The pond was outraged when it stumbled on this advice in The Atlantic (think carefully before wasting a click heading back to 2014 here) ...
No mention of how to deal with the reptiles? Bemused resignation is the best there is? But then surely 'Sisyphus' is simple enough and well understood enough to explain the pond's daily duties, without resorting to visual gibberish of the nerdy netspeak kind?
Like today, when the pond reeled back like a startled gazelle ...
That classic Barners narcissist thinks Gladys is all about him, and then comes to the completely wrong conclusion, as only a Barners narcissist could?
And Bjorn approves of Biden's plan, which automatically means that it's a waste of time and money, and we're all doomed?
There's your Sisyphean task for the day, right there ... for anyone silly enough to undertake it.
Even the pond isn't that dumb or foolhardy brave. Is it any wonder that the pond fled to the safety of the savvy Savva? Sure it'll be dull and tedious, but some days the pond must take a break ...
You see? The reptiles must have felt the same way because they awarded the savvy Savva the distinction of a cult master illustration. What did it mean? The pond didn't have a clue, but bemusement, befuddlement and mystification are entirely the point each reptile day ...
Sure, it's just a rehash of past events; sure, it's not standard reptile fare, what with the slashing at the Donald, and the benign acceptance that the cardigan wearers are a bunch of greenies.
But it's better than another bout with Barners ... and the pond is still feeling faint at the thought of Bjorn on board with Biden ...
The pond always enjoys the way that the savvy Savva verges on reptile heresy, but always offers hope to both sides ... though in the end her hostility to SloMo will emerge, as it does in the last line of the last gobbet ...
SloMo's in charge? Whoever would have guessed?
But at least the pond had taken a break from the likes of the bromancer and Killer Creighton and the dog botherer and the Major, and the Oreo - yesterday outraged at the Chinese, but possibly also upset her brand of reformed recovering feminism hadn't resulted in a chair at Melbourne University - and all the other reptiles that make the pond envy Sisyphus for the life of indolence he led ... by golly if he'd had to deal with the task of pushing reptile shit up hill each day, he'd have wondered how the pond managed it ...
So the pond could pause for the Rowe of the day in good spirits, knowing there was always more redemptive Rowe here ...
But where are the loons, some readers might ask? Just because the pond is jaded and weary, there must be loons. Send in the loons, it'd be wrong for the pond to lose its timing at this point in its career ...
And so just for the fun of it ...
Um, the pond loves scribblers, who pose as experts, deploring experts; academics, who surely must be expert, berating other experts ...
It gets even richer when this alleged academic expert opens with the Great Barrington Declaration in a way that, by way of comparison, even a reading of its wiki might offer up a tad more insight ...
The World Health Organization and numerous academic and public-health bodies have stated that the proposed strategy is dangerous, unethical, and lacks a sound scientific basis. They say that it would be impossible to shield all those who are medically vulnerable, leading to a large number of avoidable deaths among both older people and younger people with underlying health conditions, and they warn that the long-term effects of COVID-19 are still not fully understood. Moreover, they say that the herd immunity component of the proposed strategy is undermined by the limited duration of post-infection immunity.
The more likely outcome, they say, would be recurrent epidemics, as was the case with numerous infectious diseases before the advent of vaccination. The American Public Health Association and 13 other public-health groups in the United States warned in a joint open letter that the Great Barrington Declaration "is not a strategy, it is a political statement. It ignores sound public health expertise. It preys on a frustrated populace. Instead of selling false hope that will predictably backfire, we must focus on how to manage this pandemic in a safe, responsible, and equitable way."
The Great Barrington Declaration was authored by Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff ofHarvard University. The costs were paid for by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank that is part of a Koch-funded network of organizations associated with climate change denial. (with all the usual tedious wiki footnotes and justifications for the wiki police here).
Sheesh, not the Koch boys, and there's Bjorn approving of Biden, and the wonder why the pond put out a call for its meds today ...
But back to our expert academic Babones dissing experts and science and scientists, thanks to his expert scientific background ...
The pond loves it when academic experts talk dirty ... you know, like pretending they's common folks from up Tamworth way by talk of "splainin" ... followed by an immensely stupid line of argument that imagines science has something to do with the size of endowments or the state of academic tenure ...
Why, turns out, reptile articles are just like a box of Tamworth chocolates ... stale, over-heated in the dry slopes and plains climate, and you never know what you're gunna get ...
The pond began to wonder, just who was this loon, and had to resort to Google cache to discover this ...
The pond was none the wiser, and couldn't work out why he could only be found in cache, here.
Things got a little clearer at the official website - all big headlines and attention-seeking .... the sort of rank amateur layout you might expect from an academic expert berating other academic experts ...
But it was the wiki here that really gave the game away ...
