Because nobody would want to use FedBook. People on all ends of the political spectrum have reasons to not want to share their most personal and sensitive data directly with the government. Plus, because FedBook would have to be very careful about how it moderates content in order to not infringe on users 1st Amendment rights, it would likely be a cesspool of racist and conspiratorial content.
The problem with the concept of covid-induced brain fog is that the symptoms of brain fog are indistinguishable from general anxiety. I'm still not convinced that brain fog is a legitimate, medical outcome of having covid, as opposed to a culturally-conditioned response that's dependent on one's perception of the severity of covid. Anecdotally, among the people I know in real life, the only ones that have complained about post-covid brain fog are those that already tend to be hypochondriacs or doomers.
Long covid is very real and is not anxiety. There have been studies linking post covid fatigue and conditions to viral persistence and micro clotting. This type of post covid is just anxiety discourse is incredibly harmful.
This kind of discourse has been par for the course for as long as "mental illness" has existed. I don't know a single chronically ill person who hasn't gone through being undermined and treated this way.
Post viral syndrome has been been recognized for decades and linked to a wide variety of different viruses. So although the exact mechanisms aren't clearly understood there's no reason to think that SARS-CoV-2 couldn't cause similar effects.
But in terms of specific symptoms, a recent study found only a weak correlation between confirmed COVID-19 and brain fog. Other persistent symptoms such as anosmia are much more common.
This is just a case where the tools we have for examination are lacking and subjective symptom description barring specific indicators is pretty useless from a research standpoint.
This is a great point! In order to find out, perhaps we should engage some experts at a leading research institution to do some wider studies that are able to account for such factors. Maybe Stanford could do it?
I can't distinguish your comment from cognitive impairment either, but I do you the favour of assuming you're capable of evaluating and describing what's going in your head, and you'd do well to do the same for others.
Anecdotally, my brother developed long covid, with both physical (increased heart rate, increased recovery time from simple tasks like walking up stairs) and mental (only occasional brain fog). Never had these problems prior to covid. He's one of the most level-headed people I know, and is not prone to over-reacting to pretty much anything (his wife does that for him).
If he says he personally experiences a thing, I'll trust his word over an armchair therapist on the internet any day of the week.
It’s fun to drop verbatim quotes from his manifesto into random internet discussions without attribution. A lot of people agree with his ideas without realizing it.
This isn't as indicative of ignorance or hypocrisy as it implies (and it comes off as a petty "gotcha" with an attitude of superiority). He said and did a lot of things. It's normal to variously agree and disagree with each thing in a vacuum. This is true of most political/societal figures, no matter how horrific they are, taken as a whole.
If we're talking about individual out-of-context quotes, I don't think it's correct to separate the art from the artist. Human language is very imprecise, and knowing the author of a quote can significantly change the meaning of a sentence.
I'm just going to make up an example: let's say the quote in question is "Democracy requires active participation." If I saw this posted by an anonymous internet commenter in a political discussion, I would completely agree. The obvious interpretation is that democracy works better when people vote, speak to your representative, organize, etc.
Now let's say the commenter reveals that this is a quote from a presidential assassin. Well, now I'm a little uncomfortable. Why did they choose this particular quote? Do they agree with the assassin's fringe definition of "active participation"? The intended meaning has completely changed with this new information. The identity of the author is part of the message, because we aren't talking about objectively true or false statements, we're talking about philosophical ideas that are much bigger than the quote provided.
I just wonder how many people who could have done better were blocked by the actions of all these artists people want to make excuses for. How many great works were we denied because someone insisted on making space for someone who repelled (or worse) better people?
The zero-sum command-economy view of free speech: we have to exercise prior restraint on what people can say to ensure that there’s room for the people we approve of to speak.
This seems pretty un-generous. The parent is citing a real, straight-forward cause-and-effect which does not necessitate or even imply a zero-sum game, nor does it imply the extremist solution you're accusing them of supporting.
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
My post was a call for being smarter about who we invest in. I always wonder about people who call for separating art and artist over such mediocre artistry.
I haven’t read the entirety of his manifesto, but his ideas always struck me as typical narratives that resonated with people’s anxieties about modernity.
A bit of a bait and switch. Get attention with something shocking and violent, then appeal to worries through apocalyptic boogeymen. The solution, of course, is a sense of comforting tradition that the naturalness of the past is safe. A killer combo!
What are some good Nero quotes? Wikiquotes only has two; one of which is "I wish I could not write." which seems a bit ironic since it seems most of his writings are now gone.
> [Death in the battlefield] is what the youth is for, after all
...Which suggests (cpr. the "treasure" quote) how quote dropping is mostly a leisurely activity, given broad statements.
> I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few
...Which suggests - hopefully - how quote dropping is mostly a leisurely activity, given its non exhaustive intrinsic nature.
--
Edit: related (with the first branch):
> He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future
Put the three together ("treasure", "battlefield", "owning"), the whole idea gets a sinister tone; take "treasure" alone, it may even raise "awww"s - without substance.
That's because he took virtually all of his ideas from other people who said it better, and thus I'm not sure why one wouldn't quote those sources rather than a known terrorist and murderer? Young minds are often easily influenced and bad at separating the person and the message of the writing. It's kind of like inverse MAGA, where the cult of personality is the important thing and the content doesn't really matter, only its source.
one of the funniest things for me is the fact that many left-wing people add Kaczynski quotes without realizing that left-wing people are basically the first people to be criticized and almost mocked in Ted's main piece, "Industrial society and its future"
I would describe myself as left-wing, and I agree with some (not all) of his criticisms of "the left" in general. Turns out that left-wing people can have disagreements. Furthermore, I can reject argument X while simultaneously also accepting argument Y from the same person or book.
Isn't that backwards? In-group criticism is how you get so-called "fracturing", which is arguably healthier (if less politically useful) than the alternative: "loyalty". I'd be highly suspicious if any group of tens of millions of people all ostensibly agreed on everything.
This doesn't seem like the tough question you think it is. I assume Hitler had some opinions that, taken away from the context of his goals, are reasonable to agree with. What makes you think it's an exception to the parent's point?
"Leftists" offended by these sentiments are most likely centrists. The goal of neoliberalism (read: the DNC) has been to shift the left to the center. This has been their objective for years. See: Obama, Biden, the Clintons.
Why do you think they don't realize (or don't disagree with your premise)? I think you'd be surprised by how many people are not in fact one-dimensional stereotypes who must disagree with everything a person says just because they disagree with some things that person says. I'm also confused as to why you seem to imply that people should be that way.
A lot of the "leftists" Ted K disagrees with in that work are not proper Marxists but SJW/radical liberals (what's called the American Left but has little relation to Marxist thought)
Virtually everyone who quotes Kaczynski is aware of his statements on the political Left, it's just that nobody takes that particular aspect very personal or seriously given that ecological anarchism, Kaczynski's position, has always been overwhelmingly a left-wing position.
His "criticisms" of the left read like something a denizen of /pol/ or Reddit would come up with. It's entirely possible to see the merits of his arguments against technology while dismissing his deranged hatred of leftists, feminists, etc.
The OP literally asked to "attack the ideas, not the man", and here you go attacking the ideas solely because of the kind of men who share it...
What do you mean by " it reads like something /pol/ or reddit would write "? Does Kaczynsky use tired cartoon memes? Does he accuse the left of insufficient weightlifting? Does he challenge them to a 1v1 in a Nintendo fighting game?
What part of his criticism do you actually find wrong?
Lol had not heard this one. The left has "insufficient weightlifting".
Might be true.
Could it be that on the left there are more endurance sports, for health. And on the right there are more muscle building sports, so they can strike cool poses with their guns?
It's pretty common. Don't be surprised if you get called a dyel (DYEL, Do You Even Lift) lanklet (small, not fat or muscular) runcell (someone who runs to try to get women, but would be better off lifting).
His criticisms of leftist activism in the 1990s is that it will always seek to control and exploit technology to implement their ideology so followers of his anti-tech movement should not rely on them. He then rants against 'green anarchy' claiming it is a kind of naive forest worshipping cult that also should not be included in whatever anti-tech movement. It is a small part of his overall manifesto on who you shouldn't trust to join a specific (terrorist) movement and likely came from his time in academia.
It's definitely not the standard fare you would find on those 2 sites you mentioned just a brief 'don't trust these activists they want the philosopher stone for themselves'.
That's unfortunate because he expanded on ISAIF at length in his prison writing and took a more thoughtful and look at a lot of existing political tropes. For example, in his Anti-Tech Revolution* he lauds the tactics of early feminists' campaigns to obtain voting rights for women, and similarly deconstructs a lot of flaws in right wing ideology.
I disagree with a lot of Kaczynski's ideas and methods, but I still regard him as an important thinker and wish people would read his output in full rather than rushing to have the hottest take (not meant as a dig at you, rather the avalanche of attempted zingers on Twitter and in the media over the weekend).
Nah, it’s caused by mental illness and drug addiction. Short of rounding them up and forcing them to get help, there’s actually nothing we can do to get these people off the street.
It's certainly an element, but that's largely washing your hands and victim blaming. There's a direct correlation between housing costs and homelessness rates.
From the reporting I’ve seen, the vast majority of folks on Skid Row or on the street in SF are heavy addicts. And they refuse shelters because then they couldn’t use.
From a census of homeless people in LA county a few years back[1]:
15% of LA's homeless population has substance abuse problems. Only 12% of these people are in shelters.
25% have serious mental illnesses. 20% of these people are in shelters.
Overall 33% of homeless people are in shelters.
So you are partially right that drug use and mental health issues can make sheltering some people more difficult. But you are very wrong that people with either of these issues make up a majority of all homeless people. It is just classic confirmation bias in that people with these issues are the most visibly homeless. The people who are living in their car or a shelter and simply can't afford a home aren't easily identifiable as homeless when you walk past them on the street. This can also be seen in the previously linked data as only 28% of LA's homeless population qualifies as chronically homeless.
Basically you are only able to see a small portion of the problem and are assuming that is the whole problem when in actuality homelessness is roughly 4x worse.
2. Therefore, the homelessness is caused by drug addiction.
Not exactly sound reasoning. Plenty of people with mental illness and drug addiction still manage to pay rent.
No one disputes the rates of addiction and mental illness among the homeless. California has neither the highest rates for drug addiction/overdoses nor the highest rates of mental illness, yet it has the highest rate of homelessness.
There is no correlation between rates of mental illness and rates of homelessness. There is no correlation between drug addiction rates and homelessness. There is a strong Correlation between rents and homelessness.
Why? Being mentally ill and a drug addict doesn't automatically make you homeless in an area where rent for a room is $400/month.
> Dry shelters are arguably a massive part of the problem.
As someone who has housed and lived close to addicts, to put it plainly: this is a naive, academic view. Dry shelter are "a massive part of the problem"? Absolutely incorrect, and harmfully ignorant if implemented at societal scale.
As someone who provided food and shelter to an addict in my own home, guaranteeing these things does nothing to increase the willingness to quit heroin. Material deprivation may cause you to seek drugs, but remedying deprivation does not lead to recovery. In fact, I honestly believe offering it unconditionally hampers it.
If your understanding of the scientific evidence is that it supports "dry shelters are harmful and their existence exacerbates heroin addiction," then I think that's a good argument in favor of the inclusion of anecdotes on this topic.
If your understanding of the scientific method and critical inquiry amounts to "if you have some belief I don't like then anecdotes are useful" then you need to level up your understanding of the scientific method and critical inquiry.
>Cities also have higher costs of living because they are densely populated
Isn't population density supposed to introduce efficiencies that would lead to lowering costs? I think, that's the usual argument against suburban sprawl.
Nah it's caused by poor family cultures that lead to mental illness and drug addiction. Short of rounding up families and forcing them to be responsible for their children, teens, and young adults, there's actually nothing we can do to get these people off the street.
You know it's funny. A lot of people look at the US and turn up their noses at our "poor infrastructure". Just a couple of months ago I watched a very tropey discussion take place on the lack of a robust US rail system. In another discussion, the lack of a robust US healthcare system.
All the armchair pundits come out to point to other countries as leaders in these areas, but when it comes to homelessness, I see a lot less of it pointing to places like Japan, Singapore and the APAC region, where homelessness is a cultural stigma placed not just on the individual but on the family. Family name and culture mean something. Generational safety nets are present because the family cares for the individual simply because they share a common genealogy. Families will go very far to avoid allowing a member of their heritage to become a vagabond.
Weird to me how this part is left out of the conversation. Perhaps this is a consequence of our indulgence in unrestricted libertarian individualism.
I'm glad you brought up Singapore, since they can actually force people with mental health or addiction issues into shelters. Imprisoning people for being mentally ill or addicts is a viable to solution to homeless and it clearly works for Singapore, however this will never happen in the West. For better or worse, individual liberty is sacred in our cultural tradition, and it will never be politically palatable to force people into shelters.
Forcing people into treatment was our standard approach to this problem for decades and it worked very well. We need to bring it back.
There should be zero people doing meth on the street; if you see one it should be a single phone call to have the cops pick that person up and send them to the secured treatment facility on the edge of town.
Yet too many people think it's better to just let people do meth on the street, despite the problems it causes for everyone, and the huge amount of money wasted not solving the problem of the chronically homeless.
