There’s a meme going around about Carl Sagan’s predicting our current cultural state.
I find this interesting as well. It’s from a wargame — “Minuteman”, by James Dunnigan, and published by SPI over 40 years ago (in 1976) about the fanciful prospect of a revolution in the US in the far distant 2020s.
The problem many Americans have with mask wearing is proof of the grocery cart dilemma – and it doesn’t speak well of us.
The grocery cart dilemma is the simplest philosophy question we run into in daily life.
To wit –
It’s a simple test – are you a good person? Yes or no. Are you willing to impose a very minor inconvenience upon yourself for the greater good of others, with no reward for doing so?
Mask wearing in 2020-2021 is identical – and there are a lot of people who fail.
I, I’ve been watching you
I think I wanna know ya (know ya)
Update: starting to warm up here, luckily water and power are good.
The same can not be said for most of Austin. There are attempts to evacuate hospitals in progress, but there are nowhere for the patients to go as pretty much every hospital is in the same situation. The lack of potable water is far more crippling than power. Austin went on a boil water notice last night and remains under one, thanks to a key water treatment plant shutting down due to lack of power. For most Austin residents it’s irrelevant as they cannot draw water, potable or otherwise, due to lack of water pressure in the system.
Grocery stores that can open are mostly sold out of everything thanks to transport being down. This will most likely persist for a while, along with the aftereffects of the water system breaking down. A city block in downtown Austin was shut down overnight thanks to a water main break and the water freezing immediately.
Basically, we are living in a third world country on the brink of total collapse, and our state leadership is utterly feckless and incompetent, reduced to running away (Cruz) or appearing on national right-wing media to nonsensically point the blame at Trump-hated wind power (Abbott). Every last one of them needs to resign but of course won’t, and every last one of them will be re-elected.
Pretty sure this is as low as it’s going to get, and as low as it’s ever gotten.
Plus: furnace is still running, keeping the house overall at 69-70.
Minus: our home office is distinctly colder.
I’m gonna start mining bitcoins just to generate some heat up in this.
Or maybe I’ll just get impotently angry at the Internet. I’ve seen one too many memes from leftists laughing it up that Texas doesn’t have snow shovels or reliable heat. I’m going to fucking go off.
Yeah, it’s goddamn HYSTERICAL that there is going to be a quantifiable death toll from this infrastructure mismanagement, which of course is completely fucking alien to New York and California. It’s a ROLY POLY BOX OF FUCKING JOLLIES that you now have an opportunity to show your classist biases safely during a natural disaster that primarily hit the poor and homeless of a state you cheer against. But by all means, don’t actually do the hard unfashionable work of connecting the dots between underfunded systems and corrupt politicians entrenched by an iron chain of gerrymandering. No, it’s MORE FUN to point and laugh at fucking DISASTER DECLARATIONS.
A lot of people are going to die. Homeless trapped outside, elderly on home health care whose oxygen gives out, infants who can’t handle two nights in a row of an unheated subzero home.
But no, just fucking LAUGH IT UP! Forward on those memes, they’re HYSTERICAL! People in red states deserve to freeze and die, am I right?
Solidarity forever MY ASS.