I thought I’d start up again with my little Twitter roundups. Consider these to be open threads.
–DF
Categories
OH NO A SNAKE TORNADO: Twitter takes 5/2/20
We Hunted The MammothBucking the Backlash
We Hunted The MammothI thought I’d start up again with my little Twitter roundups. Consider these to be open threads.
–DF
@Naglfar,
If they really wanted to clean a body of toxins, there’s any number of teas and herbal infusions that could be used instead for that purpose. While many of them might not work the way the woo peddlers may want, at least the majority of them won’t kill the patient when used. Heck, many of them could be sold as Old Ancient Knowledge from the Time before Time that modern science won’t acknowledge because they didn’t invent it first. Or something like that.
Or is the true goal here the desire to poison ‘undesirable’ ‘broken’ people legally and get awards for doing so?
ETA: then I catch up on the posts made while I was typing this, and I guess that they really do want want awards for killing their ‘defective’ children. >.<
@Redsilkphoenix
True, but many are still dangerous. A lot of detox teas can cause kidney failure or hyponatremia if you drink too much because of the diuretic effects. Or that a lot of herbal supplements are unregulated and contain various poisons.
Exactly. There’s a reason nobody markers bleach for abled white people as a supplement (or I guess Trump did, but nobody else does).
@redsilkphoenix : relatedly, it’s pretty easy to characterize almost any substance as being harmful (or innocuous).
We say the MMS is bleach, and that’s technically true, but it’s exactly as valid as saying vaccines (sometime) have mercury, vinegar is a detergent, water an horribly corrosive liquid, or most chimiotherapy horribly toxic, as in, it’s true but don’t mean what one might think.
The main problem with that bleach cure is that there is 0 scientific proof it work, 0 valid reasoning that make it a good idea, and 0 observation of it improving anything. Saying “it’s bleach” have the advantage of being short and snappy, but it’s using a fallacy very often used by antivaxx.
@redsilkphoenix : note that “clean a body of toxin” don’t mean anything. It’s similar to “open your chakra” or “califragilisticexpialidociously wring your daos”. Toxins isn’t a well defined term, cleaning a body neither. That’s important because the concept that there are harmless detox is quite wrong too.
It’s a lot easier to make people understand thoses things are harmful by explaining thoses are random herb infusions first ; it remove the concept that it could even possibly do something good. And I find easier to explain people that something is meaningless than explaining that it don’t work.
@Ohlmann
Although it is a type of bleach, since it is somewhat different than the household type (more like an industrial variant) antivaxxers will claim that it isn’t bleach since they don’t realize that bleach refers to a broader range of substances than just one. So there are other practical reasons not to just say it’s bleach in an argument.
Speaking of antivaxxers, I recall a few days ago a prominent one on Twitter was declaring that the Trump bleach thing was a plan to expose vaccines as unsafe because supposedly vaccines contain trace amounts of bleach (don’t know if this is true but doubting it) and Trump “tricked” medical experts into saying bleach is unsafe. This obviously doesn’t make sense, but none of what antivaxxers say makes much sense.
@Kupo:
The page I was having trouble getting up to date didn’t have that to begin with, so that doesn’t (always) work.
And it happened again last night. For a while I had a tab displaying a page that was an hour and 20 minutes out-of-date compared to another tab, with both having been reloaded within the past 60 seconds. An hour and 20 minutes difference!
This problem a) does not have workarounds that work 100% reliably and b) is clearly getting worse. I think it warrants the server admin taking a look under the proverbial hood. I’m just surprised that even after the noticeable worsening it’s undergone in the past few days nobody seems to agree with me.
Surplus – WE CAN’T FIX THIS FOR YOU. PLEASE stop telling us that “someone has to do something”, NO ONE CAN.
If you MUST share your frustration, share *that*. We could sympathise with you on that. (maybe, I’m pretty burnt out on you tbh, which is why I haven’t replied to your first messages.)
Here’s a script on how that could look.
“ARGH I’m having a problem getting the ‘recent comments’ to agree! That really bothers me, and I wish it didn’t happen.”
That is a statement of fact – what is happening *for you* and how *you* are feeling about it. It ISN’T freaking over the top, like
and it ISN’T demanding some mystical ‘server admin’ fix the damn problem.
Who do you think the ‘server admin’ for this donation supported site is? Who do you think pays for the technical stuff? Can you kick in the extra money to have someone fix this? Can you fix it yourself?
If you can’t do either of those things, STOP DEMANDING FIXES.
Here’s a solution that will work 100% of the time: STOP USING THE RECENT COMMENTS FEATURE. We all *know* it’s broken! Just refresh the comment page you’re on!
I typically use the recent comments to see which article currently has activity on it, and to see if anyone has necro’d an old thread.
My brain remembers the number of comments, which is really weird, because I usually can’t remember anything. So that might not work for you, but you could keep a file or a little physical notepad where you write down the number of comments you read, maybe?
If the thing you are doing doesn’t work, STOP DOING IT. Find a NEW solution. Especially when you know the broken thing isn’t going to get fixed any time soon.
Also L-O-Freaking-L at this:
No you weren’t. We’ve been here reading your demands this whole time. These “THIS MUST BE FIXED” demands happen every few months. Come on.
@Redsilkphoenix, Naglfar:
Part of the problem is that a lot of these people are seriously treating this as some sort of Fae Changeling thing, that their ‘real’ child was stolen from them and what they actually have isn’t their child. They have quite blatantly dehumanized their own children, and then want awards for having to put up with this changeling they are ‘forced’ to help.
@Surplus:
And part of the problem, as has been explained before, is that David is using WordPress for this, and so this isn’t a problem David can fix. It’s a problem only WordPress can fix, and ‘fixing’ it could make the whole thing perform a lot worse.
What looks to you and the rest of us as one page isn’t. There are dozens of computers behind any WordPress site, each having to communicate with a database, each caching results so as to respond faster. Every single request could go to a different one of them (though requests from within the same tab will usually go to the same location due to caching within the tab), producing different results for the same request. Different parts of the page could be coming from different internal requests between the computers, which are only assembled at the front end before being sent out to you.
Take a look at the page source some time, you’ll see things like <!– Generated by https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-random-posts-widget/ –> that indicate the places where the side widgets are all based on separate internal requests.
This looks like one page, but that is an illusion, and the illusion occasionally shows cracks. Any attempt to fix that by actually requiring completely synchronous operation would be guaranteed to make the load time of the pages worse, as well as probably requiring more computers to handle the load and making it more expensive.
@Rhuu
I do the same thing. I will note that it appears there may be a new bug with the refresh that I’ve been seeing more lately, but for me it pretty much always works to just refresh the page again.
@Jenora Feuer
Yeah, that’s basically the business model of Autism $peaks. They even at one point published a horrible poem by Billy Mann, a celebrity and one of their board members, that explicitly talks about autism “stealing” their children.
@Jenora Feuer
I do wonder if autism may be behind the changeling myth. Symptoms usually become apparent at about the same age that the Fair Folk supposedly kidnap children.
@Naglfar, others:
The underlying problem seems to be entitlement again here: they had an idea of how their child would be, but their actual child didn’t live up to that idea. And they feel they have the right to bash that child into the shape of that idea by force, more or less, as if they’d ordered a product from Children Inc. and the manufacturer had failed to live up to the sales contract and went on to fail to live up to the warranty as well. But children aren’t a product and don’t have a warranty.
This in turn suggests they were already dehumanizing their children, and that other parents are doing so quietly whose children didn’t (yet) violate their expectations in a major way. The parents actually trying to alter/poison/kill autistic children are just the visible tip of a very large iceberg of parents who do not view their children as fully fledged human beings who don’t exist just to fulfill some agenda of the parents. What happens when one of the neurotypical children in such a relationship decides against following in Daddy’s footsteps on Career Day? And of course, we hear all the time here about what happens when one of the children of such parents approaches or enters puberty and turns out gay, or trans …
I’ll bet all of this strongly correlates with the parents’ voting habits, too. Seeing other people as objects that can either further one’s agenda, be an obstacle of some sort, or else be an irrelevancy seems to be a conservative trait, here extended to one’s own offspring.
@Jenora Feuer:
The problem here is that those cracks are getting wider. The desynchronization between the components was, two years ago, small enough to be undetectable (to humans). Milliseconds, maybe even whole seconds, but no larger than that. Small enough a new comment pretty much never happened to be that new when you first saw it.
Then it grew until it was a minute. Two minutes. Five minutes. Now it can be as much as AN HOUR AND TWENTY MINUTES.
