Kinda like reading a long, moralizing screed against a proposed law declaring pi to be 3.00.
Perhaps I know the subject too well. Or should quietly accept that The Atlantic needs a lot of click-fodder to pay the bills.
Perhaps I know the subject too well. Or should quietly accept that The Atlantic needs a lot of click-fodder to pay the bills.
If it's informing and convincing people who don't agree - I'm thinking that 99.9% of those folks aren't going to read any longish article in The Atlantic. And the 0.1% who might read will quickly be repelled if not angered by the article's tone. Similar for folks who do agree, then try to convince others with arguments and tones from the article.
If a preacher has no interest in actually spreading the Good News - preaching to the choir can be quite comfortable. And he's free to take nasty digs at unbelievers while doing that.
Sometimes even the choir needs a morale boost and a reminder as to why they're in the choir.
Taking the headline at face value, though, they’re not wrong at all, and this is something I’ve tried warning folks over myself for several years now. Our collective response to COVID was truly the alarm bells going off (vaccine conspiracies, anti-masking, denialism, etc), and now we’re seeing an anti-science (and anti-reality) administration celebrate the gutting of our scientific prestige in the name of nostalgia for -isms. While authors and commentators are handwringing over whether the US is “cooked” scientifically, those in the know or who are observant already know the answer is an emphatic YES.
With the present attack on science, we’ve effectively outsourced one of the last remaining industries that kept us afloat as an empire. We have no real manufacturing (at least of anything others want), and what we do make is of decreasing quality so that shareholders can get paid (e.g. Boeing jets, American cars, and now even SIG handguns - if we can’t make decent planes, cars, and guns, then what do we even export besides raw materials/agriculture?). Without science driving R&D, we won’t even have the patents on innovative new medicines, technologies, or energy sources that we can export abroad.
So yeah. We’re done as an Empire. This isn’t something we can roll back next election, and I don’t think the current crop of Americans have felt enough pain to suddenly grow cooperative and engage in self-sacrifice for the greater good.
> American cars, and now even SIG handguns
SIG is a German/Swiss company, not American. American cars vary in quality wildly by manufacturer, with Stellantis being the worst offender of what you describe but Chevrolet being the least bad (at the moment).
American gun culture and the gun business in America is a huge outlier internationally. I would find it hard to think of why that would be healthy.
The person I replied to was saying that American manufacturing was trending towards lower quality because of a shift in culture in American companies that sacrificed quality for profit.
The fact that Sig guns are manufactured in the US, or the fact that they are guns as opposed to some other product, are not actually relevant to that. Since Sig is a German company, then one would expect that they would not be subject to the same drop in quality OP described. Since they are, that indicates that the problem described is present in Europe as well and is not a uniquely American phenomenon.
With nothing like that looming right now, there is no check and balance on the anti-science regiment, and so sliding downhill we go. Sadly I don't see this changing either, unless theoretical physicists turn up the basis for some new weapon.
Maybe it’s OK. I don’t have to think about predators, which bugs are edible, and I have an entertainment rectangle in my pocket that I can use to tease people on the internet.
You act like this is something specific to one party when in fact it is representative of both parties, aka the Uniparty.
All agents of capital have blood on their hands from the pandemic they fumbled and that has not yet ended:
How the press manufactured consent for never-ending COVID reinfections
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
Also, this is nothing specific to the US, though considering how many countries followed the lead of the CDC etc, one could reasonably argue the US is most to blame. But don't let that distract you from the fact that ultimately, global capital runs the show:
Modern Capitalism Is Weirder Than You Think It also no longer works as advertised.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-h... (https://archive.ph/Ysw6k)
What a silly comment with zero connection to scientific reality.
> Never-ending reinfections were always inevitable when the first carrier left Wuhan, so "manufactured consent" or lack thereof are utterly irrelevant.
False. When properly and consistently worn, N95 respirators effectively stop COVID transmission.
> It's just another coronavirus much like the others that were already endemic.
It very clearly bucks previous trends, considering:
38% had self-reported long covid after 3 infections https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/post-covid-condit...
40% of the undergrad students reported brain fog due to COVID-19. 37% of the undergraduates exhibited impaired cognition up to 17 months post-infection.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915912...
https://oem.bmj.com/content/81/9/471 33.6% of healthcare workers have symptoms meeting NICE criteria for long Covid. Only 7.6% have a formal diagnosis
20% of kids (ages 6-11) and 14% of teens have for long covid https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2822770
30% have long covid https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6...
36% had long covid https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.01.24319384v...
There's a load of studies that something like 90% of people with long covid don't get better years later.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29513-z
https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(23)00760-9/ful...
https://www.bmj.com/content/381/bmj-2022-074425
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43856-024-00657-x
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-19...
A common type of long covid is myalgic encephalomyelitis which is generally lifelong:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15699087/
Here's two reviews papers about long covid which both say that common long covid subtypes are generally lifelong
"Long COVID" isn't anything unique or special. An infection by most any virus can cause similar long-term symptoms in a subset of patients. It sucks for them, but that's just one of the many risks of living real world. The rest of us aren't going to waste time worrying about one more minor respiratory virus among hundreds of other ones.
Give people the facts about COVID, that it is basically like airborne AIDS, and then let them decide. Unfortunately they were never given that chance thanks to capital's forced messaging on the issue. Even most doctors are drinking the Koolaid. Everyone has a nuked immune system and have become used to getting sick constantly as a result, all seasons of the year.
> "Long COVID" isn't anything unique or special. An infection by most any virus can cause similar long-term symptoms in a subset of patients.
What's different about SARS-COV-2 is that it's constantly mutating and reinfecting at drastically greater rates than anything else we're used to dealing with. Each reinfection increases the risk of long COVID, causes measurable IQ loss, etc.
But keep burying your head in the sand so that you can remain blissfully ignorant.
It's normal for someone who's taken a position fully in favor of "science" to show their bias against what they see as the most eminent threats. There's no attempt here to hide the bias, in fact there's a fairly respectable attempt to explain the reason for the bias which you don't always get.
Any anti-science crusaders from their point of view are not as sensible when they don't explain their bias either. Nobody expects it to be zero bias so when an opinionated person owns up to it this is just a little something that could lead back to better understanding.
You want to be able to compromise on the roots of disagreement, rather than mindless name-calling if you want to recover one of the most sorely-missed elements of greatness.
Naturally what brought this to mind is that the whole time almost nobody is paying any attention to the little detail where sliced bread has never been the best bread anyway :\