lit_starling

@conor64 Because the lockdowns were the largest-scale assault on civil liberties in history. Country after country jailed its entire population by decree. "Public health" with few exceptions sided with these unprecedented, totalitarian, and barbaric policies that did generational damage.

@MurielBlaivePhD ChatGPT doesn't make grammatical mistakes in German, much less English.

I'm peer-reviewing an article for a journal in my field. The author is not an English native speaker and I reproached them the numerous grammar mistakes that make the reading difficult. They half-apologized that basically, "it's ChatGPT's fault." So that's the new cocky fad, is it? "I don't need to hire a language editor anymore, ChatGPT will do it, and if it gets it wrong, it's not my fault"...?? What the heck...?

@MurielBlaivePhD @DanielHadas2 Quite right. Two things can be true at once. You can both say 'governments shouldn't have the right to do this under any circumstances' AND 'look: on top of everything, it was also pointless'.

@DanielHadas2 Not so sure - perhaps you are only saying, "Look what happens when someone does not follow the injunctions you present as absolutely necessary"...

Every time you say "but Swedish data shows", you are implying the right of the government to lock you in your house if ever Swedish data shows something else.

@TaraAnnThieke Who's this from, please? Thank you

"But modern psychology depends on physiology, physiology depends on biology, biology depends on chemistry, and chemistry depends on physics; and, deep down, the wonderful thing is that nobody understands physics."

@Rn_Psi @KbfKate @MartinKulldorff If not billions!

@KbfKate @MartinKulldorff They delayed transmission long enough that most folks could be vaccinated. That's a good thing and likely saved millions of lives.

Five years ago today, we authored the Great Barrington Declaration, arguing for focused protection instead of lockdowns. A wholehearted thank you to the almost one million co-signers. We were proven right. gbdeclaration.org

@MurielBlaivePhD I don't want to defend democracy because Swiss people keep voting for totalitarian surveillance.

Freedom of speech is attacked from both sides, and with the same argument: the other side is dangerous/corrupting our youth/endangering our democracy/propagating evil ideas so we must silence it. Clinton is hardly better than Trump in this respect. I have been saying this again and again, but we are in the same situation as in the early 1930s, when the only alternative to dictatorship was presented as being another form of dictatorship. If no one wants to grow up and defend democracy, then democracy is not going to survive, it's that simple.

@MurielBlaivePhD I love Baudelaire! Very fitting.

Heard on French public radio this morning: an extremely moving audio of the writer Jorge Semprun describing the death of the greatest sociologist of memory whose work I still use every day, Maurice Halbwachs. Both were deported to Buchenwald during the war and Halbwachs died of dysentery in March 1945. Halbwachs was agonizing and Semprun felt the need to say something like a prayer, but neither he nor Halbwachs were believers, so he recited a few Baudelaire verses to him - Halbwachs heard them, recognized them, and smiled. Poetry as prayer, can a thought be more heartwarming...? 😇

@DanielHadas2 It's very easy to know what a wold is: it's what's under a stow!

Nevertheless, they did write for a world where far more readers knew what a "wold" was, and hadn't learned it from a book. And indeed for a readership that didn't have screens and recorded sounds among the alternatives to landscape and poetry, as sources of sensation.

Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shalott' is one of the more famous English poems, and rightly so. "On either side the river lie Long fields of barley and of rye, That clothe the wold and meet the sky; And thro' the field the road runs by To many-tower'd Camelot". ...

people's self awareness only penetrates so far; if you differ from someone on a level deeper than their self awareness penetrates, then they'll have immense difficulty understanding you. They can parse you only in comparison to the depth of awareness in themselves

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.” — Doris Lessing

Interesting reflection by Rushdie on Midnight's Children forty years on; and nice to see he's a fan of @DorisLessing100 and @IrisMurdoch ! theguardian.com/books/2021/apr…

Woke people don’t realize that they all look like the Australian breakdancer to the rest of us

Arachnophobia is so stupid I mean why do you even care if these spiders get married