Completely agree.
People are tribal - they tend to conform to what the group thinks and does. We’re also primed with strong us vs. them tendencies, that is you want your team to win whatever happens.
As you say, if you believe that (for example) your friends and neighbours think democrats are radical socialists out to destroy American life, it would be highly dangerous to vote democrat let alone be on team democrat.
Take a deep breath. Hold it and count to 8. Breathe out.
I hope you feel a bit better now.
IT helps people in corporations, government, education, charities - everywhere where you have computers or electronic equipment.
People working in IT, just like every service industry, work to help people do what they need to do quickly and safely. Without them a lot of modern society simply would not work, and you could only work in a job if you knew a heck of a lot of technical stuff otherwise irrelevant to what you are doing. And just like other service workers, they are abused every day by the people they are helping.
Don’t be one of those abusers.
It’s all perfect until the wheels come off
It’s a corollary of the other famous expression that science advances one funeral at a time. This came from Max Planck and predates Clarke:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it …
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.
Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33, 97
Here’s one that I enjoyed and covers a critical period of modern East Asian history: “The Gate” by François Bizot.
It’s him recounting how he travelled to Cambodia and was captured by the Khmer Rouge. He survived … just … By forming a relationship with Comrade Duch who
as the Chairman of Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison camp, and head of the Santebal, Kang Kek Iew was responsible for the interrogation and torture of thousands of individuals, and was convicted for the execution of at least 12,272 individuals, including women and children [Wikipedia]
While he covers the history of the Khmer Rouge period, his writing is highly empathic and discusses the suffering of himself and hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens at the hands of other ordinary citizens and how could this possibly happen. It’s a highly emotional book.
Best of luck with your reading!
That was fantastic and a must-view for this topic.
And don’t forget the napple!
I think this is the primary reason, but I’ll add a couple of thoughts.
His people. The core of his actions right now is ‘project 2025’ which was written by an extreme right wing think tank in Washington called ‘The Heritage Foundation’. They’ve been around since Reagan and have been thought leaders in the GOP all this time. In other words, they know the system extremely well and they are well organised.
His supporters. A large number of his supporters are poor, Christian folk, often from red states. They are poor because the structure of the American economy has been designed to extract money from the non-rich and channel it to big business and rich individuals. Think Walmart and Musk. For 40 years GOP have been telling the lie that billionaires as job creators, that taxes, regulations and unions are bad, that trickle-down economics works. This has led to staggering amounts of money taken from the middle and working classes and piled into bank accounts of the real elites (here meaning billionaires and biggest companies). Trump’s supporters know the economy is rigged and they want to change it. Unfortunately they believe their church leaders (who have unabashedly instructed their flocks on politics and single issues like abortion) and the mainstream media (meaning Fox) who push these lies incessantly. The Democrats have not attacked (let alone resolved) these issues under Obama and Biden. But Trump claims he’ll shake up Washington as an outsider and tackle these issues. His supporters somehow do not equate a nepo baby, ivy-league educated billionaire ex-president as one of the elite. They think of him as ‘their man’.
In short, the propaganda from Fox, the Internet, their churches and their neighbours has persuaded them to vote against their interests and elect a group of elite political insiders and businessmen who have taken 4 years to plan the hostile takeover of the government in order to channel even more money to themselves.
It’s in the middle of a Russian winter so the central heating must have been belting out so much heat for the poor Colonel to open said window.
Umm, it’s your immune system that detects the vaccine and responds to it by developing antibodies specific to the vaccine (and by extension to the actual disease). Just as it would when challenged in real life by the pathogen.
Vaccination basically gives your immune system a several day head start on producing antibodies.
Many people do not hear as they read. In fact the skill of speed-reading depends on turning the auditory experience off:
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading