American, not Australian.
sdhays
@StringOnAStick: I don’t know what they said on your so-called “medical exam”, but if you OPEN YOUR MIND to all the fascinating democratically collected research published outside ELITE CONTROL on Facebook, you would understand the TRUTH.
// In case it isn’t obvious.
Brachiator
Sorry I missed this great thread with so many interesting comments. I look forward to follow up discussion.
J R in WV
What a great thread. Appreciate all the information about crazed RWNJ nurses, underpaid sheetrock hangers, over paid architects, etc. Being self-quarantined as we are, I don’t get exposed to so much of that.
I had to run to a tractor and equipment shop for a part last Friday. Listening to NPR talk about Covid Delta, then NO ONE was wearing a mask, and as sure as I’m typing this none of them were vaccinated either. Scary. Now I’m going to check my blood oxygen levels and try to go back to sleep. Insomnia got me tonight.
Dextrous
No one seems willing to acknowledge there are experts any more.
I haven’t seen this yet so I’ll add my two cents. I do think hierarchy lies at the root of all interactions. The scared subset that wallows in certainties will do anything to preserve hierarchical organization in society as up to this point it has rewarded those who have more, not who do more. For this specific issue of openly flouting expertise, I think we should look to the culture wars of the late 60’s. The right was enraged by the Questioning of Authority, but then learned to incorporate it into their DNA, as is true of any system that survives an attack. A system has to undergo an impetus, react, then arm itself against similar attack. The most expedient course for the last item is to import the gene/meme/angle of attack used against oneself and reverse it upon the enemy. (Th least efficient is to wall off the attack as the cost of maintaining the perimeter will outweigh the benefit of keeping a provisional status quo in the protected system). You have to give the threatened cohorts of the 70s a lot of credit for smoothly incorporating the arguments and the tactics of the left. March for women’s rights? Welcome to the MRA. March for civil rights? Have fascists march with torches. Expose the hypocrisy of the elite who ran the CIA? Weaponise that idea into distrusting all elites. Of course these people are playing with fire but their amorality will keep them half a step ahead of the inferno so they leap from grift to grift collecting something every step of the way.