My point is that our drunkenness on individualism has led to a low view of the family. If you have a low view of family then you're primed to inevitably become ambivalent at best, cynical at worst, to your own kin.
The vast majority of people who are homeless don't suffer from mental illness or drug addiction. The most visible do, but not most of them. And of those, a bunch didn't suffer from drug addiction when they become homeless.
I don't know, the article mentions people who work two jobs having to live in an RV because they can't afford rent. As an external observer, it seems to me that in some parts of the US, inequality is so bad that homelessness is eating the working class. In Europe or Australia[1], the lady working two jobs or the war veteran taking $1200/month in social security would definitely not be homeless. Would they live in government housing, in a sketchy part of town? Sure. But how can you even compare that to being homeless...
[1] Australia, though, is currently in the middle of a rental crisis and becoming much worse.
The visible homeless—the vagrants you see in tent cities under the freeway or harassing pedestrians—are more likely to have drug addictions or other mental illnesses. And the more mentally ill they are, the more visible they become since they end up committing crimes and making a nuisance of themselves. If you’re mainly concerned about the externalities of homelessness—e.g. needles and human feces on the street, crime, harassment, etc—then you’d be well served addressing this problem in particular.
If you define “homeless” by people not having consistent housing, there is a much larger population of those people. Maybe they’re sleeping on a buddy’s couch, or they find a kind stranger to take them in, or they get by via stealth camping. On the margin, expanding public housing or making housing more affordable would help these people. But it wouldn’t do much about the more visible and troublesome ones.
What is this help anyway? Can you magically fix someone who was fucked in the ass by foster parents as a child or someone who was born with schizophrenia?
Some people fall through the cracks. My mother was a therapist and she used to tell me tragic stories about her clients.
If I had lived those lives I'd be out there smoking crack too.
React was released back in 2012/2013. The web was already broken without JavaScript back then, and had been for quite some time. Remember jQuery? And FB placing tracking codes in cookies has nothing to do with React.
Opposite experience for me. After I had kids, I realized how shitty and neglectful my parents had been. They kept me alive but they otherwise didn’t do much. They were more like roommates than parents.
I definitely felt this when walking through the city center of Florence last fall. The streets and piazzas were jammed with thousands of tourists but it felt remarkably quiet, due to the almost complete absence of cars.
The noise of actual people on the street is also quite pleasant. Talking, laughing, footsteps, etc. it positively adds to the atmosphere rather then detract from it.
I guess that depends on opinions, there is a committee of citizens in Florence named "Ma noi quando si dorme?" (that can be roughly translated to "But when are we going to sleep?" ) by residents that protest against the noise by customers of bars and similar that talk, laugh, sing, scream, etc. in some streets of the center until well after 2 AM.
It is news of these days that, beginning in May there will be 24 "stewards" on fridays and saturday nights to help "educating" the customers.
My entire life I believed that my childhood was pretty decent, and fairly privileged even. My parents provided a safe and stable home environment in a wealthy suburb of Chicago, sent me to some decent public schools, took me on nice vacations, and paid for my college in full.
After having kids of my own, a flood of disturbing realizations came to me about all the things they didn't do. For example, my parents never played with me. Ever. They never asked me about my day, asked what I was interested in, asked for my opinions on things, or tried to get to know me. We never hugged either. They were both completely incapable of comforting me when I was upset, and would get angry at me for expressing my emotions. They didn't teach me anything. Nothing. They didn't teach me how to cook, how to do laundry, how to manage money, how to fix stuff around the house, or how to manage my time. They gave me zero structure or rules, and simply did not care what I did or how late I stayed up. I was a latchkey kid starting at the age of 9. I spent the majority of my free time playing video games in my parents' basement.
My dad was also a "functioning" alcoholic. He was functioning in the sense that he could hold down a well-paying corporate job, but was otherwise totally checked out. He would get home from work at 6, pour a glass of scotch, plop down in front of the TV, and stay seated there for the rest of the night. Weekends weren't that different. Although he was physically present, he may as well have not been in my life at all. My mom wasn't much better. Although she didn't have a drinking problem, she enabled my dad's drinking and was obsessed with her own career, and was basically checked out as a parent as well.
It took my until the age of 34 to realize that my upbringing has had a disastrous impact on my mental health. Although from the outside my life looks pretty successful and prosperous, my inner world has been a jumbled mess of anxiety, fear, denial, and avoidance for my entire life. When I learned about the concept of "hypervigilance", it was like having my core personality trait summed up as a trauma symptom.
