At least one Nobel prize winner for literature is a racist, Peter Handke, so don’t think having a Nobel award makes that person a saint. Alfred Nobel invented the prize because he felt so guilty that his Dynamite was being used to kill hoards of people in war. It worked because hardly anyone remembers he invented the stuff.
I’m not an epidemiologist and could be completely wrong about this, but I’m under the impression that you can’t really have some herd immunity – either you’ve got it or you don’t. Maybe it’s more an S-curve than a step function, or maybe I have it totally wrong, but that’s how I understand it.
Well no, Shockley’s been dead a while.
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A less optimistic view might be that herd immunity is only a possibility and not a guarantee.
Separately –
Perhaps acknowledging the League’s aging, Hill has also repeatedly asked older members on VK to include the League in their will.
A sudden source of revenue might be behind their reasoning.
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Definitely not a saint, but [citation needed] on the “racist” part. No, Erdoğan does not count as an authority in this respect. Handke is an idiot for publicly siding with Serbia in a war that was ethnically motivated on both sides. He went further by downplaying (or even denying?) war crimes committed by the Serbian side. But if you apply that standard, 90% of all citizens of countries that have been in a war recently will be “racists”, too, because they all assume that their side were the good guys, or at least “not as bad as the others say”. Also, to think that Serbians, Croatians and Bosnians are different “races” seems like a ridiculous idea to me, the kind that might be propagated by exactly the same people who wanted that war.
That said, you are completely right about the Nobel. Most of the prizes are explicitly not linked to a person’s politics. If someone makes a breakthrough in physics, writes great literature, or single-handedly cures Covid-19, the committee won’t and shouldn’t ask whether they are a good person, too.
The Peace Prize is, of course, an exception. Most of its recipients are mass murderers. But at its best, it’s given to those among the mass murderers who at least make a public attempt to change their ways. As such, I consider it a very valuable institution.
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Then back to my original plan. Quarantine them all at the gathering and see who is left alive at the end.
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Yep. There’s the rub. Right now, I’m sheltering in place with two family members, who are both pushing 80, and one has COPD.
I wouldn’t complain about these smoothbrains subjecting themselves to the forces of natural selection if they weren’t spreading Captain Trumps around afterwards.
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Pretty much sums up my feelings every time I read a news article about dTrump and the US.
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Race is a social reality, not a biological one. No racial categorisation is more or less valid than any other.
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