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Author Topic: Untamed Virus Containment Thread:COVID-19: Lurking Omni-Flu Edition  (Read 496577 times)

Naturegirl1999

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Your immune system would likely kill off the mold before it gets into your lungs anyway, also it’d have to get in your body by you ingesting it in large amounts. We have mucus that does a good job at keeping things that aren’t air out of our lungs, though there was an instance of a pea plant growing inside a person’s lung at one point. He of course had to eat the pea first though. Simply sitting around won’t be enough for your lungs to receive plant or fungal guests
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Frumple

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He says he has "mouldy lungs" due to sitting around for three weeks. That's not really a thing, is it?
Not from just sitting around, no. Mold can cause respiratory issues, but that requires exposure, not just idleness.
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MetalSlimeHunt

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I saw someone comment that the word he used does literally mean mold. Bolsonaro just doesn't know anything about anything but killing and lying to begin with. Most likely he has either a bacterial infection or blood clot scarring that created the "mold" he saw on the X-ray.
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Quote from: Thomas Paine
To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.
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No Gods, No Masters.

hector13

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Do we know why heat affects violence levels? Why football affects violence levels?

Being too hot is quite a frustrating experience, and football also can be frustrating at times.

Some people react to being frustrated by being violent.
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Look, we need to raise a psychopath who will murder God, we have no time to be spending on cooking.

If you struggle with your mental health, please seek help.

Reelya

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This is the last I'll write on this, but this is my take on why none of the domestic violence campaigns seem to be having the slightest effect. It's a big problem, and it comes down to beliefs.

Researchers note that DV perpetrators often share a common set of beliefs, so they see about stamping out those beliefs, and assume that it's that set of beliefs that got them started on the whole damned path, so they make a bunch of TV adverts challenging those beliefs and think they're preventing the whole problem. Yet, there's so far not an ounce of evidence that they're having any effect whatsoever.

The reason is that the logic itself is completely ass-backwards. If someone has a self-destructive (or other-destructive) behavior, what is more likely is that the belief system that supports it is entirely post-hoc rationalization. Say someone has a massive porn habit, they watch a lot of porn, and probably have a whole bunch of thoughts and ideas that rationalize that this is all ok. They might seek out political opinions that say it's ok, articles saying it's ok, etc etc etc, a huge amount of confirmation-bias. They didn't start out believing all the things you need to believe to make that ok, they started out gradually and as they got deeper into it they sought out post-hoc rationalizations for why it's ok. Given that, if you have someone who's harmed others, they're likely to concoct post-hoc rationalizations to justify their actions. But those justifications aren't the actual triggers. The triggers are in fact things like childhood brain damage, suffering violence as a child and other things that are known to lead to impulse control in adulthood. The "belief system" bullshit is in fact all the post-hoc stuff to justify their own actions. You can't cure the problem by challenging the beliefs, since if you do that then the perpetrators will just come up with new justifications.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24265146/
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Conclusions: Perpetrators of domestic violence present high mental rigidity, as well as low levels of inhibition, processing speed, verbal and attention skills, and abstract reasoning. Additionally, perpetrators show working and long play memory impairments. Moreover, those deficits could be impaired by traumatic brain injuries and alcohol abuse and/or dependence. Nonetheless, these both variables are not enough to explain the deficits. Functional abnormalities on the prefrontal and occipital cortex, fusiform gyrus, posterior cingulate gyrus, hippocampus, thalamus and amygdala could be associated with these impairments. An analysis of these mechanisms may assist in the development of neuropsychological rehabilitation programmes that could help improve current therapies.

^ this is basically taboo to mention as being part of the problem, but I'd argue it's almost all of the underlying problem, and is the same underlying problem of why we have so many people with mental illnesses in prison. We're locking up the mentally ill at records rates for violent crimes, and people want to tell us that an entire class of violent crimes isn't related to mental illness? Unlikely. The world just isn't compartmentalized in such a convenient way.

Broken people and no resources to treat them is the real underlying issue. The rationalizations that these people come up with to justfy being fucked up aren't something that should be taken without a grain of salt as the "cause" of the problem. Fund mental health. TV adverts to not be a baddie are ineffective, but that's the approach politicians have chosen to appear to be "doing something(tm)" about this problem, and it's a lot cheaper and provides more of those sweet tax dollars to your mates who own TV stations. I guess we can go to plan B of filling up the prisons with all these people. That approach has worked wonders for African American neighborhoods in the USA.
« Last Edit: August 01, 2020, 09:47:57 pm by Reelya »
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Naturegirl1999

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Why would it be taboo to mention that damage to the brain might play a part in behavior problems? That actually makes much more sense than the advert approach. Mental health should be funded. Why is it getting defunded when mental health problems are rising?
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Reelya

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Why would it be taboo to mention that damage to the brain might play a part in behavior problems? That actually makes much more sense than the advert approach. Mental health should be funded. Why is it getting defunded when mental health problems are rising?

Because some people build there whole career around one specific thing, and then when evidence comes along challenging the centrality of their ideas, they become hostile to it. It's not just in this field.

This is a pretty good article outlining the different perspectives:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/01/seeking-cure-domestic-violence/604168/

Clipping a little out, and this can't do justice to the topic, so read the article:
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At the time, little was known about the causes of domestic violence. Many psychologists viewed abuse as the side effect of some other difficulty—alcoholism, an inability to handle stress or anger, poor communication skills.
^ So this was the prevailing belief about DV
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Like many contemporary feminists, Pence saw the phenomenon differently. Abuse, in her view, wasn’t an individual problem, but a social one. For millennia, men had been taught that it was their right to control women, by force if necessary. Domestic violence was the means by which a man exercised this power on an interpersonal level. Far from a dysfunction, it was a rational tactic—a tool for patriarchy.
^ In this bit, you see why I said the paper MetalSlimeHunt linked was "anti-feminist". The academic feminist view is that the DV is a rational tool of control, so when the paper on football-related violence said that it was an "irrational" loss of control, they were actually directly challenging this narrative, even if they did so in nicely-couched professional language.
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The Duluth curriculum’s innovation, of attacking the societal roots of abuse, met with approval from activists and victims’ advocates. Lawmakers found in the groups a convenient means of dealing with the new wave of domestic-violence arrests. Over the next three decades, the curriculum spread rapidly, until programs advancing the theory that domestic violence was underpinned by sexism had been established in every state in the country. Over time, the “Duluth model” would come to refer to those specific gatherings, and their pedagogical focus on dismantling patriarchal norms, rather than to its original plan for coordinated community action.
^ So, here you see that it became the dominant narrative.
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But as their popularity grew, Duluth’s men’s groups faced a backlash. As researchers began conducting more studies, they found that the early psychologists who had ascribed domestic violence to individuals’ underlying problems, such as addiction and trauma, were, to an extent, correct. Studies showed that the Duluth approach, with its broad social message, had little effect on whether men actually re-offended. It was also criticized as ill-suited for addressing assaults committed by women and within same-sex partnerships.

So, like anything that's just too darn convenient, it all fell apart. And like any model under fire, they fired back, generally a scatter-shot attack at other academics for doing research that contradicted the Duluth Model of domestic violence. Note also that they get US state funding since courts mandate them to treat offenders, so they're making $$$$ in this. It's not just ideological, the Duluth Model is an industry.

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Most of the men in the room, it became clear, had issues with substances, generally alcohol or opioids. Facilitators generally like to give the men free rein on what topics they explore—Miller told me exit interviews showed that participants learn most from hearing each other’s experiences—but are quick to question men who cite addiction as a reason for their violence. For a facilitator, allowing the men to avoid accountability by placing the blame on substances would be a form of collusion.

Trying to shift topics, Rouse asked the class to consider how their abuse had affected their families...
^ Imagine if this was an actual therapist, but if you ever steered the conversation towards your personal problems, he went "woah there, let's put the emphasis back onto what a fuck-up you are ..." 

In fact, it's in the manual they give you when running these things, that if the perp states drug or alcohol abuse, or having suffered violence themselves, as a factor in their own violent behavior, you're meant to challenge that, or your "colluding" with the perp, and you're supposed to instead point them at a feminist textbook and shoehorn their "privileged" behavior into that, until you've got them rabbiting the stock phrases. THIS is why and how they're hostile to researchers looking into drug, alcohol and other factors.

The points against it are:

1) It doesn't work. Offenders going through the program are no less likely to re-offend than people who didn't get sent to a program

2) Ideologically inflexible. It's an "i've got a hammer so every problem is a nail" type of belief.

3) financial vested interests in keeping rival research out.

4) fails any test of universality. The Duluth Model (which is basically the standard model of domestic violence now) can't conceptually deal with women who are themselves abusers. It can somewhat deal with male victims of male abuse, but the kicker is that it entirely fails female victims of female abuse. In the Duluth Model, such women can't exist so you get horror stories of lesbians who have suffered partner abuse unable to access help services, since the system goes "does not compute!"
« Last Edit: August 01, 2020, 10:34:29 pm by Reelya »
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Naturegirl1999

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They care about money, right? People need to be educated to program the AI and build the robots to do the jobs that humans are slower at, and the jobs that humans can do better at than current AI need said humans to be educated to perform those jobs effectively. If said humans have bipolar disorder or OCD or any number of mental disorders, it will make working the jobs difficult, it will also make communication and coherence with fellow team members difficult. If the mechanic who builds the bodies for the AI that was taught to make chairs and tables begins hallucinating, said mechanic might put the wrong screws in the wrong areas, or add limbs where they shouldn’t be, or test out the arms by manual control, trying to get them to grab at something only he can see...there are reasons to fund education and mental health, even if all you care about is profit. The reason health care reform should be funded is that with the current system, workers can’t be treated as well as they could with a better system, they may run out of money and lose their house due to needing to buy, for example, insulin. And if said worker loses money and doesn’t have a house, it will make getting to work more difficult. Workers are needed. Lots of jobs aren’t automated yet, and those that are, those programs can’t fix themselves. People need to fix them or give the program the ability to debug itself. My point here is that education, mental health institutions, and healthcare reform are useful, even if money is what is cared about
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Eschar

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Re: Duluth not recognizing DV except within its little ideological bounds:

Which is damn weird as far as I can tell, since it looks like Duluth model would be happy to say that domestic violence stems from a form of control (which, well, it's a threat, so I suppose it by definition is), and control is a desire that shows up regardless of gender or orientation.
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Reelya

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Re: Duluth not recognizing DV except within its little ideological bounds:

Which is damn weird as far as I can tell, since it looks like Duluth model would be happy to say that domestic violence stems from a form of control (which, well, it's a threat, so I suppose it by definition is), and control is a desire that shows up regardless of gender or orientation.

"regardless of gender or orientation" is just about the last thing these specific people would ever say. Usually I'm loath to say "marxist" about anything because it's not relevant, but in this case the analysis behind the Duluth thing is entirely based on a Marxist class-conflict model. The reason they side-step what you're talking about is because they can't fit that into the rigid class hierarchy they've defined. It doesn't fit the model so it doesn't exist, basically. Or more to the point they claim that anything that doesn't fit the model is collateral damage of the whole thing, and that when patriarchy is overthrown, then naturally any domestic violence in gay relationships will just go away by itself.

I'll end with this statement, written by the creator of the Duluth Model, about 25 years after she created it:

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“Many of the men I interviewed did not seem to articulate a desire for power over their partner,” she wrote. “Although I relentlessly took every opportunity to point out to men in the groups that they were so motivated and merely in denial, the fact that few men ever articulated such a desire went unnoticed by me and many of my coworkers. Eventually, we realized that we were finding what we had already predetermined to find.”

So it's a 45 year old rigid model, which has been disavowed by its creator as being, well, a load of shit, at the end of the day. But they'd already opened Pandora's Box at that point so it was out of her hands. This is basically the plot of "Life of Brian" at this point.
« Last Edit: August 01, 2020, 11:04:31 pm by Reelya »
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Eschar

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So it's the Lysenkoists again. But like literally the Lysenkoists, not just American theocrats.
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Reelya

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It seems the Australian press has woken up to what 'sovereign citizens' are due to the spate of non-compliances to the coronavirus restrictions. Pretty sure they've never blipped on the actual news radar here at all before this.

https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/news/coronavirus-victoria-sovereign-citizens-tactic-infuriating-cops/news-story/29a57a1004bd32780c5f078d501b61da

I really don't get the thinking through here. Usually these SC's say that the governments actions are illegal, that legislation doesn't apply to you if you don't believe in it, and say they're going to take it all the way to the 'high court' or similar if they get any penalties. Who exactly do they think appoints the members of the high court? Realpolitik is that laws apply to you because the people with the guns are saying laws apply to you, and what exactly do they think the basis of the courts power is? "You don't have the power to lock me up!" um, sorry but they do have the power to do that, and they lock people up every day who don't wish to be locked up and don't agree that the laws apply to them.

Do they really think they're going to be arrested, take that to court, of all places, school the judge in Freedom Speak then have the judge go "I see the errors of my ways, you're outside my jurisdiction, i tip my hat to you, good fellow, you're free to go!"
« Last Edit: August 04, 2020, 06:12:14 pm by Reelya »
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Jopax

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Welp a coworker got a fever yesterday, might be nothing, might be the plague. This is after he's been to two weddings in the past ten or so days. And of course a week after the majority of the workers stopped wearing masks completely. And our two week vacation should be starting next week, so it's perfectly timed that we all waste it in isolation if it does turn out to be something.
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misko27

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Welp a coworker got a fever yesterday, might be nothing, might be the plague. This is after he's been to two weddings in the past ten or so days.
For what it's worth, according to my Contact-tracing training1 he is considered infectious two days before he showed symptoms but is most infectious the first day.

1Granted the NY Contact Tracing program has struggled, and just the other day the NYC Health Commissioner resigned over clashes with the Mayor. The main objection was moving the contact tracing program from the Health Department, which is experienced in contact tracing, to NYC Health & Hospitals, which represents the cities public hospitals program, as well as other issues with the Mayor.
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Jopax

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Yeah, living with family so I don't have to worry about supplies. What does worry me is their safety. Tho nobody seems to be taking it seriously, like I told my mom and she literally cracked a joke :V

It's mostly going to mess with my plans to visit friends who can't really travel atm for various reasons and of course being cooped up in a tiny room for two weeks straight is bound to drive me mad, especially since it's the summer and I don't have an AC in here, just a heating system disguised as a PC.

That is all provided I don't actually end up super sick or anything, which, considering my recent streak of luck might as well happen to put the shit cherry on top of an already shit year.

Ninja edit:
Yeah, that still gives a small window of opportunity since I did interact with him on Monday, even if it was brief as we did a shift change.
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