...left her job working at the hospital with the most inept PR department this side of Harlan Crow...
She's in a better place.
video the hospital put out clearly featured her friend and coworker as a body double
Wait, that's overstating it too. Dover was in the video, just hard to recognize with mask and lighting, and the friend/co-worker closely resembling her was in there alongside, so she got harassed even worse for being a "body double".
I don't see how you stop any of this without killing social media.
I don't know how to kill social media though.
Boring answer: social media is regulated to require adequate moderation to catch these things. (Might double as Keynesian job program given the magnitude of the task, and might require the successful ones to be nationalized/nonprofitized.)
Let's just kill it anyway. Just in case.
I've become aware in the last few days of the "Gaylor" hypothesis. I absolutely don't care even a little bit whether she is or isn't, it's fascinating how dug in people are, and how no matter what she does, everyone thinks their position is being confirmed. There's some kind of deep human need to be one of the elite who understands the real truth, not just what they want you to think. A Leo Strauss kind of thing (as an article explains).
2: I took that as reporting what they believed.
Taylor is the music industry. That means, if Taylor is a lesbian, so is Bruce Springsteen. And people aren't ready for that.
I initially misunderstood the OP claim about the video the same way Minivet did. I see now that Cala is correct about what snark was saying but the phrasing is confusing.
3: I got a lot out of reading this very recent book, but I get the sense that it's not faring especially well in the marketplace of ideas. It got a dreadful, shallow review in the NYT that seemed like an author's anxiety dream made real. ("Technology is hard, let's go shopping... oh shit, I use technology to go shopping? Does this book have something to say?")
I'm very worried about the future, but I'm not sure I'm willing to go so far as to read a book. But Facebook is now trying to sell me a wallet, so it knows I ruined my current one.
My attention span is not what it used to be. This happened well before I was vaccinated.
The best way to think of this is to compare it to statistical modeling. The problem isn't stupidity. Or if it is, we're fucked because there's no fixing it. The problem is that all the stupid people are now being stupid in the same way, so the errors are correlated.
Models don't work right if the errors are correlated, at least not the usual models.
We could just ask AI to monitor and correct social media on behalf of society. Should be fine.
17: Nonsense. Hilary will definitely win in 2016.
Article referred to: https://www.salon.com/2022/10/31/taylor-gaylor-swift-qanon-conspiracy-esoteric-writing/
Also, there's probably a more direct link between the Straussians and conspiracy theory people. I think both are funded by some on the same people.
I'm a Gaylor moderate. On the one hand, I don't think that all of her relationships are fake, all her boyfriends gay, that Tree Paine is stopping her from coming out, or that elaborate murder boards explaining the 10 different women she's dated have any merit. On the other hand, Dress is about her having sex with Karlie Kloss.
10: Bruce may not be a lesbian, but Melissa Ethridge sure is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cXzFhZVMnQ
But yeah, there's a lot of similarities between QAnon and the serious gaylors.
Gaylor is also just an entry point to wider conspiracy theories. It's got a big overlap with the extremely toxic Larry (One Direction Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson shippers), since Taylor and Harry's relationship is just fake PR to cover up that they're both really gay, and the Achelle shippers (Glee Lea Michele/Dianna Agron) since lots of people have made up that Dianna Agron dated Lea Michelle and then when they broke up she got together with Taylor. There's really a whole world out there of "a wide net of celebrities are secretly gay and in fake relationships to hide their real relationships" among the Tumblr types.
Basically all the real person shippers are insane and toxic, the straight ones too (cough, Outlander fans, cough).
"Some Harries and Louies are former Larries and self-identify as ex-Larries. There is also a substantial community of One Direction-adjacent fans called "antis" who spend large amounts of time online countering the things that Larries say and do. Ex-Larries often contribute to this anti-conspiracy work by creating posts invoking the experience of "leaving a cult.""
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larries
The funniest of these are the Spirk advocates -- that's James T. Kirk and Spock. OK, they're fictional characters so nothing is real.
The fictional ships are mostly ok (but not you Johnlock Conspiracy theorists!), it's when it crosses the line to real people that it more often gets creepy and harassy.
13: my only lasting memory of that author was of him regularly surfacing as a sealion in comments on a friend's Facebook feed. With exactly the quality of "Technology is hard, let's go shopping... oh shit, I use technology to go shopping? Does this book have something to say?" as his arguments. But I guess I did think longer writing he did formally, with an editor, was ok.
