Yet another wonderful gift given to the world by cigarette smokers, as if the butts/trash everywhere and toxic second-hand smoke wasn't enough.
For those unaware, smokers would get drunk and pass out with lit cigarettes that would set their couch on fire and burn their house down. This lead to a push to cover everything in "flame retardants" which are more accurately called "human retardants", as they do little to actually prevent combustion from an effective source and are tied to everything from cancer to developmental issues.
Reminds me a lot of working in tech to be honest. Things break, postmortems are held. Even if the breakage is as simple as "this was an honest mistake", everything is held to "how can this never happen again," so process and red tape is added. Rinse and repeat ad nauseam until your delivery speed is butchered, the bugs _still_ happen, but hey, a project manager or someone somewhere now gets to pat themselves on the back for running a meeting and adding more process that they can now tout on their future interviews.
The entire point is that "an honest mistake" shouldn't be able to cause a large incident at a mature company. Requiring tests, code reviews, a test env, locked-down prod etc may slow down delivery, but it also prevents Andrew the sales dev accidentally corrupting the production database when he's doing a "quick fix for a customer".
risk of outage + its costs vs. risk of mitigation + its costs.
or as fight club said
> Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
i don't necessarily mean prod DB going down as an "honest mistake," though. I think that is pretty deserving of a postmortem. What i meant is like, a bug making it through that stops something critical from working because the dev didn't write a test for it. We already know the resolution, we know who fucked up, we understand why it happened. There's no need for a postmortem to painstakingly add another layer or process for devs that screw up. Like, a lot of companies will then say "okay how can we prevent developers from forgetting to write tests" and start thinking about auto-generators for code, or adding some CI check, or a level of bureaucracy when all that was needed was the dev to own up to the mistake, or maybe their manager to tell them "c'mon, this can't happen again" and we can all move on with our day. And, if it keeps happening across differing folks, only THEN would I start thinking about process additions.
This is fixed by putting a dollar number on outages, and a seperate dollar number on process. Ie. "if each release has an extra day of tests and checks, then it will delay our hockey stick growth curve by 10%. Thats worth $X".
Turns out, it's usually better to be fast and break things, over trying to be reliable.
> Turns out, it's usually better to be fast and break things
In terms of # of correct guesses, sure. In terms of damage from guessing incorrectly over time, usually not.
The trick is to separate processes - A CSS update probably isn't very risky, and an auth or login update probably is. Don't bundle them into "website updates".
Run ahead with the layout changes and spend some time on failure-planning for the auth change.
Precisely this. The "move fast and break things" mantra came from a context where there were no users for the product yet and the people most inconvenienced by breakage are your own. It's a mantra saying "Don't worry about screwing up the UI team with a DB migration if it takes only five minutes to reverse the migration or ten minutes to tweak the UI; you can hash it out together and get back to work on the real problem." It's a reminder that exposing yourself to a little more pain now gets you to viable product faster, and the faster a startup gets to viable product, the likelier it is to take off before it hits the end of its runway.
It is not to be applied to destructive changes to systems users care about, and none of the companies named in the 2017 book by that title use that engineering tactic on their flagship products because real people care now.
> The 2009 Greenstreet Berman study, carried out by the UK government, showed that in the period between 2002 and 2007 the UK Furniture and Furnishings Fire Safety Regulations accounted for 54 fewer deaths per year, 780 fewer non-fatal casualties per year and 1065 fewer fires each year following the introduction of the UK furniture safety regulations in 1988.
That's an apples / oranges comparison unless we agree on an actuarial calculus for the value of saving an entire life vs. the cost of shortening a million lives by a day.
Funny thing about fires, though: they often forget to stop burning when they get to the kids' bedroom upstairs, or the wall of the nice old granny next door...
As a society, we generally try to strive for a higher standard than "The less cautious among us get what's coming to them."
We don't, for example, have the attitude "seatebelts are whatever, let speeding people get pulped." And there's a good history as to why we don't do that.
Even people with bad judgment deserve a shot at avoiding horrible death in a civilized society.
I'm currently working on minimizing the risks to life and limb associated with drunk driving, partially because I've known too many people dear to me who have suffered because of it to be comfortable with the notion "you deserve everything coming to you." So I think we may find ourselves at an "agree to disagree" place. ;)
You seem to be assuming that my friends were the ones who were doing the drunk driving, not the ones in the other lane of traffic when the drunk driver swerved.
In truth, they were both. I've known people who drove drunk and hurt others and I've known people who drove drunk and have been hurt and I know people who didn't drive drunk and were hurt by a drunk driver.
It's a systemic problem and requires a systemic solution. Personal responsibility is the can we kick when we're unwilling to face the need to change incentives and structures.
It's likely worse than that, because I suspect this study is biased towards flame retardants being effective.
It is true in a very narrow range of conditions a flame retardant can prevent combustion, but it's like an airbag that will only deploy for impacts between 15 and 17 MPH. In real world circumstances with real world combustion sources they don't make a difference.
It's do-gooders and "safety first" types who are to blame, unless there was some body of smokers I'm unaware of who said "do this to protect us from the consequences of our own actions."
Comparative oncology is a thing - epidemiologists do compare incidences of cancer in humans vs their pets to tease out the effect of the environment on cancer because the diet of cats and dogs is very controlled, most all of them get dog or cat food.
RFK Jr. is rightly maligned for his vaccine views, but he's one of the few politicians making the slow poisoning of Americans one of his central issues.
he's always misrepresented by this imo, and the constant hit pieces are blatant because the camp that he runs against does this as a primary strategy.
he called for long-term safety studies for vaccine use, which is just tracking long-term effects, both positive and negative, to populations after getting vaccinated. he rightly points out a lack of this in the US, and rightly points out the concept of tradeoffs. Yes, vaccines can cause other negative long-term effects that aren't as bad as what you're being vaccinated against, in this case they're pulling a net-good. The case is also up for grabs that when this is a net-good or a net-bad, the information is simply not being shared the way it should, and is instead obfuscated by bureaucracy.
even the latest "anti-semetic" jabs at him are from him entertaining a hypothetical in conversation where he said nothing about jewish people being a cause of anything, its just so tiresome. afaik he spoke correctly on the ace-receptor binding affinities, but the binding affinities don't cause the disease to take root more or less. do i care if he gets this detail wrong? not really, it doesn't make him a super space nazi either. to steel man what he said is to admit there's potential for ethnic targeting of bio-weapons, and since its pretty much widely understood that covid did in fact come from joint US/China idiocy, and that China's financial records show that they're preparing for war in every way possible, I wouldn't put it past a regime who's actions seem to be rhyming with a lot of other regimes from history to try to come up with a bioweapon that could potentially have that effect. The west has, after all, basically been pushing venture capital all over the insane nonsense Xi could end up using against them for the last 20+ years.
This musing about vaccine safety is quite obviously not some rigorous rationality, it is a simple dog-whistle to attract the rabid anti-vaxxers while not immediately alienating those who rightly view this as an unacceptable position. Vaccine safety is being tracked, and there is no indication whatsoever of any harm from vaccines except for mild symptoms immediately after injection and extremely rare more serious events. The research is done, there is nothing more to discuss.
The latest anti-semitic accusation is also more serious than you make it out to be. He explicitly claims that Covid-19 affected Jewish people ("Ashkenazi Jews") and Chinese people less than others, and talks about that as "targeting". His exact words are that "there is an argument that Covid-19 was ethnically targeted", repeating that it is "targeted to affect Caucasian and Black individuals". He softens it a bit by saying that we don't know if it was deliberately targeted, but he then goes on to talk about how both the USA and the Chinese are working on ethnically-targeted bio weapons, so the implication is more than clear.
I will say that it's not necessarily clear that he is being anti-semitic here, but he is clearly being sinophobic and very very clearly implying that Covid-19 was an ethnically-targeted Chinese bio-weapon, a preposterous claim.
What is a more favorable interpretation of what he said?
If he doesn't want to imply Covid-19 was a bio-weapon, why does he bring it up out of nowhere in the middle of some musings on bio-weapons? Why does he keep using the words "ethnically targeted" if he doesn't want to imply it was, well, ethnically targeted?
The poster attempts to present evidence that credence should be high that China is able to, and would, make bioweapons that are ethnically targeted. At no point does he suggest they have already done so.
That this is insufficient evidence for China's capabilities is likely the more reasonable discussion to have. I don't think they're there yet, and the lab leak from Wuhan shows they're still a bit sloppy in how they handle these things.
1. RFK Jr claims he has been doing research on bio weapons and he claims that the advancements in this area are mind-blowing
2. He then starts talking about how Covid-19 allegedly targeted certain groups less (Jewish and Chinese people), and certain others more (Caucasian and Black people).
3. He then says we don't know if it was intentionally targeted
4. He then goes back to talking about how both the USA and China supposedly have research programs into ethnically-targeted bio-weapons.
The best possible interpretation of this is that he uses the Covid-19 example to only to show that a virus can affect certain populations more than others. However, he uses the word "targeted" for this, and explicitly mentions that it's possible that it was intentionally targeted [by someone]. So, the more plausible read is that he is implying Covid-19 may well be an example of such a bioweapon created by the Chinese to attack Caucasian and Black people.
I will note that I am highly skeptical of his base claim that Covid-19 had some genetic preference for Caucasian and Black people. Any such claim is highly suspect, since it typically conflates ethnicity with genetics without actually doing any actual genetic testing to check. While it is of course true that there are certain genetic differences between ethnic groups, there are also huge social and behavioral and wealth differences between all such groups, which can also explain differences in disease outcomes.
