whipaway

> It hasn’t ever happened once in 70 years.

do you expect the government to publish photographs or something from some of the most important sites of national defense?

> 100% we’re being trolled.

I have a hard time rationalizing or disproving the Malmstrom base incident, along with other stuff that's allegedly happened around nuclear facilities.

On top of the growing noise about government records surrounding UAP/USO phenomenon, I'm not sure why you're so confident.

> if there was anything else that was dismissed or treated with disdain simply because of pure contrarianism to anything with Trump-adjacency

It's blindingly clear that you can (remarkably this should raise eyebrows, but in this case it's shamefully close to reality) paint with broad brush-strokes that the entire media/tech/creative class making more than the avg household, that lives in cities, etc. effectively out-sourced their judgement to Trump.

The reactions to him were automatic and opposite.

> He basically lets the Trump administration off the hook

That's pretty loaded.

Should we let the entire liberal political establishment off the hook for screaming at the top of their lungs that Trump is evil for not going gung-ho with a WWII mobilization for ventilators? Only to later find that ventilators in many cases were not only ineffective, but leading to death.

> This is also an unrepeatable experiment

This frustrates any discussion about the pandemic and government response (and more broadly practically any question about govt policy & history), namely that these assertions always resort to counterfactuals.

So what happened and what could have happened with different policies is essentially unfalsifiable.

> and OP started it

So really you're implying both comments should be downvoted and flagged?

> seem to treat their agoraphobia with the same fervor and source of moral purity as a religion

Oh yea, I'm gay and it clicked to me recently that the gay clubs I go to are basically just monasteries now. It used to be that gay people were known for unabashedly saying what couldn't be said (the profane) - it's now the complete opposite, gay people largely are enumerating an endless list of what's considered profane. Constant pearl-clutching, tip-toeing, hushed gossip, forced repentance and excommunication.

It's hard not to see the illiberal attitudes on the left (which at least in recent history were concentrated on the right, a consequence of their rigid sense of morality and tradition) as nothing more than rule-book fanatics evangelizing and prescribing a sacred morality.

John McWhorter calls these people The Elect, and I think correctly identified that this is fundamentally a religion. It spans all sorts of topics, but maintains the same character, for instance, in something like anti-racism:

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-neoracists-po...

Isn't this precisely the type of comment that goes against site guidelines? Curiously, because of the ideological bent of many in the SV crowd, a comment like this evades the downvoting that the OP gets.

It seems to me that there's a de facto ideological standard around flagging and downvoting, where certain people are allowed to pearl-clutch and pose opposing viewpoint as plainly absurd and lacking the dignity of intellectual consideration.

That brings to mind "safetyism" coined in the The Coddling of the American Mind.

Unsurprisingly safety is invoked in a variety of ways when certain people encounter ideas they don't like.

Doing so allows a person to completely sidestep the responsibility of mounting an argument.

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

Yea I largely agree with all the stuff you're saying. Regarding Trump though, I think he did do himself a massive disservice giving space to people like Fauci and Bolton. Although, with a generous interpretation, he certainly seems to be able to listen and platform people he diametrically opposes, which is something I don't know can be said about his opposition.

Yea I think back to generations past, where you'd find yourself being sent to Normandy or something or stationed on a ship that just got hit by a torpedo. Chance of death - >>1%.

Now healthy people with a fraction of a percent risk of hospitalization, much less death, act like agoraphobes - apparently willing to do so indefinitely.

Far removed from the experience of the world as it is, dependent on the comfort of advanced human technology, people have become debilitated by the mere idea of the challenges that their ancestors overcame and readily coped with.

Courage is gone, and it's perhaps the most important virtue that allows one to get through life and face the insurmountable challenges that all of us will encounter.

It's sad that medical advice offers little to people, effectively waiting until people are suffocating to rush them to the hospital.

There's something seriously broken about how people are being treated.

This is an intersection of so many things: politics (outsourcing your judgment to your enemy and effectively just doing the opposite of them), brain-structure propensity for fear, esteem for authorities and experts (fundamentally the tendency towards authoritarianism, whether it's based in expertise or other things), class tendencies that value visible signals of virtue, intelligence and taste, etc.

They've been so circumspect about their advice, their advice is practically useless and even worse: induces society-wide agoraphobia and fear. This does not come without consequence, the health effects of destroying the normal fabric of society are profound. Constant stress and fear ruins a person's health, never mind the effect of it occurring at a global level.

Under a critical reading, the idea that "the world is neurotypical" is useful to say for someone who wants to gain power in the world by problematizing society and prescribing their own "fixes."

DEI is so obviously demagoguery and in practice the groups that profess it resemble a religion or cult.

Unsurprisingly the organizations that spearhead it are communists set on seeing that society as it exists today collapses.

The strict and all-encompassing moral code professed by DEI groups provides the perfect camouflage for sociopaths to fly under the radar and gain a foothold in organizations since the standard of morality is now a very clear set of token phrases to repeat.

On top of that - the whole sphere of DEI is essentially a luxury good for a bourgeois milieu, usually some of the most powerful workers in the economy - at the local level but even more appallingly at the global level.