See also: Vaccinations. In so many ways, they’ve been insulated from the old Nature, “Red in tooth and claw”, and they can’t conceive of how bad things will be without the safety barriers that civilization has build for them.
As the vaccines began to give us control over the pandemic, a cohort of Americans believed that vaccines no longer mattered, and that no other precautions were necessary.
Which I likened to ditching your parachute half-way through the fall because … you’d slowed your descent immensely and were absolutely sure you’d be fine now without it.
I’ll never tire of being shocked at the lack of critical thinking skills of so many of my fellow countrymen.
Also see:
Chesterton's Fence
“Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”
The lesson of Chesterton’s Fence is what already exists likely serves purposes that are not immediately obvious. Fences don’t appear by accident. They are built by people who planned them and had a reason to believe they would benefit someone. Before we take an ax to a fence, we must first understand the reason behind its existence. The original reason might not have been a good one, and even if it was, things might have changed, but we need to be aware of it. Otherwise, we risk unleashing unintended consequences that spread like ripples on a pond, causing damage for years.
ETA: If I had only read @Horatius post before creating my own 
yes, so much this right here! you combine that with the mis and mal-information and the number (the HUGE number) of bots on places like facebook, convincing you others think just like you do! you must be right! and it’s no longer surprising we are where we are.
and, yes, we are all about to find out. 
This is fantastic.
Basically, a woman testifying before the Wyoming legislature referred to the male chairman as “Madame Chairman.” When he got indignant, she pointed to the recent state law, voted for by the Madam Chairman, that preferred pronouns cannot be compelled speech. Kind of amazing he didn’t see what she was doing.
Rather like the Y2K thing a quarter century ago. Folks were asking what all the fear was, nothing happened.
Sure, because $6-billion had been spent tweaking vintage software to ensure it wouldn’t. Sure, your Mum or yourself gets a Social Security check every month without fail. because literally thousands of workers ensure that it does.
Otherwise it’ll be like landing one of Elmo’s rockets.
Ha, I love that sound-track and know exactly where it is taken from.
I know that a certain number of technical failures are inevitable in this sort of endeavour but it kind of seems like this approach is in operation:
It’s just the “Liberty Bell March” by Sousa. I’m sure its use in other contexts is entirely unrelated…
Mayor Chad “No Face” Alcox speaks.
It is. He admits it. Break it fast, fix it fast, iterate fast.
Granted, that approach can work well for many technical problems when there’s not a wealth of existing knowledge to lean on.
It worked at Tesla (the first several hundred thousand cars from each model had bad quality issues until their worked out how to do their assembly line) and at SpaceX (much faster and cheaper to build and launch a bunch of rockets and learn from them than to over-engineer for a decade).
But less so for well established systems with decades or centuries of experience. Or for systems that human beings rely on for health or safety. In fact, it’s a terrible way to do things if you care about lives at all. And that’s what they did at SpaceX - crashed unmanned craft until they knew it was safe to send people up. They didn’t take an existing spacecraft and deliberately radically re-engineer it on the fly during operation. Or at least the actual engineers at SpaceX didn’t. I suspect if left to his druthers, Elmo wouldn’t mind trying that.
It’s another way Musk shows he might have above average intelligence but is no genius - he has a favorite hammer and sees all problems as nails. It’s not a one size fits all solution to all challenges, even if he treats it that way.
That is awesome! It’s odd I hadn’t thought of this before. You don’t want to be compelled to call people what they want to be called? Fine, we’ll call YOU whatever the fuck we want to.
I’ve been doing that whenever someone says they “don’t do pronouns”.
My response when they inevitably get pissed: “But you said you didn’t do pronouns.”
Why, yes. I am a GenX middle child. Why do you ask?
Yeah, I was surprised this hadn’t got more notice, because I too think its pretty awesome.
As I said, I’m kinda surprised he didn’t see what was coming.
Another snark option is “WHO doesn’t do pronouns?” (Since “I”, of course, is a pronoun).
So many of them are like an amoeba, no planning or foresight, just reacting to the stimulus of the moment.
“Pronoun bad. Vote can use whatever pronoun hurt most… Why you use bad pronoun on me?”
Yes, can you imagine testing vaccines or other medical treatments this way? Who’s going to sign up to be the “break it fast group” – oh wait, that’s what political prisoners are for.
Seriously, all of scientific research is in jeopardy. This crowd doesn’t realize that the process is slow, iterative, and with a lot of inefficient dead ends on the way.
They think they can simply declare reality to work the way they want and have it stick. But while they can browbeat and terrorize people into pretending they are right, something like a virus or the laws of physics doesn’t care about their assertions. Nor is the portion of the world they have no control over required to play along.
But they are fundamentally irrational so they consistently fail to recognize that. They won’t just metaphorically step off a cliff convinced it’s flat ground, they’ll keep on going though the motions of walking on the way down convinced if they just believe hard enough, reject reality firmly enough the universe itself will yield to their stubbornness. Classic fascist “triumph of the will” nonsense, like Hitler being convinced that a sheer refusal to yield would magically hold the Allies off.
That strip predates the attempt to launch a reusable first stage vehicle by well over twenty years. Maybe that’s where Elmo got the idea.
First they came for the Associated Press
And the White House Correspondent’s Association said nothing
I really wish the (quasi-legitimate) press would stand together and just say, “Fuck you - we’ve got better uses for our time.” I’m not sure what is more useless these days than White House press briefings.
And from a post I made in another thread about it:
The WHCA was founded on February 25, 1914, by journalists in response to an unfounded rumor that a United States congressional committee would select which journalists could attend press conferences of President Woodrow Wilson.[4]