Also, especially when looking at these groups inside of multi-ethnic countries like the USA, the exact genetics of any specific individual may or may not match the general group genetics, since they have different heritability, and inter-group marriages are common. Just because someone has inherited darker skin tones (and would thus be part of the ethnic group "Black people") doesn't mean they also inherited a predisposition to sickle-cell anemia, for example.
Thank you for laying that out. I took your comment to mean that it was the second-level poster, and not RFK Jr., making those claims, but this clarifies things.
As for any ethnic preference of SARS-CoV-2, I've not seen any evidence for that either. We do know that it affects men worse than women, which is explained by XY instead of XX chromosomes (women are better at fighting it off as their immune systems begin the work sooner). The comorbidities in the US just happen to be because we have higher tendencies toward type II diabetes (poor diet, lack of exercise). That's not anything special about the virus, though.
Here is the paper where he got the claim about the ethnic preference of SARS-CoV-2. It was produced by the Cleveland Clinic and mentions differences in the cleavage sites depending on race.
Pfizer vaccinated their control group from the initial vaccines, so that long-term study was squashed by Pfizer. And the adverse effects data are still being collected and examined in light of reporting criteria and classification. Yet, the blanket policy to vax everyone without prioritizing by harm-benefit analysis and ignoring the science was not just negligent but intentional to push a social policy over the data. Memory-holing natural immunity was another. If you were engineering a virus to not affect one group, say Chinese, it doesn't mean another group may be unintendedly less affected too, say Ashkenazi Jews. Calling that racist would make genetic testing among Hassidic Jews for genetic predisposition to specific diseases before marrying and producing offspring, what? Science. Given the homogeneity of a large portion of the genetic makeup of China, the Han people, it would be easier to target other races than say it would for Americans to exclude the majority of its diverse population from an engineered virus. And if you truly believe bio-weapon research is not being done by most powerful nations you are naive.
Pfizer wanted a license to sell their COVID vaccine in India.
The Indian government asked them for local clinical trials first.
This should have been an easy win, prove the vaccine is safe and effective in a controlled trial and you can sell it into a market of 1.38 billion people.
Pfizer declined. Why do you think that is?
Let me give you a hint, here is the CEO of Pfizer admitting that he never took his own COVID vaccine. Isn’t that odd? [0]
Funny that your Twitter link happens to leave out when the Pfizer CEO made that comment. Initially all doses were supposed to the elderly and front-line workers. He mentions that the vaccine wasn't recommended for his group as he isn't a front-line worker. Do you have any evidence he still hasn't taken it?
> Do you have any evidence he still hasn't taken it?
No I don’t have any evidence he still hasn’t taken it. Do you have any evidence he has?
I agree with your recall of the initial recommendation, but I also know how much pressure was put on me and many others outside that group to take the vaccine. I would have been prevented from flying to my home country or working for many companies had I not taken two doses of an experimental vaccine approved under emergency use authorization.
I learned only recently that the CEO of the leading vaccine developer chose not to take it himself at the time. As a result, I feel I was mislead.
When I read about the significant increase in all cause mortality among the vaccinated and learn that no trials were conducted related to fertility or pregnancy related side effects and consider that my wife and I were trying for a baby at that time, if I am being honest - I do feel like I was deceived.
When was the video taken? If it was during the initial time, why do you use it as evidence that the Pfizer CEO hasn't taken the vaccine? Why didn't you mention that, instead making it seem like the CEO hasn't taken the vaccine for other reasons than he literally stated in the video?
And let's consider you were right, the Pfizer CEO doesn't trust the vaccine and still hasn't taken it. Why the hell would he ever admit he didn't take it? Why wouldn't he say "yeah, I took the first dose"?
I don’t know when the video was taken. It could have been early in the pandemic. I saw that video and found it odd that the CEO didn’t take his own vaccine in the middle of a pandemic - that’s all.
What does concern me, is the reason why Pfizer would be willing to give up on a market of 1.38 billion people. That single local trial could have doubled their potential global market.
I don’t understand the logic of foregoing so much profit. Why do you think they would do that? Any explanations?
How was it misleading? By his own admission he didn’t take the vaccine.
Do you agree it is fishy that a for profit Pharma company would choose to forego a market of 1.38 billion customers simply because they would have been required to do local clinical trials? I find that troubling. Why don’t you?
> How was it misleading? By his own admission he didn’t take the vaccine.
You posted the video as proof the Pfizer CEO hasn't taken the video, without mentioning when it was taken, and without mentioning that he followed public health recommendations. You made it seem like the CEO decided not to take it because he doesn't trust it, but he didn't take it as to not be selfish. Do you now admit that you posted this in a highly misleading way?
I will admit that when I initially posted the video I did not know when it was taken.
Do you admit it is highly suspicious for a for profit Pharma company to forego the profits on a single market that is larger than both the US and the EU combined?
Can you explain your hypothesis for why they would do that?
I disagree. There, proven wrong. Happy? I'm not going to engage with your argument until we've cleared up your initial point.
Now, back to my question: Then we are in agreement that the Pfizer CEO acted fully correctly and you shouldn't take this video as any evidence he hasn't taken the vaccine yet?
On what basis do you disagree? What is your explanation?
> Then we are in agreement that the Pfizer CEO acted fully correctly
No, the CEO did not act fully correctly. In fact he lied to the world when he implied that the vaccine prevented infection.
He knew at the time that it had not been tested for its ability to prevent infection but he implied we should take it to protect our loved ones. [0]
> and you shouldn't take this video as any evidence he hasn't taken the vaccine yet?
Yes, I already agreed several comments back that I hadn’t checked the date of the video when I first posted it. I also agreed that it isn’t evidence he hasn’t taken the vaccine since the video was taken.
You were being intellectually dishonest by repeatedly ignoring the core point of my argument about the Indian market, even after I openly acknowledged the error about the date on the original video.
I’m genuinely sorry this argument got so heated. I just get frustrated when people who accuse me of being dishonest behave in a dishonest way.
your response tells me everything though, you think one thing is "rightly viewed as an unacceptable position", neither nuance or complexity is allowed, my original paragraph spoke on tradeoffs, on nuance itself. if you don't address that then you yourself are dogwhistling, how are you better than the strawman you paint of RFK?
regarding the anti-semetic bit, not only did you completely avoid the main point of what was being said by both RFK and me, which is the potential for ethnic targeting, you've quoted his statement yourself with "there is an argument...", its not "i support the idea that...". its like people can't even speak hypotheticals without baseless accusations coming around every corner, what's the point of dialogue if we act like this? let's just settle presidential elections in a wrestling ring.
I think the issue is that the "I'm just asking questions!" technique is used to express opinions without taking responsibility for them.
When anxiety-producing questions keep getting "asked" by a politician when they already have rigorous, data-backed answers, they are being used as a political tool, disguised as skepticism or genuine scientific inquiry.
There are questions where looking for nuance detracts rather than add to the conversation. The earth is round, there is no need for nuance there. Similarly, vaccines work and have been proven to be better than not getting vaccinated in every single case in the last, say, 20 years. Adding nuance to that only serves to muddy the waters.
The same sort of thing happens with hypotheticals. Sure, they are important and not every hypothetical should be read as an affirmation. But then there are cases like OJ Simpsons "If I had done it" - where the hypothetical framing is such an obvious fig leaf that it's ridiculous to pretend. And saying "there's an argument that" in the middle of a discussion about bio weapons, bringing up highly disputable facts like the supposed ethnic differences in Covid-19 effects, and then not spending even another second to acknowledge that there is 0 evidence for this supposed hypothetical - that all brings it to a level where it's comical not to recognize what was actually being said.
> The earth is round, there is no need for nuance there.
Clearly there is _some_ need for nuance there since the Earth isn't exactly a sphere. Even calling it an oblate ellipsoid isn't a perfect model. There is nuance everywhere, and clearly some models are more wrong than others; modeling the Earth as flat is much less accurate than a sphere, which in turn is less accurate than the somewhat flattened spheres common today, which in turn is less accurate than whatever the true shape of the Earth is.
But the takeaway from that shouldn't be creating a dogma that "the Earth is round" and moving on, just to own the guys that claim its flat (who are by and large just trolling you).
even if a vaccine has passed all the required clinical trials for america's FDA to certify it, if and when you release it on a population you can still find things to be wrong with it, or effects its having that weren't understood. this is how all of medicine works, to try and dismiss the complexity of biology is a detraction from honesty itself. long term safety studies of vaccines, especially those given in early childhood, need to be used to determine that they don't cause harm, worse than the disease they're meant to prevent, 10-20 years down the line.
can you explain what i've detracted from this conversation? the nuance is appropriate. the complexity belongs as a natural part of the conversation.
your oversimplifications are more dangerous than the so called "detractions" that you haven't given a proper example of.
Why do you keep implying that such studies are not already being done? Most vaccines we use are by now decades old, and adverse effects of all medicines, especially serious adverse effects, are reported, there is a whole system for this.
Vaccines, by and large, have proven to be some of the safest medicine we take. Will the mRNA vaccines prove different? I hope not, but it is of course relatively early in their existence. But thing like the MMR vaccines and the polio vaccine have been administered on a huge scale for decades, and all the possible data has been collected - they are effective and safe.
RFK has suggested they're locked in bureaucratic problems, which I agree with, because of regulatory capture.
and you keep framing things as if i'm saying all vaccines are terrible, that's insane, i've not said that once. and you also want to argue this laser-focussed agenda on whether ALL vaccines are good or bad, but we're literally MAKING them bad by going after the livelihoods of people who don't want to get it. and there are vaccines, much like other drugs, that have been recalled before. you have every right to be skeptical. otherwise we're not living in a free society.
there's literally people being denied life-saving surgeries because they haven't gotten a covid vaccine. it should be your choice whether you get vaccinated or not. someone in canada needed a kidney transplant, and had multiple brothers as compatible donors willing to give one to him, but he was denied the right to a surgery all over a covid vaccine.
is this what vaccines are supposed to be? something you hang over other people's heads in order to passive aggressively kill them for their beliefs? getting covid and gaining immunity offers all the same herd immunity (better, even) than you would get from a vaccine. there's no moral high-ground for denying someone life-saving surgery anymore and we're still playing this stupid game.
literally 8 years ago i would be arguing every point you're trying to make, but after being in the pharmaceutical industry for longer than that, after watching clinical trials of drugs i've contributed to myself, i know the flaws of this system. i'm not a moron and i'm not a lunatic. there is a lot to be worried about and if RFK wants to raise these issues in the federal political arena, i'm willing to believe it will bring benefit to the flaws i've become familiar with.
This is an unbelievably generous take on RFK2's vaccine views. He has said, as recently as a few days ago on live TV, that vaccine research created HIV and other major diseases. He is not in favor of more long-term research, as you suggest. He is against all vaccine research.
The right's is pushing this guy hard as someone the left is conspiring against to silence.
I've heard him compared to Bernie...by those on the right.
They clearly do not understand what they are saying but it is clear they are using him to 'concern' the left that the left is up to it's tricks by suppressing this clearly "intelligent" man with a (D) after his name.
But the intelligence they see is because he believes the same anti-vax nonsense that aligns with their politicization of covid including that covid itself is a conspiracy.
If he is as inconsistent or deceptive on vaccines as he is on guns and gun rights, then it is very possible you and the person you replied to have seen wildly different opinions from RFK.
i've heard him say the exact words I wrote out in a calm environment of a podcast that doesn't invoke media-gaslighting-urgency, or clip out any of what you say in bad faith
television forces the worst out of people, especially with the constant interruptions made by professional interrupters aka newcasters who's job it is to make people look bad whenever necessary.
i simply don't believe what you have to say because i know the nature of the media business, they're against him so they'll do anything they can to throw him off kilter in a conversation, change the topic, or interrupt him to make it look like he's saying something different. he talks on really complicated topics that can't be compressed through interruptions, the media has only shown itself incapable of hosting such conversations.
can you link me to this video because i've tried googling it and i haven't found him talking about HIV, yet i've found youtube commentary of people saying he did while clipping a video where he didn't talk about it at all
and did he say vaccine research created aids? or was he saying it's been spread through needles? there's so many details missing in this story
That isn't really a literal comparison being made -- it's maximally exaggerated, to emphasize the main point: that the negative thing being conceded vastly outweighs the positive thing being lauded.
"OK, yeah, our buddy Louis does beat his wife, and totally deserved to get arrested last weekend, don't get me wrong -- but man does that guy make a delicious lasagna!"
The piece of shit known as RFK isn't just your normal crackpot science-denier uncle. I mean, he actually is very much like that in many ways, but because of the famous family name he banks on, and perhaps the credulous idiotism of our modern media landscape and/or celebrity-worship cultural defect, he is responsible for enormous suffering, including the deaths of many children. It's hard to put a precise number on, because the parents are truly responsible, and he only convinced them not to vaccinate -- but if bringing back measles to kill children was a sport, he'd be the Joe Rogan color commentator for it.
He's repudiated by his family, and those with at least a rudimentary high school understanding of science, for a reason.
So, yes, toxic chemicals in our environment or in consumer products is a problem, and one that the US political system isn't doing well addressing. But even if Jeffrey Dahmer agrees with you, and can pithily and eloquently summarize the risks -- you still need to find a different spokesperson.
It seems to me that there are two different things being conflated. I've listened to a number of his interviews and do confess he's not always easy to follow but this seems partly due to a history of speech problems which he has worked to overcome.
There is consensus (even by RFK Jr from what I hear in interviews) that vaccines confer good immunity to the population and help control serious diseases that historically killed or maimed millions of people.
There is also an argument RFK Jr. makes which is that the vaccine solutions contain many harmful components other than the actual vaccine and these components are responsible for many harmful outcomes due to their presence. These harmful side effects should not be considered acceptable and there should be work to eliminate these harms because they are not really acceptable.
However, these positions seem to be routinely headlined as being anti-vaccine. They are not. The argument is anti-harm and that seems to be something people would normally support. Only through misrepresentation of his comments do people come to believe he is against vaccines and he should be "rightly maligned".
His interview with Jordan Peterson was very interesting, especially as it did highlight some of RFK Jr's blindspots on politics. Worth taking time to listen to the whole thing even though it is quite long.
> There is also an argument RFK Jr. makes which is that the vaccine solutions contain many harmful components
.. and he started down that path by repeating, without checking, highly bogus discredited "science" about the harmful effects of thimerosal and a deliberate widespread conspiracy regarding its use.