I’d expect steeply diminishing marginal returns in saved server resources from reducing the synchronization frequency that much. Even every one minute would probably give decent performance, without much noticeable out-of-date-ness to end users, and with little resource usage such that changing it to every two minutes wouldn’t be worthwhile. And I can’t believe any human being would think letting things get out of step by HOURS would be a good idea at all. So I’m quite sure there are bugs/malfunctions involved here and not just intentional resource management decisions. The bugs might stem from such decisions, incorrectly implemented, though.
And another thing: that the magnitude of the desynchronization is growing and growing (and now I suspect the rate of growth is itself growing) points to a cascading failure that will keep getting worse if not attended to. At some point I expect the threshold of linear behavior will be exceeded, and instead of things just being a few more minutes out of date some times, something will just outright crash. And then there goes WHTM, if nothing has been done in the interim.
I hope David and/or the hosting company keeps good backups …
@Allandrel
I’ve heard autism proposed as one possible explanation, but there are numerous other things that it could be as well (I’ve heard Williams Syndrome suggested as an explanation, for example).
@Surplus
Sadly, it’s not just a conservative trait. I know plenty of people who are more progressive who still think their children are to follow in their footsteps and be molded to their vision. Though I do think conservatives are more likely to push the stereotyped roles for their children, and are more likely to push ideas like filial piety and that children should be like their parents and continue some sort of familial trend rather than being different.
The response of homophobic and transphobic parents to having LGBT kids is very similar to that of ableist parents to autistic children. Both talk about an “agenda” that took their child, both advocate “therapy” that is actually torture, and both spend time grieving because they think they’ve “lost” their child (when in reality they have not “lost” their child, they are just failing to accept that said child isn’t what they expected).
Has anyone been watching the Hulu/FX series Mrs. America? It’s about the fight over the Equal Rights Amendment, with Cate Blanchette as Phyllis Schlafly. Interestingly, Phyllis’s side is vociferously defending some of the very things that the manosphere blames on feminists: women being free of the draft, alimony, mothers being granted custody. The acronym of her group was STOP ERA, and the STOP stood for Stop Taking Our Privileges. Maybe these guys need to stop screeching about [random woman they’ve been harassing for years] and get post-mortemly angry at Phyllis.
@LindsayIrene
IIRC the manosphere generally likes Phyllis Schlafly (as does the dirtbag left, like Aimee Terese, because of course they do). Phyllis also started sounding a lot like the manosphere in her later years, talking about hypergamy a lot.
Of course, her whole life was hypocrisy: she thought women should stay out of politics and stay at home, yet she was a woman who traveled the country to speak about politics.
And her son is an interesting character too.
@Naglfar
Cripes, I forgot one of her offspring was responsible for Conservapedia! He really is a piece of work. I suppose she didn’t care that he says women are dumb? She seemed to think so much applied only to women who weren’t her.
I bet he hates the TV series, even though it may be a kinder portrayal of his mother than she deserves.
@LindsayIrene
You are correct.
He also co wrote an opinion piece and made his own series against it.
Just to give everyone a heads up. This is Liet Kynes in the upcoming Dune film (which the buzz suggests is going to be awesome) so expect much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the usual suspects.
@Alan Robertshaw
I’ll get my teakettle ready to make incel tear tea.
I just can’t find it in me to watch Mrs America. I’d recommend Little Fires Everywhere though.
Cate Blanchett, though. I don’t stan, but, if I did, she’d be the one.
@Alan
They gender-swapped a secondary character ? OH yeah we are going to get a few “SJWs ruined the entire franchisee ! Frank Herbert is spinning his grave!” rants/
@ fabe
Yup; although it appears Liet gets a much expanded role in this one.
As a big fan of the Dune Encyclopaedia, I’m hoping they incorporate some of the material from that.
Oh undoubtably. It will be interesting to see how many of them though had nothing to say about the Herbert/Anderson books; even though you could probably get a couple of gigawatts from Frank’s spinning there.
Mrs. America also has Margo Martindale as Belle Abzug and Uzo Aduba as Shirley Chisholm. Like, there are so many amazing female actors in it, Elizabeth Banks has a bit part.
I have worked with chlorine dioxide when doing water treatment. We used it because it’s a good way of stripping biofilms out of water systems when getting rid of pseudomonas, which is nasty anyway and also harbours legionella. When the abusive parents use it as an enema it has a similar stripping effect on the colon. They see lots of mystery stuff coming out and assume it’s the badness. It’s actually important gut lining stuff. These people need locking up.
@simon
Some scary stuff used in water treatment. One of the few inquests I took part in taught me that!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camelford_water_pollution_incident