If we stopped requiring employees to wash their hands after using the restroom, we'd all be safer because the market would sort out which restaurants gave you the trots and they would all either close or be Taco Bell.
Remember, today is the day you should teach while wearing a poppy or using opium.
1: Sylvester Stallone's "Demolition Man" envisioned the latter outcome: They all become Taco Bell.
And now that I think of it, that movie in some ways embodies the conservative trope that do-gooding is necessarily (and maybe even deliberately) counter-productive. The rank-and-file do-gooders are treated sympathetically, though.
This, I think, is yet another example of the way that school predisposes us to believe unlikely sounding things over likely sounding things. We go to school and get told about atoms being basically like little solar systems and then at about age 14 or so we learn about quantum theory and how the truth is aha! a bit different and far more complicated.
Also because someone who says something obvious and correct might not be very bright, but someone saying something counterintuitive and right probably is pretty bright, so we get taught at school that the people saying counterintuitive things are the bright ones, overlooking the possibility that they might be being counterintuitive and wrong.
The king of the "the counterintuitive is right" is the people saying the Civil War wasn't about slavery. But that's a different branch of bullshit.
4 is maybe a bit harsh. The Nigel Hawthorne character isn't a villain because he's a do-gooder, he's a villain because he's trying to assassinate his political opponents. The Stallone character makes it clear at the end that the ideal is a lot closer to the clean San Angeles than to what the resistance movement wants (and both are of course infinitely better than the 1990s).
Top film trivia fact: Hawthorne tried to get Hollywood to film "The Madness of George III" but they refused to do it with an unknown actor in the lead; so he did "Demolition Man" so he wouldn't be unknown any more.
6: indeed. There's a meme image going round with a bell curve of intelligence, and three stereotyped faces at different points on it: an idiot, a normal person and a genius. I've seen one that actually says something like
IDIOT: The Civil War was about slavery
NORMAL: The Civil War was the culmination of decades of disputes over tariffs, the power of the federal government, the accession of new states to the union, and industrial vs rural interests
GENIUS: The Civil War was about slavery
Stallone did it because he wanted the whole world to mentally picture him putting a sea shell in his butt.
Academia helps people rationalize their stupid beliefs more effectively.
The incentives are such that you can be rewarded for that.
10 to 5.
7: It was a movie from a less polarized time. Gun-loving fascists could needle well-meaning liberals for their excesses while acknowledging that violence has drawbacks, too.
It's good to keep in mind that approximately no one who isn't a professional asshole says that the solution to people not saving for retirement is to end social security to stop people from feeling protected but something close to 100% of one political party thinks that $600 is enough to make a young person think they don't need to work.
I think most of the profit in the gig economy comes from getting workers to misprice risk. That is, they compute their income without thinking about downtime where they earn nothing and assuming they aren't going to crash their car and the like.
Of the profit that isn't just from tax evasion.
You can make good money mispricing risk, for a while.
Just a second. There's a penny in front of this steamroller.
I don't go in front of the steamroller for less than a nickel.
I kind of feel like I was a little bit ahead of the curve on being completely fed up with contrarianism as a posture.
So you adopted a contrarian position about contrarians.
19 same, except when Derauqsed does it take
21 -take
I'm in the bar and I'm four sheets
That is, they compute their income without thinking about downtime where they earn nothing and assuming they aren't going to crash their car and the like.
Or they just don't price in car depreciation (if they own the car).
Are there even any contrarian positions remaining, which haven't been subsumed into the greater reasonable humans vs fascist nutballs whirlpool?
Given that Slate ran the piece in the OP, probably not.
My kid still insists the Star Wars prequels were good.
The secret is the original ones sucked too, but we were kids.
I keep reading the Herman Cain awards because knowing something isn't good for my mental well-being isn't the same as being able to stop doing it. It does strike me that the way lots of people think about the protection from modern medicine is similar to the risk compensation hypothesis. It really doesn't occur to them that there's an infectious disease that can kill a basically healthy, non-elderly adult with access to the best American medical care. Or didn't until it was much too late. They say they are asking for prayers, but they sure are going to the hospital and demanding care as soon as they can't breathe well.
