disneygibson

Try posting / searching here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/

Indeed. Any mild criticism is immediately flagged, downvoted, and deleted. I don’t care how serious the pandemic is, it doesn’t justify mass hysteria.

As I said, I don’t see this changing anytime soon. Your best bet is likely Mexico and/or a way into certain US states like Texas or Florida. Not sure if you can get a permanent residence card from abroad, but it may be something to investigate.

Of course it’s horrifying, especially since these actions are supported by a majority of the population.

There are a few countries with little or no entry restrictions. Mexico in particular is fairly close to Canada and is open. If you are able to work remotely, I’d strongly suggest looking into it. Canada is not going to change its policies anytime soon, sadly.

I’m not sure what the restrictions are, but can they actually prevent you from leaving if you are flying internationally? What about for a medical or other “official” purpose?

Edit: seriously scary that this post is flagged. Not cool.

This isn’t going to end. There is no point at which things will return to normal. If you think otherwise, I’m sorry but you simply haven’t been paying attention.

If vaccine mandates bother you, I strongly suggest moving to a rural area or to a region/country with less restrictions. Otherwise you will inevitably be forced to receive yearly boosters in order to participate in society.

Tokyo has very few trash cans yet not much litter. It’s a cultural problem, not an engineering or city planning one.

John Oliver is a biased comedian out for laughs. You should never take his “investigations” as anything more than entertainment.

About the last thing people in small towns want are arrogant city folks coming in, kicking them out, and moving them to a nightmarish megacity. It might come as a surprise to denizens of coastal cities, but no one in a small town looks at NYC or SF and thinks it’s a successful, nice place to live.

If you want to help small towns, push for more remote work. There is absolutely zero reason why millions need to be crammed in a single geographic location when we all work online anyway.

I’m honestly not sure if this post is satire.

There is much more homogenization today which goes far beyond your point.

You can think of it as a hollowing out of the middle. As people have become more individualistic, they’ve lost interest in the “middle range” of power: neighborhood, town, city, state. This power structure has collapsed almost entirely, flushing all of it to the top, centralized federal level. This is also why an urbanite in Brooklyn is more similar to one in San Francisco than to those a hundred miles north in upstate New York. Local identities have been replaced entirely by national and increasingly international ones.

Reagan survived an attempt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Ron...

Considering how the US government has spent its trillions in the last few decades, keeping money offshore might actually be an ethical move. If buying products from a company that exploits workers in X country is unethical, why are taxes used to fund wars any different?

You’ve moved the goal posts about five times now. First it was our entire lives indoors. Now it’s just a few months a year in some parts of the world. First it was in the next 20 years. Now it’s by the end of the century.

A single study that predicts brain damage from CO2 “by the end of the century” is pure speculation at this point. The link you shared even says it’s still very unclear what the effect is.

I’ll say it again; the actual science says that climate change is a serious problem. It doesn’t say that we are headed into the apocalypse in the next decade.

The author uses the word apocalypse at least five times in the article. I don’t think he was being hyperbolic.

Because absolutely no climate science says that increased CO2 in the next twenty years will lead to humans living entirely inside with AC’d units? Again, this is basic science.

The real effects of climate change will be difficult enough. We don’t need to waste energy on inventing fantastical ones.

My complaint is that the author has forgotten what fiction is and seems to think it correlates to reality.

Do you honestly believe that everyone will spend their lives inside an air conditioned room and with CO2 scrubbers?

My assurance is reality. Reality isn’t a science fiction novel.

Interestingly you only get these absurd predictions from a very narrow group of people, which lines up quite well with what my original comment said. It’s a religious movement, not an accurate assessment of climate science.

The exact same conversation could be had at an obscure religious cult ranch in the middle of the desert. Remember, these people are completely serious.

“Dad, I’m depressed and unmotivated about going to college.”

“Son, the world is ending in the near future in sci-fi fashion and I want to make sure you survive in the dome.”

