Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
By which I mean, very specifically: expend a militarily useful but potentially troublesome force in a bloody but strategically pointless battle which may cripple enemy morale. Three birds, one stone, if you pull it off. Like the #VietCong, #Wagner is becoming more trouble than it's worth.
I think Putin is drastically underestimating *all* his opponents at this point, but I could be wrong.
I'm terribly afraid this may already be in production.
"#Norwegians are #Cylons. It all makes sense now." #nocontextforyou
Another day, another "cancel culture is ruining America" argument.
"It used to be that people would listen to one another, and refute ideas point by point. The other person would listen, and make counter arguments or, possibly, see the point the person was making."
"Yes, I remember that golden age too: it was called high school debate class. Then I graduated and found out how the real world works."
@AndySocial agreed, for sure.
@AndySocial I honestly don't know. But it wouldn't surprise me.
That being said, a lot of Quora questions do seem to come from people who have honest intentions but are just stunningly, profoundly ignorant. It's also very international, with a lot of users who "learned" English in school and really don't have the skills to ask the questions they think they're asking. So I try to answer sincerely ... most of the time.
Some answers just write themselves.
https://www.quora.com/What-name-do-you-put-on-an-Army-s-uniform/answer/Daniel-Dvorkin-3
I think about this a lot, as my own #online record grows ever longer.
The #internet is full of ghosts of *myself*, and friends—some still in my life, most not, an alarming number who can never be again—caught at points of our lives when we were utterly different people. Hell, sometimes spambots still comment on my #LiveJournal posts, and I have to go see what they said, which brings the memories flooding back. Decades of #Usenet and #Slashdot floating around in the ether.
And yeah, it gets exponentially weirder when it's *everybody* who's left similar traces—which is probably close to half the world's population by now, if it hasn't already passed that point. I've been online for forty years or so, continuously for about thirty. Another such span of time, and a solid majority of people on the planet will have most or all of their lives self-documented in a detail that has never before been possible in human history.
My fiancée is a social #historian, focusing on a little over a century ago. There's lots of material, but never enough. So much is irretrievably lost. Her counterparts a century hence will have the opposite probem.
Probably a good thing those teenage #BBS posts are lost forever. Er, I think: maybe they're still on a stack of cassette tapes in someone's basement. If so, I hope they stay in their graves.
I particularly love the birdlike head tilt. #dinosaur #dromaeosaur #raptor #feathers
"Space Shuttle Door Gunner Syndrome is a chronic disease. Your inner ears just never work right after coming back to Earth from an extended tour. Don’t get me wrong: I know I have it easier than some of the other NASASOC guys like the SSRJs (Space Shuttle Rescue Jumpers) who had to freefall from orbit, or the SSEODs who almost all suffer from hydrazine exposure. But damn, it’s annoying.
"Anyway, yeah, the VA takes care of us like everyone else. 'Balance problems again?' they’ll say, and then send me over to the zero-g clinic for an hour or so. There’s no cure, but it keeps things under control."
... I should probably go back to bed.
A bit late to the party, but this is something I want to say.
One inevitable reaction to #ScottAdams' downfall has been a lot of people saying "#Dilbert was always crap anyway." Maybe some of them are even telling the truth, as they see it. But I bet a lot of them aren't.
My skepticism is based on long experience: it's truly remarkable how *every single time* a celebrity turns out to be a horrible person, suddenly they never had a fan base at all. How they became celebrities in the first place must be one of those great unsolved mysteries. Nobody ever watched Mel Gibson, nobody ever read JK Rowling ... you get the idea.
Dilbert was once a sharp, funny look at office life in a particular time and place and circumstance. If you were a tech worker in the '90s, you instantly recognized the characters and situations. The Pointy-Haired Boss, in particular, crystallized a concept everyone knew but didn't quite have a name for. Adams could have gone the Watterson or Larson route, retired from cartooning and from public life around the turn of the century, and left a sterling legacy.
Voiceover: he did not, in fact, retire.