James T. Kirk and Spock
I hope some right-winger funds turning this into a combination of Russell Kirk and Benjamin Spock.
There are a lot of lesser / plausible / confirmed conspiracy theories that can nevertheless act as gateways, no? Like, Britney really was plotted against for at least financial abuse. Per the pyramid.
I'm pretty sure the Denver International Airport is real. I've connected there twice now.
yes, but does the blue horse come alive on a full moon?
Sorry for the confusing phrasing! I dashed it off in an email to Heebie without reading over what I wrote. Yes, the folks at Crazytown came up with the idea that the Dover was dead and not in the hospital video of her. The video was terrible but Dover did actually make an appearance. (As she says in the interview, she made the mistake of doing her hair differently and she wasn't wearing her uniform, so obviously she was a body double.)
26: Another piece of evidence for my theory that the main problem of American public live in the 2020s is that every kind of asshole is now the same kind of asshole.
I feel like I should have some response to 32 besides an enormous long sigh, but I really don't. It's so unfortunate. I want the book to do well, but I also really, really, really, really don't want to have to act as an authorial proxy in order to help it do well, because my argumentative/interpersonal style is... different. (I am actually curious to see people engage with the arguments, though. Here is a sample and another sample.)
I'll read the excerpts even though I've never opened Instagram and TikTok and still feel a fair bit of existential dread. But first I'll eat some Peeps (capitalization done carefully).
Incidentally, I noticed that NPR is now flagged on Twitter as "government-funded media," which cracks me up.
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Also I am reading about Vietnam and wonder if anyone has a good book to recommend on postwar Vietnam, say late 70s to anytime in the 21st century, the more up-to-date the better?
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The Doonesbury comics explain the period from Vietnam through Carter (maybe Reagan) about as good as anything.
I read the excerpts and I really just can't read a book written that way. I have a not from my doctor.
The book I'm reading now is pretty turgid, but I guess I just interpolate visuals from art films whenever my eyes glaze over.
But probably not the "art films" you pervs are envisioning.
I am the very model of a modern major general education.
The weirdest and wildest shit right now is all the GC TERFvestigators. Every famous actress is secretly trans. I saw one that pointed out an Adam's apple on Marilyn Monroe and they were going wild over Daniel Radcliffe's girlfriend who is actually several months pregnant.
The transvestigators are amazing. I remember one getting passed around where the post title was "[some actor]'s girl eye = [some actor] NOT A GUY!" I wish I could remember who the actor was because the kooky couplet structure is now installed in my head.
50 s/b by The Algebra Pirates of Penzance High School
"transvestigators" that's the word I was looking for.
Now I want to look up the old thread under the post title "Malcolm Gladwell is not gay", which I remember being sort of classic for some reason, maybe because it turned into a discussion of baseball and/or pizza.
55: It's dead, gay, or Canadian. You can only be one.
At a certain point, it probably gets hard for rural, red state hospitals to find front line staff. Then, I don't know what happens beyond more dropping of life expectancy.
Yeah but that doesn't necessarily work. The people voting Republican often have enough money to go get treatment. The poor in the area often don't.
59: The thing that keeps them hanging on is that the hospitals are often in blue college towns already anyway. And even if not, just a large hospital is enough to make a town denser, more vibrant, and younger than the surrounding area.
62 I think this is right, but in larger Western states, it's not good enough to have a real hospital 2 hours or more -- sometimes much more -- away.
63: But isn't it already basically true that in large swaths of the west the nearest real hospital is several hours away? There doesn't seem to be a lot of range for things to get worse in that direction. Which is why these counties are just emptying out and the old people moving to Florida and Arizona.
I think the emptying is more young people moving to get jobs. But there's plenty of room for it to get worse. Towns are losing not just hospitals, but also their doctors in outpatient clinics.
64 Oh, there's a long way down yet to go.
65 There's a wrinkle in eastern Montana, which probably applies even more in Nebraska. There's no real place on a farm or ranch for the adult children of an 45-60 year old owner/operator. They can be a hired hand, but they're not going to accumulate the wealth needed to buy out the parents, and even if they could, that's a long time to be a dependent. Instead, they leave, to get careers, spouses, and families. And still can't cash out the parents when they're ready to retire from agriculture. The bison people pop in for a visit to ol mom and dad, and offer a fair market price for the place. Kids don't want and can't afford it, so the property reverts to wild pasture. Which affects feed stores, vets, banks, schools, and a bunch of other small town rural infrastructure.
