Thank god my stomach and bowels seemed to have calmed down. These doctors don't listen to you. I know my own body, I knew it was the medication which was fucking me over. I went back to the less powerful antibiotics. My recovery is going to be longer, but not completely unbearable which is what it was. It's taken a good month out of my life and will probably take another week or more to clear. But I'm finally seeing a way out of this.

gamingeek said:

Thank god my stomach and bowels seemed to have calmed down. These doctors don't listen to you. I know my own body, I knew it was the medication which was fucking me over. I went back to the less powerful antibiotics. My recovery is going to be longer, but not completely unbearable which is what it was. It's taken a good month out of my life and will probably take another week or more to clear. But I'm finally seeing a way out of this.

They listened.  They're just power tripping masochists.  

I had an appointment tomorrow to go to a hospital to have something checked.  Got called up today to ask if I had had covid before, travelled abroad recently, ...  One of the questions was if I had a cold or a sore throat.  I answered truthfully that yes, in fact I've been having a slight sore throat since a day or two and have a slight cold.  BAM! appointment moved back by 2 weeks.  I don't mind them being very carefull, it's not like I'm in big pain or anything and I wouldn't want to infect a whole hospital, but, as I told the lady on the phone, it's winter, I'll probably still have that cold in 2 weeks time...

SupremeAC said:

To give my 2 cents: opinions are important, but unless you're in a business that can really have an effect on how things turn out (politics for example) it's best to keep them to yourself when in public.  With how fractured reality is these days, thanks to the rise of myriads of political parties and how the internet is engineered to echo everyone's own convictions and thus strengthen the idea that one's own idea's are the only truth, you're always going to alienate more people than you'll find agreeing with you.

As for Foolz' bringing in the lack of long term thinking: it's not baked into our nature.  Never before in humanity's history did we need to keep the bigger picture in mind like we need to do today.  It's too new as a phenomenom for us as a species to be ready for it.  Add in to this that the democratic system does not reward planning for the long term, and that as a species we are too self centered and divided for the West to really care if Africa becomes even less hospitable.  I'm not surprised we're failing horribly.

Foolz said:

While the political impasse may be expressed through a multitude of political parties in Belgium, that isn't really true universally. America, for example, has a distinct lack of a way for people to vote for anything meaningful outside of the two right wing parties who take turns in ruling.

Social media is designed that way, not the internet---and even then, only social media companies that have adopted the editorial policy of old school sensationalist media. Of course, these companies are also the most popular... Not surprising when you consider that this is a model that goes back at least to the Gutenberg press, and who knows what fake news qaranic  verses contrasted with biblical passages the town-cryer was belching out during the crusades to rile people up lol!

While it seems logical, I'm not so sure democracy rewards short-term thinking---outside of referendums and plebicites, and even then; most are actually about long term issues! E.g. Brexit and marriage laws: both are long term projects, with long term consequences. And take the prevailing economic rationality, for example. The neo-liberal project begins at the end of the second world war, growing out of a rehabilitation of Austrian aristocracy and into a response to Keynes and while it was able to be implemented due to a short term crisis, both in the minds of Thatcher and to a lesser extent Carter as well as in the way it was presented to the public, it was long-term vision which would transform society over the coming decades! Whether it did or not, is for you to decide, but that was certainly the hope. On top of that, Neo-liberalism's main victory has merely been in how wealth is distributed as well as a cultural change in how we conceive of individuality, race, nationality, labour and civic responsibility; while it has been utterly impotent in being able to bend the direction of long-term institutions that were already in place like welfare the way it wants.

So, in short, whether successful or otherwise, "Western" democratic politics has and still is very much about long-term thinking. The problem with climate change, or coronavirus, is that those are actually short term problems: the former, because if nothing is done instantly, you're screwed, and the latter because herd immunity (whether through mass deaths or mass vaccination) is just around the corner in everyone's mind. Now, does this really have much to do with democracy? Probably not. The countries who have done the best on coronavirus are a mixture of democratic and authoritarian states. As for climate change, well done Bhutan! Everyone else, not so much.

I'm not only referring to the Belgian situation, as it's a trend we're seeing in the whole of Europe.  Smaller 'niche' parties are on the rise in the Netherlands, Italy, ...  And the number of parties doesn't actually matter, more the large ideological divides that were at the base of this discussion, namely that one's opinion can be grounds for them to be fired, even (especially?) in the USA where there are de facto only 2 political parties.

Yes, it's mostly social media that herds people together with likeminded individuals, but the intenet itself is not devoid of this.  Look at our forum.  We're all relatively likeminded, while larger forums will often have a lot of people just trolling eachother based on opinion.  People hardly ever listen to what the other has to say.

I disagree that democracy is in it for the long game.  Brexit is not an example of long term thinking.  Yes, it will have long term rammifications, but it was not decided upon based on long term ideologies.  It was won with populist argumentations and half truths that tapped into the fears of people at that point in time.  The same can be said for the construct of neo-liberalism after WW2.  People were promised a better life with more wellfare.  That's short term thinking.  What can I do so that I can benefit from it in the near future?  That it ended up changing our whole culture is merely a byproduct, I hardly think changing perception of individuality, race, nationality, ... was part of the goals set out by those who engineered the system.

As for global warming and climate change, that is indeed long term.  The actions need to be taken now, but the goals and thus benefits are long term.  Because of this, they are too vague to connect with enough individuals to really bring on a sense of urgency and drive change.  Half the people who are eligible to vote today won't even be around by 2050.

SupremeAC said:

I'm not only referring to the Belgian situation, as it's a trend we're seeing in the whole of Europe.  Smaller 'niche' parties are on the rise in the Netherlands, Italy, ...  And the number of parties doesn't actually matter, more the large ideological divides that were at the base of this discussion, namely that one's opinion can be grounds for them to be fired, even (especially?) in the USA where there are de facto only 2 political parties.

Yes, it's mostly social media that herds people together with likeminded individuals, but the intenet itself is not devoid of this.  Look at our forum.  We're all relatively likeminded, while larger forums will often have a lot of people just trolling eachother based on opinion.  People hardly ever listen to what the other has to say.

I disagree that democracy is in it for the long game.  Brexit is not an example of long term thinking.  Yes, it will have long term rammifications, but it was not decided upon based on long term ideologies.  It was won with populist argumentations and half truths that tapped into the fears of people at that point in time.  The same can be said for the construct of neo-liberalism after WW2.  People were promised a better life with more wellfare.  That's short term thinking.  What can I do so that I can benefit from it in the near future?  That it ended up changing our whole culture is merely a byproduct, I hardly think changing perception of individuality, race, nationality, ... was part of the goals set out by those who engineered the system.

As for global warming and climate change, that is indeed long term.  The actions need to be taken now, but the goals and thus benefits are long term.  Because of this, they are too vague to connect with enough individuals to really bring on a sense of urgency and drive change.  Half the people who are eligible to vote today won't even be around by 2050.

Definitely agree about Europe, but I don't think it can be generalised to the rest of the world so easily. To me, the American ideological divide playing itself out is between conservative and reactionary liberalism, with the democrats representing the former and the Republicans the latter. There is no genuine competitor to these two views, and no progressive alternative. Bernie Sanders is just as much of a reactionary as Trump, for example and MMT is more of a theory than it is a poltical prescription...what else is there, universal basic income lol? Which suggests to me that the cause of opinion being a firing offence is not because of an unprecendeted multiplicity of poltiical opinions. Personally, I'd suggest that the reason is simply a lack of labour power!

Internet: we disagree, thus proving I'm right! (Though this reply also proves you correct about trolling.)

Brexit might be muddle-headed long-term thinking, but it absolutely was long-term thinking. Here's an awful strawman illustration for fun: once upon a time in the long distant past Britain used to be a nation state (LOL), then she foolishly joined the EU and since than has given up her national soveregnity (LOL), and by leaving the EU it will be possible to once again return to the good old days because she will have the power to sort out her own affairs. The sense of cultural implosion, also, isn't a new phenomenon but one that has defined colonial countries since they started colonising places, and nor is it short term thinking, as stupid as it is. "Muh ancient bloodlines (or cultural norms) will be destroyed after several generations of interbreeding (or multiculturalism) screeeee!"

Not only was the welfare state a long term project in terms of its design and the time it took to actually build, so too was it a long term struggle that it might even have taken place, and it was absolutely as much of a cultural project as it was a political one, from Rousseau to Marx to Keynes---and it was only possible in the "West" with the a greater level of democratic emancipation as well as a levelling of economic political power through the monopoly of violence being slightly diminished through labour power. Likewise, all the economic thinkers who were the inspiration for neo-liberalism had their own cultural hopes that they wanted to foster through their economic policies, and so too did the politicians. Indeed, a change in the conception of individuality and civic duty were Thatcher's and Reagan's whole shtick! "There is no such thing as a society" said Thatcher, the second-in-command of her society and "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem!" said the head of the American government, just as Trump the swamp-thing planned to drain the swamp because no one day has any faith that governments are capable of doing anything for them.

Of course this is a simplification, but politicians are dumb enough to read and believe books written by economists, philosophers and social scientists and such people are usually just as interested in how their fields fit into culture as they are in viewing them in a vacuum.

But more importantly, I don't really see how the welfare state can't be seen as a long term project. In England it began being taken seriously as a means to solve the problems caused by Victorian industrialisation and the state by the end of that century was replacing the religious institutions with their own, and it did not reach it's peak until the 1950s and in spite of a massive ideological attack for the past 50 years, still remains in place. That's a democratic political project that took some 100 years to properly implement, and has since survived for some 70 years!

Woo hoo! Nintendo Direct tomorrow at 2:00 PT. It’s going to focus on Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and games scheduled to release in the first half of 2021. Going to be about 50 minutes long.

That better be a healthy number of interesting games, and not 30+ minutes of Smash bros talk  

edit: it's definitely going to be a new F-Zero game.

I'm closing on the house today!!

robio said:

How are they still adding characters to Smash???

Well they said that “Everyone is here” so they have to deliver.

travo said:

I'm closing on the house today!!

Congrats!