Sorry, that's all I can say to this. He may have entered the country illegally, but when he was arrested, he was here legally, and there's 0 non-circumstantial evidence that he's a gang member, and even the circumstantial stuff is pretty sketchy and relies on us to trust an administration and federal agencies that are known to lie their asses off, and to treat even the slightest connection (like a tattoo of a crown) as evidence of gang membership. It's very weird to see non-MAGA buy this nonsense.
Once upon a time, when I lived in certain neighborhoods and took buses from certain stops (and going back further, to when I hung out in downtown Nashville 30 years ago), I spent a lot of time talking to people experiencing homelessness. I learned a lot from those conversations, but the biggest lesson is that for most of us, homelessness is way closer than we'd like to think. The cracks in the system that lead to homelessness are quite large, and all it takes to fall through it them are one of many pretty common precipitating events, e.g., a head injury, abuse at home (particularly for teenagers and women), surprisingly minor mental illness (though homelessness itself has a way of exacerbating most mental illnesses), or drug addiction (either what we think of as illicit drugs, or prescription drug addiction, which often comes from relatively common injuries), and a lack of resources and support (from family, community, or state).
With this in mind, it makes no sense to see people experiencing homeless as an other, defined by some feature inherent to themselves that makes them homeless, and differences on which make it difficult or impossible for me to become homeless. However, this is how people tend to see homelessness: as a straightforward result of bad choices, caused by something inherent to the people who make them. And this is why people experiencing homelessness remain one of the few social categories, and in particular one of the few vulnerable social categories, that it's OK to treat poorly.
It's interesting that, given the language so many people use to talk about homelessness, the only language people like Jaybird are interested in is the language people trying to change how we see homelessness ask us to use. If I were a better Freudian than I am, I'd say it has something to do with our deep need to not see how alike people experiencing homelessness and we are.
One of the interesting things about homelessness is that we don't want to spend resources on people experiencing it, because we think about them in highly essentialized ways, but we end up spending a sh*t ton of resources on them anyway, as in the article you initially linked. One way to fix this vicious cycle would be for people to think about homelessness differently, and in particular, in a way that doesn't involve moral judgment of people who are experiencing it, and language change is way we can help people get there.
Having a philosophy background, I'm sure you've thought a lot about language and thought (the house of being, speech acts, and so on), and you might even be aware that labels tend to cause us to think in essentialist terms, that is, e.g., when we call someone homeless, we tend to see it as being the result of something inherent and possibly immutable about them, so trying to avoid essentializing labels is one part of a strategy to change the way people think about people who fall into a social category.
Again, focusing entirely on language, or harshly policing language (calling out instead of calling in, as the kids say), are generally bad, but so is a stubborn resistance to language change (a resistance usually explainable, obviously, by the fact that it really does affect how people think).
Anyway, like I said, I'm sure you know all this, but you are temporarily experiencing ressentiment.
Yeah, there's definitely a serious 90s libertarian vibe: a lot of sarcasm, hates everyone (but especially women), hates the government, hates taxes, likes weed and guns, wants to be mostly left alone. The only known politically-oriented person I saw him cite approvingly was Thomas Sowell, which fits with this vibe.
To be clear, the "Registered socialist" (not an actual thing) post was a clear shitpost, in which he also claimed he had 27 mail in ballots, playing on the rightwing belief that the "left" votes multiple times. I don't think there's any evidence he was any sort of socialist.
I'm not a fan of the Biden administration by any means, but if you wanted to bring back manufacturing, the Biden administration's chip and green initiatives seem to be the right way to do it. Those sectors also bring in enough jobs that there are whole non-profits being set up to help with workforce issues.
There's a somewhat heated debate amongst the various types of leftists going on right now on the various social media around the idea of tariffs. A lot of trade unionist types going back to the industrial revolution, and a lot of social democrats in the 20th century, have been in favor of targeted tariffs as a form of protectionism for workers (can't lose jobs to manufacturing in Germany if we have tariffs on German-made goods here in 1840s England, now can we! sorta thing). A lot of internationalists are like, "Tariffs are a form of nationalism. All nationalism is bad. Therefore all tariffs are bad." And the various types of Marxists (including the internationalists) point out that tariffs don't end up helping workers, they just help capital (there are a bunch of Marx and Engels writings to this effect from the 1840s on). It's been an interesting discussion, with good points on both sides (but still, tariffs are bad, and don't help workers!).
Union leaders in the U.S. seem to heavily favor tariffs, particularly on cars, and a year or two ago, their members largely agreed, but recent polling suggest union rank and file are increasingly anti-tariff generally. I suspect that a Democratic mayor of Michigan has to say "Some tariffs are good" to keep on the auto unions good side.
I’m not the one who introduced the term “cold” to the conversation.
Sigh. Alright, man, onto the next conversation, where maybe you'll decide to be a productive participant, or maybe you'll do this sort of sh*t. See you there.
Aha, straw-manning, another common conspiracy-theorist tactic.
No, I'm not saying COVID is just a bad cold. I'm saying its symptoms heavily overlap with other respiratory viruses, including the flu and the various types of viruses that get classified under the common cold. And the majority of people who get COVID, especially healthy people like, say, athletes in the military, experience only the cold-like symptoms. However, COVID is not just a bad cold, because in its more severe form, it is much worse than either the cold or the flu (or at least was worse than the flu, before widespread immunity and vaccination; I haven't seen the latest mortality rate numbers for COVID, but I suspect they've dropped down closer to the flu). And that's before we start talking about long COVID and its various manifestations.
My point is all we know is that 7 Americans who participated in the World Military Games in 2019 had COVID-like symptoms, and that this 7 is not an unusual number for that time in the military, even compared to units that sent no one to the World Military Games. So those 7 people tell us nothing, for better or worse. You'll have to look elsewhere for clues, I'm afraid.
Oh man, by all means, keep talking about alternatives. The problem isn't that you're talking about alternatives on a podunk website in 2025: it's that scientists keep saying there's a very real impact on research because people in power keep insisting that they, the scientists, focus on the alternatives.
I mean, I know in your mind, the conspiracy is more than likely, it's almost certain, and therefore what's actually being suppressed is the conspiracy, but seriously, scientists have been saying for years now that the pressure they're getting is very much from the opposite direction.
Syllogism 1:
If a report is required by law to be released, it is important.
This report was required by law to be released.
Therefore, this report was important.
Syllogism 2:
If a report was not required to be released, but is important, it should be released.
This report was not required to be released, but isimportant (per syllogism 1).
Therefore this report should have been released even though it was not required by law to be so.
If you read the report, or even just the sections I quoted above, you'll see that it says nothing that could possibly lead anyone to conclude that U.S. military personnel contracted COVID at the World Military Games in Wuhan in 2019 without a great deal more evidence. It mostly just looks like about the number of people you'd expect got colds. It just so happens that they got colds a couple months before a worldwide pandemic with cold-like symptoms originated in the place they were. It's weak even as circumstantial evidence goes, if you take 2 seconds to think about it. But you're thinking like a conspiracy theorist, so 2 seconds is more than you have to spare.
So in addition to reconfirming the laziness of conspiracy theory thinking, we have another common feature: draw a conclusion from false information, and when the information is shown to be false, continue to the maintain the conclusion as though it had been proven anyway.
I realize that, post-February 2020, we're all virologists and epidemiologists now, but man, I really suggest reading some of the actual research by virologists and epidemiologists. I even linked a Nature write-up of a recent (published in February) study on the origins of the virus above. It's a good place to start.
The article you posted, by a yellow rag, says they were required by law to release the report, but it references a law that says no such thing (the quote in the article is "publicly available on an internet website in a searchable format," but their link to the law actually takes you to the same report, and the part of the law that has that quote is actually about other reports related to Wuhan and the DOD (I've included the entire section of the law below). In other words, you don't know that they were required by law to publish it, and the yellow rag you linked to doesn't seem to know either.
It seems more than likely that the report came out, it was a big ol' nothing burger (because that's what it is), and they just sent it on the Congress along with a bunch of other stuff without thinking about it further.
The other feature of the conspiracy theorist is laziness: he or she is willing to accept, without question, the mere conjecture and outright misinformation of any publication that says anything that confirms their conspiratorial suspicions, but he or she is unwilling to do even basic checking of the facts and assumptions presented in said publications, despite the fact that it takes mere minutes to do such fact checking most of the time.
The committee directs the Secretary of Defense to submit a report to the Armed Services Committee of the House of Representatives not later than January 1, 2022 describing:
(1) All contracts the Department of Defense signed with the
EcoHealth Alliance or its affiliates by year from 2012-2021 in
spreadsheet format, to include purpose, location where contract was performed, cost, metrics, contract number, contract oversight organization, and whether any funds were provided ultimately to the Wuhan Institute of Virology;
(2) Whether any DoD-funded research projects involving
EcoHealth Alliance or its affiliates were performed in China or
in support of research performed in China, and if so, a
description of the projects, the work performed, and the risk
assessments DoD used to evaluate the project;
(3) Whether DoD issued any awards to the EcoHealth Alliance or its affiliates that are not available on USASpending.gov;
(4) Whether the Department sponsored any classified
research involving EcoHealth Alliance or its affiliates; and
(5) Copies of the agreements, initial research reports, and
all progress and final reports from the EcoHealth Alliance or
its affiliates.
This report shall be submitted in unclassified form and
made publicly available on an internet website in a searchable
format, but may contain a classified annex.
ThTh6: this really sounds like they just made some edits to a few genes (14?) in modern wolves, ignoring whatever other genetic differences there are between modern wolves and a species that last had a common ancestor millions of years ago, and called it a dire wolf. Maybe this is the first step in a more complex attempt at resurrecting extinct species, but right now it looks like they just have some slightly genetically modified wolves, not anything like actual dire wolves, to this lay person.
Keep what hidden? And did they try? Have you ever seen a report like this before for any sort of event?
You've made a bunch of assumptions about what happened with the report, what the report secretly means, etc., and drawn your conclusion from those assumptions. It's like the Ontological Argument of Conspiracies: if you can conceive it, then it happened.
Relatedly, man, conspiracy theorizers are so keen on finding evidence of a conspiracy that they'll latch onto literally anything. Though Slade already said that better than I.
I read the report. It would be difficult to conclude from it that COVID existed pre-December from it, given these quotes and the reports own conclusion:
Data surveillance reports from military treatment facilities indicate no statistically significant difference in COVID-19-like symptoms cases at installations with participating athletes when compared to installations without them. In addition, no significant increase in COVID-19-like signs and/or symptoms was documented for the dates of October 2019 through March 2020 as a result of U.S. Army separate surveillance testing.
and
Data surveillance reports from military treatment facilities indicate no statistically significant difference in COVID-19-like symptoms cases at installations with participating athletes when compared to installations without them. In addition, no significant increase in COVID-19-like signs and/or symptoms was documented for the dates of October 2019 through March 2020 as a result of U.S. Army separate surveillance testing.
It sounds like 7 members of the U.S. military who attended the games in Wuhan had COVID-like symptoms, which are, as we all know now, very consistent with other respiratory viruses, including the flu and the common cold (which would include various other coronaviruses and rhinoviruses). These 7 wouldn't have stood out, given that a bunch other servicemembers all over the world also had colds, if there hadn't been a global pandemic that originated in Wuhan (likely from racoon dogs, the cute little buggers, the latest research suggests).
Buncha people in their 50s and 60s, a few years from what would have been a decent pension after decades of work, deciding, you know what, why not work doing repetitive, body-destroying labor for a fraction of what they were previously paid, getting their pay docked if they screw up one piece of a widget out of many thousands in a day, with no paid time off and no real ability to form a union because labor laws have been gutted. Seems likely.
Relevant for the sizeable OT contingent clinging to the "If white people had been able to express their race-realist views in the classroom/workplace, none of this would have happened" theory of the (re-)rise of Trump.
No, the issue is that the way the tariffs were set is very, very stupid. Like, no rational person with even a basic understanding of economics or international trade would set tariffs that way.
More importantly, on a personal level, I'm not online as much as I used to be, so the opportunities for serious owns are few and far between, so thank you, man, for teeing one up for me. Next time, read the articles you post.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/14/2025”
Ooooooof.
Sorry, that's all I can say to this. He may have entered the country illegally, but when he was arrested, he was here legally, and there's 0 non-circumstantial evidence that he's a gang member, and even the circumstantial stuff is pretty sketchy and relies on us to trust an administration and federal agencies that are known to lie their asses off, and to treat even the slightest connection (like a tattoo of a crown) as evidence of gang membership. It's very weird to see non-MAGA buy this nonsense.
"
Perhaps if Israel agrees to disarm as well.
"
Once upon a time, when I lived in certain neighborhoods and took buses from certain stops (and going back further, to when I hung out in downtown Nashville 30 years ago), I spent a lot of time talking to people experiencing homelessness. I learned a lot from those conversations, but the biggest lesson is that for most of us, homelessness is way closer than we'd like to think. The cracks in the system that lead to homelessness are quite large, and all it takes to fall through it them are one of many pretty common precipitating events, e.g., a head injury, abuse at home (particularly for teenagers and women), surprisingly minor mental illness (though homelessness itself has a way of exacerbating most mental illnesses), or drug addiction (either what we think of as illicit drugs, or prescription drug addiction, which often comes from relatively common injuries), and a lack of resources and support (from family, community, or state).
With this in mind, it makes no sense to see people experiencing homeless as an other, defined by some feature inherent to themselves that makes them homeless, and differences on which make it difficult or impossible for me to become homeless. However, this is how people tend to see homelessness: as a straightforward result of bad choices, caused by something inherent to the people who make them. And this is why people experiencing homelessness remain one of the few social categories, and in particular one of the few vulnerable social categories, that it's OK to treat poorly.
It's interesting that, given the language so many people use to talk about homelessness, the only language people like Jaybird are interested in is the language people trying to change how we see homelessness ask us to use. If I were a better Freudian than I am, I'd say it has something to do with our deep need to not see how alike people experiencing homelessness and we are.
"
One of the interesting things about homelessness is that we don't want to spend resources on people experiencing it, because we think about them in highly essentialized ways, but we end up spending a sh*t ton of resources on them anyway, as in the article you initially linked. One way to fix this vicious cycle would be for people to think about homelessness differently, and in particular, in a way that doesn't involve moral judgment of people who are experiencing it, and language change is way we can help people get there.
"
Having a philosophy background, I'm sure you've thought a lot about language and thought (the house of being, speech acts, and so on), and you might even be aware that labels tend to cause us to think in essentialist terms, that is, e.g., when we call someone homeless, we tend to see it as being the result of something inherent and possibly immutable about them, so trying to avoid essentializing labels is one part of a strategy to change the way people think about people who fall into a social category.
Again, focusing entirely on language, or harshly policing language (calling out instead of calling in, as the kids say), are generally bad, but so is a stubborn resistance to language change (a resistance usually explainable, obviously, by the fact that it really does affect how people think).
Anyway, like I said, I'm sure you know all this, but you are temporarily experiencing ressentiment.
"
Commenters temporarily experiencing shitposting?
"
The bulk of the increase was rubbish fires, not structure or wildfires, in case that's not clear from the linked article.
On “Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s Residence Attacked, Suspect Arrested”
Yeah, there's definitely a serious 90s libertarian vibe: a lot of sarcasm, hates everyone (but especially women), hates the government, hates taxes, likes weed and guns, wants to be mostly left alone. The only known politically-oriented person I saw him cite approvingly was Thomas Sowell, which fits with this vibe.
"
To be clear, the "Registered socialist" (not an actual thing) post was a clear shitpost, in which he also claimed he had 27 mail in ballots, playing on the rightwing belief that the "left" votes multiple times. I don't think there's any evidence he was any sort of socialist.
On “What To Expect When You’re Expecting a Trade War”
I'm not a fan of the Biden administration by any means, but if you wanted to bring back manufacturing, the Biden administration's chip and green initiatives seem to be the right way to do it. Those sectors also bring in enough jobs that there are whole non-profits being set up to help with workforce issues.
"
There's a somewhat heated debate amongst the various types of leftists going on right now on the various social media around the idea of tariffs. A lot of trade unionist types going back to the industrial revolution, and a lot of social democrats in the 20th century, have been in favor of targeted tariffs as a form of protectionism for workers (can't lose jobs to manufacturing in Germany if we have tariffs on German-made goods here in 1840s England, now can we! sorta thing). A lot of internationalists are like, "Tariffs are a form of nationalism. All nationalism is bad. Therefore all tariffs are bad." And the various types of Marxists (including the internationalists) point out that tariffs don't end up helping workers, they just help capital (there are a bunch of Marx and Engels writings to this effect from the 1840s on). It's been an interesting discussion, with good points on both sides (but still, tariffs are bad, and don't help workers!).
Union leaders in the U.S. seem to heavily favor tariffs, particularly on cars, and a year or two ago, their members largely agreed, but recent polling suggest union rank and file are increasingly anti-tariff generally. I suspect that a Democratic mayor of Michigan has to say "Some tariffs are good" to keep on the auto unions good side.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/7/2025”
I’m not the one who introduced the term “cold” to the conversation.
Sigh. Alright, man, onto the next conversation, where maybe you'll decide to be a productive participant, or maybe you'll do this sort of sh*t. See you there.
"
Aha, straw-manning, another common conspiracy-theorist tactic.
No, I'm not saying COVID is just a bad cold. I'm saying its symptoms heavily overlap with other respiratory viruses, including the flu and the various types of viruses that get classified under the common cold. And the majority of people who get COVID, especially healthy people like, say, athletes in the military, experience only the cold-like symptoms. However, COVID is not just a bad cold, because in its more severe form, it is much worse than either the cold or the flu (or at least was worse than the flu, before widespread immunity and vaccination; I haven't seen the latest mortality rate numbers for COVID, but I suspect they've dropped down closer to the flu). And that's before we start talking about long COVID and its various manifestations.
My point is all we know is that 7 Americans who participated in the World Military Games in 2019 had COVID-like symptoms, and that this 7 is not an unusual number for that time in the military, even compared to units that sent no one to the World Military Games. So those 7 people tell us nothing, for better or worse. You'll have to look elsewhere for clues, I'm afraid.
"
Oh man, by all means, keep talking about alternatives. The problem isn't that you're talking about alternatives on a podunk website in 2025: it's that scientists keep saying there's a very real impact on research because people in power keep insisting that they, the scientists, focus on the alternatives.
I mean, I know in your mind, the conspiracy is more than likely, it's almost certain, and therefore what's actually being suppressed is the conspiracy, but seriously, scientists have been saying for years now that the pressure they're getting is very much from the opposite direction.
"
What's great here is your logic:
Syllogism 1:
If a report is required by law to be released, it is important.
This report was required by law to be released.
Therefore, this report was important.
Syllogism 2:
If a report was not required to be released, but is important, it should be released.
This report was not required to be released, but isimportant (per syllogism 1).
Therefore this report should have been released even though it was not required by law to be so.
If you read the report, or even just the sections I quoted above, you'll see that it says nothing that could possibly lead anyone to conclude that U.S. military personnel contracted COVID at the World Military Games in Wuhan in 2019 without a great deal more evidence. It mostly just looks like about the number of people you'd expect got colds. It just so happens that they got colds a couple months before a worldwide pandemic with cold-like symptoms originated in the place they were. It's weak even as circumstantial evidence goes, if you take 2 seconds to think about it. But you're thinking like a conspiracy theorist, so 2 seconds is more than you have to spare.
