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TACD posted:it’s always a little surprising to me that “thinking of ending your life” is apparently rare? bad? strange? Yeah uh I've thought of suicide fairly regularly (though not actual planning or anything) and "I wonder what it would be like to be a woman" and a variety of other things that people say they never think about and I highly doubt I'm either suicidal or trans, so I reckon there's just a bunch of social taboos people aren't willing to fess up to or I'm a special unique snowflake who is immune to Bad Brain Syndrome. e lmao what a terrible snipe. I'm on a train with bad Internet so you're not getting a Today in History fact. You'll live. Miftan fucked around with this message at 08:54 on Dec 28, 2021 |
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Dec 28, 2021 08:51
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WhatEvil posted:Seems like we're going round in circles so I'll just quote these: Phew I was worried for a minute there but thankfully the thread elders have made their ruling and absolved themselves of any wrongdoing. This is the article. I think if you read it you might understand why I'm feeling a little confused about the reaction just now.
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Dec 28, 2021 08:52
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Nobody's addressed the point about aliens but the literature is out there. J Allen Hynek's book is a good start.
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Dec 28, 2021 08:58
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Mugsbaloney posted:Phew I was worried for a minute there but thankfully the thread elders have made their ruling and absolved themselves of any wrongdoing. Mate, nobody wants to read all that poo poo. Even the posters who are broadly in the "lab leak isn't technically impossible" or slightly more sympathetic side of the argument (me included) have pretty much wrapped this up with "so what it doesn't change anything" so maybe just drop it? Nobody wants to talk about it. If they did, there would be a discussion about the points in the article or the podcast instead of how it's a fash talking point. You don't have to keep linking it, I guarantee everyone who has read the thread over the last 2 days knows about it.
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Dec 28, 2021 08:58
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Mourning Due posted:My plan for post-Christmas of only using my phone as a phone, and having it on silent, is so far working perfectly. Social media is a massive cancer and even 24 hours away from it has done me a world of good. This is a good post. We weren’t always like this. Constant micro-activity has massively undermined our general mental health, and it takes some reprogramming to get a relaxed thought process working again. Things like that article showing 1/4 of younger people are considering suicide suggests to me there needs to be a stronger societal movement towards reduced technology use. Problem is that capital likes how individual despair leads to impulse purchasing, substance abuse and poor financial management
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Dec 28, 2021 09:05
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Like I said though, when someone crashes into a conversation about one subject with something only tangentially related to the subject and completely irrelevant to the actual discussion then that's at best extremely poor posting and certainly reeks of someone trying to steer the conversation to their particular hobby horse, especially when the tone is very much "Hah you idiots, you morons, you think this one thing and all laughed at me when I said otherwise" (I've no idea if they've ever mentioned this ITT before; I vaguely remember it coming up a while back). 1. You are having a dialogue with the voices in your head, not with me 2. You are being absurdly condescending 3. I suggest you take some time to reflect on why you felt the need to act like this when someone transgresses your very important rules about posting 4. The reason we are now posting about posters and I 'look like a crybully' is because people called me a fascist and said nasty words at me when even a cursory glance at the introduction of the article I linked would have shown them that was not the case. I think this is reasonable. 5. Why is the burden on me to digest the information and spit it into your mouths like a mother penguin, complete with a call to action? (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 28, 2021 09:17
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Convex posted:This is a good post. What is "micro activity" please? I haven't really heard of it before. I confess that I haven't ever really found technology to be a negative to my mental health, if anything I find it to be a primary stabilizer because I need to be doing something to keep my brain going, and I can't stay focused on one thing for more than a few minutes so I generally need to be doing several things at once, and I have found technology to be very helpful for that, as it provides many different activities and I can do all of them together, as a rule.
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Dec 28, 2021 09:22
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Mugsbaloney posted:5. Why is the burden on me to digest the information and spit it into your mouths like a mother penguin, complete with a call to action? Because you're the one who wants to talk about a subject that most people only know as a fash talking point! If you want to talk about something people aren't familiar with, you should introduce the subject in a way that isn't 15k words. Doubly so if the subject is a fash talking point you expect people to take seriously!
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Dec 28, 2021 09:22
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hmm let's take a quick gander at this article, surely it won't take long to read  
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Dec 28, 2021 09:28
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Miftan posted:Because you're the one who wants to talk about a subject that most people only know as a fash talking point! If you want to talk about something people aren't familiar with, you should introduce the subject in a way that isn't 15k words. Doubly so if the subject is a fash talking point you expect people to take seriously! Seriously. I've ignored & reported MugsBaloney, but they're cluttering up the thread with unhinged nonsense. Recommend a probation at least.
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Dec 28, 2021 09:35
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I skimmed the article and it just seems like a bunch of circumstancial bollocks that some weirdo convinced there must be conspiracy is trying to hammer into evidence of one, exactly like every conspiracy weirdo in the world does, it does at least helpfully suggest that on the other side is the vast majority of the scientific consensus on the subject, and on his side is apparently him and a few other nutters. I can see why you found it so compelling.
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Dec 28, 2021 09:38
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MeinPanzer posted:For everyone asking why it matters whether the pandemic resulted from a lab leak, from what I remember of the Vanity Fair article, there are two reasonable takeaways: Was it lax? Because after a quick skim all I can find is this bit: (quick aside - this article is shockingly awful form the perspective of laying out why the lab leak is possible. This kind of meandering person-focused reporting is the exact opposite of the careful laying out of evidence that is required for something like this. gently caress vanity fair) quote:Only one of them has the highest biosafety protocol: BSL-4, in which researchers must wear full-body pressurized suits with independent oxygen. Others are designated BSL-3 and even BSL-2, roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office. This is a nonsense comparison, because the rules and equipment for a biology lab are massively different to a dentist office. It's also massively loaded language. Bsl 2/3 is the same as your normal hospital lab dealing with infectious patients, but that doesn't make wuhan sound scary and incompetent. Quick summary of the bsl levels - it's a mixture of how bad something is, and how easy it is to catch. So bsl 1 is non pathogenic things, bsl 2 is stuff that's either not very dangerous or non-aerosol transmitted, so e. Coli but also HIV and hep. Bsl 3 is your more dangerous aerosol ones - TB, plague. Bsl 4 is ebola and poo poo. I've handled covid samples in a bsl-2 lab (with a bit more PPE than normal, but not full bsl-3). I won't go into all the safety details, but basically live samples get handled inside a filtered biosafety cabinet (when was the last time you saw one of them in a dentists office), and only inactivated virus gets used out on an open bench top. The VF article is really manipulative in that it calls out bsl-3 as less secure than 4. But I can't see if shows why this is lax. it doesn't say what tasks were performed there, it doesnt say if its secure *enough*. It just sneakily implies that bsl-2/3 were bad. It's rotten.
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Dec 28, 2021 09:38
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Also yes the entire article is written in this absurd loving history channel style to the point I half expected it to start arguing that maybe it was loving aliens.
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Dec 28, 2021 09:40
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Miftan posted:Because you're the one who wants to talk about a subject that most people only know as a fash talking point! If you want to talk about something people aren't familiar with, you should introduce the subject in a way that isn't 15k words. Doubly so if the subject is a fash talking point you expect people to take seriously! Okay, and maybe in another world I would have done exactly that, but in this world the good people of ukmt decided to express their opinions in no uncertain terms. I have no time for bullies, particularly bullies that presume some sort of intellectual or moral or posting superiority. Since you sort of asked nicely, a major takeaway from the article for me is the way in which the US investigation into the origin of COVID has been poisoned from the very start- there is a parallel to the discussion in this thread even! It paints a picture of dysfunctional processes at the heart of government and science in multiple countries, and names specific people who were empowered to investigate the origin at the WHO as having MAJOR conflicts of interest. As My Posting Enemies have pointed out, the article makes a lot of assertions. I'm not sure how they are certain that the assertions are unsubstantiated, as it looks like a serious piece of journalism and it has references and it isn't on infowars and I did my best to Google around it, what else do you want from me. However because I am terminally online leftist I don't have the tools to assess the truthiness of claims made about for example how the state department or the WHO works. Fortunately, I don't have to be! My smart and enlightened comrades in the UKMT will probably be able to shed some light on this interesting and complex topic. And now we're here.
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Dec 28, 2021 09:45
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Mugsbaloney posted:Phew I was worried for a minute there but thankfully the thread elders have made their ruling and absolved themselves of any wrongdoing. can you seriously not find an article that's at least halfway scientifically literate like, if you want to talk about the BANAL variant's receptor binding area and the hilariously awkward FoIa reveal of it being sent to Wuhan in 2019 by DARPA I promise I'll feel disconcerted, but you keep linking something that starts with the offensive Appeal To Sherlock bullshit and then goes into him repeating an argument that requires deliberate engineering to have occurred while jorpishly denying the implication
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Dec 28, 2021 09:45
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Why was the lab set up in Wuhan in the first place? Oh, it was to study the native bat population and see if the endemic coronavirus' could be a threat, as this was one of the areas where many poor people live in close proximity to natural reservoirs of close mammalian animal populations. And they published research over the past few years saying 'hey guys, there are totally viruses here similar to SARs and MERs which are just a small hop away from infecting humans!' And what takeaway did we get from thus rather obvious conclusion? gently caress all. The politicians at large shrugged, carried on not updating ppe stock, and generally sleepwalking into this. The idea the lab is at fault is largely a trumpian blame the messenger (to deflect where the actual blame should be going, see the follow up denialism), mixed up with knee jerk anti science, and a healthy dose of anti chinese racism.
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Dec 28, 2021 09:54
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Convex posted:This is a good post. Does it? Like yes, there's something clearly wrong about modern life but putting all that on technology use rather than neoliberalism & the very clear fact that life for under 40s is less good in a lot of metrics than it was for our parents seems like a pretty big leap. Cutting poo poo that just makes you mad out of your life is obviously good advice & if that's social media then OK but blaming it for all or even most of our ills is missing the forest for the trees. forkboy84 fucked around with this message at 10:01 on Dec 28, 2021 |
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Dec 28, 2021 09:54
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Mugsbaloney posted:I'm not trying to evangelise though, I just wanted to know what other people thought about the article? This was your opener: Mugsbaloney posted:Hmmm yes only a headcase would think that the pandemic's origin had something to do with the coronavirus gain of function research that was taking place in the same city it was first detected in No quote of any post that might have been relevant, no link to any evidence, no mention of biosecurity or immunology, just a fash-adjacent talking point, delivered in a condescending tone, irrelevant to the discussion, dropped into the thread like a turd in a punchbowl. Maybe you're just the worst poster ever rather than an actual fascist, but it's not on me to work out which is which.
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Dec 28, 2021 09:55
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Spangly A posted:can you seriously not find an article that's at least halfway scientifically literate Whilst I'm flattered by the implication, I'm not a polyglot intellectual philosopher king who is able to assess the scientific validity of this stuff by myself. In the matter of boots I am happy to defer to the bootmaker, provided the bootmaker is not yelling gently caress at me.
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Dec 28, 2021 09:59
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goddamnedtwisto posted:This was your opener: I don't really care if you think I'm a good poster you weird and condescending police.
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Dec 28, 2021 10:02
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I've suggested before that the UK's response to Covid-19 was blunted by an institutional fascination with the contrarian idea of an especially bad winter flu season - especially analogizing the 2009 swine flu outbreak to said winter flu - and an evidence-free approach to theorizing what PHIs the public will or will not comply with. There's an attempt to anticipate 'the politicians' and 'the public' as entities and to pre-empt both, which backfires because neither anticipation turns out to be correct; the VF article locates this thread also in origin theorizing, but it seems to be a general problem. see e.g. the dosing debate or the booster debate earlier this year I've no hot take solutions for national-zeitgeist groupthink in that sense, I suppose given the regularity of pandemic outbreaks (SARS in 03/04, swine flu in 09, MERS in 13/14 and sporadically since), it does seem plausible the UK will experience another novel epidemic eventually and then predictably treat the next crisis as the previous one. It's normal for countries to react this way. e.g., in 2020, a swathe of APAC, democratic or authoritarian alike, all rolled out the crowd temperature detectors since it worked for SARS (which generated high fevers during its incubation period) even though it was ineffective for SARS-CoV-2 (i.e., Covid-19, which did not consistently generate high fevers during incubation, but was more transmissible during that period). It's not very hard to anticipate how this may turn out badly - e.g., if the next pandemic is as fatal as SARS-CoV-1 or MERS-CoV, rapid and disciplined contact tracing and rigid quarantine would really be justified despite these measures being ineffectual or counterproductive with the less deadly Covid-19. Diffusing resources to support hospitals nationwide rather than concentrating it to rapidly contain an outbreak could be a mistake. Conversely, e.g., calls to preserve PPE back in early Covid-19 had in mind the massive death toll on frontline HCWs of SARS (which killed about one in ten frontline healthcare workers!) but its relatively successful containment at large; almost all the public genuinely did not need to wear masks, esp given the effectiveness of fever detection. It actually made some sense in its context. But things were not really exactly the same as the previous crisis. There is scope for some reflection on how actually poo poo's complex and difficult yo but I suppose I wouldn't go to UKMT for subtlety either, anyway
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Dec 28, 2021 10:25
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Calls to preserve PPE were - at the absolute, very least - to try to ensure that NHS staff were available to work, because it was 'all hands to the pump'. The NHS was, and still is, short more than 40,000 nurses (because of Tory cuts) and keeping those staff working was a high priority.
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Dec 28, 2021 10:42
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Miftan posted:Yeah uh I've thought of suicide fairly regularly (though not actual planning or anything) and "I wonder what it would be like to be a woman" and a variety of other things that people say they never think about and I highly doubt I'm either suicidal or trans, so I reckon there's just a bunch of social taboos people aren't willing to fess up to or I'm a special unique snowflake who is immune to Bad Brain Syndrome. Without knowing the exact question asked, it's hard to know but 25% is really really high for suicidal ideation prevalence in the past year. UK and US numbers for all adults are usually somewhere in the range of 3 to 5 percent. Yes that number is probably an underestimate because of social taboo or some sort of recency effect (e.g. if someone had a fleeting thought on a bad day in February and got asked in October, they might not remember). I know the world is poo poo and it's probably logical to feel quite doomridden about it but I wouldn't like someone with persistent ideation to think it's just normal and not addressable.
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Dec 28, 2021 10:54
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ronya posted:I've no hot take solutions for national-zeitgeist groupthink in that sense, I suppose This implies the existence of ronya's hot take solutions for national-zeitgeist groupthink in other senses, which I feel ukmt deserves the know
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Dec 28, 2021 11:02
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OwlFancier posted:What is "micro activity" please? I haven't really heard of it before. Constant little things you may not be consciously aware of, like checking your emails or looking for notifications or checking for new podcasts - basically things that stop you relaxing without really being aware of it. forkboy84 posted:Does it? Like yes, there's something clearly wrong about modern life but putting all that on technology use rather than neoliberalism & the very clear fact that life for under 40s is less good in a lot of metrics than it was for our parents seems like a pretty big leap. I think focusing on an element of your life you can actually affect and change for the better is good for your mental health.
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Dec 28, 2021 11:46
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OwlFancier posted:What is "micro activity" please? I haven't really heard of it before.  Speaking of wankers https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1475625602937929732?s=20
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Dec 28, 2021 11:49
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Convex posted:Constant little things you may not be consciously aware of, like checking your emails or looking for notifications or checking for new podcasts - basically things that stop you relaxing without really being aware of it. I think "fixing" small things & ignoring the big picture is bad for societal health. Your mental health is going to get a lot worse if we continue to allow capital to ignore the climate crisis and the housing crisis and the inequality crisis & no amount of ignoring your emails is going to change that. Again, yes, stop doing things that solely make you mad or sad. It's good general advice. But ignoring the actual root causes to focus on minutiae just because you as an individual cannot change society isn't helpful & is in fact giving into neoliberalism's cult of the individual. It's your lovely employer that expects you to check your email constantly even when off the clock. Me, I ain't doing poo poo for work if I'm not being paid. If it's not important enough to pay me for it then it can wait until you do pay me. I check Twitter when I want to shitpost or chat about a specific topic or just checking in with a friend. It's really not hard. Do things in moderation, a lesson I learned watching Rainbow. Although for the sake of clarity I am writing this on my phone while watching wrestling on my PC so I might still give in occasionally to getting distracted. forkboy84 fucked around with this message at 12:11 on Dec 28, 2021 |
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Dec 28, 2021 12:03
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Convex posted:Constant little things you may not be consciously aware of, like checking your emails or looking for notifications or checking for new podcasts - basically things that stop you relaxing without really being aware of it. That's a big factor for me. Like, throughout my day, every time I have 10 minutes free, l'll spend it looking at Twitter, or the UKMT, or quickly checking work email, it any number of things like this. Little checks multiple times a day, that don't seem like much but add up to like 2 hours of my waking life per day. Not to mention half paying attention to watching a movie when I'm constantly being distracted by my vibrating pocket. Now if I have 10 minutes free, I'm aiming to say "I'll do little job X or read 5 pages of Y" and already I'm seeing a big difference in my positive headspace at the end of the day. EDIT: I just spent 10 minutes writing that post, and have pissed off my wife who I'm supposed to be helping clean the house. A perfect example 😆 Mourning Due fucked around with this message at 12:11 on Dec 28, 2021 |
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Dec 28, 2021 12:06
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oh, youvve read a few books this year? cute. i have read over 100000 posts.
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Dec 28, 2021 12:10
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I've read that long covid (lol) article now. Reflecting back on the thread, an unfortunate proportion of the people replying to mugsballoney earlier on look like a bunch of bullying morons determined to shout down, prod and lol around someone setting off their "not one of us" senses. Since then most people have replied pretty much with what I think - yeah maybe but we'll never know because China's authoritarianism and the US military/industrial complex has already battened down the hatches on us ever finding out. This seems about the best summary: OzyMandrill posted:Why was the lab set up in Wuhan in the first place? Oh, it was to study the native bat population and see if the endemic coronavirus' could be a threat, as this was one of the areas where many poor people live in close proximity to natural reservoirs of close mammalian animal populations. Although I did notice whilst reading the article laying in bed with pressure on the side of my head just right, my eyeballs got squeezed and defocused perfectly to reveal a diagonal cursive script in the negative white space of the text whose meaning I couldn't quite discern, so i think theres probably some hypnotic suggestion at work and maybe my analysis should be considered compromised by agents unknown.
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Dec 28, 2021 12:10
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forkboy84 posted:I think "fixing" small things & ignoring the big picture is bad for societal health. Your mental health is going to get a lot worse if we continue to allow capital to ignore the climate crisis and the housing crisis and the inequality crisis & no amount of ignoring your emails is going to change that. Personal mental health is not a “small” thing, hth
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Dec 28, 2021 12:15
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Covid Day five: It's still a bit sore but I think my sore throat has turned the corner. Hopefully the beginning of the end...
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Dec 28, 2021 12:15
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sinky posted:
When will these people learn that grovelling like this gets you precisely nothing.
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Dec 28, 2021 12:17
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As someone who has dealt with suicidal ideation since I was around fourteen I can finally say that it's not normal and should be addressed The problem being that the thing that finally started to make it go away for me is intensive psychotherapy that eats two thirds of my paycheque and probably will for another year at least, while I am fed and housed by my partner and I make little to no financial contribution, which is a really really privileged position to be in The sheer cost means that it's out of the reach of most of the people who need it most and that's completely awful. Mental health provision in this country is bleak, and that means mental health in this country is bleak
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Dec 28, 2021 12:26
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forkboy84 posted:I think "fixing" small things & ignoring the big picture is bad for societal health. Your mental health is going to get a lot worse if we continue to allow capital to ignore the climate crisis and the housing crisis and the inequality crisis & no amount of ignoring your emails is going to change that. I'd say the opposite. Constant gloomposting and doomscrolling makes me feel powerless, and me feeling like poo poo all the time won't stop "allowing capital" to do what it wants. At least if I'm happy and healthy as an individual, then once a realistic challenger against the Tories comes along, I'll be in a headspace to do what I can to bring to an end their wicked rule. Right this second though, as I already know the world is hosed, it does me no benefit to wallow in the minutiae of how explicitly hosed it is.
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Dec 28, 2021 12:33
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Convex posted:Constant little things you may not be consciously aware of, like checking your emails or looking for notifications or checking for new podcasts - basically things that stop you relaxing without really being aware of it. Huh, I guess I don't actually do any of those so that might explain it. Other than when I want to listen to a podcast etc, which is part of the relaxation. Probably helps that I think mobile devices are the devil and have strayed us from the one true path of the desktop, where I don't get loving pinged with poo poo all the time. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 12:42 on Dec 28, 2021 |
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Dec 28, 2021 12:37
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Convex posted:Personal mental health is not a “small” thing, hth I don't think it is & didn't say or imply it was. I posted within the last couple of pages about my own issues with quite severe & debilitating depression & the relief from it I've gotten with sertraline. I think rearranging the deckchairs while the Titanic is sinking is the small thing. Well, that's unfair. Doing whatever in order to lessen your time feeling like poo poo is good, but you can't let that turn to ignoring the root causes. It's hard to effectively work against the large societal problems when you want to die constantly, I get that. Do whatever to be, if not happy then at least, able to get by. But acknowledge that some poo poo is out of our, personal, control & to change that requires wide popular support. Stinking your head in the sand about it & just focusing on getting 8 hours of sleep a night & showering every day & rediscovering how to switch off ignores the root causes. Self-care is important despite the term kind of turning into a parody of itself, but the original idea, yes, very positive. Just don't retreat from the world, that's all I'm saying. Blaming technology instead of capitalism in its current form when an awful lot of those unhelpful impulses about technology are ultimately the result of neoliberalism & libertarian tech weirdness.
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Dec 28, 2021 12:40
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forkboy84 posted:I don't think it is & didn't say or imply it was. I'm not here for an argument, but the conversation literally went like this: Me: I think focusing on an element of your life you can actually affect and change for the better is good for your mental health. You: I think "fixing" small things & ignoring the big picture is bad for societal health.
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Dec 28, 2021 12:44
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I also had a stab at the Vanity Fair article but yeah, the first three people being introduced being two non-medical twitter investigators and a state department guy who tweets incessently about WWIII did not convince me to devote an hour of my time to their theories.
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Dec 28, 2021 12:53
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I think it’s absolutely fine to stick your head in the sand for a bit. If you’re miserable you probably can’t do anything about it anyway, and like MD said a constant litany of ‘Tories did evil thing, police did evil thing’ doesn’t actually make you more informed or capable of doing anything, it just makes you loving miserable. I’ve increasingly taken a similar tack to be honest and intend to do so more and more, for a while anyway. Unfortunately, I’m laid up with booster-sickness and my phone is the only thing in reach. Sad!
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Dec 28, 2021 12:57
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