When he jumped on that public bandwagon it had already been out of use for more than a decade after being used for some two decades prior in trace amounts that caused not great issues.
Everything he said was either false, 30 years out of date, or both.
Remember when pharma companies rolled out a vaccine in record time with nearly zero safety or efficacy studies and claimed it was both safe and effective and got lots of media and researchers to parrot the same. And then when asked for data they said it shouldn’t be made public for something like 50 years? And then we learned it wasn’t nearly as safe as claimed and a lot of the impossible to spread from the injection site claimed were untrue at scale and whatever measure of effectiveness used didn’t include immunity or transmission. History is littered with junk science claims by entities with financial incentives. Unfortunately, there are probably also incentives to identify risk in competitors products.
Unfortunately, “science” has done a good job of discrediting itself lately and shown to be susceptible to corruption, influence, and outright fabrication. How can anyone trust a paper discrediting another any more than the original research when the liability associated with those harmful effects would be astronomically damaging to influential organizations?
I don’t have any issues with most traditional, dead virus vaccines, but also have no trust in pharma or even public institutions to do what’s in the public’s best interest when it is not aligned with theirs or causes other harm to them.
We need more pharma sceptics, imho. They hold a considerable amount of power over the population and take in absurd profits in the process. Anyone who challenges that will be misrepresented and maligned publicly, if not removed through more violent means. I’m sure Kennedy’s know that more than most dynasty families.
I remember when the COVID-19 pandemic first appeared and the R values were announced.
I remember immediately volunteering to be part of locally run trials to test probably suitable vaccine classes already in the pipeline and I remember being an active part of a trial within months.
I recall the planning and the effort spent to bring modern critical path JIT approaches to traditional vaccine development that ran multiple variations of every traditional stage as much in parallel as possible thereby shortening the entire runway without compressing the neccesary time for each critical stage.
I recall having discussions with a world renowned epidemiologist from here in my home state who I worked with as a young student in mathematics some 40 years ago about the quality of the science and the diligence being taken.
History is littered with easily disproven junk science claims by political entities that play to feelings of the masses by saying whatever plays to their base.
I use that phrase because it is an accurate descriptor. He has literally published articles claiming a grand conspiracy to poison Americans, rejecting all data from repeated vaccine trials and studies by the international scientific community.
Vaccine trials use the real vaccine that would go to consumers, all of it. There is robust study of the whole package, not just the component that interacts with the immune system.
RFK is a bogus baseless conspiracy theorist, regardless of his current PR campaign.
His thoughts have lots of traction, I think he needs to be engaged and not dismissed as a joke. There is a lot of distrust on the right in how covid played out. We are all on the same team here and everyone would be better off if we all realized it. The other side is not evil, they are trying to do what they think is best for everyone.
Not sure that's true, but I'm sure that people with good intentions who are very stupid do often cause unintended harm.
(Here by "stupid" I mostly mean "unable to perceive the world accurately, relative to other people with the same resources at their disposal, and unable to differentiate objective reality from false ideas that make them feel good in some way".)
It’s the current hobbyhorse of a certain part of the political spectrum, brought up with a frequency out of all proportion to the number of people actually affected by it. That’s the culture war for ya.
Yes a certain set of people do seem to be obsessed. And when you point that out their response is “no you’re obsessed!” No hints of irony or self awareness detected.
Most of the actual reasoned criticism comes from left-wing feminist women.
Right-wing conservatives have only jumped on this topic since fairly recently, and tend to look at this from a different angle.
Looking through his comments, the previous commenter seems to be discussing this from a more feminist, gender-critical perspective, rather than taking a conservative viewpoint.
Wow dude, Way to deflect political criticism in a thread about presidential candidates. Partisan much?
This is simply your side's baggage. So many stupid decrees.
Both sides are nuts, but the dems aren't even trying to justify what they say - it's a purity test to believe the right things without needing an explanation. It wouldn't be a useful shibboleth if it was something everyone else would say anyways.
Nobody explained how Fauci could know if the Wuhan lab leaked or not and even asking for details was called white supremacist. There's no rush to investigate Wuhan, or trans medicine, because they want to scream at you for not believing entirely - not to discuss the subtleties of real-world situations.
"When Joe Biden agrees with the broad medical consensus you all cheer but when RFK Jr. disagrees with the broad medical consensus you all boo, how curious."
For other, less brain-wormed people, being trans is not considered a mental illness. Maybe it was in the past, similarly to how being gay used to be considered a mental illness; but it definitely isn't today. Gender dysphoria, is a mental health condition, like depression, but it is treatable through transition.
> If you truly believe that this is the supported medical intervention, then you should be able to find a clear explanation of this - including the adults who are giving the child these restrictions and this gendered-soul vocabulary - and the surgical interventions it requires. A doctor and their clinic should have this on their webpage and they should be proud of the work they do.
