The Uncanny Counter Puns

Wait, wrong sub.

Link to "Industrial Society and Its Future" (aka the Unabomber manifesto)

Let me pre-emptively state that I don't agree with his methods and his killing, but I've read this document several times, and I think there's a lot here that Kaczynski was surprisingly on point about when he wrote it 25 years ago.

While the brunt of the document is about technological evolution and the racheting danger it presents to humanity and freedom, he opens the document with a series of attacks on "leftists." Because it is so relevant to this subreddit, I will excerpt some pieces of a section called "Feelings of Inferiority", in which he critiques the American left. While the precise verbiage of this section can sometimes feel slightly dated [probably due to his being a cishet white guy!!], his general points are pretty much spot on, in my opinion, and worth reading, especially since they were written a quarter century ago. I've left out some passages for brevity, denoted by [...].

For a TL;DR, read passage 21.

---

>Feelings of Inferiority
>
>10. By “feelings of inferiority” we mean not only inferiority feelings in the strict sense but a whole spectrum of related traits; low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self- hatred, etc. We argue that modern leftists tend to have some such feelings (possibly more or less repressed) and that these feelings are decisive in determining the direction of modern leftism.
>
>11. When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him (or about groups with whom he identifies) we conclude that he has inferiority feelings or low self-esteem. This tendency is pronounced among minority rights activists, whether or not they belong to the minority groups whose rights they defend. They are hypersensitive about the words used to designate minorities and about anything that is said concerning minorities. The terms “negro,” “oriental,” “handicapped” or “chick” for an African, an Asian, a disabled person or a woman originally had no derogatory connotation. “Broad” and “chick” were merely the feminine equivalents of “guy,” “dude” or “fellow.” The negative connotations have been attached to these terms by the activists themselves. [...] Leftish anthropologists go to great lengths to avoid saying anything about primitive peoples that could conceivably be interpreted as negative. [...] T

So in 2012 the renown Robert Koch Institute, an independent federal agency that is directly subordinated to the German Ministry of Health and responsible for disease control and prevention, did a risk assessment on behalf of the German government, which included the assessment of a hypothetical scenario of a virus outbreak that results in a global pandemic. The virus used in the fictional scenario was a SARS-like corona virus, called "Modi-SARS".It was published on the 3rd of January 2013 and can be found via the official document and information publishing platform of the German government:https://dipbt.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/17/120/1712051.pdf (source is in German, starts on page 55)

Disclaimer

• This is not supposed to be fearmongering. It is good to know that presumably all of our governments conduct such risk assessments and run simulations to prepare themselves.
• The numbers presented in the document are obviously exaggerated. – Take them with a grain of salt!
• The numbers can not directly be applied to the current scenario with 2019-nCoV as a threat. I personally do not think that the number of 7.5 million casualties is realistic for the current threat, because I have high hopes that a treatment and vaccine can be found faster than in the next three years.
• Please be aware that in this risk assessment certain assumptions had to be made, such as in regards to the R naught, the lethality, the incubation time and the time it takes for a vaccine to be developed.

However, Robert Koch Institute did their best to pick estimations and make assumptions that were somewhat reasonable and realistic. Their sources and reasoning is also appended to the assessment (pp. 81-84).

In 2012 they obviously could not know about 2019-nCoV, it's reproduction number, incubation times and lethality ... yet, the parallels are uncanny.

Main parallels

• The fictional virus "Modi-SARS" was a new, unknown SARS-like corona virus, just like 2019-nCoV is.
• It originated from wildlife in Southeast Asia. Zoonotic transmission to humans happened on markets.
• The outbreak started in Asia in February and was undetected for two months, just like 2019-nCoV, where first cases can be backdated to end of November/beginning of December 2019.
• Infected cases appeared in Germany before the WHO released official warnings.
• 2 infected Germans returned back to Germany. One was a student returning afte

It's the wrong colour scheme for the film, its an action film, and he's only in a casino very briefly. It barely even looks like Timothy Dalton, more like a weird PS4 game version of him. I've noticed this more and more with blu ray releases that the cover designs are shit. Why can't they just use the original posters?

https://i.redd.it/ruqftgmnflh31.jpg

Edit - on mobile I noticed its blowing up big the actual poster I linked to at the end. The bluray cover Im referring to is the link that shows Dalton at a casino table.

Please note this is NOT a moral judgement. I don’t care who you want to bang or what orientation/gender you see yourself as; I’m not judging you for that.

But I find trans people, especially MtF persons who still look very manly, to be very unsettling. I’m a 23F if that matters at all.

I’ve only met one trans person irl—their name was Stephanie. They wore lipstick, a skirt, and had shoulder-length hair with bangs. But they also had several days of stubble, hairy legs, and a deep voice.

I couldn’t make myself talk to them. I felt terrible, but I couldn’t get past the dissonance of a very burly man trying to look like a woman.

I find it so unsettling to see men wearing makeup or little girls transitioning into boys on YouTube.

Maybe it’s how I was raised. I was homeschooled, Baptist, and didn’t hear anyone swear irl until I was 16 and out of the country. I’m not even sure I knew the Internet was anything other than Yahoo Mail and Lego.com until I was in my last two years of high school. Gender identity wasn’t something I even knew about until the last couple years. As far as I know I’ve still never met someone who was anything other than straight, besides the aforementioned Stephanie.

I don’t consider myself transphobic. I don’t hate the LGBT community. I just find the dissonance of what I see very unsettling.