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I wandered through the rest of the blog. What an amazing asshat. He should be on display somewhere. His rant about US health issues[1] is breathtaking. What so
by pixelgeek 5y ago
I wandered through the rest of the blog. What an amazing asshat. He should be on display somewhere. His rant about US health issues[1] is breathtaking.
What sort of person begins a description of autism like this?
> Autism. I’m not sure this doesn’t fall into the category of “insanity.” It may also have something to do with hormonal disruption. Either way, the fact that some huge fraction of the population who thinks they don’t have to be kind and thoughtful to others because “muh disability.”
I don't want to read the biography he is referring to but I do want to read a psych profile of Scott Locklin. He is the platonic ideal of a cranky, covid-denying asshat.
[1]https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2021/11/20/us-public-health-problems-which-are-more-serious-than-corona-chan/ https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2021/11/20/us-public-heal...
- slibhb 5y agoI believe the author was banned from HN a while back. I find his bluntness funny and somewhat admirable, where I disagree with him and not. Might be a regional thing, we're both New Englanders.
- temporaryi3 5y agoPoliteness > accuracy & honestly is a very common preference, but not mine.
- dahak27 5y agoYou can be honest and accurate without being needlessly nasty/mocking as the quote seems to be Your sentiment is a really common and insidious one that way too many people use to feel smug and "rational" about being mean
- jollybean 5y agoPeople are allowed to be blunt and even curmudgeon, there's nothing wrong with that, it's just one of the many dispositions we can assume. That's diversity. This is a personal blog and it's totally reasonable the he takes this posture, it's slightly refreshing. If this were a public intellectual being taken seriously, or if he had a huge audience, then there would be more scrutiny, but otherwise he's just a guy with an odd way of communicating with a small soap-box on a small corner. It's fine.
- ska 5y ago> " Politeness > accuracy & honestly " These concept are pretty much orthogonal. While I don't disagree that insistence on politeness can get in the way of good discourse, it is an all-to-common mistake to read or promote lack of politeness as a signal of honesty and accuracy - which manifestly isn't the case. It's also often done in a lazy way. Which doesn't imply the thinking is also lazy, but there is a good correlation.
- serverholic 5y agoIn practice they are far from orthogonal.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ska 5y agoThat doesn't match my experience at all, and I suspect it isn't unusual.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- h2odragon 5y agosee also: https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2021/08/12/things-the-establishment-got-wrong-about-wuhan-coof/ https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2021/08/12/things-the-est... aside from the "COVID denying", he's also refreshingly unwilling to bow to the trend towards dilution of language in favor of obfuscation of meaning. Direct and entertaining rants have their place and he's good at them.
- pixelgeek 5y agoWhat is it about the scientific method and changing your advice based on new evidence is so difficult for some people to understand? > The same dipshits who now think you should wear a mask while outside by yourself insisted that they were ineffective, because they knew the mask factories had long since been outsourced to China, and they wanted those masks for hospital worker to have while doing tiktoc videos. Now we have to wear them forever, because muh consensus or something. Wow
- Kranar 5y agoBecause there was no new evidence, the only thing that changed were the incentives. The evidence was always there and most of the rest of the world that didn't suffer from mask shortages recommended wearing masks and made them readily available for their residents. The countries that were not prepared for this decided it was best to lie and spread misinformation that masks don't work, or people are too stupid to put a mask on properly, or that there's nothing to be concerned about in the hopes that COVID would not be a long term global lockdown type of pandemic. Whatever disagreement you might have about the author of this website, don't give a pass to the people who were at the helm during this pandemic. They failed the public along numerous basic metrics and that doesn't change simply because this author may or may not be an asshole.
- pixelgeek 5y ago> Because there was no new evidence... But there was. The WHO recommendations, which I assume is what he is referring to, were based initially on data that suggested an non-aerosol transmission and then evidence was produced that lead to the theory of aerosol transmission. One can certainly criticize the WHO and other health organizations for moving too slowly but the issue I am referring to isn't that. There is a general tendency on the right to point to changing advice as some sort of proof of a conspiracy or idiocy on the part of the health officials. I see it all the time (as a daily lark I read Gab) and it points to an obvious lack of understanding on the part of a large part of the population (deliberate or not) about how science works on a fairly fundamental level.
- kache_ 5y agoDoes that have anything to do with this blog post in particular? I would wager your comment is off topic
- pixelgeek 5y agoThat depends on whether the original post was about the book review or about him :-) I think you are correct though that I am wildly off-topic but when one discovers something like this you really need to point it out.
