Well, yeah, but based on that- “Hmm there is a strange man over there, maybe I better go this other direction instead”. A distant encounter is way way difference that one coming into your camp. Mind you- both could be very scary.
Wow, thats interesting.
Absolutely. Even if, as most scientists believe, interstellar travel is possible, we’re still a long, long way from developing it. But we currently have telescopes that can see the spectra of planetary atmospheres, and we’re not anywhere near any fundamental limits of telescope capability. Plus, the same advances that would bring us closer to being able to travel interstellar distances would themselves also enable better telescopes. There’s no reason anyone would send out a manned interplanetary mission until we knew very well what the best destination was.
There are enough people who genuinely have HIV that they wouldn’t need to invent a public celebrity face. There were bound to be plenty of celebrities. And it’s hardly surprising that one of them would be a person known to be highly promiscuous: Johnson wasn’t up there with Chamberlain, but he still estimated that he’d had over a thousand partners (many of whom were likely also fairly promiscuous). Yes, it’s less common for a man to catch it from a woman, but that’s still a lot of rolls of the dice.
[quote=“Chronos, post:243, topic:1003156”]
There are enough people who genuinely have HIV that they wouldn’t need to invent a public celebrity face. There were bound to be plenty of celebrities.[/quote]
There were bound to be plenty? Okay. Who? Rock Hudson? Already dead. Ashe? Wasn’t public yet. Freddie Mercury? Anthony Perkins?
I think you’re missing the point. Johnson was a mainstream popculture celebrity and most importantly straight and not a drug user—a safe public face. At that point in history Wilt Chamberlain was a punchline to dirty jokes.
Except Magic Johnson’s treatment involved a lot of testing. Any misdiagnosis would be spotted immediately by his many doctors. Who would have misdiagnosed him, how would it have been organized, and how would they prevent him from finding out?
Or are you saying he was in on it?
Ok. My super-crazy idea:
Isaac Asimov was bisexual.
We know he died of AIDS, and the story has always gone that he got it from a blood transfusion in the early 1980s. And that may be what happened. But we also know, from his own writing, that he was a serious dog in his youth, and during his first, unhappy marriage he was serially unfaithful. He also told the story about not knowing what homosexuality was until he was 21 a lot. I believe that story, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t bisexual, and didn’t fully understand that himself until late in life. That was more common than not for men of his generation.
I wouldn’t say I’m certain of this. But I do wonder. I also don’t think it really matters, except it would be another sad story of repression and bigotry in society making a terrible death even harder on those involved.
Well, he did include the “There go my Sundays!” joke in his Treasury of Humor…
I’ll quote from a favorite movie of mine.
“Spartan” by David Mamet
“How did they fake the DNA?”
“They didn’t fake the DNA, they issued a press release.”
Were any of us involved in his health care? No. Any of us know the details of his treatment? No. All that was needed were a few doctors willing to go along.
You think outside doctors are going to show up and say “Hey, we want to verify this.” Maybe the Olympic Committee, but chances are they had no internal system and would just trust Johnson’s doctors since it wasn’t performance enhancing related
He doesn’t HAVE to have been in on it. I don’t see an upside for him. How much is he actually going to understand–about as much as the average person does when their doctor does anything.
Like you think he’s going to take an at-home HIV test in1995 and say “Hey you guys have been lying to me!” No.
He makes AIDS issues mainstream, raises awareness and funding… He’s thriving to this day.
I don’t actually believe this but…I think its a good conspiracy theory.
I think Ryan White satisfied all bases for celebrity AIDS victim: a straight white virgin and so was palatable to the Right, while his persecution by his schoolmates’ moms gave him common cause with the demonized gays and those who sympathized with the injustice of the whole situation.
Magic got AIDS because he, like (the inaptly named) Wilt and other male celebrities during the Sexual Revolution, women were making themselves available to him at such a high frequency, and saying “no thank you” went against the prevailing male mindset, that his dick was rubbed raw and vulnerable to viral infection. Not something the average person could relate to. (Maybe the rubbed-raw part, but not the plethora of women part).
I’m certain that humans will make the earth virtually uninhabitable much sooner than is commonly imagined. But before that, fascism and civil war.
Him being in on it is the one thing that DID have to happen. Medical records are confidential, and can’t be released without the patient’s permission. And even if someone did leak it and face the very serious consequences, he could have just said “Fake news, untrue”. What made him important wasn’t that he was a celebrity with HIV; it was the fact that he himself went public about it, when so many others didn’t. Why? I can only assume it was because he saw the opportunity to do some good.
Re: Asimov and HIV.
Remember, his diagnosis wasn’t revealed until ten years after his death and almost 20 years after he supposedly contracted it. He was in no way a living, public face of AIDS or anything. He, and later his widow, kept it secret.
I doubted from day one he got it from a transfusion during surgery. He was a “libertine” who slept around. He didn’t need to sleep with men to get HIV.
I also suspect that the reason his diagnosis was kept secret was to deter lawsuits from people he slept with that he might have in turn infected.
Not a lot of “certain” in the above but certainly I can’t prove.
Which reminds me, I’m pretty sure Orson Scott Card is a self-hating gay man. I read Ender’s Game and it pinged the hell out of my gaydar. It would explain why he’s so obsessed with gay people, and, being a Mormon, how very repressed he must be.
Except Ryan White actually having AIDS is a tragic story and has already died at this point. He isn’t an active part of culture. Johnson–since he’s not actually sick–can go on to be a regular and reliable figure for the AIDS movement.
Again, I think you are missing the point…by a lot. The idea is his doctor said “I’m sorry Mr. Johnson, but you’ve tested positive for HIV. Let’s discuss what happens next…” This leads to Johnson–who believes he has HIV–going public.
My belief:
It doesn’t happen in NFL football, because although you can call penalties on practically every play, an entire 44 minutes and 58 seconds of referee- “carefully controlled game” can be turned around by one hail mary play.
But i really and truly believe the NBA is controlled more than pro wrestling. When you have one team shooting 35 free throws in a game, and the other shooting 5, you KNOW one team isn’t that bad at defending The flow of the game and the quickness of play really allows for ref-induced outcomes. The players don’t have to be in on it. It’s actually better if they are not.
The NBA wants certain outcomes, and it is easy enough to get them. Of course, you still have to make your shots, and such random factor things cause the “wrong” team to win every now and then.
I still like watching most regular season games, because I convince myself that NBA doesn’t care about every game, and sometimes just let them play.
I also really believe Michael Jordan was on double secret suspension for gambling when he went to play baseball.
I agree in general, but every so often I have such vivid and well plotted dreams, that, were I a writer, I could adapt them into movies or TV episodes with little work. People would ask me, “where DO you get your crazy ideas?” and I would truly say “I just dream them up!”.
As for the OP, I think the likelihood of intelligent species developing is much rarer than people think. Like, at any given time, there are one or maybe two intelligent species in an entire galaxy. Yes, there’s life, but not much intelligence. No space faring races.
And for really far-out space nut beliefs, I think FTL must be possible, because the universe would be wasted if we could never go visit it.
The situation with NBA refs is appalling. I remember watching Michael Jordan taking five+ steps to the basket, double dribbling, running into a stationary player and the other guy gets the foul, etc.
He was the star. Stars get special treatment.
This attitude spread. When two guys collide, the ref’s question is “Who has the bigger shoe contract?” Virtually non-existent refereeing also spread to college games. “Don’t slow down the game blowing the whistle.” Excuse me, if you blow the whistle for petty stuff, people will stop palming the ball and such and you won’t end up blowing the whistle any more than before.
Not sure of what is going on in the NFL. In MLB there’s stupid games with the strike zone. But I am certain that NBA refs have ruined the game. (That and the 3 point line. I used to be sort of for it. Now 90% of the game has been nearly buried.)
What did it for me with the NFL with one particular team (whom I won’t name) was the haste with which the refs would make the calls for them. It’s one thing for a team to get more calls than others, but in this particular situation, body language, behavior, tone of voice, says a lot. The refs were almost tripping over their shoelaces to make calls in their favor. There was an urgency to rule things in their favor that I’ve never seen with any other team.
I have no idea whether they had at any point an explicit agreement. I am however entirely certain that Hillary Clinton knew she was marrying a tomcat, possibly before the marriage but certainly by not too long after it; and either didn’t care or did mind but decided that overall she felt the man was worth it.
I am certain, but can’t prove (though I think there is by now some medical evidence), that for many people going on weight-loss diets causes obesity; and that the primary cause of the “obesity epidemic” is the stress on putting massive numbers of people on weight loss diets.
It depends on how one defines the phrase “weight loss diet”. If it means the sort of thing that used to be advertised in the National Enquirer back in the '80s and '90s, then I agree that sort of short term crash diet is bad (though not the leading cause of the obesity epidemic). If by weight loss diet one means changing ones eating habits on a long term basis to eat less or no junk food and eat more healthy food, then I disagree.
FWIW, I have a hard time getting behind the first definition. I suppose it used to be a thing, but I don’t see or hear people using that definition (and it’s not because I’m surrounded by a bunch of non-obese people, I live in South Texas, the fattest place in the world). Maybe it’s because I’m a physician, so when I hear people talking about a diet, it’s almost always in the second context.
It might seem like the healthier option, but we still don’t have any evidence that doing this supports long-term weight loss for a significant portion of overweight or obese individuals. I think an argument could be made that it could help maintain weight, but I’m not sure.
My feeling is that it’s the calorie restriction itself -healthy or not – that triggers overeating. It’s worse on crash diets but the phenomenon exists for any kind of caloric restriction. This might be somewhat mitigated by really easing into it, I dunno.
But my sense is that efforts to get healthy should be focused on reducing all-cause mortality through proper nutrition and exercise, activities that probably won’t result in long-term weight loss but will still decrease one’s chances of metabolic disorder. I know this is not what fat people want to hear, and I get that, because I am fat, and I don’t like it either. The message is that the thing that hurts us the most, being treated as inferior because of our appearance, is likely going to continue for the rest of our lives. That sucks.
But for the moment, I think a healthier lifestyle is the best we get. And that’s not nothing.