Babones has offered a reformulation of world-systems analysis that distinguishes five core elements of the perspective from ancillary theories that have been promulgated within that perspective. He added to these five core elements the "strong theorem" that the core-periphery hierarchy of the modern world-economy could best be understood in terms of state strength and cultural integration. He began to use the historical Chinese concept of tianxia ("all under heaven") to describe the structure of the millennial world-system as an American tianxia that has endogenized the entire world-economy under a single, American-dominated political system. He also writes on quantitative methodology for the social sciences.
He's an expert bullshit artist, an academic adept at blather ... though it helped splain to the pond why he felt so confident, so assured in his ability to scribble on science and all that jazz ... he's a latter-day Caterist of the sociological kind...
But to be fair, and the pond is always fair, at least he kept it short ... and he did deliver an expert "billy goat buttism", with "none of this should be taken to minimise the importance of science."
The pond immediately understood that everything that had gone before, and was to follow, was meaningless gibberish done for the sake of a sociological argument ...
Oh that's grand, that it is, a series of simplistic trolling rhetorical questions of the moronic reptile kind ... coral or coal?
Everybody can play that game. Life or death, Tamworth chocolates or sociological gibberish, reptile crocodile stew or reptile cheese fondue ...
And so on, but at least the pond had done its duty, the pond had served up a desperate, attention-seeking academic loon, and thrown in a great deal of satisfying verbiage to boot ... and hopefully someone in the comments section would enjoy at least this portion of the meal ...
Meanwhile, it was left to the infallible Pope to make an observation on a topic you will rarely find discussed at the lizard Oz, and as usual, the infallible Pope manages to say in one image what a Babones couldn't manage to ask, not even with a zillion trolling rhetorical questions of the simplistic kind ...
If you should ever want to include the 'shruggle' in text, you can pick it up here:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.copyshrug.com/
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And if you want an enormous range of pastable symbols, go here:
https://coolsymbol.com/
"There's your Sisyphean task for the day, right there ..."
ReplyDeleteAwww, c'mon DP, it's just typical reptile tomfoolery: first, spend a lot of time getting a large 'green research' budget though the parliament - and we all know how long that can take in the US. Second, spend a lot of time gathering up scientists and planning a bunch of long and expensive research projects. Third, spend a lot of time doing, and repeating for verification, a whole bunch of research projects. Fourth, pick a bunch of 'works' to actually do and spend a lot of time getting a huge budget through parliament. Fifth, maybe start actually doing a few things, all of which will take many years.
All of us here today will be long gone before that delivers anything. A classic Lomborg "indirection".
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Babones: "Science has given us.. the perpetual motion globe that uses solar energy and the power of the Earth’s magnetic field to spin forever". WTF! Forget about your Arts types knowing about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, this guy hasn't got to Newton's Laws of Motion! Every concept in this sentence is wrong (alright, "globe" is not wrong)!
ReplyDeleteMore like a pear than a true globe, Joe.
DeleteWell spotted Joe, and thank the long absent lord someone with a better attention span than the pond took a good look at the babbling Babones ...
DeleteSome time ago I read a comment by a blog 'front page' lady to the effect that in the first election in which she was eligible to vote, she just couldn't bring herself to vote for "that man" (Carter) so she voted for John Anderson (a Republican 'independent') and got Reagan. "A mistake I've never repeated", she averred.
ReplyDeleteNow Savvy Savva would like to inform us that: "Trump has built his campaign around chaos, dysfunction and disunity. ... it is staggering that about 43 per cent of voters are still saying they will vote for Trump." Well, actually only about ten or twenty thousand have actually said so but pollsters believe that "the science" [tm Barbones] will correctly extend these tiny samples to encompass the entire population. And how many of "the population" just repeat the front page lady's mistake ?
But mainly, is Savvy Sav truly unaware that the large majority of that 43 per cent know nothing at all about Trump because they only ever watch Fox News ? That when she criticises Trump's "gross mishandling of the pandemic" the great majority of that 43 per cent think Trump has handled the pandemic just fine. And that he has kept all of his election promises and done even more. And that he's the very bestest president America's ever had ?
Because if she doesn't understand at least that, she's just blind, deaf, dumb and stupid. Then she goes on to say: "Here at least, and across the ditch, even in these abnormal times, thankfully a few normal rules still apply. Leaders ...might play tough, but they have not sought to profit by tearing their country apart or by turning one group of citizens against another."
Yep, just like I said: blind, deaf, dumb and stupid.
Dorothy - back in November 2018, Dame Slap told her readers about Babones’ book - given another little promo. here today - ‘‘The New Authoritarianism - Trump, Populism and the Tyranny of Experts’.
ReplyDeleteShe assured those readers that ‘Babones debunks the growing hysteria that Trump is an authoritarian threat to democracy. . . .’ - so that book should be even more useful now, as we watch Trump working his ‘rallies’ like a stand-up comedian doing an impression of a failing stand-up comedian; walk on the stage, try a line - oh, that line didn’t work, try the opposite - ‘no, really, I love Fauci’ - hmmm, bit of response there.
Joe, above, has nailed Babones on his (Babones’) utter misunderstanding of how that globe thingy operates. It might be that Sal (if I may be so familiar) has inside information on the fifth force, but, when he also says ‘in reality science can only definitively answer two kinds of questions: mathematical ones and experimental ones.’ then I doubt he would recognise the elusive fifth force if it bit him somewhere in his ‘core-periphery’.
He is welcome to his ‘reality’. He would not have to share it with many scientists, but it may be that Dame Slap joins him there, from time to time, so they can howl at ‘experts’.
D'you think, Chad, that Barebonies has even a simplistic knowledge of the rotational and orbital interaction between Terra and Luna ? D'you think he'd even begin to grasp that the life-giving effect of Luna on slowing Terra's rotation and increasing its orbital radius was that the result evened out the effect of the sun by lengthening the day and balancing out the daytime and nighttime so that, mostly, the planet was neither too hot nor too cold and there was enough daylight to allow for a very great variance in plant types and plant lifetimes and in the slow growth and ripening of fruit etc etc.
DeleteNo, I thought not.
But Barebonies reckons that, since most Unis don't have the endowments of Harvard, Oxford and Stanhope, they can't hire "the best professors" and since Uni of Sydney has hired Barebonies, I guess that puts them in their place. But at least Uni Sydney has only appointed him as an "assistant professor" so maybe it doesn't think all that much of him.
Otherwise the 'Great Barrington' group is just a particularly egregious example of a "magnified minority" (qv). And we've all known about them since the first major modern one, the "silent majority". Or, in our fair land, Morrision's "quiet Australians"
GB - As Dorothy has shown us, Babones’ two main areas of academic research are the political economy of the greater China region and the methodology of quantitative modelling in the social sciences.
DeleteThose are his stated research areas. Yet, he writes ‘in reality science can only definitively answer two kinds of questions: mathematical ones and experimental ones.’ So, presumably, he believes that it is possible to design experiments in the social sciences that would test the great questions of society in ways that could deliver definitive answers, or that there is some mathematical key to most questions.
I have worked with one mathematician who was regarded as in the top echelon by other mathematicians. (I have worked with many who regarded themselves as in the top echelon, when their entire talent did not extend beyond being able to do fancy manipulations of equations that the great ones had derived). The thing I learned from the genuine top echelon person was that scientific inquiry was about seeking out a problem - a question, if you will - whittling it down to its essentials, then demonstrating what it was all about. Mathematics, at his level, was a language, pure and simple, to describe a concept that he had in his mind. Questions were not inherently ‘mathematical’ - it might take years to get the mental concept to a stage where it could be represented in mathematics.
I suspect that Babones is of the lesser breed. Probably he was ahead of his high school class in dexterity with calculus, or similar tricks, and was lead to believe that he had some real gift. What his writings do not show is that he has found any new insights into the social sciences, and I am not aware of any statistical procedure which carries his name, whereas there are many, for example, which carry Sir Ronald Fisher’s name.
From such a mediocre level, it is no more than arrogance to snipe at ‘experts’ in the way he does.
Really nothing I can add to that, Chad, I think you've essentially covered it all. Just another example of someone who is ignorant of how ignorant he is. And we had to import him from America for reasons that utterly escape us all.
DeleteAll the pond knows Chadders, is that hits for the pond were up this day, because everyone loves a certified loon, and if approved by Dame Slap, how much more certified can any loon be?
Delete“Oh that's grand, that it is, a series of simplistic trolling rhetorical questions of the moronic reptile kind ... coral or coal?
ReplyDeleteEverybody can play that game. Life or death, Tamworth chocolates or sociological gibberish, reptile crocodile stew or reptile cheese fondue ...”
lol....the herpetarium always delivers an appropriate loon, or as Joe and others have noted, the esteemed ‘intellectual imbecile’.
GB.....we may have, for reasons unknown, imported him from America, but they got Amanda the Devine.
All is fair in the exchange of loons!
CA.
Yes, and they got Joe Hockey too, so fair point I guess.
DeleteBut since it was him who made the point about "If they [Harvard, Oxford, Stanford] can't afford the best professors, who can ?" and yet the best he can manage is an Associate Professorship at Uni Sydney, then what can be concluded from this ? But he's still young - 51 - so maybe he'll get better with age and one day, who can tell, end up with a full professorshop somewhere. Just not in Australia, I hope.
But the Yanks are more than welcome to keep Miranda and Joe.