A Majority of One (Tribalism is for Losers...)

 "I am NOT a racist....I hated Obama's White Half, too..." -- The Overlord

Some observations on our current state of affairs.

1) It is now considered "wildly racist" to yell at the Chinese man ahead of you on the check-out line when he sneezes five times in succession without covering his face, using a handkerchief, utilizing the crook of his elbow, or wear a mask if he should choose to do so.

In this day and age, after the experience of nearly 2 years under the equivalent of House Arrest in part because of the filthy, unhygienic habits of some Orientals (yeah, I used the word. Fucking deal) none of us is to be upset or alarmed at the sight of an Asian spewing snot, spit, and The-Force-Only-Knows-What pathogens willy-nilly in the vicinity of otherwise healthy people.

Certainly we're not supposed to tell Dr. Flu Manchu to cover his goddamned mouth and face if he's going to be expelling the contents of his lungs in a crowded area, if only because a) that's what civilized people do, and b) it's common fucking courtesy.

I understand the respect for other's personal space, health, and potentially life, is virtually nil when you come from a Communist Republic where tens of thousands or millions of dead people can be considered  an absolute boon -- shorter toilet paper lines! Three extra grains of rice at each meal! That many fewer people to rat you out to the Party! -- but you're Stateside now, Dumbass; either get some manners and learn not to be such a fucking slob or fucking leave.

My -- completely understandable -- outburst received a sharp rebuke from the Bat Fucker's daughter ( I would assume because Shanghai Bill doesn't speak English), who referred to me as "a racist". Probably in an attempt to shame and silence me.

When it was pointed out that no one mentioned Number One Patient's race, ethnicity or nationality, it was simply requested that he exercise some common sense and proper hygienic standards, she fell back on another well-worn, ineffective line of invective, which is to say that while I didn't mention race or ethnicity, I was surely THINKING about them when I spoke up.

When asked for her qualifications as a mind reader, she told me "everyone knows" that even if I didn't say it, and I wasn't thinking it, I was still MEANING it in a racist way.

If I could get away with smacking a stupid woman in the face in broad daylight -- even with 50 witnesses to her dumbfuck --- I would have.

Instead, I just asked the manager for a new cart and told him he could throw away everything in the one I was currently using, as it was all now potentially infected with whatever might have been in Grasshopper's body.

I restocked a new cart, paid for my shit -- in a different check-out lane -- and left.

2) On the stupidity of  American liberals, here's how I can easily summarize it:

When the descendants of the old northeastern Puritan douchebag lost faith in God (because they had been unable to build the New Jerusalem they had fled England to construct), they discovered a new deity in Darwin, and formulated another stupid premise to excuse their extremist bullshit: They had not failed because God had abandoned them; they had failed because Men were imperfect. Darwin had chiseled the scales from their eyes. if livestock could be improved by selective breeding and the proper environment, so could Men. The first victim of this experiment was the Confederacy. War and Reconstruction would elevate the sub-human Southerner. The next victim was the former slave. He would be elevated by being trained to mimic the White Man, and follow his religious beliefs and social mores. He would be educated (but not too well, of course) and thus rise from his savage, tribal origins. Of course, failure -- even repeated failure -- was not a signal that these idiots were wrong. On the contrary, just as previous failures had been attributed to a lack of piety, and thus loss of the favor of God, goddammit, failure in these new endeavors just required a renewed vigor, an increase in force, and a wider field of endeavor.. In effect, the FundaMENTALists needed to get more fundMENTAL on everyone's ass. Get fundaMENTAL enough, and you will finally succeed. This is exactly the same thought process that drives Islamic Terrorism and Despotism. Congratulations, Liberals! You've finally become the Ayatollah Khomeini. Millions of examples of this thickheaded approach abound: They are raised in what are the highest standards of living that have ever existed in human history, even in the ghettos, and decide their lives somehow still suck and they should be given MORE for free. They are fantastically-expensively "educated" in public schools and tony universities, but can't spell, do math and have great, big gaps in their knowledge concerning politics, law, literature, history, art, and basically all of the things that make up their culture. They speak their own language poorly. They are raised on a steady diet of toddler-level television shows right on up to "highbrow" documentaries extolling the finer "virtues" of sharing, caring and trying to understand The Other. They are given the proper thoughts to think, the proper books to read, the proper manners to display by helicopter Mommies and Professors of Groupthink. And they turn out to be some of the least-evolved, most close-minded, fantastically un-intellectual, culturally and historically-illiterate people to have ever walked the face of My Planet. Even to the extent of believing that they can achieve good ends by evil means. The attempt to create "The Earthly Paradise" always ends in tyranny and bloodshed. It has to, if only for the simple fact that those who profess to know and understand what "paradise" looks like can never admit error, can never change their methods, can never recognize failure, because The Cause is all-consuming and the admission of being imperfect themselves calls into question their motives, means, and methods. Once the questions start, so too does the system of repression that leads to gulags, "cancelling", "othering", "struggle sessions", and, eventually, extermination. The question is the first sign of rebellion against the sacred cause.
3) Argument made in a trade-related message board today:

Re: the "accuracy" and "viability" of statistical modeling that has been a common feature in all the stupidity surrounding Global Warming and COVID, a colleague defended this practice as "scientific".

I, on the other hand, don't believe it is and for a very good reason.

Because they're computer programs.

To cut to the chase, one writes code to achieve a specific end. When that goal is not reached, it is because something went wrong; your input was bad, or your variables were too variable, or you've structured the code incorrectly.

And so, you go back to the drawing board, and figure out what went wrong.

You use better input. You re-write problematic sections of code. You define variables more rigorously. You attempt to take the ambiguity out of the whole thing. Eventually, if you're doing it correctly, you arrive at the correct answer. You've achieved your goal.

When Michael Mann, for instance, runs a program to create his (in-)famous Hockey Stick, and doesn't get the stick he wants, he changes his input, he changes variables, he adds a little here, lops off a little there, and once he has enacted the exact changes he needs to create the Stick, voila!, he gets a stick.

This is not "science".

This is debugging.

But, my adversary responds, it is a result achieved by crunching scientifically-collected data. Therefore, it is "science".

Except that the scientifically-collected data is, itself, sketchy. Accurate weather reporting (even sorta-kinda accurate) is only about 150 years old. The planet is 4.5 billion years old. The Universe, who has a say in this, as well, is 14 billion years old.

Michael Mann attempted to recreate the climactic conditions of the past millennia and to extrapolate from that what the climate would be in the the next century. In the context of 14 billion years, or even 4.5 billion, he was attempting to do something with virtually NO DATA WHATSOEVER.

But, comes the plaintive wail, he didn't expect to get his Hockey Stick, and so, it must be valid.

Only right up until the time that a) we discover Mann carefully selected his input to achieve a desired result, b) Mann deliberately excluded data that threatened to keep him from the desired result, and c) none of Mann's "experiments" are reproducible anywhere except inside a computer. That is to say they cannot be tested in the laboratory or in the field and measured against observation and experience.

Therefore, Mann was shooting for a specific goal; therefore, the results are not "science".

They're engineered, i.e. they're programming.

The same with the COVID models. There's no possible way anyone could have produced anything approaching an accurate model of the spread of the disease or it's effects given the limited amount of data at the time such models were produced.

We know the results.

This is not science, either; it is piss-poor programming. 

And now we know what those piss-poor results were used for.

At some point, probably very soon, we will have to view scientific endeavor with a more-jaundiced eye, if only because recent "scientific" discoveries turn out to be complete shit. The field(s) is poisoned by ultra-competitive people seeking funding, grants, and even minor celebrity to the point where they will readily abandon rigorous scientific protocols, manipulate or fabricate data, co-opt peer-review process, lie to the public and one another.

And the media will report the results as if they were Bible Truth, because if there's anyone more scientifically-illiterate than the current generation of "scientists", it's The Media.

If there were any silver linings in the complete disaster of COVID, they were that science shit the bed, publicly and in the most-dramatically-bad form, we've learned the media will propagate the most-fantastic and incorrect information just for the sake of eyeballs and clicks, and that government policy formulated on the basis of bad science and media-generated bandwagons works about as well as a three-legged sled dog

These are all forms of Tribalism.

The person who sees racism in everything, and assumes racism is still there when it evidently isn't; the monomaniacal zealot committed to a cause that is inimical to telling truths; the swallower of all things labelled "science" that aren't even scientific in the general sense of the word.

These people are dangerous, not only because they're usually too blinded by their particular form of tribalism to recognize and correct their mistakes, but mostly because they are under the false impression that their tribe is ALL THERE IS.