Hear that, Mister Carp? That is the sound of inevitability.
There really aren't bison people doing that in Nebraska*, but the rest fits. I have one cousin who farms and he's about to turn 60. There's no one else.
* At least not the part where my family has land. It's first-rate cropland.
As a biologist I'm skeptical that you could even make bison people.
66.last: How much of a role are carbon offsets playing in that cycle? I'm used to hearing about that spiral in the context of my Scotland politics twitter follows, but maybe all the peat makes the carbon calculations a bit different there? I'd guess there's also a lot of resentment in this context around people who care more about returning land to Bison than to native people...
At the end of the day there's just a lot of places that don't make a ton of sense for people to live in at all. It's absolutely plausible that no one should live in large swaths of Eastern Montana. But of course getting down to zero is going to cause a lot of problem for the people there close to the end...
You just fuck the bison. At least that's the theory they work from.
I'd guess there's also a lot of resentment in this context around people who care more about returning land to Bison than to native people...
There's a lot of overlap in general between the movements so not a lot of resentment AFAIK, but I'm not very close to the areas where there's a lot of bison stuff actually happening.
The "Buffalo Commons" concept (which is not really what's actually happening so far) definitely appeals to both.
I'm all for rewilding as much of the West (and the East, where we can pull it off) as isn't economically sensible for farmland. People belong in towns and cities, and bison (or bison-people, I'm not fussy about eldritch hybrids) should have the rest.
Plenty is economically feasible range land.
The bison people pop in for a visit to ol mom and dad, and offer a fair market price for the place. Kids don't want and can't afford it, so the property reverts to wild pasture.
The dog not barking here is that big ag (subtype: crops) interests are not offering to buy them out, suggesting something about the value accruing from the respective uses.
72, 73: Interesting. In the Scotland setting there seems to be a lot of hostility between the "rewilding" people and the "trusts held by locals" (e.g. https://www.north-harris.org) people, where the rewilding people seem to mostly have a no-people vision and the carbon offsets make the land too valuable for trusts to have a chance to compete with big outside buyers. Of course there's lots of differences between Scotland and Montana, but it's interesting to me that this isn't a flash point.
64: sort of? In a lot of places the rural hospital basically stabilizes you to get you to the big one that's an hour+ away and deals with little things. Losing that layer of care is a big deal, even if it was already less optimal than what's common in more developed regions. Maternity care is often hit, too, especially post -Dobbs. (So don't move to rural Idaho.)
Of course there's lots of differences between Scotland and Montana, but it's interesting to me that this isn't a flash point.
Well, you know, bison have kind of a big role in Plains Indian cultures. A lot of tribes have been acquiring their own herds. It's a whole thing.
Right, I guess my surprise is that the tribes have enough money to compete buying the land against outsiders, which returns to the point that the land is probably much cheaper.
Not the land, the bison. At least so far.
This is all a bit outside my own personal experience (Charley would know better) but my sense is that Plains tribes are more focused on making land claims through legal channels and building bison herds on land they already control. They're probably broadly in favor of more bison even on private land, which doesn't really impact their interests very directly at this point.
76 You wouldn't put bison on land that could grow corn or soybeans. It's land where cattle/sheep are dominant, with hay being raised on the river bottoms. We do have some Texas zillionaires also buying up ranches -- not so they can turn a profit, really, but so they can be masters of a big domain.
70 The Native nations are working at buying fee land within reservations, which was lost under prior paradigms. I don't think they'd be ready to be paying market price for ranches outside the reservations for a good long while. The notion of taking back public land continues to pick up steam, though, and the return of the National Bison Range to CSKT -- passed by Congress in 2020 -- is being watched pretty closely. I've said many a time that I won't be surprised in the eastern third of Glacier National Park gets returned to the Blackfeet Nation is my granddaughter's lifetime. In the interim, I can see the Forest Service land immediately to the south of that, which was part of the same 1895 land deal -- the Badger-Two Medicine area -- evolves first into co-management and then eventually gets returned.
Native nations are also developing their own bison raising programs.
The tribal bison hunting just outside of Yellowstone is have a very unsustainable year, and it's not clear what's going to happen. (There's a short stretch of Forest Service land immediately north of Yellowstone NP. 8 different nations have asserted treaty right to hunt bison there, and efforts to coordinate and limit harvests don't seem to have been very effective this year. A lot of bison have been killed. Part of this is because there was a lot of snow in the high country, and a lot of bison left the park for better grazing.)
Also to 66, obviously we've known for ages that the ideal of the family farm was a myth, but it's especially clashing that in this scenario the parents won't consider letting their adult child take over for them without being bought out in full and upfront. Surely if it were a more viable business, they could work something out where the child takes over the work and supports the parents on the profits.
Should have hit preview.
CSKT has an interesting series of maps showing the growth over the last five decades in trust land within reservation boundaries. I wouldn't be shocked if there isn't some significant federal help at this. They are getting a huge amount of federal money as part of the water rights compact (approved by Congress in 2020) but I think the bulk of that is going to be habitat restoration, with less of acquisition.
The tribal bison hunting just outside of Yellowstone is have a very unsustainable year, and it's not clear what's going to happen. (There's a short stretch of Forest Service land immediately north of Yellowstone NP. 8 different nations have asserted treaty right to hunt bison there, and efforts to coordinate and limit harvests don't seem to have been very effective this year. A lot of bison have been killed. Part of this is because there was a lot of snow in the high country, and a lot of bison left the park for better grazing.)
There's a plausible historical case that Plains bison hunting wasn't sustainable in the nineteenth century either for the number of tribes that were trying to do it, so this may end up being a very difficult problem to solve.
84 A business that's viable to support a couple in relative comfort may not be able to support 2 or 3 couples in comfort. I worked on a case a few years ago where the three kids inherited a ranch. It could support one of them. It was then worth $10 million. Of the remaining kids, one wanted to sell, and the other, for sentimental but not economic reasons, wanted to keep it in the family. These "kids" are in their 70s, and their kids are surely going to sell the place. Someday.
87: Sure, I see that. I guess I mean if the family farm were all it's cracked up to be - if it had any intrinsic value beyond its economic value - you'd think they would make a few sacrifices, rather than expect to live at the comfort level of a full-time salaried job.
It's really hard to price some land, making it difficult to buy out within the family.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/science/bison-hunt-yellowstone-native-americans.html
The NYT had a story on the bison hunt. I've heard much more alarming accounts from advocacy groups.
The traditional solution to 87 is that the first-born son gets the property and the windfall, and the other kids know that from birth and so find other careers.
Well, that ranch wasn't worth 10 mill based on the income you could make from a livestock operation. That's based on rich people buying land from which they can see mountains, and having an annual picnic for their rich friends. The couple running the ranch had a pretty hand-to-mouth lifestyle. Land poor is the term, and it's a real barrier.
Well, that ranch wasn't worth 10 mill based on the income you could make from a livestock operation. That's based on rich people...
And yet the owners wish their kids to compete with that price!
Some don't. Some don't have the choice not to for various reasons.
(Well, in the case I had, the sibling who lives on the ranch paid nothing for it, and gets to continue his hand to mouth existence, while the one who wanted to sell is a minority owner of a valuable asset with no way to realize that value at all. This option, just like the primogeniture option, is available out there. It's not without its own cost . . .)
If you have only daughters, you can just give it to the one who loves you most. There's no downside.
It's like you haven't even read Pride and Prejudice.
The land goes to some random cousin, so you have to convince one of your daughters to marry that cousin. And if that doesn't work you're headed for genteel poverty unless a daughter can fall madly in love with someone with a much bigger house, a house so beautiful she will immediately have an intense housegasm upon seeing it for the first time. And everyone lives happily ever after.
That's just pimping with differnt steps.
shiv's family in Canada has had to deal with that. His grandmother left the farm to him and his cousins with a couple of provisos, the main one being that it has to be sold and the proceeds split. No one is allowed to buy the others out even at market price. The reason for this is her seeing how the primogeniture rule destroyed a lot of relationships in her generation.
So probably in the next decade, there will be a new subdivision there.
Used to be you buying the farm was what happened when you died. Now that's when you sell it.