I have been there numerous times, way up the the top and east and west and down to Chennai on trains, buses, planes, taxis and rickshaws, even in the good times though India was in chaos. Their infrastructure is at best haphazard and dangerous, sewerage systems are rivers where both dead humans and animals float down. There is tuberculosis, dysentery, various mosquito borne diseases, the occasional break out of typhoid and cholera, childhood diseases are all over the place. The hospitals are for the elite and their caste system drags down the whole country. Bribery is how you get to the front of the line, it is a wonder covid even got started. About 2 million die annually before covid and I would venture to say the many have died with covid, but not from covid. There are too many languages and too many bureaucrats and politicians, There are 1.4 billion of them and in the cities they are crammed, filled with people, the air is filled with diesel fumes and smoke from wood cooking fires and very little clean drinking water ( I had to boil it all the time). In the whole country it is rare to see a blue sky as a smoke haze blankets the whole country. That is why Indians are busting down the gates to get of India, as it is polluted from top to bottom. It is polluted with crooked politicians, cheating bushiness practices and poor land management, (mother Ganga is considered a goddess, it starts out clean at is source and is a sewer towards the end). The outcasts are kept down while the top end rip the country off. To make it worse their prime minister wants to make India a Hindu fascist state "Hinduvta". Would I go back there, probably not.
Does anyone remember the acid rain shit?
I went to elementary school in the 80’s. I don’t know the frequency, but I remember hearing excessively about AIDS when I was in school. The panic was very real. Even as a kid I know I picked up on it. My impression of AIDS, based on what they taught in school, was that if you “made love” to someone, you were at high risk of catching the virus. As a kid, I didn’t understand what that meant. People kissing were clearly in love, as far as I was concerned. So, imagine the amount of anxiety I felt at 9 years old when I “made love” to a girl on the playground by kissing her on the lips. It was weeks before I finally told my parents I needed an AIDS test after having “made love” to a girl at school. I’m sure they had a good laugh, but goddamn, that was some scary shit to me.
I can only imagine what’s going through the heads of kids in this day and age when their parents, panic-stricken with fear, wrap muzzles around their kid’s heads and tell them “if you don’t wear this, YOU could kill me or someone else.” The unnecessary burden of responsibility we’re placing on our kids to “protect us” from dying is ridiculous.
When I first read on this forum that Anthony Fauci did this same bullshit with AIDS, I knew we were being duped. The level of hysteria and stupidity he projected in the 80’s fucked me up for months when I was a kid. Stupid people who don’t know they’re stupid are the most destructive people on this planet.
I like how they lead with the implied defense of Lincoln and his horrible war, a gross violation of the First Amendment, and using the state to severely impede the free-market. Also, no mention of Teddy Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, or Ronald Reagan, and not in positive lights.
I mean the thesis is sound; that being said, this article proves that Boomer-cons also suck.
Sunday round-up:
The people who want to keep masking: ‘It’s like an invisibility cloak’ | US news | The Guardian
Francesca, honey, if we can't see your face we're just going to look at your tits. Best to just stay home if eyes bother you this much.She’s been fully vaccinated for three weeks, but Francesca, a 46-year-old professor, does not plan to abandon the face mask that she’s come to view as a kind of “invisibility cloak” just yet.
“Maybe it’s because I’m a New Yorker or maybe it’s because I always feel like I have to present my best self to the world, but it has been such a relief to feel anonymous,” she said. “It’s like having a force field around me that says ‘don’t see me’.”
Francesca is not alone. After more than a year of the coronavirus pandemic, some people – especially some women – are reluctant to give up the pieces of cloth that serve as a potent symbol of our changed reality.
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Scientism: America’s State Religion - The American Mind
The main sources for Feyerabend’s views on the proper role of science in a pluralistic democracy are his book Science in a Free Society (1978) and several essays in the third volume of his collected Philosophical Papers. There are three main components to his argument.
First: science as an institution, and liberalism as its house philosophy, have taken over the role that the Church and its theology played in medieval society.
Second: the case for this takeover rests on the purported superiority of the methods and results of science, but crumbles on close inspection.
Third: when consistently applied, the most powerful expression of the liberal idea—John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech in On Liberty—tells against rather than in favor of the hegemony of scientism. Let’s consider these themes in turn.The hegemony of science is nevertheless typically presented as if it were merely part of the neutral framework provided by a modern liberal polity. But the neutrality of liberalism is, in Feyerabend’s view, itself a sham. White Western liberal intellectuals initially claimed to affirm the equality of all people, whatever their tradition. But this equality “did not mean equality of traditions; it meant equality of access to one particular tradition,” namely the liberal and scientific tradition favored by white Western intellectuals.
Then these intellectuals tried to be more sensitive to alternative traditions. But they did so by reinterpreting these traditions in ways that would make them conform to their own liberal and scientific assumptions, especially by downplaying metaphysical beliefs that do not sit well with those assumptions. In this way, “they could pose as understanding friends of non-Western cultures without endangering the supremacy of their own religion: science.”
Yeah. The article is typical Boomer revisionist history.
Sure the Republicans have, at times, been the prettiest ugly girl in the room, but it sure wasn't under Lincoln, who had zero interest in ending slavery until it became a means to win the war to end states rights and a means to punish the Confederacy. And even then he made sure the Union states got to keep theirs.
And Eisenhower was the one who hung us on the very cross he warned us of by essentially creating the Military Industrial Complex. Which is the root of pretty much every foreign policies/BS wars issue we have had. And the US would have had prosperity regardless of what policies he enacted thanks to the rest of the industrialized world being in shambles. It would have taken Stalin level bad governance not to thrive after WWII.
Comparing Democrats to Republicans reminds me of this story: