SoylentNews

That's right. You like the fact that you didn't get sent down into the coal mines at age 6, or mangled in a factory machine as a little kid and then get thrown out on the street with 3 limbs and zero money? Thank a liberal. You like the idea of weekends off? Social Security? Cleaner air and water? Workplace rights? FMLA? Anti-discrimination protections? What few tattered remains of the social safety net still exist despite your best (worst) efforts to dismantle them? Thank a liberal.

The bitter irony of you MAGA morons is that the vast majority of you would have ended up as disposable grist for heavy industry as children if it weren't for the efforts of the very people you hiss and screech and spew venom at. You owe liberals goddamn near every good thing you have, and you're feeling outraged and nauseated reading this because some part of you knows it's true. You've pickled your brains in so much stupid, shortsighted hate you don't even understand whose shoulders you're standing on any longer. Spoiler alert: it's liberals' shoulders.

So go ahead, enjoy your holiday, as all Americans should do. But think a little. Think about how and why you're still alive and why you enjoy a standard of living better than "Dickensian nightmare." Because I have news for you: the titans of industry who thought in the 19th century like you think now would never, ever have allowed it to you. The only reason you are anything better than a modern-day slave is centuries of people with better morals and more humanity than you thinking of people other than themselves and saying "No, this is wrong. NO ONE should suffer this."

That, in a nutshell, is the difference between liberal and "conservative" (read: reactionary) political worldviews. The conservative says "It's not happening to me, so I don't care." The liberal says "It shouldn't happen to *anyone,* which is why I care." Be glad that caring extended to you and your ancestors...and don't push your luck. If we stop caring, you're going to get exactly what you wished for, and you're not going to like it.

No, I haven't emigrated yet, but I've used this weekend to book a cheap hotel in St. Catharines and zip around southern Ontario on their incredibly awesome Go Transit system. I saw some of Burlington, a little of Missisauga at the bus terminal, *all* of Hamilton along both King and Main streets--twice!--and got to visit Thorold today on the St. Catharines local lines.

This entire place, so far, has been a revelation. It feels completely different from everywhere I've been in the US, and in almost every single way, it feels better. A lot better. The one downside I think is that money doesn't go quite as far for most things here, though with the inflation issues in the US everyday food actually costs *less* here, which is something I was pleasantly surprised by. This is despite the higher price tags - the raw numbers are vertiginous, but multiply by ~.75 to get the price in USD. Eating out is another story - I just paid $17 for my one and only meal out, an admittedly gigantic mission-style burrito. Then again that's about USD$12.50, so still not awful. Just testing a similar order against a Chipotle in Buffalo comes to well over $12 and I suspect it's a smaller burrito so yeah.

Then there's the Bulk Barn. Steel cut oats, my go-to, are $3.50 (remember, ~$2.80 USD) for *a kilogram.* I can get an entire month plus of oats for way, way less than the cost of that burrito above. Parboiled rice is $5.90 (~$4.50 USD) a kilogram. Hard whole wheat flour is just over $5/kg. Both green and red gram (lentils) are $4/kg. Even veggies are cheaper here! Carrots appear to be about $2.25/kg for example.

What I notice most is that "working poor" goes a lot further here than in the US. Even the notionally low-end grocery stores like Food Basics look like Christmas came early to me. The selection is incredibly huge, there are plain-label generics -- often literally called "no name" -- that are just as good, and there's a much healthier spread overall. Zehr's, which is apparently only considered mid-end, looks like something out of the sort of dream I might have after 2 weeks on a starvation diet.

The transit, as mentioned, is amazingly good: buses come every hour at worst, usually every half-hour, and they all seem to be coordinating with one another so that waiting for transfers doesn't take very long at all. The fares are expensive, $3 here and $3.25 in Hamilton (but remember, $2.25 and ~$2.50 in US money!), but they have 10-ride cards, day passes, monthly passes, and transfers good for 2 hours at minimum for unlimited rides. St. Catharines is not a large city, so that effectively $2.25 fare would let me get anywhere and possibly back.

This place is also amazingly clean. There are segmented trash/recycle bins everywhere, and people actually use them properly. There's very little plastic waste, almost all the paper packaging is recycled kraft paper, and most places straight up don't have plastic bags, or even bags at all. This is definitely a BYOB nation and I am all for it.

Somewhat surprisingly, if I take the worst-case scenario of making CAD$16/hr ($32000/yr gross) up here as a pharmacy assistant, the position that most closely matches the US definition of "pharmacy tech," my tax burden is slightly *lower* than it would be in the US! And I'd get actual services, like healthcare, for that tax, so the real number for takehome pay is going to be around $1500 higher per year when considering that I won't need health insurance any longer. Apparently, while certain powerful people are trying their damndest to turn Canada into "USA 2.0 with a side of Timbits," enough people are awake (for now...) to stave it off for at least while.

The major problem is rent. Apparently, just 5 years ago, a decent 1 bedroom would have been under $1000, all-inclusive. Now? Good luck getting a bachelor(ette) for that, *without* heat and hydro thrown in. For this reason I am very likely going to attempt to land in, in this order, Thorold, Niagara Falls, and Fort Erie rather than any of the larger cities, though Hamilton still has some decent pricing in areas that Canadians consider bad neighborhoods...which, of course, I consider a vacation spot. There definitely are some parts of Hamilton even I wouldn't rent in, but very few, and they're all in the small gap between about 400-800 Main Street East and its nearby E/W corridors. Rent definitely does worry me, as apparently it's almost doubled over the last 10 years all over Ontario, but my girlfriend and I live simply and don't spend much other than the basics.

So what's next? Well, turns out the PTCB credential doesn't transfer across borders, but the good news is that 1) there are PA courses, 2) they are available online and I can take them in the US, 3) they are not very long at all -- 34 weeks but "self-directed," and 4) the whole shebang will cost me less than $4,000 US. Unfortunately the next set of these at George Brown doesn't start matriculation until July, though I haven't looked into McMaster or Niagara College yet, so it will likely be a while before I get the cert. Then, of course, I'd need a work permit and to find housing. And then, it goes without saying, I'd want to become a legal permanent resident ASAP, and hopefully a citizen once the 5-year period is over.

Wish me luck. I may be too late, or I may not have enough money, but I'm damn sure going to try.

...because the Law of Unintended Consequences is a biiiiiiiiitch.

Josh Hawley said the quiet part loud, AGAIN, when he opined that today's ruling would strengthen Republican presence in the electoral college, because by his logic, pro-choice people in red states would move elsewhere. Except...hey, asshole, do you think they wouldn't have already if they could have?! No, what this is going to do is produce very large blocks of very poor people who have a very obvious and well-known set of villains to blame for their misery. This, in other words, is a recipe for turning red states blue, NOT vice-versa. I am looking forward to the collective freakout when this moron realizes he's forbidden people from, essentially, aborting future Democrats :)

Exhibit B: Justice Clarence ("Uncle [Ruckus]") Thomas sees today's destruction of Roe vs. Wade as the thin end of the wedge to dismantling other recent rulings like marriage equality, and even not-so-recent ones like access to contraception. In other words, this is the full-steam-ahead signal for the hideous theocracy the Birchers and their ilk want to implement. This wholesale slaughter of precedent, however, is...let's say, extremely inadvisable. Why?

Simple: Loving vs. Virginina. Brown vs. Board of Ed. Hell, Plessy vs Ferguson! Maybe we can save time and money by trying these cases "separately but equally," hmm...? If Thomas really believes that his white colleagues won't throw him under the bus the instant it becomes convenient and he's no longer needed, he's an even bigger fool than I thought he was, and I already thought he was such a gigantic fool that he visibly bends light around himself with the sheer density of his malignant judicial incompetence.

Karma is a bitch. Don't say you've not been warned.

I had an idea earlier today: why not just...*give* all the racists and white supremacists and various other pants-pissing demographic whiners the ethnostate they want so much?

Let's take some shithole state in the middle of the US that's already whiter than the inside of a jar of mayonnaise in the middle of a blizzard -- I'm thinking Wyoming, for preference -- and just...cut it off from the rest of the lower 48 politically. Let all the Ku Kucks Klanners and their ilk move in, free of charge. We can call it "White-oming" if they want.

Build a wall around it (and make them pay for it). No one leaves, because why would they want to? Only white people can enter, so no more, for example, Latina housekeepers. White people will be the entire society in there. No more paying taxes to, or getting ANY sort of aid FROM, the fed.gov. We can even let them secede if they want to; we can change the US flag to have 49 stars and a single burning cross on it.

Thoughts? Seems like the most efficient way to give everyone what they want. All the sheet fetishists get their much-ballyhooed white ethnostate, and the rest of the country gets their poisonous influence removed from politics so we can concentrate on civilizing ourselves.

I'm surprised no one's thought of this yet, actually.

Logically speaking, a single man can cause a lot more pregnancies than a single woman can carry to term. The vast, vast majority of rape is also committed by men against women. The best way to avoid abortion is to avoid pregnancy in the first place.

Sooooo...my proposal is mandatory vasectomies for every American male at or over the age of 12, to be reversed when said males are capable of supporting a family and have proven themselves stable and financially solvent. We should of course freeze a sperm sample in case the vasectomy reversal process runs into trouble, we're not monsters here, but if we're really serious about preventing abortion, we should -- pardon the turn of phrase here -- cut the problem off at the root.

As it were.

Thoughts? You have to admit this would be stunningly, supremely effective in cutting down unwanted pregnancies. And as long as we're ignoring bodily autonomy and medical privacy, why not? Now hold still and let me go find the scissors, boys, 'cause this is gonna hurt you a lot more than it's gonna hurt me :)

Yes, you heard me, the resident lesbian threw a homophobic slur. Little-known secret? Team Fag and Team Dyke do NOT get along. Why should we? Men are still men, even if they like other men. And that comes with allllll the same stupid, self-destructive baggage just being a man implies.

Now, down to business: fascism, and the associated LARPing, has replaced football and even pro-wrestling as the single faggiest pastime in the entire US of A. All the performative homophobia is just that: *performative.* I've never seen a bigger bunch of self-loathing pig bottoms trying to sublimate their man-lust in ammosexuality, gun-worship, male-only spaces, casual misogyny, you name it.

Even the central fascist tendency to gather around and worship a so-called "strongman" leader speaks to this. You don't even need the spiffy uniforms (remember where Hugo Boss started, please). It's men who recognize and hate their own latent homosexuality turning that resentment outward on the rest of the world, plain and simple. You're too scared to admit you want to suck cock, so you suck guns. You don't have the guts to attend some kink club and find a leather daddy, so you want your entire political life dominated by a hard, ruthless sociopath who gives you what you need, indeed, what you insist you deserve. Which is fine, but leave the rest of us out of it!

In case you are wondering, yes, this is a callout. The first person who comes to mind is local ammosexual Runaway of course, whose incessant leaks about the sorry state of his family scream "closeted peter puffer" in giant neon letters the size of the Chrysler building. But there's plenty of others in here too: the "libertarians," the "former liberals," the incels, the "red-pilled," and the list goes on. I have no idea why spaces like SN inevitably become a love nest (hate nest?) for this kind of dysfunctional secret sausage-sitter, but there you go.

Now will you fucking lunatics please stop trying to destroy civilization and just go out and get laid already?!

Thought I should post this quick, before the sockpuppets of right-wing doom manage to overrule the weak admin attempts at justice and fair-dealing.

I went from a karma of 50, (maxed, normal) to a -2 in a week or so. Strange, since I did not change any of my normal posting behaviors. Also, I am mod-banned until forever, so this is not revenge for my modding. But there does seem to be a concerted effort by some to "cancel" the aristarchus.

Whether or not you agree with my positions, we all have an interest in keeping free and open debate on all issues alive on SoylentNews, so I would ask my fellow soylentils to rally to the cause. By the Way, the cause is not storming the Capitol, or denying that storming the Capitol ever took place. Just allowing views that someone like myself might put forward, because they are true and reasonable.

If not, I could be put into the situation again where I could not submit submissions, because hostile editors immediately replaced them with their own subs, and I could not post comments to regain my karma, since I was banned from posting, and I could not even do what I am doing now, since if your karma falls low enough, you cannot even journal.

I call it "janrinok's revenge". Put it in your journal. Sure, if you have not been banned from SoylentNews because of your political opinions. Free speech, my ass.

***Update! Welcome to all who have found their way back to this journal entry, even though it has be disappeared from the jounrnal list on the front page! Janrinok has "no idea" how that happened, but is gloating over my karma. What more evidence do we need of a concerted admin attempt to ban aristarchus? Well, I may not be able to post much as me in the near future, but keep your eye out for "aristachish" AC posts. You can't stop the signal, Mal!

****
Quick test to see if I can edit my hidden journal! Cannot post to it, or anywhere. Not sure if I am still able to make aristarchus submissions, but even if I can, most likely they will be censored as well. This may well be the end of SoylentNews!

*****
Looks like! Almost none of the accusations against aristarchus are true. This may be my last message to SN. Been fun, people, with a notable exception.

Last Halloween, allegedly, there were fake tombstones on people's lawns, with the eptitaph "I did my own research." The New York Times published a piece on some actual studies (here, and here) that suggest that it is not always as successful as the tyro researcher believes it is.

One of the authors is familiar, a certain Professor Dunning?

A new slogan has emerged in the culture: “Do your own research.” On internet forums and social media platforms, people arguing about hotly contested topics like vaccines, climate change and voter fraud sometimes bolster their point or challenge their interlocutors by slipping in the acronym “D.Y.O.R.”

“Two days after getting the jab, a friend of mine’s friend had a heart attack,” a Reddit user wrote recently in a discussion about Covid-19 vaccines. “I’m not saying they’re connected, but D.Y.O.R.”

The slogan, which appeared in conspiracy theory circles in the 1990s, has grown in popularity over the past decade as conflicts over the reliability of expert judgment have become more pronounced. It promotes an individualistic, freethinking approach to understanding the world: Don’t be gullible — go and find out for yourself what the truth is.

That may seem to be sound advice. Isn’t it always a good idea to gather more information before making up your mind about a complex topic?

Philosophers are always about rejecting authority, and seeking the truth for oneself, so this seems like a sound procedure. Empirical studies, however, differ.

In theory, perhaps. But in practice the idea that people should investigate topics on their own, instinctively skeptical of expert opinion, is often misguided. As psychological studies have repeatedly shown, when it comes to technical and complex issues like climate change and vaccine efficacy, novices who do their own research often end up becoming more misled than informed — the exact opposite of what D.Y.O.R. is supposed to accomplish.

Consider what can happen when people begin to learn about a topic. They may start out appropriately humble, but they can quickly become unreasonably confident after just a small amount of exposure to the subject. Researchers have called this phenomenon the beginner’s bubble.

Not pointing out an specific cases, but you know what we are talking about.

Anecdotally, you can see the beginner’s bubble at work outside the laboratory too. Consider do-it-yourself projects gone wrong. Power tools, ladders and lawn mowers are easily mishandled by untrained users who know just enough to put themselves in danger. A study found that U.S. consumer injuries from pneumatic nail guns increased about 200 percent between 1991 and 2005, apparently as a result of the increased availability of nail guns that were affordable for nonprofessionals.

Research also shows that people learning about topics are vulnerable to hubris. Consider a 2015 study by one of us (Professor Dunning) and the psychologists Stav Atir and Emily Rosenzweig. It found that when novices perceive themselves as having developed expertise about topics such as finance and geography, they will frequently claim that they know about nonexistent financial instruments (like “prerated stocks”) and made-up places (like Cashmere, Ore.) when asked about such things.

I spent a week in Cashmere, Oregon, one day. Drilled my hand with a power drill, and looked into the laser with my remaining eye. Doing my own research!

The take-away? Well, first, self-awareness and self-criticism are hard to come by, so do not just check your sources, check your motivation for checking those particular sources.

Likewise, a 2018 study of attitudes about vaccine policy found that when people ascribe authority to themselves about vaccines, they tend to view their own ideas as better than ideas from rival sources and as equal to those of doctors and scientists who have focused on the issue. Their experience makes them less willing to listen to well-informed advisers than they would have been otherwise.

There should be no shame in identifying a consensus of independent experts and deferring to what they collectively report. As individuals, our skills at adequately vetting information are spotty. You can be expert at telling reliable cardiologists from quacks without knowing how to separate serious authorities from pretenders on economic policy.

And on the other hand,

For D.Y.O.R. enthusiasts, one lesson to take away from all of this might be: Don’t do your own research, because you are probably not competent to do it.

Is that our message? Not necessarily. For one thing, that is precisely the kind of advice that advocates of D.Y.O.R. are primed to reject. In a society where conflicts between so-called elites and their critics are so pronounced, appealing to the superiority of experts can trigger distrust.

The problem is compounded by the fact that outsider critics frequently have legitimate complaints about advice provided by insider authorities. One example might be the initial instruction from public officials at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic that people need not wear masks.

So the problem is knowing when to trust those who know, when you don't really know that they know what they are talking about, because you don't know, either. Professional trust is the issue.

Instead, our message, in part, is that it’s not enough for experts to have credentials, knowledge and lots of facts. They must show that they are trustworthy and listen seriously to objections from alternative perspectives.