It's been a massive uphill battle for me to learn, essentially from scratch, how to be a good father. My number one goal is be emotionally present for my sons. My oldest isn't even two yet, but I try to: comfort him when he's upset, give him the vocabulary to express what he's feeling, play with him on the floor everyday, teach him the names of things we see on our walks together (birds, plants, trees, etc.), read to him, and give him choices that he can make on his own. As he gets older, I want to help him discover who he is and what he likes, rather than force him to like the things I like. Above all, I want to be present in his life, and for him to truly feel that he's loved and supported by me.
Dude I feel you, I've had to figure everything out myself. I didn't have an outwardly rosy upbringing, but we have in common the fact that our parents taught us literally nothing. One of mine taught me how to drive, that's it. They never taught me how to do laundry, cook, never took an interest in anything I liked, or anything at all really, and any interaction that wasn't surface level pleasant was met with resistance, frustration, resentment or worse. Any time parenting was expected of them they weren't happy about it.
I'm doing really well all things considered. As someone with older kids, if I may: don't ever lie to your kids about anything, ever, and if they ask you something you don't want to answer, tell them you don't want to answer it. Expect the same of them, and respect them when they don't want to tell you something too, unless it's pertinent to your duty to them. At some point your kids will realize they don't have to listen to you, and at that point they have to want to listen to you or they won't do it. For that, they have to respect you, look up to you and trust you. The only way to ensure this is to live up to what you expect of them and never bullshit them.
Same story here, but less wealthy. All I can say is forgive and move on. Your dad stuck around, which is something. They delivered the material goods, which is something. And most valuable of all, they provided a valuable counterexample. Stay away from the shrinks. They pour salt into the wounds, prescribe pills, and hardly any of their "research" replicates. Forgiveness is where it's at.
> answering here since I'm rate-limited:
Took maybe a year or two. I see them a couple times a year. Not saying to ignore facts and forget what they are, but to stop holding the grudge and move on.
For the shrinks, I wouldn't call it a "bad" experience, but an unfruitful one. Lots of words, terminology, techniques--just to dig the hole deeper. Better and simpler to just chalk it up to their own limitations as human beings and forgive. You don't get pissed at the dog for not knowing how to use a toilet. As the child, you are made from the same stuff. Without their counterexample, you probably would have settled into the same error.
How long did it take you to forgive them? Are they still in your life?
For me personally, I think it's too soon to forgive them. The past six months have been the first time in my life that I've allowed myself to feel all the pent up rage I have towards them. It's the first time that I've stopped making excuses for their behavior too. I feel like I need to process all this anger before I can forgive them. And even then, I'm not sure I want them back in my life. They've continued to disappoint me even well into adulthood. For example, they chose to go on a long vacation instead of being in town during the birth of my first son (their first grandson). They missed his first birthday party as well, despite living only 45 minutes away.
That's interesting that you advise staying away from shrinks. Did you have a bad experience? I've been relying heavily on my therapist (and books written by therapists) to help me process these realizations. It's been extremely painful but overall I've found it helpful, especially the books.
Hey you sound like me. I grew up similarly to you. What you experienced is called childhood emotional neglect. It's basically the absence of emotional connection with your parents. As in you did not get your emotional needs met by your parents.
There are a bunch of books on it now but the first was Running on Empty by Dr. Jonice Webb. She describes it well. Someone here on HN recommended it a few weeks ago and I read it. And low and behold I identify with it completely and it explains a lot of my life. And now I am working to break that cycle with my kids and wife first and eventually my parents if possible. It's been a lot of hard work.
I would encourage you to look into attachment theory -- it'll have some good advice for dealing with the childhood influences on your current relationships and how to overcome them. Personally, I've found Thais Gibson's videos to be higher in density than most who talk about attachment theory.
1. There’s a lot of backlash against Twitter’s new owner for his change in editorial policy. Users or tweets that would have been previously removed are no longer being censored. On a government-run platform protected by the first amendment, no censorship would be permitted. That’s mean you would have, for better or worse, a ton of racist content, conspiracy theories, violent images, pornographic images, and fake news.
2. There’s a lot of concern of data security and privacy. If you don’t trust Zuckerberg with your data, would you trust the government?
3. People flock to services that other people widely use. There are numerous social network alternatives these days, but people still flock to the major ones like FB, IG, TikTok, etc. Would anyone want to use FedBook? I have my doubts that a government-run social media platform would gain any real traction.