So in addition to reconfirming the laziness of conspiracy theory thinking, we have another common feature: draw a conclusion from false information, and when the information is shown to be false, continue to the maintain the conclusion as though it had been proven anyway.
"
I realize that, post-February 2020, we're all virologists and epidemiologists now, but man, I really suggest reading some of the actual research by virologists and epidemiologists. I even linked a Nature write-up of a recent (published in February) study on the origins of the virus above. It's a good place to start.
"
The article you posted, by a yellow rag, says they were required by law to release the report, but it references a law that says no such thing (the quote in the article is "publicly available on an internet website in a searchable format," but their link to the law actually takes you to the same report, and the part of the law that has that quote is actually about other reports related to Wuhan and the DOD (I've included the entire section of the law below). In other words, you don't know that they were required by law to publish it, and the yellow rag you linked to doesn't seem to know either.
It seems more than likely that the report came out, it was a big ol' nothing burger (because that's what it is), and they just sent it on the Congress along with a bunch of other stuff without thinking about it further.
The other feature of the conspiracy theorist is laziness: he or she is willing to accept, without question, the mere conjecture and outright misinformation of any publication that says anything that confirms their conspiratorial suspicions, but he or she is unwilling to do even basic checking of the facts and assumptions presented in said publications, despite the fact that it takes mere minutes to do such fact checking most of the time.
On “Next Throughput: An Electronic Resistance to Unreason”
ThTh6: this really sounds like they just made some edits to a few genes (14?) in modern wolves, ignoring whatever other genetic differences there are between modern wolves and a species that last had a common ancestor millions of years ago, and called it a dire wolf. Maybe this is the first step in a more complex attempt at resurrecting extinct species, but right now it looks like they just have some slightly genetically modified wolves, not anything like actual dire wolves, to this lay person.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/7/2025”
Keep what hidden? And did they try? Have you ever seen a report like this before for any sort of event?
You've made a bunch of assumptions about what happened with the report, what the report secretly means, etc., and drawn your conclusion from those assumptions. It's like the Ontological Argument of Conspiracies: if you can conceive it, then it happened.
"
Relatedly, man, conspiracy theorizers are so keen on finding evidence of a conspiracy that they'll latch onto literally anything. Though Slade already said that better than I.
"
I read the report. It would be difficult to conclude from it that COVID existed pre-December from it, given these quotes and the reports own conclusion:
and
It sounds like 7 members of the U.S. military who attended the games in Wuhan had COVID-like symptoms, which are, as we all know now, very consistent with other respiratory viruses, including the flu and the common cold (which would include various other coronaviruses and rhinoviruses). These 7 wouldn't have stood out, given that a bunch other servicemembers all over the world also had colds, if there hadn't been a global pandemic that originated in Wuhan (likely from racoon dogs, the cute little buggers, the latest research suggests).
"
Buncha people in their 50s and 60s, a few years from what would have been a decent pension after decades of work, deciding, you know what, why not work doing repetitive, body-destroying labor for a fraction of what they were previously paid, getting their pay docked if they screw up one piece of a widget out of many thousands in a day, with no paid time off and no real ability to form a union because labor laws have been gutted. Seems likely.
"
This is a month old, but I just stumbled upon it this morning:
https://sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2025/03/the-agents-of-history.html
Relevant for the sizeable OT contingent clinging to the "If white people had been able to express their race-realist views in the classroom/workplace, none of this would have happened" theory of the (re-)rise of Trump.
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25”
No, the issue is that the way the tariffs were set is very, very stupid. Like, no rational person with even a basic understanding of economics or international trade would set tariffs that way.
More importantly, on a personal level, I'm not online as much as I used to be, so the opportunities for serious owns are few and far between, so thank you, man, for teeing one up for me. Next time, read the articles you post.
"
The lesson of St. Pierre is that we just need to return all of the Jordan's to Cambodia, and we'll be all even.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.