That and the people putting stuff up their butt without it having a flared base. They run risks expecting someone will be able to fix things if there's a problem.
Maybe I said this here before, but surely a big part of why these people abhor vaccinations but love pills/cures is that vaccines are collective action.
And yet they will go out of their way to take part in collective action speaking out against collective action.
That's different, it's collective action by the right people, their people.
I'm guessing they're the same people getting things stuck up their butt and needing to go to the ER, but they keep that off Facebook.
Maybe Facebook should do some PSAs about that.
"This Thanksgiving, remember that Gen. Flynn says to 'use a flared base.'"
Especially if you've taken your horse de-worming medication.
It's great that teens and young adults consider that they have the most years of life expectancy remaining and therefore never do stupid risky things.
This seems even simpler to me: believing in "risk compensation" fits perfectly with opposition to regulation, indeed with opposition to government itself. All we need are market signals! The weak can go to the wall!
The Stallone character makes it clear at the end that the ideal is a lot closer to the clean San Angeles than to what the resistance movement wants (and both are of course infinitely better than the 1990s).
Fortunately, audiences rarely reinterpret texts to fit them to their own political aesthetic.
Yeah, nobody got Starship Troopers.
I get that it's the movie that isn't the movie I like with a similar title.
Eeeeeverybody wants to believe they're Galileo, when the truth is, they're barely Salieri.
NO! Wait. That's that dumb cop movie.
I don't actually agree with 30! I think that collective action is truly nonexistent as a concept for most anti-vaxxers. They're only weighing the risks/benefits of a vaccine for themselves in isolation, vs the risks/benefits of treatment for themselves.
The former is abstract and requires you to think about the value of prevention for your future self. The latter is concrete and tangible and you don't like being sick, at the present moment. It's strictly a problem of not being able to internalize the personal benefit of prevention.
I would never like a dumb cop movie. Unless Liam Nielson is maybe in it.
Galaxy Quest. Such a serious name.
Stallone also stars in the underrated janeane Garofalo film Cop Land. It's plausibly a {dumb cop} film rather than a dumb {cop film}. Unclear if Sly was in on that.
49: That too to an extent. It all flows together. (Put another way, vaccination is being bound (to protect others makes no difference), medical treatments are being protected.
55: I thought that was the one with Estelle Getty.
no, you're thinking of the British singer that collaborated with Kanye twenty years ago.
I've seen this argument a lot of times about bike helmets but not about any of the other stuff. I don't really know what to think of it related to bike helmets either.
Nobody says it about MOTORCYCLE helmets that I know of though.
It's probably because telling everyone to go fuck themselves works better for the motorcyclists.
I think the bicycle helmet argument was that car drivers who see bicyclists in helmets are more aggressive than drivers who see bare-headed bicyclists. Not that the bicyclists themselves were less careful. But I don't really remember.
I broke my neck when a truck turned left in front of me while I was biking to work. Having a helmet on my head saved my life. Have had a few other head-asphalt interactions that leave me firmly pro-helmet for my personal riding.
That does seem like a good reason. I started wearing a seat belt even when my mom wasn't in the car after cracking the windshield with my head once.
There is one safety measure where the perversity argument does seem to be correct: sharrows.
54: And stop calling me Shirley.
59: All the motorcyclists who used to make this arguments about helmets are dead now.
I know I have seen some proper research supporting messily's 61: people filmed how close motorists drove to cyclists with and without helmets. But that makes cycling with s helmet more uncomfortable or even frightening. It doesn't it more dangerous since most car/bicyclist collisions are the result of the driver not noticing the cyclist at all.
Less than half of all collisions are the result of a car being deliberately driven into a cyclist.
that would be a statistician's way of looking at it, yes.