Believe it or not this information is extremely easy to find and the standards of care used by a huge number of practitioners (WPATH) are free to download and peruse at your leisure: https://www.wpath.org/publications/soc
As just one example, the Boston children's hospital has their Guidelines and Standards of Care listed in multiple places on their website. This of course did not help them avoid the avalanche of bomb threats they received from individuals who were presumably very concerned and willing to listen.
I don't know any trans people who believe any of the things that you're suggesting they do. Literally every single one of your claims about what trans people believe are false; I count at least 7 distinct ones. (I can enumerate them if you'd like.) It's honestly impressive how little your world view overlaps with reality.
On another note, in this comment you mentioned the genitals of children and surgery on the genitals of children ten times. Given that genital surgery for children is not something that transgender activists are advocating for, I must ask you why you seem so fixated on the topic?
> Literally every single one of your claims about what trans people believe are false; I count at least 7 distinct ones. (I can enumerate them if you'd like.) It's honestly impressive how little your world view overlaps with reality.
Which trans people did I mention? I called out Susie Green and "Dr's" Kinsey and Money. If I didn't talk about trans people, just "doctors" and advocates, how could I be claiming anything about trans people's beliefs?
But sure, please do list out those mistaken beliefs you think I touched on.
> Given that genital surgery for children is not something that transgender activists are advocating for
If it isn't happening, why not just agree with me? If it doesn't need to happen, why not support laws banning it?
> I must ask you why you seem so fixated on the topic?
That's straight out of the narcissists prayer. "That doesn't happen, but if it does it's no big deal, and why do you care so much anyways?"
I'm a parent and this is infesting our schools. I care because I have had kids, I have been a kid, I have empathy for other people and their kids, I want useful schools, and I don't want my tax money spent hurting people.
"Advocates" is probably a better descriptor than mine tbh. Anyways, here's how I counted.
1. "cutting a boy's penis off is an appropriate treatment for liking dolls" - Not a position held by trans people or allies. We support the rights of transgender and cisgender people to be as gender-non-conforming as they like.
Note re: "transed her son because her husband wasn't happen with his 'girly' interests" - Having seen the talk she gave that you are referring to, she made no claim of the sort. Also, 'transed' is not a word that describes a coherent concept that exists.
2. "why does he then need further intervention to be that girl" - Nobody needs any interventions to be a girl. "Girl" is just a label.
3. "a child who wants to be a girl totally needs to lose his dick and the parents are Nazi's if they question it" - Advocates do not believe this. Trans adults can have SRS if they want it but it's not "required" for anything and it is not offered for children.
4. "Where is the research showing that children come up with 'gender dysphoria' without adult prompting them" - Most transgender adults were once transgender children. It's quite common to see them say on twitter, tumblr, etc. that nobody told them about gender dysphoria when they were young, and that they had to create their own vocabulary for it when they tried to explain their feelings to their parents.
5. "these are the words they'd use and the interventions that they'd have asked for without 'therapists'" - This one is just confusing. Of course they wouldn't use the same words and independently develop the same medical treatments we have now.
Note re: Money and Reimer: Money was influential in early study of transgender people, but it's important to note that this does not make him an "advocate". Reimer was not transgender, and it always confuses me why anti-trans people think what happened to him supports them. He knew he was a boy, others ignored him, and he suffered greatly as a result, in many of the same ways that transgender people suffer when they aren't allowed to decide their gender for themselves.
Note re: "Why isn't the much more likely explanation - that these adults are pedophiles" - This is not a more likely explanation.
6. "Where, without an adult telling them that a sex change is a real thing is possible for them to have, do you have children asking to be surgically changed to look vaguely like (ie, cosmetic only) the other sex?" - Children generally do not ask for SRS. Apart from that, I'm not sure what your point is here?
7. "How many children, without weird homophobic parents, want their genitals surgically modified?" - This is pretty clearly a reference to the conspiracy theory that transition is a form of gay conversion therapy. Like many conspiracy theories, it's really stupid. Homophobes are generally transphobic as well. Many trans people were asked "why couldn't you just be gay" when they came out to their parents, showing that they see being transgender as worse than being gay (not that they would have approved if they were gay either). Also, only about a quarter of transgender people describe themselves as straight, compared to about 90% for the general population, so if it were a form of gay conversion therapy then it would probably be the most counterproductive form yet devised.
Note re: "explain why wanting to be a dinosaur doesn't warrant surgery but wanting to play with dolls does" - (This is a duplicate of #1, but to reiterate: ) Transgender and cisgender children have every right to play with whatever toys they want, regardless of what gender they are marketed to. It's the transphobes who say children should only play with toys that match their gender.
Note re: "why not just agree with me?" - Because you are wrong about many, many, many things. There's more than this that you're wrong about, but if I listed everything you were wrong about and gave long-form sourced arguments in rebuttal, it'd be a full-time job, and I'm not doing one of those unless I'm getting paid to do it.
