Or at the very least Colonialism was inevitable and the damage done was worth it cause the world is better now that white men are in charge…
This is the Rare Earth guy I’m familiar with, the brother of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, Evan…
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Hitler was the greatest parodist… killing millions of people for a laugh… that comedian. /s
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Yeah, it’s always disappointing when these authority figures like Pinsky— whom we trusted as dispassionate arbiters— pull a Beneath The Planet of the Apes I-Reveal-My-Inmost-Self and it turns out they were hiding a monster the entire time.
I think this is the case of someone “aging out” of his political neutrality. He’s reached a certain age, and reasons he is wise enough to know what policies and politics has got him as far as he has gotten, and that those, therefore, must be the correct ones (and only those).
He’s stopped saying it’s “no worse than the flu”, but he still sounds vaguely pro-Covid when saying he’s “looking forward to my immunity.”
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This seems much nicer, especially when adorable trash panda thumbnails are involved.
I was referring to this book:
The hypothesis is that we must be alone in the universe because “OMG earth is so perfect for us”. It’s one of those books that, if you read it by itself with little other scientific information or reasoning skills, it sounds super plausible. It builds point after point in a very Malcolm Gladwell way. The problem, of course, is that it’s all nonsense. It’s a house of cards built on one big Lottery Fallacy. The unstated major premise in it is also some form of directed evolution rather than emergent evolution (a creationist idea), which is deeply disappointing considering one of the authors is an evolutionary biologist. The whole thing is a terrible piece of speculation at odds with all the evidence, but it’s engagingly written and sucks people (like me) into it.
Anyways, I’m pulling us off topic here. Talk amongst yourselves.
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Not Gladwell, although a similar sort of book.
I found Freakonomics more entertaining, and a little more thought-provoking, than Gladwell, but I’m conditioned to automatically reject anything described as “an economist explains…”.
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That would be greatly disappointing since his seminal work is pretty much a polemic against racist ideas about historical technological development
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There is a slippery slope from being nostalgic for one’s youth, to idealizing the past, to advocating for how things were in the past, and then to making common cause with other people who want to Make Someplace Great Again
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I figured it was something differ. I had not come across that at all. Looks terrible! Faux intellectual seems a great way to describe it. Same with Gladwell, and the book @teknocholer mentions, too.
It SEEMS to be, but it still comes around to the idea that the evolution of societies were MEANT to go a particular way, with Europeans just lucking into that, rather than having actual agency and making some pretty brutal decisions with regards to the rest of the world. At the end of the, the decision was still made for brutal conquest of the rest of the world, yeah? It’s still, I think too Eurocentric in it’s thinking. YMMV (assuming you mean Guns, Germs, and Steel).
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The problem is, what he was saying was contrary to the known facts, and either he didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, in which case he should have known better than to open his mouth in the first place, or he was deliberately spreading misinformation and then changed his mind, or some combination of the two. Either way, he did irreversible damage. He spent two key months grotesquely downplaying it, even being angry at the media as late as April, for causing what he claimed was “press-induced panic.” Anyone paying the slightest bit of attention knew what he was saying was bullshit long before that, which means he was, at best, making public statements about a health crisis he hadn’t bothered to do the least bit of research on, which is totally inexcusable when making public statements about health issues is one’s damn job.
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???
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Wasn’t there a whole “Noble Savage” intro to Guns, Germs and Steel where he goes on and on about how intelligent and perceptive native Papua New Guineans are compared to ignorant lazy contemporary Euro-Westerners?
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couldn’t happen to a “nicer” ____________ (insert your own insult)
Ok, maybe I should qualify with “celebrity doctor”. Or Dr. Nick.
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Haha, oh yes, the banana. 
That guy is such a tool. This is another great example of the kind of argument that sounds convincing if you have zero education in science, history, agriculture, or, much of anything. Bananas are that way, of course, because we bred them to be. Everything we eat bears almost no resemblance to what it started as 10,000 years ago when we started cultivating things to our liking.
Oops, I had the authors mixed up there, thanks for the correction. I also found it entertaining and interesting (like almost everyone at the time) but again, it’s a house of cards that collapses as soon as you start looking at the sources and statistical methods. The problem with books like this is that they put a bunch of bad information into the popular culture and then it becomes accepted as “true” because everyone hears it from everyone else. Even if the book is later discredited, that doesn’t get around like the catchy first book did, so now a whole bunch of people believe a bunch of dumb things, which then get repeated to their kids. This is basically the entire diet/nutrition fad industry as well, but don’t get me started on that (we’re far enough off topic as it is).
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I know we’re getting way off topic, but that is such a cool article! Going to cross post it on the food thread.
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Yes. And.
The new coronavirus, Sars-CoV-2, has not been around long enough to know how long immunity lasts, but there are six other human coronaviruses that can give a clue.
Four produce the symptoms of the common cold and immunity is short-lived. Studies showed some patients could be re-infected within a year.
Research at King’s College London also suggested levels of antibodies that kill coronavirus waned over the three month study.
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Yes, but it played to a much broader audience than you “straight (White) dudes”. You get to tell us your opinion all the time, and have throughout history – maybe give non Straight White Dudes a chance to tell their side…?
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Dr. John never steered me wrong. Just sayin’.
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