We strive to offer careful guidance when it comes to our own areas of expertise. Even so, some D.Y.O.R. enthusiasts may reject our cautions. If they do, we hope that they will nonetheless heed at least one piece of advice: If you are going to do your own research, the research you should do first is on how best to do your own research.

Article is NYT paywalled, so beware. And now, my dear Soylentils, time to do your own research, and stop calling those that attempt to do so Dunning-Kroeger idiots. Far more likely that they are lying insurgents and trolls.

Discuss!

They are nothing if not easily suggestible. Seems the waco right in America cannot comprehend "pandemic". No wonder Republicans are dying off in rural areas, and Reddit is keeping a running tab on "Herman Cain Awards". But denial runs deep in the minds of conspiracy theorists, and a recent super-spreader event by the same must, therefore, have some other cause. And what is more plausible, but the underlying plot device of a recent movie? Award winning movie! Yes, the conservatives have been undone by The Power of the Dog.

The coverage is to be found at Vice.

A group of unvaccinated people who attended a huge conspiracy conference in Dallas earlier this month all became sick in the days after the event with symptoms like coughing, shortness of breath, and fever. Instead of blaming the global COVID pandemic, however, the conspiracy theorists think they were attacked with anthrax.

And they weren't even plaiting a rawhide lariat! Of course, all the shouting and spittle could have been a vector, but not usually for anthrax.

This far-right conspiracy claim began after a dozen people spent time together in a confined space at the ReAwaken America tour event in Dallas over the weekend of Dec. 10. And the fact that this was likely a COVID outbreak and superspreader event has been almost entirely ignored.

The anthrax claim was first made by Joe Oltmann on his Conservative Daily podcast earlier this week. In a video recording of the podcast, Oltmann can be seen coughing and sneezing on camera, symptoms often associated with COVID-19 or other illnesses.

Instead, Oltmann, who has spent much of 2021 spreading bogus election conspiracies, claimed that he and his fellow conspiracy theorists who recently attended the conference had been attacked by anthrax. The conference, run by Tulsa businessman Clay Clark, was headlined by figures like disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump adviser Roger Stone, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Eric Trump, the son of former President Donald Trump, also spoke at the event.

More like "Re-Infect America", if you know what I mean. Flynn, Stone, MyPillow guy? And one of the Spawn? Just, wow.

“There’s a 99.9% chance it’s anthrax,” Oltmann said on his podcast, even though no one had tested positive for anthrax poisoning and none of the other 3,500 attendees have so far reported suffering the effects of anthrax.

Oltmann claimed that he and up to a dozen other people who were in the green room at an event fell ill over the following days.

That's funny, 99.9% of all statistics based on no data are totally made up! Coincidence? I think not! But, there is more: Oltmann took an arrow to the knee, or somewhere.

While Oltmann said he was “sick, sick,” he claimed his symptoms were tempered because he was already taking the antibiotic doxycycline as a result of impaling his leg on an arrow in an accident in his brother’s garage weeks previously.

Evidently, you can be not careful enough. But, now for the tie-in. Power of the Dog is trying to Stop the Stop the Steel!

Jovan Pulitzer, an election conspiracist who was also at the conference, apparently experienced more severe symptoms.

Pulitzer, a failed inventor who once created a barcode scanner listed as one of the 50 worst inventions ever, was heavily involved in the bogus Arizona recount, consulting for the Cyber Ninjas and promoting the idea that box of ballots had been flown into Arizona on election night from Asia to swing the vote in Biden’s favor.

According to Oltmann, Pulitzer has not been heard from in several days and he reported more severe complications including “body lesions and weeping skin.”

Not been heard from, except, of course, to report suspicious symptoms. Takes a special mind to hold these two facts together.

The claims that these illnesses were due to an anthrax attack were shared and viewed hundreds of thousands of times on Telegram and other alt-tech platforms like Gab and Parler. The claims have also been boosted on mainstream social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

After Oltmann made the claim about anthrax—without providing a shred of evidence—the conspiracy was boosted by other election fraud conspiracists like former New Mexico State University professor David Clements, and Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne.

The bogus claim was also boosted by QAnon influencer-turned-Congressional candidate Ron Watkins, who called for prayers for those affected.

Of course, Ockham's Razor would suggest that, in the midst of a viral pandemic, the simpler explanation was that all these people, many of whom presumably are unvaccinated, were spreading the COVID-19 virus. That, of course, is a lie spread by the Deep State. Everyone knows that.