As his fortune grew and he got further away from the world he was lampooning, the quality of the strip declined. The characters became a collection of tics, the jokes were recycled over and over, and Dilbert himself became a kind of superhero—no longer deflecting corporate inanity in an almost-believable way, but challenging it head-on and *winning*. That's not satire. That's embarrassing auctorial wish-fulfillment. Pure Gary Stu.
This is a common problem with long-running comic strips whose humor depends on the characters being in a particular situation. ("Sitcomics," perhaps?) Beetle Bailey was once a biting lampoon of military life. Andy Capp was once a whistling-past-the-graveyard depiction of poverty in a dying industrial town. Mort Walker and Reg Smythe lived in the same worlds as their characters ... and then they didn't. No one should criticize them for enjoying their success, but it came with a price.
Neither Walker nor Smythe, as far as I know, went completely off the rails as human beings.
Had Adams kept his mouth shut, Dilbert would have kept running forever, becoming even more clichéd and unfunny, the same jokes recycled until they passed even out of catchphrase territory, yet another of those odd ghosts haunting the decaying mansion of newsprint, until the mansion itself crumbled to dust. Goth as fuck, really, when you think about it—a description I suspect Adams would angrily reject, which brings me a certain amount of glee.
Really, there's no excuse for it taking this long. Adams has been running his mouth for years, getting more repulsive all the while. *Even if* his work had maintained its original quality—which I think is flat-out impossible; see above—he should still have been far too radioactive to appear in any paper aimed at a general audience. His sexism and racism and MAGAtry no doubt play very well in certain quarters, but those quarters are home to vermin. No mass media outlet should cater to them, and those that do richly deserve to fail.
Also he drove his stepson to suicide, then tried to turn the tragedy into part of his industry. So there's that.
I do not for a minute believe his current shtick is "dementia," or "satire," or any of the other excuses his die-hard fans are making. (That's almost as common as "I never liked ___ even a little bit," when idols show their feet of clay.) It's all him. This is who he is now, and who he chose to be.
But I do hope it's not who he *always* was, I really do. And if I'm wrong, if he's been a monster his whole life and just used to be better at hiding it ... I'm not going to pretend I knew. That's all.
Seen in the wild: "Rep.-elect Jennifer McClellan's (D-VA) victory in the special election for Virginia's 4th congressional district is a historic moment not only because it's the first time a Black woman has won a congressional race in #Virginia. It's also a historic moment because it's the first time anyone named #McClellan has ever won anything in Virginia."
@UnconventionalEmma @SandyDiersing ... and then getting canceled halfway through the first season.
One year.
A three-day operation. Short, glorious victory. Our boys will crush those decadent, corrupt, effeminate, *Westernized* [hiss! spit!] Ukrainians like the scum they are, then bring them back into the fold of Mother Russia once they realize the error of their ways. Why, we're not invading anyone! We're *liberating* them from their (((oppressors))) is what we're doing. Soon we will again be one people under one T/s/a/r/ President, as God intended.
Didn't quite work out that way, did it, Vladdie baby?
If #Russia won the war today (voiceover: Russia did not, in fact, win the war) then still Ukraine's magnificent fight would stand for all time as a monument to the human need for freedom. Zelenskyy's government has made its share of mistakes, sure. Every government does. They're *Ukrainian* mistakes, made by a Ukrainian government that assumed office through free and fair election, and accountable to the Ukrainian people. No one else—most especially not the Grand Duke of Moscow.
Every principle I swore to defend on behalf of the United States of #America ... is being put into practice in #Ukraine, right now. Had I had to do the same, against much the same enemy, there's a really good chance none of us would be here right now. We have the opportunity to uphold those principles *and* make that worst of all possible worlds less likely.
No, Ukraine is not morally pure. I guess no combatant in any war has been, ever. But the morality they do show, and monstrosity they face, make this the clearest conflict of good vs. evil in my lifetime.
And while we can and should be grateful that it's not our cities being turned to rubble, our fields ground under tank treads, **our children stolen**—we have those who would cheerfully do the same here at home, and pledge their allegiance to the invader half a world away. You know who and what they are.
Decent people would always prefer not to fight at all. We have to keep fighting those who are not decent, on all fronts. Ukraine shows we can fight and *win*.
For the last year, and the year to come, and however long it takes. Слава Україні.
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