- xibalba 5y agoReminder of the HN Guidelines [1]: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- pixelgeek 5y agoI am quite serious in my praise for this blog. It is breathtaking. I disagree with almost everything he says but I am still reading it.
- Certhas 5y agoThis is a direct quote from the blog: "The main upside to all this for me anyway is middle aged to old men like me have giant cocks compared to 20-somethings because we weren’t exposed to this shit in the womb. Of course most of the 20-something year old American women are obese and mentally ill anyway, so it’s a wash." How do you appropriately comment on something like this? Other than to point out that this is not someone worth having a conversation with? And yet this blog hits the front page,and therefore requires engagement of some sort. Pretending, against all evidence, that you are engaged in a good faith, curiosity driven conversation when faced with stuff like this does not seem like an appropriate, rational strategy to me.
- inkblotuniverse 5y agoAverage penis size has shrunk, though, right? And obesity does have negative effects on pregnancy, and you'd rather your mother weren't mentally ill. Obesity's definitely exploded over the last 60 years. (Isn't obesity in 20-30 y.o. women in america above 50%?) What's wrong with what he's said, here?
- teachrdan 5y ago> Of course most of the 20-something year old American women are obese and mentally ill anyway Do you not recognize this as misogynist? I can't tell if you're trolling or not.
- asmos7 5y agoyou should spend sometime in special education classrooms in America. You'd be shocked what is considered a disability. You have to realize once you have a documented disability it opens up things like lifelong disability payments. Imagine you have an E student, 16 years old. You have major anxiety over the thought of supporting them for the remainder of your life as it seems unlikely they'll ever be able to able to hold a job/achieve financial independence. Disability can be your ticket and parents hire what's know in the industry as advocates who you guessed it advocate for their student to be labeled and receive support for having a disability. I can tell you it's a surefire way to ensure your child receives passing grades w/ out doing anything at all b/c you can relabel the lack of effort as due to their disability. It's akin to drug addicts learning the in's and out's of the hospital system to receive pain medications. Pain has a lot of wiggle room and ppl will milk it just they like do disabilities.
- irishloop 5y agoEven if all of this is true, it doesn't disprove the existence of autism as a legitimate disability or diagnosis.
- bko 5y agoI just looked it up and the number of kids on disability started to skyrocket in the early 90s. In 1980 there were about 260k kids on disability. By 1990, there was ~300k kids on disability. In 2000 there was nearly 900k. > Let's imagine that happens. Jahleel starts doing better in school, overcomes some of his disabilities. He doesn't need the disability program anymore. That would seem to be great for everyone, except for one thing: It would threaten his family's livelihood. Jahleel's family primarily survives off the monthly $700 check they get for his disability. https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
- asmos7 5y agoI mean yea - another way to look at is if you're making $700 per month doing nothing you'd need make at least $701 to even consider from a pure economic perspective - realistically more like $1000+ to be motivated enough to go to work. So many will write that off but then you have the a ha moment of what if I do work under the table so that's what you do - best of both worlds free money and extra cash. Problem obviously is a lot of ppl choose illegal options especially considering how profitable they are.
- jl2718 5y agoBookmarked for review later. Can’t wait to get all steamed up about something some guy said.
- emmelaich 5y agoAnything that can be gamed will be gamed. It's a hard problem. https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/a-complex-problem-richest-schools-claim-most-hsc-disability-provisions-20211122-p59ayg.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/a-complex-problem-riches... > High-fee private schools are claiming the most HSC disability provisions despite the independent sector having the fewest students with special needs, as new data shows claims increased by a third in the last four years HSC is the Higher School Certificate, the highest secondary school examination in this state.
- paganel 5y agoFollowing a link from his "Stuff I like" page I also found this excellent blog-post [1] about the modern-day corporate antitrust industry, the author reminds me of Christopher Lasch and his writings on (good) populism that can still save our (Western world) democratic system (or the most important principles supporting it). For example I didn't know this fact: > In 1931, Jackson, the last Supreme Court not to graduate from law school which I found pretty interesting, especially as he was pretty instrumental in implementing some important New Deal stuff (I'm not and American and as such many of those facts were knew to me): > Jackson, a country lawyer from upstate New York, became one of the central lawyers in the New Deal, resurrecting the Antitrust Division in 1937 and a few years later sitting on the Supreme Court [1] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-big-law-cartel-how-antitrust https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-big-law-cartel-how-an...
- dang 5y agoPlease don't take HN threads on offtopic flamewar tangents. That's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. Edit: And boy was this a doozy. Not cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html