The vast, vast majority of gender affirming care for children is social transition, then maybe puberty blockers, then maybe hormones. SRS is exceedingly rare for under-18s and the massive focus you are putting on it suggests to me that your sources are extremely biased or outright disingenuous. Again look to WPATH, where absolutely no medical intervention whatsoeveris suggested for prepubescent children (S69).
Practically all of your questions have answers either in WPATH SoC or have been heavily discussed in the transgender community or in the medical community. It would be worth your time to see those perspectives.
Thanks for the link, but it will only confirm what you and I both believe for opposite reasons. The latest paper from the link reinforces the idea that long term post surgery QoL decreases after an an initial short term increase. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5440516/
Edit to add: as the father of two neuro-atypical kids I have an interest in therapy’s that help them get through life with their unique gifts. Were I offered a therapy that placated their idiosyncrasies in the short term only to harm them in the long term, it would quickly be rejected from all options, doubly were it permanently damaging to them in some way. Unfortunately, psychology is full of pop “therapies” that cause significant harm to vulnerable populations who are left to deal with the consequences.
"We need to, prior to licensing vaccines, do gold standard safety testing, like every other drug approval requires. We need to do double-blind placebo testing."
- We do mate.
Kennedy also said that he wanted to ensure “that vaccines are subject to the same kind of safety scrutiny and safety testing that other drugs are subject to."
- They are already subjected to more safety scrutiny and more safety testing.
"the hepatitis B vaccines that are currently approved had fewer than five days of safety testing."
- 2 years of human clinical trials is a longer length of time than 5 days.
If there were significant harms then they would arise is the rigorous trials done before a vaccine is released. This isn’t exactly an unstudied area and his extraordinary claims have no scientifically reviewed evidence. He’s just a guy saying things.
mRNA vaccines have been studied for decades. Vaccinations in general, for significantly longer.
Specifically, how many studies, and for what length, would you have been satisfied with? What is your specific epidemiological and medical background that led you to decide on that length of time? What is the specific number of elderly deaths you would have allowed, before giving people the completely optional ability to take those vaccines?
I ask none of those questions in bad faith, but I'm rather tired of the 'no no no no' attitude on the right, where nothing was ever going to be good enough and the real answer you want is that we should've vaccinated no one at all, ever.
What does democracy have to do with being poisoned by another entity without knowledge of the risks? Buying laws is the antithesis of democracy. I could see that argument regarding capitalism (though I probably wouldn’t agree).
And how does regulatory capture fit within your conception that democracy and capitalism are completely separate?
Of course people with large amounts of money and influence can influence ostensibly democratic processes, in order to take more of the money for themselves.
Didn't democracy just force us all inside for two years? Tyranny of the majority is always a problem, the solution is a better constitution that prevents this kind of problem. Plus getting personally informed. If fire retardant is your concern, you can probably source things that don't have it if it's important enough to you.
It be more accurate to say that democracy forced you _not_ to go inside. I spent a lot of time outside, but some shops were closed or you had to gasp wear a mask in them.
I think the "forced inside thing" is false. I am not particularly religious but I take issue with the government telling congregations they cannot practice their faith, even outdoors, and in the same breath tell people protesting is a-ok and totally your right.
What we have isn't a democracy. It's a gerontocracy that saw political gain in putting hundreds of thousands at risk while simultaneously sticking it to the religious (possibly) right. For whatever reason, mentioning this turns things inflammatory when it's the reality of the situation. You could protest shoulder to shoulder with or without a mask but congregating for church was made temporarily illegal. What kind of logic is that?
Weren't all gatherings banned, but due to different legal rights for protests they weren't? Framing it as an attack against religion is incredibly misleading in that case.
Freedom of speech and freedom of religion are held in the same esteem constitutionally.
There's no different legal rights. Practicing a religion is a form of speech. The same form of speech protesters were using. It was entirely political. By and large the protesters agreed with the dominant political party, and people practicing religion generally didn't. There was no constitutional basis for their restriction. Unfortunately, a case like this has to be resolved at the higher courts and we know that those work on geologic time.
Ah, a libertarian. Would you support everyone having to test every food product they buy in order to make sure they aren't getting exposed? Regulation would be tyranny after all.
(and no, I had no problem with being "forced" inside to stop people from dying - if you did, you might want to look in the mirror and consider your moral framework)
> ...everyone having to test every food product they buy...
On the one hand - that would only push the problem one turtle down, to "who is testing the food testing supplies & equipment?".
OTOH - since the libertarians have a "zero out of N and counting" record of ever creating even a micro-scale functioning libertarian society...is it worth the electrons to bother refuting libertarian arguments?
For those unaware, smokers would get drunk and pass out with lit cigarettes that would set their couch on fire and burn their house down. This lead to a push to cover everything in "flame retardants" which are more accurately called "human retardants", as they do little to actually prevent combustion from an effective source and are tied to everything from cancer to developmental issues.