[286/365] Some links for today

[cosmolinguist]

Breakthrough infections might not be a big transmission risk. Here's the evidence

"If you actually isolate virus from people who are getting a secondary infection after being vaccinated, that virus is less good at infecting cells," Pepper says. "It's not known why. Is it covered with an antibody? Maybe. Has it been hit by some other kind of immune mediators, cytokines, things like that? Maybe. Nobody really knows. But the virus does seem to be less viable coming from a vaccinated person."

More studies are emerging that suggest there's something different about the virus coming from a vaccinated person, something that may help prevent transmission."​

I'm still isolating and not even dreaming of seeing my family basically because of how many chronically ill people I am or would be around. The less my chance is of infecting them, the better I'd feel...and maybe the more things I can eventually do.

True Crime Is Rotting Our Brains

Crime stories are a fundamentally conservative way of looking at the world. Republicans bleat about high crime rates in lawless liberal cities because someone stole a toothbrush from a CVS. Suburban crime paranoia is as old as the suburbs themselves — hell, it’s why they exist to begin with. The reactionary basis of true crime is how you end up with ostensibly liberal podcast hosts defending the death penalty and arguing against double jeopardy protections. It’s easy and correct to condemn Fox News for increasing our grandparents’ blood pressure, keeping them in a perpetual state of fear about roving gangs of MS-13 coming to their gated communities, but we should also consider that other demographics might be susceptible to fear-stoking propaganda.

This has big You're Wrong About energy, this is the kind of stuff I learned to think about because of them.

Calm Down, The Classics Aren’t Going Anywhere

Very, very few students enter college having taken [Latin or Greek in high school], and to the extent that those students are overrepresented at Princeton, this is a problem rather than an asset. The “Classics” track functioned mostly as a class segregation tool...If you are wondering why I have spent so much time recounting the internecine politics of a single department at a tiny university, then you have a healthy person’s sense of . But the people writing hand-wringing articles about the decline of education are not classicists or people who studied Classics in college, which might explain their concern. Instead, they are paid employees of right wing publications or foundations, all repeating the same talking point: that somehow, the presence of non-white students on campus is causing a dilution of the curriculum, a deterioration of college education, an abridgement of the rights of the (mostly white) student body.

What this really comes back to, for the op-ed writers on the right, is race and the implicit white ownership of Classics as a discipline. This is evident mainly from their choice to focus on a minor administrative change at a historically and predominantly white institution, when far more disastrous things were happening to the Classics department at Howard University: on April 16th, news broke that the administration at Howard had decided to dissolve the department, the last Classics department remaining at any Historically Black College/University (HBCU).

Come to think of it, this is very You're Wrong About too, in that episode about political correctness that now serves as the beginning of the trilogy that ended up being Michael Hobbes's swansong there, he talks about tons of examples from the 90s exactly like this, very low-stakes anecdotes about minor tweaks like this at elite universities, extrapolating wildly from the most minor things.

Archaeologists for Trans Liberation

The Black Trowel Collective has called for archaeologists to stand in solidarity with trans people, noting that “an archaeological understanding of the past is incompatible with transphobia and so-called ‘gender critical’ or trans-exclusionary radical feminism.”

The erasure of the complexity of sex and gender beyond simple binaries is a function of contemporary transphobic ideologies within archaeological analyses and not a reflection of past peoples’ lives. Moreover, this erasure risks providing fodder for accounts of the past that are used to further marginalize trans and gender fluid people.

Comments

Tab transplant!

[jesse_the_k]

I opened the True Crime article a while back; finished it today; excellent points.

Another driver of the True Crime genre is the relentless copaganda -- "entertainment" showing cops in every conceivable sector. There are broadcast channels running nothing but law enforcement. Growing up surrounded by police procedural wallpaper nourishes those "Reddit amateur detectives."

Is copaganda as ubiquitous in the UK?

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2018 Study Shows Surgical Masks are Equally Effective As N95s In Preventing Viral Transmission