*shrugs*

I *would* argue that Apollo 8 and 13 did not go to the moon, though Apollo 8 is notable for being the first human spacecraft to enter lunar orbit, which means it still a huge milestone. Apollo 13, of course, failed spectacularly in its attempt to reach the moon, and is notable for being one of the most amazing saves in the history of the space program. And clearly they are both lunar missions, in that they are moon-related, whereas when I think of a moon mission, I think of a mission specifically to the moon's surface. Very esoteric linguistic distinction, and I may just be splitting hairs.

Is it really? I think it's more personal than political, though in general it gets really fuzzy when political views take aim at individual identity.

His ammunition had obscure internet meme references that are used more by the alt-right than the left, though it's really hard to tell because Internet extremists apply many layers of irony, making it really hard to tell.

No, his political motivations are not very clear.

Except that Crooks was also tracking events of the Democratic candidates. He wanted to shoot a prominent figure, it didn't matter which side. Ryan Routh was definitely political, but he wasn't any sort of left-winger. He voted for Trump, then supported Bernie, then Tulsi Gabbard, then Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.

I think it's highly likely that Robinson was similarly all over the place, but likely less clear since he was young probably didn't think much about politics.

No, I think he was probably already further to the right, but moved at least some of his views to the left. You do know who Nick Fuentes and the groypers are, right?

This almost earned you a "Foe" tag. I haven't impugned your intelligence or other personal characteristics. Keep it civil, please.

Indeed, left-wing violence is on the rise, but that's coming from a point where right-wing violence utterly dominated the space for decades. Don't go assuming that your side is somehow less violent just because they've been relatively quiet this year. And although I'm actually not on the left, if I were I wouldn't assume that my side is inherently less violent, either, because the opposite was true in the 60s.

The only correct reaction here is to condemn political violence, full stop, and not to care what the motivations of the individuals were (though, obviously, I have a sick fascination with understanding their motivations and spend way too much time digging into whatever we have).

Note that condemning political violence, full stop, is not what Trump and the GOP leadership are doing. They're condemning only violence from the left and ignoring violence from the right. This is very bad for all of us left, right and center.

What makes you think it wasn't?

Like the flat Earth conspiracy theories, the COVID conspiracy theories are really amusing, and for the same reason: The theorists can offer no plausible explanation as to why the alleged conspirators are doing the dastardly thing. During COVID, the best rationale on offer was "To control us!". Okay, but if someone wants to control you, don't they generally use that control to make you do something that benefits them? If I built a mind control machine, would I use it to make people give me money and sex, or would I use it to get them to turn in a circle three times before going to bed?

The best the flat Earthers can come up with is "It's a plot by NASA to get money from the government", which they then "prove" by ginning up some math that shows that the cost of deceiving the world just happens to be about the same amount as NASA's budget. Except that actually disproves their point. If I'm going to create a hoax to extract government funding, I definitely don't want to spend every penny of the funding on running the hoax. That's just working for a living, and if I'm a scammer it's exactly what I don't want to do.

It has not, though keep in mind that you don't actually kiss their cheeks, you kiss the air next to their cheeks. What touches their cheek is your cheek, if anything (often there is no actual contact).

Huh? Right-handers writing left to right and top to bottom have no problem with this. When you go to the next line, you don't touch the line above. It's above, and the pen extends beyond your fingers, so your fingers stay well away from the just-written line. If you're a left-hander, going to the next line isn't the issue, the problem is smudging the just-written characters on the same line... except that left-handers often avoid that problem by cocking their wrist sharply to move the edge of their palm up out of the way so it doesn't touch the just-written letters. That then means they might smudge lines above. They make it work, mostly, but it's tricky.

About 5.56 billion people have Internet access, but subtract 1.12 billion for China and 130.4 million for Russia, because I'm pretty sure neither has access to U.S. social media, an that leaves 4.3 billion. So it's *maybe* possible that 69.8% of the Internet-using world uses Instagram...

But yeah, a lot of them almost certainly are bots.

Artemis (block 1), not Starship. So more like 50 launch attempts, 1 launch, no explosions. :-D

In all seriousness, three launch attempts, but it felt like 50.

Because an average person reading the headline would think that they are going to the moon, not that they are going around the moon. "NASA plans moon-orbit mission for february" would be clearer and not that much longer.

Yeah, no question. Better to tell them something that they won't understand than to tell them something that they will misunderstand.

Exactly my point.

MAGA assumed from the outset that he must be far-left, both because it confirmed their own biases and because they didn't want to believe otherwise. They did the same thing with the kid who shot Trump, though he turned out not to really have any political intentions.

It's actually pretty plausible. The alt-right has been pissed at Charlie Kirk for years, especially Nick Fuentes' groypers, who have considered Kirk a race traitor. And there is some evidence that Robinson had sympathy for groypers, though at some point he decided he was gay and probably started to get pissed about Kirk's anti-LGBTQ screeds. Perhaps he shifted left generally, perhaps he remained generally right-leaning except on those issues, we don't know. The only information we have is a vague claim by his family that he had become more political and that he disagreed with them.

We really don't know that for sure. On balance I think he probably had shifted pretty left, but the evidence is ambiguous at best. Maybe we'll learn more, but it's possible we'll never know unless Robinson decides to tell us.

If I had to put money on it, I'd bet that Robinson's politics were pretty muddled and his main reason for hating Kirk was the LGBTQ stuff.

The only Iranian I've ever met (that I'm aware of) said that when he met people, he usually called himself Persian to avoid the stigma that comes from saying you're from Iran, presumably out of fear that Americans would assume that he was a fundamentalist just waiting for a chance to shout "Death to America" and blow himself up or whatever. He didn't put it exactly that way, but that was the gist.

Who made claims that oxycontin isn't addictive? The government? No. The manufacturer. The government merely allowed them to do it until their claims were shown to be false.

Spreading claims that would encourage a pandemic to get massively worse by discouraging vaccination falls squarely under "detrimental to public health". At no point were *legitimate* studies that showed safety concerns in any way squashed to favor any company's interest. That's why we know that vector-based vaccines were responsible for a statistically significant number of strokes and heart attacks in otherwise healthy people.

The studies that were squashed were a bunch of very weak, mathematically garbage studies that contained errors so obvious that even I, a non-medical person, could shoot dozens of holes in their methodology. A small number of individuals were behind publishing fraudulent study after fraudulent study, and they kept doing this despite broad consensus that their methodology and their conclusions were pure, unadulterated bulls**t. They did this by publishing in journals significantly outside the areas that were appropriate for the papers, relying on the journals' lack of people with adequate understanding of the subject to shoot it full of holes and recommend not publishing it.

And these folks had a tendency to go on YouTube and spread their bulls**t, using their publication in a "journal" (of physics, social sciences, psychiatry, chiropractic medicine, etc.) to support their absolutely fraudulent claims. YouTube quite literally became a dumping ground for trash science that made the National Enquirer look like respectable journalism by comparison.

It got to the point where my canned response was, "If you are showing me something in a YouTube video instead of a peer-reviewed journal, I automatically assume that what you are saying is pure, unadulterated bulls**t, because out of the roughly one hundred times I have not made that assumption, I have found it to be true every single time. If you want me to read it, write it down, so that at least I can skim it in three minutes and point out why you are wrong without wasting an hour of my time watching your stupid video."

IMO, YouTube was right to crack down on that. When people without medical degrees are basically giving medical advice that contradicts broad medical consensus, this is almost guaranteed to be harming society. And nothing good can come of that. Children dying of measles, smallpox, polio, and other vaccine-preventable conditions is not something we should aspire to. Regardless of whether they have freedom of speech, that doesn't mean companies should be required to be their megaphone. And regardless of whether the government was the group who pointed out how potentially harmful the things they were saying are, the stuff they were saying was still harmful.

If the best available evidence indicates X, but you believe Y based on gut feel, then later solid evidence of Y is developed, were you right? Further, should this experience convince you to trust your gut over the best available evidence in the future?

The closest thing I can think of would be the "There are no studies showing that masks are effective when worn by the general public" statements early on when they needed all the N95 masks for medical personnel. But even that wasn't really disinformation; it was just stating the absence of supporting evidence, and later, when supporting evidence appeared, there was no longer a lack of supporting evidence.

There's a difference between being wrong and spreading disinformation. The former requires either knowing that you're wrong or having a mountain of evidence saying that you're wrong, but still saying it anyway. There are definitely some grey areas, particularly in areas related to myocarditis/pericarditis, but there were also a lot of folks spewing stuff way, way on the other side of that grey area. :-)

There's definitely a big difference in my mind between the government pushing industry to not spread claims that it considers to be detrimental to public health and the government pushing industry to not spread claims that it sees as being mean to our current leaders. The former seems way more acceptable to me, in much the same way that regulating commercial speech and licensing doctors are both way less objectionable than regulating political speech.