No matter how bad climate change is, I can assure you, we won’t be living in a dome to escape the hellscape in 20 years. People who believe this are exhibiting cultish behavior.

I will add more of the quote.

The author was talking to his son, who was feeling unmotivated about going to college because the world was ending soon. The author's reply was the section I quoted.

Because for many people (this author included), this topic is akin to a religion, complete with holy literature (sci-fi) and a high priesthood (scientists and sci-fi writers.) So when a "god" like Stephenson (the word god is used in the article to describe him) doesn't preach about the imminent End of Times, everyone gets nervous.

If you think I'm exaggerating, here is an excerpt:

But a few weeks ago, at dinner, a conversation with my teenage son went awry. I was trying to talk to him about possible college plans, and he wouldn't engage. I pushed. We gotta get started, I explained. Applications. Money. Campus visits.

And he said, “Frankly, I just feel sort of nihilistic about it.”

I followed up. About what?

Well, it turned out—the whole thing, really. College, jobs, the ecosphere, the future. The boomers blasted it all into oblivion while Gen X screwed around on the internet.

Here's where I blew it. Instead of giving him the we're-all-in-this-together-change-the-future speech, I said, “Kiddo, I think there's a chance that when all this shakes out, some people will get to be inside the dome and most people won't, and I'm just hoping you'll get inside the dome before they shut the door.”

Like I said, cultish.

Incorrect. He would be hailed as the first African American Secretary of State with a decorated military career that resigned to protest lies and an unjust war.

Textbooks a century from now will include his name. It could have been in a positive light, but now his name will be forever tarnished.

The estimates vary, but between half a million and a million people have died from the war and its aftermath. Not including Syrian Civil War or Libya, which were absolutely consequences of destabilizing the region.

No matter how bad Saddam was, invading was a bad solution.

Imagine if he had resigned in protest at the decision to push for the invasion of Iraq. He would now be hailed as a hero around the world.

Instead, he didn’t. What a waste of an exceptional career.

HN is a very niche audience. Most of the global population is in China, India, Africa, and the Muslim world (including Indonesia and Pakistan) and the majority of these people do not want nudity everywhere.

As usual, a small segment of Western society deems itself morally superior to the entire world. New century, same old mentality.

I’m glad that nude artwork is filtered out from the mainstream, because if it weren’t, the art world would become even more faddish and attention-seeking. I can’t even search YouTube for recipes or offgrid videos anymore, because the top results are always a woman in a sexualized pose.

It’s okay to like boundaries. Everything doesn’t need to be blared in your face all the time. Saying this doesn’t make me a Puritan, it makes me in line with most of the people on earth.

No, it isn’t, and the “moving past X toward a democratic future” is an Enlightenment idea rooted in Western culture, largely enforced upon other states via violence, economic sanctions, and colonialism. As the West continues to decline, so will the appeal of its political structures.

This is fairly obvious if you pay attention to Russia, China, India, and other powerful countries. It isn’t 1990 or 1950. The world isn’t trying to reinvent itself in the mold of the West anymore.

The article is quite negative and assumes that Western ideas are inherently superior, all monarchies are bad, etc. To be expected for a left-wing literature journal, obviously, but that doesn’t make it any less culturally imperialistic.

Not sure how that has anything to do with my comment.

I’ll repeat it: the primary reasons which caused Japan to become “imperialist” are directly tied to Western imperialism. The Japanese emperor was mostly a political symbolic figurehead that united the Japanese islands, not a Roman emperor or British monarch intent on conquering the world.

This is all basic Japanese history.

The Japanese emperor concept precedes Western “invade everyone” imperialism by about a thousand years and has historically almost nothing to do with other countries. It really took Western ideas of imperialism to get Japan to be interested in the outside world.

Yeah I really did not like this article. How about the West lets Japan figure out its own proper government and role for the emperor, rather than continuing to insist that our ways are unquestionably superior? The entire mood of this piece is dismissive and arrogant. Poor journalism.

The first tweet has a link to the blog post.