_(Attention conservation notice: passing thoughts on the present scene)_
-Okay, three years lat—three _months_, three _months_ later, let me say it was too optimistic of me to have [suggested that public discourse was working with respect to pandemic response](/2020/Mar/relative-gratitude-and-the-great-plague-of-2020/). I was pointing at _something_ real with that post—there is _some_ subgraph of the network of the world that's interested in doing serious cognition to minimize horrible suffocation deaths, but which is overwhelmingly _not_ interested in ...
+Okay, three years lat—three _months_, three _months_ and one week later, let me say it was too optimistic of me to have [suggested that public discourse was working with respect to pandemic response](/2020/Mar/relative-gratitude-and-the-great-plague-of-2020/). I was pointing at _something_ real with that post—there is _some_ subgraph of the network of the world that's interested in doing serious cognition to minimize horrible suffocation deaths, but which is definitively _not_ interested in ...
But it's a _small_ subgraph. It is written that every improvement is necessarily a change, but not every change is an improvement. When the center of collective narrative gravity shifts, that _could_ be the homing device of our [beautiful weapons](http://web.archive.org/web/20200521005958/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/) converging on the needle of Truth in the haystack of thought, but it could just be the blind thrashing of Fashion.
-The Smart Subgraph [sounding the alarm](https://putanumonit.com/2020/02/27/seeing-the-smoke/) might have been an input into authorities calling for a half-measured lockdown ("lockdown")—which was only enough to push <em>R<sub>0</sub></em> [slightly below 1](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/covid-19-4-30-stuck-in-limbo/). That might have bought us time if we had any [live players](https://medium.com/@samo.burja/live-versus-dead-players-2b24f6e9eae2) who could do the test-trace-quarantine scurrying we fantasized about, but it doesn't look like that's a thing.
+The Smart Subgraph [sounding the alarm](https://putanumonit.com/2020/02/27/seeing-the-smoke/) might have been an input into authorities calling for a half-measured lockdown ("lockdown")—which was only enough to push <em>R<sub>0</sub></em> [slightly below 1](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/covid-19-4-30-stuck-in-limbo/). That might have bought us time if we had any [live players](https://medium.com/@samo.burja/live-versus-dead-players-2b24f6e9eae2) who could do the test–trace–quarantine scurrying we fantasized about, but it doesn't look like that's a thing.
The lockdown ("lockdown") became a distinguishing tribal value for Blue Egregore, with hick anti-lockdown protesters an object of scorn: ["The whiteness of anti-lockdown protests"](https://www.vox.com/first-person/2020/4/25/21234774/coronavirus-covid-19-protest-anti-lockdown), proclaimed one _Vox_ headline on 25 April, "How ignorance, privilege, and anti-black racism is driving white protesters to risk their lives." The "risking their lives" characterization of that piece's subhead makes an interesting contrast to what similar voices would say about the George Floyd protests little more than a month later: ["Public Health Experts Say the Pandemic Is Exactly Why Protests Must Continue"](https://slate.com/technology/2020/06/protests-coronavirus-pandemic-public-health-racism.html) proclaimed _Slate_ on 2 June.
Is it wrong for me to say "similar voices"? I _know_ that Maia Niguel Hoskin (author of the _Vox_ piece) and Shannon Palus (author of the _Slate_ piece) are different people, and that reporters often have no control over what headline gets pasted on top their work.
+
+
[TODO: but the things-Slate-and-Vox-writers-say category is predictively useful]
[TOOD: I don't have anything interesting to say about racial oppression and policing; I'm more concerned with inter-elite squabbles]
[TODO: Kayfabe wants me to believe anti-cop rioters and anti-speech petitioners are the same, but mere coalition-membership is less predictively useful for the actual for the actual weft of people's lives and their effects on the graph]
https://www2.gmu.edu/news/586546
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/nooses-oakland-park-exercise-aids-man-71314468
-
+SATs
+https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/816#issuecomment-644694838
https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/national-book-critics-circle-resignations.html
http://archive.is/ffcPm
"You ain't black"
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff