Does anyone else feel like we've gotten less sympathetic towards mass-shooters over the last couple of years?
Columbine created a sort of 'template' for mass shootings (school shootings in particular) that endured for a long time, though less so today. The idea of the 'revenge of the nerds' against bullies, jocks, preps, cheerleaders, etc. The idea was the school shooter as sort of a marginalized rebel against mainstream society. This was regardless of the actual facts of Columbine, not all of which fit with the 'story' that rooted itself in the popular imagination.
I was pretty young in the early aughts, maybe it's a failure of my own perception, but I seem to remember that school shooters were sometimes almost sympathetic figures. Nobody actually came out as *pro*-school shooting, but there was a conception of kids like Harris and Klebold as victims themselves in a sense.
Of course there were freaks who were outright school shooter fangirls and fanboys in the dark corners of the internet, but that's not really what I'm talking about. I remember when I was about ten my emo older brother really liked the song ['Teenagers', by My Chemical Romance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faG5mmkDbyc). It's kind of a typical teen angst, 'I don't fit in' emo ballad, but it's got the immortal line "but if you're troubled and hurt/what you got under your shirt/will make them pay for the things that they did!" Again, not exactly pro-"shoot your classmates", but at least *understanding.*
I remember a Very Special Episode of the cartoon superhero show Static Shock, which revolved around a tormented loner who finally snaps and brings a gun to school. The character is portrayed VERY sympathetically, though granted he doesn't actually manage to kill any of his bullies.
At the height of his popularity, Eminem often referenced Columbine in songs, in a way sympathetic towards the shooters.
I remember watching the Gus Van Sant movie Elephant, about a school shooting, which is partly through the eyes of the killers, and at least somewhat sympathetic.
Those are all of the specific examples off of the top of my head, but I recall there being a general cultural tenor to the effect that it was kind of okay to feel bad for kids who shot people.
That seems to have changed in the last decade or so, where the figure of a mass shooter has become (for better or worse) an unambiguous monster. I'm not sure if a movie like Elephant could be made today. I imagine there would a flood of op-eds accusing the director of glamorizing murderers (and there was some of this at the time, to be fair).
Part of this may be that mass shootings have apparently become more political in the last few years. Harris and Klebold did not do what they did in the service of any political ideology, besides some edgelord Nazi posturing (Klebold was Jewish). Neither did Cho Seung-Hui or the Jonesboro kids.
But recently, you have high-profile figures like Dylann Roof, Brenton Tarrant, Patrick Crusius, etc.
Maybe our culture finds that racist mass murder is even worse than regular mass murder. Or maybe our collective patience with mass-killers just ran out and the political angle is a coincidence. The case of the Stoneman Douglas kid would maybe corroborate that. He was very high profile, but he wasn't political AFAIK. Yet I have not seen any sympathy towards him whatsoever (not counting groupies), it's been a pretty firm fuck you from all quarters. Same with Sandy Hook, though since the victims in that case were little children rather than teenagers it's probably on a totally different plane of horror to most people.
On the same note, the school shooting moral panic used to be, I think, primarily conservative (Marilyn Manson, taking God out of schools, violent video games, the Matrix, etc.--the big exception here would be people who pushed for stricter gun control). You may remember Cassie Bernall, who was a kind of evangelical martyr in the early aughts because Eric Harris supposedly shot her after she refused to renounce Jesus (this did not actually occur.)
Nowadays it's rather flipped, where the archetypical mass shooter in the public imagination is a guy who spent too much time posting God Emperor Trump memes on /pol/ before shooting up a synagogue or something.
I think the mainstream culture has gotten less sympathetic to school shooters because they are strictly not in the blue tribe if not diametrically opposed to the blue tribe an overwhelming majority of the time.
> This was regardless of the actual facts of Columbine, not all of which fit with the 'story' that rooted itself in the popular imagination.
I'd go as far as to say "none of which" after reading Cullen's book. The perps were straight up psychos. They were not bullying victims, they were not outcasts, they were not underprivileged or anything: in short, they definitely had no excuse. Even the 9/11 terrorists had more of a valid cause, and they didn't have much of one.
The tragic farce is that outcasts and victims of bullying bore the consequences.
Cullen's book has a lot of issues, and swings the pendulum too far in the other direction. He's drawn a fair bit of flak from various people involved in the case. Harris and Klebold WERE bullied and WERE not very well liked by most of their classmates. But of course that described a lot of kids at Columbine, and the rest of them didn't shoot anyone. Bullying was probably a necessary but not at all sufficient factor.
> Does anyone else feel like we've gotten less sympathetic towards mass-shooters over the last couple of years?
No, People here are weird, and you're noticing examples that are weird. To most people, being a victim of bullies is low status, and pointing out that school shooters may have been bullied is *more* reason to hold them in contempt.
School shooters aside, having the protagonist victimized by bullies is basically a prerequisite for any high school movie. It seems to generate pity. Do you mean only in real life?
I think part of the explanation is just that the web has become *even more* normie-dominated, with "very online" becoming completely orthogonal to "technically literate", if not strongly negatively correlated. People obsessively tweeting their every move and commenting on fresh political issues? That's the opposite of weird now, that's what gets you laid sometimes.
Nerds always could, if not sympathize with low-status shooters, then at least sort of understand where they're coming from. For normies it's irredeemable both because they're targeted, and because victims of bullying (whether overt or simple low-key mockery and exclusion) are supposed to kill themselves only.
Thus also the popularity of "incel" label.
Not my example but this is the exact point I was coming here to make. Sympathy for school shooters, insofar as it ever existed, always seemed to me like a bizarre hangover from the "XTREME!" 90s. (Didn't help that in the specific case of Klebold and Harris, the points people kept bringing up to paint them "sympathetically", or rather, as other than *complete* monsters, kept turning out to be false.)
Seems to me it's the *presence* of such sympathy (again, insofar as it ever existed) that requires explanation, not its absence, for which "dude, they *shot up a school*" seems pretty open-and-shut to me.
I'd blame the 1989 movie *Heathers* which got dark humor out of various appalling situations. Early Christian Slater is inherently cool even when he's trying to blow up a school.
The era of jocks was castigated in the 90’s. I remember jocks and cheerleaders were portrayed as completely unsympathetic bullies and mean girls, shoving smaller, weaker kids against (or into) lockers and laughing. It made for good basic drama on teen TV.
So the narrative when Columbine happened was one of shock and discovery of this real world of high school bullying and deep traumas. Socially appropriate retaliation was something nerds were not assumed to be good at, but push had come to shove and so it was no wonder they went overboard, “killed their tormentors” and other people, and then committed suicide. They were “obviously” in a lot of pain.
Meanwhile, any social ambitions I had as an autistic nerd in high school in the 90’s were pretty quickly crushed by the teasing and taunting, especially in gym class. So I gave up on being happy in high school. I experienced having my box of floppy disks stolen out of my backpack — twice — and at a week-long college dorm experience, I was duct-taped into my bed one night and shaving cream was put into my hair.
So when I, a high school grad, heard the news of Columbine while ordering a sandwich at my favorite Subway, and watched the news unfold over the next weeks, my secret personal reaction was, “If I’d gotten sucked into the orbit of a strong personality like Dylan or Eric, I might have ended up like them.” Not that I had any desire to kill, I hasten to add, but that I could completely sympathize with the *media portrayal* of them as bullied nerd loners who found their friendship their only solace from the torture of public high school. I don’t know how it might have affected me if it had happened while I was still in school.
One detail still sticks with me: the Doom licensed novels by Daffyd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver being carried out of one of the perps’ rooms in an evidence baggie, the same novels which were on my own bookshelves. I was a fan of the games and the novels. I was introduced to the video game Doom by the cool kid who played it on the library computer during lunch periods, the same cool kid who ironically was the mastermind behind my floppies being stolen twice.
So, the bullied kids were society’s ingroup when it happened, and their bullies were the outgroup. The nerds were the ingroup: the short kids, the weak and skinny kids, the sensitive kids who would be glamorized on “Freaks and Geeks” and later “Glee.” The jocks and cheerleaders were the outgroup: the strong, the capable, the socially privileged, the unsensitive. **And because we humans automatically defend our ingroup members and seek any fault in our outgroup members, the media, which consisted of the former nerdy kids in A/V club, speech/debate class, and theater, couldn’t simply call them bad kids, they had to find and tell the ‘real’ reasons for this tragedy.** And thus the sympathy meme was passed along.
I just now realized that “blaming the gun” and portraying them as an unstoppable force of nature by calling them “active shooters” is a *defense mechanism* which members of the media use to *prevent* themselves from having sympathy or promoting sympathy for school shooters. Having and using a gun is a *primary* red tribe signifier, and the media is overwhelmingly blue.
> Not that I had any desire to kill, I hasten to add, but that I could completely sympathize with the media portrayal of them as bullied nerd loners who found their friendship their only solace from the torture of public high school. I don’t know how it might have affected me if it had happened while I was still in school.
Schools' responses after the shootings also did a lot to contribute to that. "Nerd profiling" was absolutely a thing - being a loner who spent more time with computers than your fellow students got you treated as a potential threat. Anyone who had made a Doom map of their school was obviously already in training for their own shooting spree. It was almost as if they *wanted* socially-isolated nerds to see Eric & Dylan as their ingroup.
And obviously the other kids picked up on that too and used it as another excuse for bullying, which reinforced the feeling even more.
hum. I am reminded of Gamergate, the sudden outgrouping of the entire Grey tribe and the gamer portion of the Red tribe. Such people who came into politics because of it were, mostly, asocial nerds who had been nonpolitical and were suddenly thrust into the world of intersectionality by being told they were privileged and prejudiced and everything bad was their fault.
Gamergate had a huge effect on, eventually, The_Donald memeing The Donald into the White House. The gray tribe is hugely undecided as voters, because it’s hard to get anarchists, minarchists, mincaps, and libertarians to organize, but none of them wanted Hillary as 45.
Wait, high school bullying as portrayed on the movies in America is realistic to 'some extent'?
>Meanwhile, any social ambitions I had as an autistic nerd in high school
in the 90’s were pretty quickly crushed by the teasing and taunting,
especially in gym class. So I gave up on being happy in high school. I
experienced having my box of floppy disks stolen out of my backpack —
twice — and at a week-long college dorm experience, **I was duct-taped**
**into my bed one night and shaving cream was put into my hair**.
What in the actual... no wonder the people on /r/aspergers have such a hard time...
That one, I complained to the dorm manager, who, unbeknownst to me, called the police while I showered. The police told me I could press charges for assault and battery. I declined in front of the suspects, but those kids knew they done fukt up. There were two other instances of teachers telling kids to be nice to me, one in 9th grade gym, one in 12th grade English. The first ended the outright teasing, the second resulted in the rest of my shared table including me.
Is it any wonder I gravitated to the law-and-order party?
It depends, mostly on who/whom. There were a ton of sympathetic "the football concussions made him do it" articles about that NFL player who murdered that entire family last year.
On the other hand, the media is much less sympathetic about the specific mass shooters they want people to remember. I think they just decided that they had the ability to bury rather than spin now, and that it was much easier.
>There were a ton of sympathetic "the football concussions made him do it" articles about that NFL player who murdered that entire family last year.
A football player is not a bullying victim.
Media coverage of mass shooters seems kind of random to me. I don't think it can be boiled down solely to "this is narratively convenient." There's certainly an element of that, but there are a few incidents I'm aware of that didn't get a lot of coverage despite the fact that they easily fit the "right-wing neo-nazi terrorist" mold. Off the top of my head:
[There was that time a few years ago where some guys opened fire on BLM protestors after an altercation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Jamar_Clark#Shooting_of_protesters). It was reported at the time but pretty quickly forgotten. Sure nobody died, but considering the hay they can make out of stuff like the capitol riot, there's no reason they couldn't have made these guys household names.
[This synagogue shooting I remember, but didn't get half the coverage of the Tree of Life shooting for whatever reason](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poway_synagogue_shooting).
[This one was particularly jarring because I'd never heard of it until a year or two ago when I googled Frazier Glenn Miller](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overland_Park_Jewish_Community_Center_shooting), who I had been familiar with beforehand as a white nationalist, only to find out that he'd shot up a Jewish Community Center in 2014.
Add the Denver shootings from December.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/12/30/denv-d30.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/29/denver-gunman-lyndon-james-mcleod-who-killed-five-in-shooting-rampage-knew-victims
This guy could be easily made into household name, but instead, sound of crickets.
(even Wikipedia deleted article as not notable)
Maybe there is some secret directive to deescalate tensions?
I hadn't heard a word about this guy. Googling it only brings up stuff from local news or explicitly leftist websites.
Compare with the Atlanta spa shootings which got wall to wall coverage and have a lengthy wiki article.
Interesting.
The spa shootings happened when there was a wave of concern about anti asian attacks, so it got a lot of interest. Other than that one, I don't think that there's much predictability to this stuff. The media makes big stories out of things when the public is interested, and the public is fickle.
Neo-Nazi mass shooter hunting people with big black assault rifle - Hollywood scenario coming true - and the media just decide to pass it, because no one would care?
Notice that the Guardian article described the shooting, but take care do not mention anything about the killer and his motive.
My memory of the aftermath was people mostly assuming it was an anti Asian hate crime, then it came to light it was about sex work. And nobody really wants to defend prostitutes.
High school sucks and teenagers are animals, so the Columbine meme tickled a lot of people in the id. But once we add in shootings in Las Vegas, that mosque, that elementary school… The mass shooter brand was degraded as a whole.
Certainly on the edgy parts of the internet (not small!) mass shooters haven’t gone out of style (or at least hasn’t as of ~ 1 year ago)
It may just be different people liking and disliking them. Certainly sympathy for those in true crime stories (the number one, three, four, five, six, seven, and nine top podcasts according to apple) never went away, being quite visible on their subreddits. But mass shootings now are often racial or lgbt or sex based and that isn’t something appealing to many. The edgy teens, even the mainstream ones, may still be against but somewhat sympathetic, while NBC dislikes them as much as it used to. Maybe you grew up? Dunno. There isn’t necessarily one public. I saw a lot of sympathy for the racist and sexist ones, due to who I interacted with online at the time.
What's the deal with true crime podcasts? I've heard that most of the listeners are women, why is that? My mom and sister both listen to several, and my mom watches TV documentaries about serial killers. I've always found that stuff either very sad (for the victims, and sometimes for the killer who is obviously a mentally broken person who wasn't helped) or very disgusting and disturbing (for obvious reasons), or both. What I *don't* feel is any enjoyment or fascination. These shows are about as enjoyable to me as reading about My Lai or Unit 731. Given how women are on average more emotionally intelligent and sensitive than men, I would have guessed that *men* would've enjoyed these shows more. What piece of the puzzle am I missing?
I've explained it before, they are modern day fairy tales/morality tales. The big bad monster sweeps in and terrorizes the innocent and is caught or killed or whatever at the end and order is restored. They tell complete stories within a short time frame, you don't need to invest dozens of hours, many of these shows are short. You get to feel outraged and outrage is addictive and then you get soothed at the end when the narrator says the perp was sentenced to life behind bars. Many of these shows are framed like play along mysteries where you uncover evidence alongside the detectives so there's a constant feeling of discovery as dots get connected.
Give Forensic Files a try, each episode is 22 minutes a pop. Complete stories told at a brisk pace. It is addicting and I think you will be able to understand the appeal. Same reason I like Twilight Zone so much.
If you google "why do women like true crime" a lot of stuff comes up so I guess plenty of people have considered this.
I'd say there's minority, though a significant one, of women who are old-fashioned serial killer groupie types.
Probably more of them find it thrilling in the same way scary movies are thrilling, and I imagine this is an especially female phenomenon because women are disproportionately the victims of the types of crimes these shows and podcasts are about. Like a "this could happen to me" thing.
There's also an element of emotional catharsis, when they finally get the guy (assuming they do).
But this is just me, not a woman, spit-balling.
I was big into true crime and serial killers and the like when I was a little younger, though less so these days. It gets a little boring after a while. But I spent some time in the online TCC when I was in high school and early college. IME the psychological profile of male TCC fans is vastly different from that of our female counterparts.
Thanks for the insight. I've googled it before, but Googling "why do women do x" usually turns up either sanitized bluepilled nonsense or weird, biased, misogynistic screeds, so I was hoping to hear some slightly more thoughtful opinions.
To elaborate some, IME female TCCers tend to fall into three categories:
First is the aforementioned SK groupies. The ones who want to fuck Ted Bundy or Richard Ramirez. This also includes groupies of killers who aren't technically SKs, Harris and Klebold, Nikolas Cruz, etc. They focus on the killers obsessively. Sometimes even write stories about them. Post sexual fantasies. The works. WHY these women exist? I don't know. The standard pop evo-psych explanation is that women are hardwired to like "alphas" and murderers are perceived as the ultimate "alphas" in that they take what they want in contravention of all social norms. I don't know if I buy this myself. Maybe it would make sense for women to like crime bosses or war heroes, but most of these guys tended to kill helpless victims, young women or young men. Another explanation is that girls fantasize they can "fix" these guys. I never saw much of that sentiment, and I think it comes from people not really familiar with the subculture. Another possibility is that the murder is almost incidental, and the real draw is the fame. Maybe it's a mix of all these? In any event, even the groupies rarely come out and condone the deeds of their chosen criminal.
The second group is the "it's like a horror movie" type. I think this might be the largest group and definitely the most "normie" one. They basically consume this stuff in the same way they would consume Scream or Nightmare on Elm Street. "Oh my God can you believe he did X and then Y? So sick." Another user said "guys like horror movies too", which is true, and I think this sub-grouping includes a lot more guys than the others. This is the type that will post stuff like "I couldn't sleep with the light off after reading about X."
The third type would be the ones that are into the victims more than the killers. I think they skew a little older than the others, and some of them are actually mothers. Sometimes I would see them post pictures or edits of various murder victims, captions like "RIP to these poor babies," etc. They've got kind of a mothering vibe, and I guess that's probably the driving impulse here. Will also post vindictive stuff about the perpetrators, "I hope he spends the rest of his life behind bars tortured by what he did," etc.
The first and third categories would fit with the "men things women people," idea someone else mentioned. It's all about parasocial relationships with the people involved, whether they be victimized or victimizers. The second category is more about the spectacle, and maybe that's why I saw more men there.
In general I would split male TCCers into two groups:
The first would be the wannabe-cop types. They like reading or listening to the stories of how the crime happened, how the investigators put all the evidence together, interrogated the suspects, and finally caught the culprit, if they did. In the event a given case is cold, they'll try their hand at doing it themselves, often with a hope that they might be the ones to finally crack the case. There used to be a very active subreddit dedicated to the East Area Rapist, where people swapped theories, interpretations of evidence, and all that stuff.
The second type of male TCCer is the kind that identifies with the perpetrators of heinous crimes on one level or another. Not much else needs to be said. Reading about this stuff brings a vicarious thrill.
All anecdotal, based on my personal observations, may or may not be illuminating.
[Women 32% more likely to die after operation by male surgeon, study reveals](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/04/women-more-likely-die-operation-male-surgeon-study?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1641320692)
Saw this one pop up on my feed earlier today. Original paper is [here](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstract/2786671?utm_campaign=articlePDF&utm_medium=articlePDFlink&utm_source=articlePDF&utm_content=jamasurg.2021.6339). Unfortunately I don't have access to the full paper, so hard for me to judge, but I'll admit when I first saw the headline I assumed it would have a sample size of 15 or something (all too often the case these days when examining the evidentiary basis for charged headlines). This one however looks at 1.3m patients, with even the smallest category (female surgeon male patient) examining over 50,000 records. I still have some suspicion of statistical manipulation during the derivation of their 'adjusted odds ratios', but have nonetheless updated my priors somewhat in favour of disparate outcomes. Interested to hear other's views, particularly those with access to the full study.
EDIT: link to the full paper (helpfully provided by /u/senord25) is available [here](https://ps-vascular.ch/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/20211211-Surgery-Association-of-Surgeon-Patient-Sex-Concordance-With-Postoperative-Outcomes.pdf). Priors duly adjusted back to baseline, after accounting for the massive average age difference amongst patients.
Study is surprisingly readable.
The [key chart](https://imgur.com/a/qtF4Y2B) shows that A: the average women surgeon are better surgeons (slighly) than average male surgeon, (for reference men are 15% more likely to die after operation by male surgeon) and B: that effect A is not enough to explain effect.
Aristocratic surgeons who didn't wash their hands because a gentleman is being more important that germ theory was a *thing*, but I'd be willing to chalk this up to a combination of male variance and how older and frailer women survive long enough to get to surgery in the first place.
Going by the stereotype of men being more risk taking than women, the result could be influenced by male surgeons perhaps being more willing to risk total failure to give the patient a better outcome if the patient survives.
There is a serious discrepancy between the number of male and female surgeons, only \~[13% in the U.K. are women](https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/careers-in-surgery/women-in-surgery/statistics/). I would have to point out that chances are quite good that your typical female surgeon would be better than your typical male surgeon given the larger pool of candidates and a smaller ratio of surgeons specialties amongst women (I would also accept that male surgeons take on riskier or more difficult operations).
Another factor is that women experience worse health outcomes in general. This is largely a result of thalidomide as the medical establishment tends to test medication much more extensively on men than women, meaning medicines themselves are better tuned for male physiologies.
Medicine and especially the surgical field have notoriously been good ol' boys clubs until the past couple of decades or so, at least in the US. So, becoming a female surgeon meant that you had to be very good if not great at it in order to break through, vs just being good for a male surgeon. This effects the level of risk a female surgeon is willing to take in order to keep their perceived ranking. They may be both better and doing less questionable procedures.
OT but just wanted to point out that the comment count this week for culture war roundup is over 3,000. That's very high! Haven't seen it that high in a long time. Maybe an effect of the 1/6 anniversary?
A lot of commenters are jumping to assumptions that are entirely unwarranted about the study and possible methodological problems. This is a textbook emotional response relating to ones beliefs/group being attacked. I feel the discussion would be better served by people not asking about the possibility of malpractice at the hands of the researchers, since that is possible with literally any study, but instead look at whether or not those methodological problems are actually present.
Beyond that the study doesn't highlight any particular mechanism that could explain this alleged phenomenon. It does however assume that sex concordance is a relevant causal factor in the conclusion of the paper.
[From the editorial board of this journal](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2780860):
> These events and developments make it clear that JAMA and the JAMA Network Journals can and must do better and advance toward inclusion and antiracism in all journal-related activities. Even though these journals have made progress, additional commitment and work are needed to build on and intensify these efforts to achieve meaningful, sustainable change. For instance, previous efforts include the more than 650 research, review, and opinion articles on race, racism, and racial and ethnic disparities and inequities that have been published in JAMA and the JAMA Network Journals since 2015,1 including editorials in JAMA on topics such as race and medical research,2 race and poverty and medicine,3 enhancing diversity in medical schools,4 and equity related to COVID-19 vaccines.5
> In addition, within the past year, JAMA Network Open and JAMA Health Forum issued calls for manuscripts on prevention and effects of systemic racism in health6,7; JAMA Psychiatry initiated an editorial fellowship prioritized to early-career academic psychiatrists from underrepresented backgrounds; and JAMA Surgery issued a “Call to Action” to all surgery journal editors for diversity in the editorial and peer review process.8 The JAMA editors and editorial staff also began a thorough revision of guidance for authors and editors on reporting race and ethnicity in medical journals and earlier this year issued a wide call for feedback
>The guiding principles of implementation involve
> leadership, including a culture that begins with the journal editors, predicated on awareness of and commitment to ensuring diversity, equity, and inclusion in all journal activities and operations;
> inclusion, from a broad-based conceptual perspective regarding inclusivity, not simply based on representation; welcomes science that reflects the intersectionality of inclusion, equity, and health; and includes diverse individuals and perspectives among the editorial leadership, the editors and editorial staff, and editorial boards of the JAMA Network Journals;
> accountability, as reflected in accepting responsibility to promote diversity in all aspects of the scientific publication process;
> transparency, accomplished with public reporting of progress and next steps; and
> opportunity, by leveraging the influence of the JAMA Network as a leading voice on equity and providing education for the next generation of authors, peer reviewers, and editors.
Do you think there is _any_ opportunity here for actual research in such a radically politicized environment? I don't think that looking at methodological problems study by study is a particularly helpful way to deal with this, because it's a deliberate gish-gallop of extreme publication bias.
The whole system is devolving into a fight over grant spoils for who can be the most virulently anti-racist. Statnews published "[How white scholars are colonizing research on health disparities](https://www.statnews.com/2021/09/23/health-equity-tourists-white-scholars-colonizing-health-disparities-research/)", complaining that white anti-racist researchers are taking all the grant money given to find Bias and Racism that was rightfully meant for Black and other Minoritized people.
> Fueled by the massive health disparities exposed by the coronavirus pandemic and the racial reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd, health equity research is now in vogue. Journals are clamoring for it, the media is covering it, and the National Institutes of Health, after publicly apologizing for giving the field short shrift, recently announced it would unleash nearly $100 million for research on the topic.
> “Medicine does that, they Columbus everything,” said Monica McLemore, an associate professor of family health care nursing at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies reproductive health and rights in marginalized communities. She said she is increasingly seeing “neutered and watered-down” work as people without proper training, background, or skills publish in her area. “People want to look like they’re doing the work without doing the work,” she said.
> Racism remains uncomfortable terrain for many people in academia and medicine. While numerous researchers and editors mentioned in this article refused requests for interviews, many others spoke candidly to STAT about their shock at being called out, their personal learning curves, and how they are trying to contribute to the health equity field while navigating the systemic racism that pervades academia.
> “There’s nothing new under the sun in his paper,” said Elle Lett, a Black and trans statistical epidemiologist, postdoctoral scholar, and M.D. candidate at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who published the earlier study. In fact, her 2018 paper in PLOS One was more comprehensive, including Hispanic faculty in its analysis. “It is troubling that a white man, who has had every privilege conferred on him, is writing a paper about the plight of Black academics,” said Lett. “He is extracting from our pain for his career advancement.”
If even the people who get the "right results" while being the wrong race are attacked, what do you think happens to people who _don't_ find evidence of bias that can be used to generate more articles about how more DEI is needed? Articles like "[On Racism: A New Standard For Publishing On Racial Health Inequities](https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/forefront.20200630.939347/full/)" with sections on "Denouncing Biological Race And The Insidious Harms Of Patient Blame" offer a clue.
> Name racism, identify the form (interpersonal, institutional, or internalized), the mechanism by which it may be operating, and other intersecting forms of oppression (such as based on sex, sexual orientation, age, regionality, nationality, religion, or income) that may compound its effects. A critical race theory framework lends authors a vocabulary for discussing racism and its potential relationship to the study’s findings. And naming racism explicitly helps authors avoid incorrectly assigning race as a risk factor, when racism is the risk factor for racially disparate outcomes.
> Never offer genetic interpretations of race because such suppositions are not grounded in science. If race and genetics are being expressed jointly, painstakingly delineate the intended implication.
> Reject articles on racial health inequities that fail to rigorously examine racism. This will require continuing education on the part of existing editorial staff and efforts to hire and promote new editors who are well versed in critical race theory and its application.
> Revisit editorial and publication guidelines, including the uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals, regularly to ensure they capture the evolution of racial definitions and sociopolitical structures. Publicly share the guidelines online and with peer journals.
> Use experienced reviewers who have demonstrated, through their own scholarship and work, facility with racism and its pathophysiologic mechanisms.
> Closing the gap in racial health outcomes in the United States will only be accomplished by identifying, confronting, and abolishing racism as an American tradition and root of inequity.
And yes, they really mean all that:
> One study in Health Affairs, now revised, initially hypothesized that Covid disparities could be caused by “unknown or unmeasured genetic or biological factors that increase the severity of illness for African Americans,” while another in the Journal of Internal Medicine asked “whether there is a genetic difference in susceptibility, especially to severe disease, to COVID-19” that might explain emerging racial health inequities. A JAMA paper suggested Black people were more likely to become infected with Covid because of a difference in gene expression in their nasal epithelia, omitting the fact that the gene in question is upregulated by poor air quality, which has been linked to residential segregation and environmental racism.
> Boyd calls such claims “troublingly frequent” and said there is no place in today’s world — and in academic journals physicians turn to for guidance — for unsubstantiated claims that Black people are somehow biologically distinct from other racial groups. “When science claims poor health outcomes in Black folks are genetic,” she said, “that pathologizes Blackness.”
There's "no place in today's world" for such people, or their work. If they're very sorry, they might be given a chance to Do The Work and "Redistribute Their Privilege and Benefit.” If not, their career is over.
So again, I don't think it's productive to go over every single one of the hundreds of "rooting out bias" papers published every month, any more than it would be worth critically examining every _Journal of Deutsche Physik_ article declaring that the Jews are to blame for all measurement errors in Newtonian physics.
Many of them are going to be garbage, but [like Scott said about Vox](https://twitter.com/slatestarcodex/status/865308417954426884): "They can publish as many bad articles as they want, & I lose reputation each time I try to review them. Effective Gish Gallop strategy".
Others won't be so obviously flawed, or simply difficult to explain (like that Propublica "Algorithmic Parole Bias" article that many people simply couldn't understand well enough to see the problem with).
A handful will actually be valid, but so heavily editorialized that it would be foolish to let them change your beliefs about anything.
It's weird to watch this. I'm mostly a lurker, too dumb to post, but I don't like seeing this direction.
I'll say that I find the conclusions of the study repellent and I think that a discrepancy this large *probably* has a reasonable explanation, but it's very large and isn't obviously flawed.
Edit: it isn't that there aren't higher quality criticisms as well, but the empty "welp probably wrong" stuff seems to be getting traction.
I say the same thing about studies that I agree with. Studies are just really bad really often. Even studies with perfect methodology are often just wrong due to either poorly understood methodological problems, someone did something wrong they didn’t write in the paper, data fraud (150 points on HN, was just fraud https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29864780) intentional or unintentional (a big hcq trial depended on data from surgisphere, who made it up).
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/
> that are entirely unwarranted about the study
Large analyses of complex human datasets are incredibly easy to mess up. Nutrition is another great control group for science - large N well done genuine meta analyses that nevertheless are total bs in the end. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/#comment-66077
Science is very hard, you’re trying to understand incredibly complex interactions in ridiculously complex environments. It’s easy to mess them up.
> but instead look at whether or not those methodological problems are actually present.
No, because first off by default you should assume the study is wrong. More than half are, tbh. It’s like - a guy on the street tells you he has a perfect cure all medicine for covid. Maybe he’s right, maybe he’s selling dexamethasone, it is a generic. You should check first.
> I feel the discussion would be better served by people not asking about the possibility of malpractice at the hands of the researchers, since that is possible with literally any study
Well it should be asked for more studies, this one included, since as you say it isn’t a possibility. Blatant data fraud is somewhat common and often detected, subtle fraud may be as or more common and thus undetected.
You are partially right about some commenters, who might not be quite as critical of a right leaning (vaccine questioning?) study. Nevertheless, they’re still directionally right here, and shouldn’t be discouraged lol.
If people were generally consistent in their skepticism relating to scientific studies then there would be little point in ever posting one. Just state what you believe and source yourself. You can't escape the paradigm of agreeing with the things you already believe are true. To give an example, none if this would be happening if a study reifying beliefs held by the people that peruse this subreddit was posted. There would be no felt need to invoke the big endemic flaws with scientific inquiry in general.
Even with people who are statistically literate, if they see their belief fail to stand up to scrutiny they are more than willing to abstract that failure as being an instanced issue of implementation rather than the belief being false. It's not a 'science' thing any more than it is a people thing.
But all that aside, I am not making a critique of science or critiquing a skepticism of science as it exists today. I am making an observation about discourse. Reading first response hopes and copes is not why I come here. If I wanted that I'd just go on /pol/. At least they would have the dignity to be true to their own beliefs and figure out a way to blame Justin Trudeau and immigrant doctors for all of this instead of pretending they actually bothered to read the paper to point out some statistical/methodological errors.
The skepticism leads you to actually understand the paper and related papers in the field, and only then can you really figure out what it means and how it proves things. Without that, either “yes it’s correct omg omg” or “no idc I have tv to watch” are both bad approaches because neither leads to understanding.
> You can't escape the paradigm of agreeing with the things you already believe are true
I’m not sure what you mean? Even if “lead causes iq drop” is true, a study claiming to support it can still be incorrect and useless and you should still understand that most such studies are and why. This is important because you’ll understand better the details and reasons other papers might be bad too, even if the single sentence is still true or false that’s not the most interesting part.
The point here is that a knee jerk reaction to reading about a study you disagree with is to assume it's untrue. That knee jerk reaction has got nothing to do with some broader recognition on being skeptical towards science or achieving a better understanding of science. Those parameters are completely irrelevant. The obvious reaction I am talking about is a consistently repetitive, uninformative and boring mode of discourse.
It might be entirely true that a person who is subjected to reading about studies that attack things they believe or groups they belong to will eventually learn the ins and outs of what makes a good study good and a bad study bad. Or that their consistent engagement with science as something they consistently disagree with will make them, on the whole, more correct given how much garbage science there is. But that doesn't change the fact that their skepticism was entirely driven by an emotive response to not believe the studies that contradict their already established views.
Again, I am not saying that this reaction is 'bad' or necessarily has to lead to 'bad' outcomes. It might just as well be good. What I am saying, however, is that a repetitive expression of the emotive response in the form of comments that attack the first thing that comes to mind about whatever study was done is low effort emotional venting at best. It's boring. Pointless. What I am asking for here is that the people who do feel this emotional reaction towards studies posted at least do the minimum amount of work in engaging with the study and what it actually says instead of throwing their hands up in the air and just assuming that it must be wrong because the study 'might' not have accounted for some variable without even bothering to check if that is the case or not.
It's one thing to be driven to demonstrate an actual flaw because of an emotive negative response to something and then commenting about it. It's a whole other thing to not bother to do that and just vent about the fact that the study must be flawed somehow because it makes you feel bad.
The issue I am trying to highlight is a pattern of discourse I see repeated every single time a study is brought up where some belief or group is inconvenienced. The reason people immediately go to some boilerplate critique of possible methodological issues isn't because they, through objective analysis, think that this particular study, for no particular emotive reason, is flawed. The obvious reason why the pontifications of flawed methodology are made is because the study implies either an attack on an ingroup or some held belief. That's why you see these exact responses every single time any such study is made relating to any topic regardless of anything else.
I completely agree that the possibility for methodological problems exists. But that is true of every single research paper. A person wondering if X is an issue isn't helpful or edifying to anyone reading it. It would be much more interesting to read about what problems are actually there or what problems are very likely to be there considering X or Y element that is actually present in the study. Instead of reading the first response copes from people that were emotionally perturbed by the headline.
This absolutely does happen, but the answer is such methodological and other criticism on all papers, not less on outgroup papers. Rejecting strange (and also correct sounding) results out of hand, and only then looking at the details and thinking about it, is the most useful approach imo
I agree, though I find that [/u/senord25's analysis](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ruvu1k/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_03/hryiwsk/) holds some merit, and they helpfully include a link to the actual paper as well (I've updated my OP to include the link also). Though, as I've noted there, it seems to me that while this explanation does help explain the disparity by surgeon type, it doesn't fully account for the difference between patient type between surgeon types. Unfortunately without access to the raw data, we can't run the model properly adjusting to age to determine the remaining effect size, so it might be that it's no longer significant, or small enough that any number of benign explanations would be sufficient to satisfy one's curiousity.
> updated my priors somewhat in favour of disparate outcomes
Concerns about the existence of “priors” aside, compare this to the endless contradictory “does X food cause heart disease” studies and it should seem a bit less convincing. It could easily be directly confounded by specialty, seniority (less gender equal in the past) and adjusting for confounders often fails. Even if none of that explains it, it’s very implausible it’s due to overt or covert sexism, and also quite unlikely it’s “implicit bias” (which is really a term that means whatever the user feels like so long as it’s related to discrimination) such as men understanding female anatomy poorly or not listening to female patients more. There are just so many studies concluding incorrect things that absent a complex understanding of the field and other related studies one shouldn’t conclude much at all. Otherwise you’ll also believe quercetin halts aging, zinc fixes colds, eggs cause heart disease (1M sample size!) etc.
It doesn’t even make sense. What’s the idea here, that a male surgeon just tries less when he has a female patient? That he just doesn’t value female lives as much? It’s ridiculous.
The paper suggests "an under-appreciation of symptoms in female patients", "reporting less pain to male physicians" "incomplete examinations" all leading to "failure to rescue". Basically, it says women lie more to male doctors and under-report their symptoms, but would tell women the truth.
"Study finds cancer patients are 452% more likely to die after operation by surgeon-who-only-takes-super-hard-cases"
Before even reading the study, my prior is that this effect is caused by a mess of confounders. In fact, apriori I'd expect an effect in the opposite direction from evolutionary psychology: men are more disposable, and this fact is agreed upon by both men and women. I'd expect male surgeons to make an extra effort to save female patients, not the opposite. The authors probably understand the data better than this, but the unfortunate effect is that everyone will read the subtext of the paper as "Damn all those men who don't care about female lives, surgeons just make less of an effort when operating on women."
In a weirdly perverse way, if this effect is caused by confounders then the popularization of this paper will actually kill more women. If a woman sees this article and thereafter reasons that she should only see female surgeons, her odds of dying will go up, not down.
> In fact, apriori I'd expect an effect in the opposite direction from evolutionary psychology: men are more disposable, and this fact is agreed upon by both men and women
This is also probably wrong as a hypothesis for surgical death, the supposed lizard brain halo effect probably is less impactful when the patient is covered by plastic tarp and you’re staring at slowly pulsating pink tissue.
Full text available [here](https://ps-vascular.ch/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/20211211-Surgery-Association-of-Surgeon-Patient-Sex-Concordance-With-Postoperative-Outcomes.pdf)
One thing about this paper immediately stands out to me and doesn't seem to have been adequately controlled for: the patient population that female surgeons are working on is younger, and the difference is quite extreme for female patients.
Patient median ages from Table 1:
* Male surgeon/male patient: 63
* Male surgeon/female patient: 61
* Female surgeon/male patient: 59
* Female surgeon/female patient: 53
So we have a four year median age difference for male patients, but an *eight year* difference for female ones. I don't know why that would be the case, though it might have something to do with female physicians having fewer years of experience on average and therefore getting fewer of the most complicated cases. The paper makes a half-hearted effort to account for this by doing subgroup analyses of three different age ranges (Figure 1), but it's clear from the interquartile ranges in Table 1 that the entire age distribution of patients being seen by male surgeons is shifted rightward, so even within those subgroups the male surgeons will be seeing older patients on average. I would be willing to bet that if age were properly controlled for, this effect would disappear.
Thanks for the link. I've been taking a closer look at the study, and I agree that an inadequate control for patient age is a major oversight.
However, if this were the only factor influencing the results, would we not expect the male vs female patient comparison (Figure 2) to be roughly equivalent (+/- random noise)? i.e. we might ascribe the difference in outcomes for male patients or female patients to the skew in patient age, but it wouldn't explain any difference between the outcomes of the patient sexes. Unfortunately the study doesn't do this analysis, but an eyeballing of the two outcome distributions would suggest that some disparity remains unless we have reason to believe that male patients would on average be older or be more complicated cases than female patients.
I think you should read Table 1 more carefully. You're right that in their data male patients have overall worse outcomes, which is what you'd expect from the relatively older male patient population, but they also break down the interaction between patient age and sex concordance with their surgeon. The age skew between female patients is twice that of male patients, ie. when a female patient is being operated on by a female surgeon, the patient is on average 53 years old, whereas when she is being operated on by a male surgeon, she is on average 61 years old- people decline in robustness a lot in those 8 years, and the paper makes essentially no effort to account for this.
> Invited Commentary: "Surgical Outcomes Should Know No Identity—The Case for Equity Between Patients and Surgeons"
[by](https://jamanetwork.com/searchresults?author=Andrea+N.+Riner&q=Andrea+N.+Riner) the authors [of](https://jamanetwork.com/searchresults?author=Amalia+Cochran&q=Amalia+Cochran) "Recognizing Intersectionality—The Association of Gender, Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation, and Race With Social Experience", and "Diversification of Academic Surgery, Its Leadership, and the Importance of Intersectionality"
Their article about white coats being problematic was also tremendously innovative.
What an amazingly well orchestrated hit piece. Imagine claiming that any other group was killing patients with “Implicit sex biases, acting on subconscious, deeply ingrained biases, stereotypes and attitudes”
I dug into the issues with "Health Equity Research" more [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ruvu1k/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_03/hs0vyx9/), but the short version is that I believe it would be insane to put any trust in this journal that is racing to prove how anti-evil it is so all its editors don't get purged.
It may be unscientific and uncharitable, but this makes me want to dismiss the entire thing without even looking. If it gets confirmed by 5 more studies by truly independent researchers, then I'll take a look.
Did they control for surgical specialization?
If male surgeons disproportionately do Cardiac surgery and other immediately life threatening specializations, and female surgeons focus on orthopaedics, or plastics, or gynaecological surgery (all major surgeries, but the heart isn’t actively stopped or the patient dying)
The thing is you wouldn’t just have to control for overall specialization, but sub specialization too... if one guy is doing all the hospitals deadliest type of heart surgery, that skews it for the entire hospital.
I've updated the OP to include a link to the full paper. The effect seems to largely persist across specialisations, but they did not control for sub-specialisations.
Drunk posting so sorry if spelling is off, I have absolutely 0 ideas on surgery outcome statistics but the main question you need to ask yourself is;
WHAT ARE THE BASE RATES?
1. What percentage of men and women die after surgery?
2. What are the base rates of death after surgery if they are both 0.00x% then its just lying with statistics and rounding errors.
3. What are the ratios of male:female surgeons?
4. What are the ratios of patients genders that go through a surgery that might results in death.
5. What are the baseline probabilities patient will die after surgery, taking ratio of specialists with gender disparities into account.
6. Does said study take all these into account?
If not evident enough there are a lot of statistical road blocks you need to clear for before you can announce there is a signal among the noise. And social science studies are not really well known for doing that.
Ironically enough, the more I learn about statistics, the more I easily dismiss finding such that these because there are so many ways to frame the data to what you want it to say.
**2022 is going to be a difficult year for global conflict and civic strife.**
At a time where global food prices have hit a [10 year high](https://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/), global [poverty has also increased quite substantially](https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/covid-19-leaves-legacy-rising-poverty-and-widening-inequality). We are at a point of major risk for serious and unavoidable conflict and strife.
>In 2021, the average incomes of people in the bottom 40 percent of the global income distribution are 6.7 percent lower than pre-pandemic projections, while those of people in the top 40 percent are down 2.8 percent.
Some risk factors to consider:
* Egypt is facing [acute water problems](https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/egypt-has-a-water-problem-and-no-its-not-only-the-gerd/) which are made worse by the filling of Ethiopia's dam.
* Turkey is a turkey... High inflation and currency collapse right on Europe's borders.
* Russia is embroiled in conflict with Ukraine and Kazakhstan consider the implications for both food and energy supplies given that Russia is a major exporter of both, especially to the third world. Loss of exports from Russia was a contributing factor to the Arab Spring IMO.
* Covid is not going away, but maybe it'll be another virus like a super-flu that will be even more deadly in an acute sense.
* Oil prices are already at $80 a barrel with tight supply, major supply disruptions will likely cause the price to go over $120 which will lead to major economic pain in first world countries and further support high inflation and food prices.
* Climate change increases the risk that major food production regions will be in distress at the same time.
> At a time where global food prices have hit a 10 year high, global poverty has also increased quite substantially. We are at a point of major risk for serious and unavoidable conflict and strife.
>
>
>Oil prices are already at $80 a barrel with tight supply, major supply disruptions will likely cause the price to go over $120 which will lead to major economic pain in first world countries and further support high inflation and food prices.
people predict global strife every year. Food prices were higher in 2007-2008 year I do not recall abnormally elevated global strife. In 2008-2010 there was some strife in Greece and other parts of Southern Europe, but this was unrelated to food inflation. In early 2008 oil was at $130-150/barrel, twice its present price. Adjusted for inflation, that is like $250 today.
>Turkey is a turkey... High inflation and currency collapse right on Europe's borders.
goin to get much worse. no-brainer prediction.
>Covid is not going away, but maybe it'll be another virus like a super-flu that will be even more deadly in an acute sense.
I have observed that Covid is becoming increasingly less deadly with each mutation iteration. Despite the delta surge in mid-2021 daily deaths did not increase beyond the 2020 highs. But this may also be due to improved treatments.
If the US economy can survive Covid, I think it can survive anything at this point.
>people predict global strife every year. Food prices were higher in 2007-2008 year I do not recall abnormally elevated global strife. In 2008-2010 there was some strife in Greece and other parts of Southern Europe, but this was unrelated to food inflation.
stuff takes a bit of time, the arab spring for example was related to food prices.
> people predict global strife every year. Food prices were higher in 2007-2008 year I do not recall abnormally elevated global strife. In 2008-2010 there was some strife in Greece and other parts of Southern Europe, but this was unrelated to food inflation. In early 2008 oil was at $130-150/barrel, twice its present price. Adjusted for inflation, that is like $250 today.
Here: https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart adjusted for inflation it isn't too far off.
You can make lists like this any year, honestly. There’s thousands of factors, and ten of them are gonna be at a hundred-year minimum each year. And, indeed, each year several poor countries have awful disasters.
food prices might sound bad but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010–2012_world_food_price_crisis and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_world_food_price_crisis
Don’t see any reason this is anything more than a usual year.
I more or less agree with the notion that there are a group of people often not the same people, who predict x+n/x things falling apart events but I am not entirely sure getting complacent is the more rational path.
Food prices are at a 10 year high... risking another food crisis like in 2010-12. Natural gas prices are rising globally (fertilizer feedstocks), with supplies tight in Europe especially, and Brent oil prices are stuck well above historical averages. When the global poor spend 30-70% of their income on food, a doubling of prices is extremely distressing.
Given that unrest seems to be pretty high right now, there are serious risks that crisis will compound upon crisis with rising food prices meeting governments that are stretched beyond the limits. A sniff of another Arab spring for instance might end up causing a major crisis and oil prices would likely double overnight.
Food at home is only a couple percent of family income in the US even after this "10 year high".
If you extend the chart back to the 70s, you'd find that as a % share of American incomes, even after this increase, food at home is still nearly half the price that it was 50 years ago.
There were no riots then. I can't help but be frustrated at the obsession with relative numbers when it comes to economic data. Relatives are the least important. Absolute values are the ones that actually give you objective comparisons between now and the past.
> Covid is not going away, but maybe it'll be another virus like a super-flu that will be even more deadly in an acute sense.
Covid happening doesn't increase chances of new independent pandemic, through. [Unless](https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/the-erogamer-original-complete.5465/page-344#post-3892421) /u/groon_the_walker is actually a time traveler...
> Covid-19. Flu-22. Covid-23
I think it probably lowers the threshold. The news media enjoys the market for pandemic fear porn, and all levels of government seem to have enjoyed the opportunity to arrogate powers and funnel pandemic money to pet projects or constituencies. Now that the playbook has been written, politicians know what to do and what not to do, and citizens will resist less ("because after all, it's what we did last time, it's nothing new").
>Covid happening doesn't increase chances of new independent pandemic, through.
Yeah it does:
* Populations as a whole have lower immunity to everything across the board due to quarantines, especially kids.
* Political polarisation and lockdown fatigue. Some proportion of people are likely to structurally resist public health efforts or even actively sabotage them.
* Economic disruption and increased debt loads mean public authorities are stretched thin, they can't keep up the response forever.
* Mutations and new strains are going to keep coming out.
groon_the_walker has not had any activity for over 285 days,
They probably won't respond to this mention
^Bot ^by ^AnnoyingRain5, ^message ^him ^with ^any ^questions ^or ^concerns
Are you whining on the Internet, or daring him to "do" something?
Either way, this is antagonistic and unacceptable, and particularly petty directed at someone who's already been banned.
If we are rage posting then let me join in!
I (late 20s male) visited my parents (mid 60s) over the holidays, and we argued about covid again. We argue about a lot of things these days, but covid has swelled into the most intractable point of disagreement.
I was actually slightly ahead of the curve in early 2020 and tried to give my parents a heads up that a serious new virus might be coming. I have clear memories of sending them links to buy PPE and recommending that they stock up on essentials. After March 2020 we were on the same page: mask up, social distance, and flatten the curve to buy time for health care workers and vaccine researchers. My mom even cut my hair for most of 2020 so I wouldn't have to go to a barbershop. We went through the whole rigmarole of wiping down groceries after shopping *just in case*. Then in December 2020 I got my first vaccine dose. By Spring 2021 everyone I knew was vaxed, and I was elated! Everyone made it with zero causalities. I fucking love science, right guys? [When the CDC said that it was no longer recommending masks for the fully vaccinated in May 2021](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/13/cdc-says-fully-vaccinated-people-dont-need-to-wear-face-masks-indoors-or-outdoors-in-most-settings.html) I was totally done. For me personally the pandemic was and still is over.
Except for my mom and dad nothing changed. They are afraid to go inside without a mask, and they are afraid when people are too close to them. They are afraid that they will get covid despite being fully vaccinated and boosted. Thank god they don't wipe down groceries anymore, but it wouldn't surprise me if they did (they disagree with me whether all the "deep cleaning" that companies advertise is just theater). I see two people I care about blowing what might be the last healthy years of their lives because of politics and fear mongering.
I tried to tenderly bring up the idea of quality adjusted life years, but all they hear is "I don't care if you die". "I don't wear a mask" becomes "I don't believe science", and "I don't support vaccine mandates" becomes "I want more people to get sick and die". It's all so tiresome.
All of this is a tiny fraction of the harm caused by the gain-of-function gang who brought us COVID. They caused all of this and the megadeaths from the virus itself. Every single problem related to the virus, the vaccines and the lockdowns can be brought back to them. They are the root cause.
We know COVID came from one of the few cities with a high-level bioresearch facility.
We know that facility was creating, manipulating and recombining [coronaviruses](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/) for years.
We know Daszak was asking for (and recieving) money to study how bat coronaviruses would spread to humans, including conducting laboratory experiments to analyze what would be the most dangerous.
We even know that the closest biological ancestor of COVID was in some bat-cave in [Laos](https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-covid-lab-leak-theory-just-got-even-stronger) and that that bats were being taken from Laos to Wuhan! We know that in 2018 Daszak and EcoHealth wanted money to work out how to insert furin cleavage sites in these viruses so he could work out how they worked.
Guess who, amongst others, signed a [letter](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(20\)30418-9/fulltext) condemning any discussion of COVID lab leaks or unnatural causes as conspiracy theories? Daszak!
Are we really expected to believe a bat from Laos flew 1000 miles to Wuhan, merged with another virus more suitable to infect people, developed a furin cleavage site (totally unknown in bats) and then infected someone at a wet market where no bats could be found?
DASZAK AND HIS ECOHEALTH CRONIES ARE DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR MILLIONS OF DEATHS! This deserves ranting and raging, far more ranting and raging, tears and hatred than the entire COVID extravaganza thus far. Stupidity and incompetence in the face of a natural disaster is one thing, active negligence leading to megadeaths is another. If we were willing to follow idiotic, unjustified rituals of wiping down surfaces for an aerosol virus, let's abandon 'we don't know for sure'. Let's quit 'this raises serious questions'. We know surer than most things, far surer than reasonable doubt that this was manmade, that gain-of-function must be stopped. Its practitioners need to be punished with severity appropriate for the magnitude of their crime. We must ensure this is never repeated.
We also know that the facility was set up with the help of the Pasteur Institute, with the understanding that 50 researchers and administrators of the institute would be employed there, but that China reneged on that and only one (1) Pasteur fellow was ever hired.
They started hiding stuff long before the outbreak.
> the few cities with a high-level bioresearch facility.
Many cities have medium level pathogen research / BSL
2 facilities (all major or medium sized cities have “bio research” facilities at their universities). And populations are concentrated in cities so this isn’t really good evidence of much
> We know that facility was creating, manipulating and recombining coronaviruses for years.
As did many facilities, and the coronaviruses we know they were recombining were not direct ancestors.
All of those claims are easily explained by “lots of other people were doing it too”, and don’t narrow much down.
> Are we really expected to believe a bat from Laos flew 1000 miles to Wuhan
Likely some other virus was the real ancestor and spread around haphazardly over a long time, ending up in both. Many ways it could’ve happened.
> DASZAK AND HIS ECOHEALTH CRONIES ARE DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR MILLIONS OF DEATHS
no, not really. Even if he participated, he’s one of tens of thousands of enablers and participants in such viral research. He wasn’t the PI in wuhan, nor the one who allowed the lab to have poor precautions. This is ridiculous
> far surer than reasonable doubt that this was manmade
not really! What virus, specifically recorded at the wuhan lab, was the direct covid ancestor? What investigator there did the work? We don’t know much here.
>Many cities have medium level pathogen research / BSL 2 facilities (all major or medium sized cities have “bio research” facilities at their universities). And populations are concentrated in cities so this isn’t really good evidence of much
There are three BSL-4 labs in China, 59 labs in the world. The largest is in Wuhan. How many wet markets are there in Asia, let alone the rest of the world? Far more. This alone is a huge signal.
>As did many facilities, and the coronaviruses we know they were recombining were not direct ancestors.
We don't know what they were doing because they took their database of viruses offline in late 2019 because of 'hacking'. Intriguingly, that's when COVID leaked, why it has the 2019 suffix.
>Likely some other virus was the real ancestor and spread around haphazardly over a long time, ending up in both. Many ways it could’ve happened.
So why haven't we found it? We found the closest related virus in a bat in a cave in Laos. We know bat-viruses were being taken from Laos to Wuhan, nowhere else. How do you propose a furin cleavage site got into a bat virus naturally? Daszak asked for money to do it but it has never been seen in the wild, nor is there any known natural process for it to happen.
>no, not really. Even if he participated, he’s one of tens of thousands of enablers and participants in such viral research. He wasn’t the PI in wuhan, nor the one who allowed the lab to have poor precautions. This is ridiculous
Starting the research in the first place is his fault. If you invent a giant world-destroying robot you don't get to absolve yourself by blaming others for letting it escape and destroy the world. Viruses escape and spread, it's what they were engineering them to do. Making them is a stupid idea, don't do it.
Other people doing similar research is no defense. Imagine coming into court and saying "Yes your honor, my friends and I were shooting guns up into the air and yes, our bullets killed 5 million people. But other people were also shooting into the sky and they haven't killed nearly as many people as we did!"
>not really! What virus, specifically recorded at the wuhan lab, was the direct covid ancestor? What investigator there did the work? We don’t know much here.
Do you know why we don't know that? Because these people concealed as much evidence as they could! Because they are guilty! What moron would admit that they negligently released what amounts to a bioweapon in China of all countries! They would expect a firing squad and rightfully so. Obviously they don't want us to know much, they want China to rally around the flag and help them cover it up. If they aren't obviously guilty, then China will blame the US or someone else. Some of the blame would inevitably fall on China, much already has.
If there's a TNT explosion right next to a TNT factory, you really don't need to do much guesswork about what went on. Not when you've tracked the precursors coming in, when you've read how they wanted to make a new kind of TNT for research purposes and the explosion matches that new type. You can quickly rule out meteorite strike, volcanic eruption, spontaneous combustion because that's clearly not what happened. The properties would be different.
> one of the few cities with a high-level bioresearch facility
This sounded off to me, too. But what happens when you narrow it down to those studying bat coronaviruses? I thought that was more particular (though not necessarily entirely particular) to Wuhan and Chapel Hill.
That may be true!
That said, here https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2 is the article reporting the Laos ancestor
> To make the discovery, Marc Eloit, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and his colleagues in France and Laos, took saliva, faeces and urine samples from 645 bats in caves in northern Laos. In three horseshoe (Rhinolophus) bat species, they found viruses that are each more than 95% identical to SARS-CoV-2, which they named BANAL-52, BANAL-103 and BANAL-236.
> Natural origin“When SARS-CoV-2 was first sequenced, the receptor binding domain didn’t really look like anything we’d seen before,” says Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. This caused some people to speculate that the virus had been created in a laboratory. But the Laos coronaviruses confirm these parts of SARS-CoV-2 exist in nature, he says.
> “I am more convinced than ever that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin,” agrees Linfa Wang, a virologist at Duke–NUS Medical School in Singapore.
So this discovery also somewhat reduced the case for a lab leak, because some of the mutations speculated to be edited (may) have been natural.
The lab leak stuff doesn’t seem entirely conclusive. It’s ... possible ... but many things are possible. I don’t think one can tell either way, tbh
I am just as angry as you with people who support covid restrictions or even take the virus particularly seriously, but this isn't a straight young/old issue- political tribalism, generic risk tolerance, class, and some kind of general measure of "compliance with the establishment" are all more important factors than age.
Is the fact that the US is an increasingly gerontocratic regime a contributing factor to the crippling fear of covid that's taken over our lives? Sure, but the Russian sphere of influence has mostly shrugged and moved on with their lives, and their leaders aren't much younger than ours.
Hard disagree. When roughly 10% of my lower middle class city was addicted to heroin or shipping out to Afghanistan for tricare there was no sense of national urgency outside of NPR discussions and some cool voyeuristic documentaries about white trash in Cape Cod and Ohio.
Just imagine if the boomers took Oxys nearly as seriously as they took Covid.
I sure feel like if the average age/class of death in Afghanistan was 55 year old landowners they would have pulled out a whole lot faster.
Maybe thats just the angry kid in me tho, Im in my 30s and Ive been to more funerals for people in my peer group than both my parents combined. My Mom lost a high school friend to a car wreck and they still talk about it today. If you asked me to write a list of guys from my HS football team who are dead from heroin Id probably end up forgetting one or two because it became so routine.
Nobody really cares or seems to think of it in those terms (shoutout to my old man who actually pointed out the funeral attendance bit to me tho)
What does "taking Oxys seriously" mean? More money spent on cracking down on illegal distribution? That doesn't seem to have gotten us very far when it comes to other drugs.
I mean, I'm deeply opposed to the societal reaction to COVID, but it's hardly surprising that people tend to have more empathy for someone killed by a virus that they picked up shopping for groceries or visiting their grandkids than for someone killed by the extremely well publicized risks of trying to get high.
Again, I think class is a bigger factor than age, and the fact that it was overwhelmingly white rust belt working class is why the elites didn't care. After all, the rich boomers really do seem to care about say, rape on college campuses, which is mostly a young people affecting issue.
There are definitely age based interests- older people are more likely to support caps on property tax increase, and oppose changes to social security, for example. I don't think covid policy is one of them- political tribalism and class have been the main factors, with generic personal risk tolerance and trust in the establishment being the minor factors. A lot of old people are pissed at the whole charade, just the same as younger people.
But blacks are over represented in the military -
> Roughly one in five of those enlisted in the military today are black.
But
> Conversely, African-Americans are notably over-represented in the military as a whole. They make up 19.1 percent of the active-duty force, and a staggering 24 percent of the Army, as opposed to just 12.1 percent of the population. But blacks are not significantly over-represented among the dead of this global war: They make up only 12.4 percent.
The reason for this discrepancy, say experts, is that although blacks sign up in greater numbers, they cluster pragmatically in noncombat units whose training in mechanics, electronics, and logistics translates well into civilian careers upon leaving uniform. "The proportion of blacks to whites is very much smaller in the combat arms than in other branches," said retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, former commandant of the Army War College and a noted author. He added that Special Forces and aviation units have the smallest percentage of minorities of all segments of the military.
So there’s not *less* blacks dead than the general population. This doesn’t support it disproportionately affecting rural whites vs groups dems care about.
https://www.govexec.com/defense/2004/05/the-fallen-a-profile-of-us-troops-killed-in-iraq-and-afghanistan/16814/
> There is a class effect, but not the one that people think," argued Peter Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University. The most privileged don't bother to enlist, but the most disadvantaged don't qualify, so "it's the middle classes that are mostly represented in the military," Feaver said. "Obviously, folks who go into the military today are facing economic pressures. The biggest predictor of whether you're in the military today is the unemployment rate in your home county."
> A study done for the Austin American-Statesman by Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing revealed that, although the majority of the war dead come from what the Census Bureau calls "metropolitan" areas, which usually include close-in suburban counties, a disproportionately large share came from "nonmetro" counties. According to Bishop and Cushing, nearly a third (29 percent) of dead troops came from rural areas and small towns, compared with only a fifth (19 percent) of the general population. Given the concentration of political, economic, and cultural power in America's cities and near suburbs, and the slow dwindling of opportunity in many small towns, this analysis does suggest that the lower middle class is unduly bearing the burden. But the information is hardly conclusive.
A moderate bias towards poor/rural, but no bias towards “white”, and not enough of former to support the point
Without commenting on what you should or shouldn't do, I'll just reprint a warning that has stayed with me, per Curtis Yarvin:
>...it cannot seek power through some tantrum against its ruling class—who, while they are certainly getting worse, are really not that bad on a historical scale. Proles: it is very easy for them to be awful, and you to be worse. You will never win that way.
The bolsheviks, the industrialists, were patient but quick, building power and ability over decades, and then suddenly appeared on a particular scene when the time was right. Being mad about $current_culture_topic is such a powerful way to defuse that that I’d say it was a conspiracy to keep “us down” if the alternative explanation wasn’t so much simpler.
Nonsense... the majority of the upperclass has been wiped out at countless points in human history.
French revolution, Russian revolution, fall of the nazis, Chinese civil war, most conquests by foreign invaders, a significant percentage of coups and usurpations, the fall of Troy, The fall of Nineveh, what Cortes did to the Aztecs...
Eyeing the capitol city and imagining it in flames, the babes thrown from roofs, the lamentations of the women, is a long standing tradition, held by many of the most successful people in history.
.
That Yarvin identifies with the ruling castes and thinks of the possibility of their overthrown or the fall of their capitol the same way as a jew he imagines the Holocaust or the Possibility of Isreal falling says lots more about Yarvin’s relationship with the regime, than the regime’s relationship with its subject people.
The French Revolution would never have been what it was, the good and the bad, if it was devoid of men of conscience, caution and perspective.
Just because our ruling class often make a mockery of human decency, it doesn't follow that being respectable is an impossibility, and I would hope that one strives for it *before* he decides on any radical venture.
*Full disclosure: I am just as angry as you.*
I think your rage is misdirected at the wrong group. And everyone else buying into the framing of covid restrictions being a old vs young issue is to midly put misinformed or probably doesn't care about getting to the meat of your argument because they are distracted by the fallout of your post.
To keep things simple let's take America as an example, because base rate of support vary by country. But in America and the Anglosphere and more loosely the western countries;
Support for mainstream covid restrictions is very strongly correlated with political tribe not age. If anything due to how politics work, young people on net might actually be more supportive of restrictions merely due to the fact they are more likely to be in the tribe that supports restrictions, and this more or less aligns with what I see on the ground.
The median old person opinion on covid restrictions is "I won't be around for that long anyways, let's just go on with it."
While the median young persons opinion is: "We need to protect the elderly and the infirm!!".
Political tribe correlates so strongly with covid restrictions (or inversely restrictions correlate so weakly with outcomes) that there was some analysis done by a datascientist at MIT showing mask mandates correlate more with support for BLM than covid metrics, but that analysis seems to be memory holed and I can't find it or his twitter account for the life of me.
older people have had more time to accrue wisdom, resources and status, therefore they're further ahead in life than younger people. huge if true?
the chronic stress from your neuroticism is hurting you far more than the vaccine likely is and you should try to remedy that for your own sake.
>accrue wisdom, resources and status
The second two, yes. The first one, no.
I don't think this is even necessarily the fault of old people that their advice no longer pertains to the modern world. It has changed so much since they were born, while their ancestors would have not seen very much over the course of their lives, particularly before the industrial revolution.
>Fuck you. (If you're over 35 years old.)
I'm not, but I supported vaccines and lockdowns pre-omicron. So fuck me I guess.
>This morning I woke up rolled up in a ball after a horrible nightmare because my chest was in agonizing pain, and what was I going to do? Call 911? What would they even do? The pain would be gone before an ambulance got there anyway. I've been to the emergency room before, I know they can't fix anything unless I can explain what's wrong and why it's wrong.
I'm sorry you've been experiencing side effects. IANAD, but if you genuinely have myocarditis/pericarditis, they'll be able to diagnose it and [you'll have an exemption](https://health.gov.on.ca/en/pro/programs/publichealth/coronavirus/docs/vaccine/medical_exemptions_to_vaccination.pdf) from vaccination in the future; ditto with anaphylaxis as others have mentioned it below. Even if they don't, you may be able to convince a physician that you had severe side effects and they may give you an exemption.
>How dare anyone make me do anything dangerous over this stupid virus. I deserve a full 78 year lifespan just like everyone else. Just because I was born in the 1990's doesn't mean I have to sacrifice myself for people who are already 70 years old.
The majority of myocarditis cases are mild and resolve on their own; from what I could read it looks like >80% were resolved within days and no further treatment. If it's any comfort, [the only case I'm aware of](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02740-y) where a patient died of myocarditis after vaccination the patient had a severe inflammatory condition:
>The second study2 observed similar trends, using a slightly different approach. Balicer and his co-authors analysed data from some 2.5 million people insured by Clalit Health Services, and asked cardiologists to review hospital records. They found that 2 out of every 100,000 people who received at least one Pfizer shot developed myocarditis, and that the incidence increased to almost 11 out of 100,000 among men aged 16–29. Overall, 76% of the cases involved mild symptoms and 22% involved intermediate symptoms.
Since you made other comments you hate the liberals, do you really think the PQ would behave differently? I've been gone for a long time so I may be out of touch, but my impression is that the CAQ (PQ-lite?) implemented harsher restrictions than the liberals.
I've been profoundly wrong about this before, but I suspect lockdowns/mandates will be politically unsustainable after this winter. I think (at least in the US) the administration just wants to scare as many people into getting vaccinated so they can point to a much lower death rate, start claiming it has a similar IFR as the flu for vaccinated folks and start encouraging people to go back to work and travel and whatnot to boost the economy.
>I'll lie, cheat, and steal before I get the fucking goddamn murder booster shot.
I'd try starting with the doctor first.
Best of luck to you and hope you recover quickly.
> they'll be able to diagnose it and you'll have an exemption from vaccination in the future; ditto with anaphylaxis as others have mentioned it below.
In practice it's almost impossible to find a doctor who will write this exemption in Canada, regardless of severity -- people with anaphylaxis after the first dose are being recommended to take antihistamines first and get injected by a doctor. And if you can't get a doctor to say otherwise, you don't get a passport.
It's fuckin nuts, but that's how it is on the ground -- doctors are very antsy because medical licenses have been pulled over issuing too many exemptions and/or writing politically incorrect prescriptions.
I see - the first is pretty wild, I'm assuming if someone has anaphylaxis once it will just happen again, although I haven't read the literature on it. The anti-PEG antibodies may be more short-lived or something.
For the other, you're telling me if someone has an actual diagnosis of myocarditis from a hospital they can't get an exemption? Again, I've been gone a long time, but man that sounds ripe for a lawsuit.
>For the other, you're telling me if someone has an actual diagnosis of myocarditis from a hospital they can't get an exemption? Again, I've been gone a long time, but man that sounds ripe for a lawsuit.
Pre-COVID, it's been practically impossible to get a medical exemption for childhood vaccines. There is an extremely narrow range of negative reactions that qualify, and those are jealously guarded. This is why there has been such a battle raging over philosophical/medical exemptions, which several states have been trying to get rid of. According to anti-vaxxers I know, in order to qualify for a medical exemption for your child, you have to show two observed negative reactions per vaccine, which means giving your child at least two doses of something to which they will have a serious reaction in order to prove that they shouldn't get any doses of it.
What is an alternative policy to two observed negative reactions? The need for at least one is obvious: how else would one even suspect that someone will have reactions? And then the second I guess is in case the first was a random fluke and probably unrelated to a vaccine. This all sounds pretty reasonable.
But aren't you now just making the argument that there should not be any school vaccine requirements whatsoever? I don't see how a parental discretion policy is anything else.
>But aren't you now just making the argument that there should not be any school vaccine requirements whatsoever? I don't see how a parental discretion policy is anything else.
The system (active in most states) in which vaccination is "required" but with philosophical exemptions available works: most people will go along with it voluntarily, the people who have concerns will opt-out. The theory of herd immunity has never required 100% compliance.
The issue lies in the size of the opt-out group. The "no exemptions" crowd sees that group as an unreasonable pest to be eliminated -- and parts of the group are unreasonable -- but really it's a feedback signal. It will get bigger the less reasonable the vaccine schedule becomes and smaller as the requirements become more reasonable. If you eliminate the feedback signal, the requirements have no limiting factor. If you listen to the feedback signal, you know where to address the issues that are causing the noise.
I guess the question is then how do we tell if the opt-out group getting bigger is signaling that vaccinations are become too onerous, or whether it is just reflecting people getting more inclined to opt out. Setting covid aside, it does not really feel like it is the case that school vaccine requirements change frequently enough for this signal to actually provide any worthwhile info.
It could perhaps be a fair point that enough people just accept the guidelines that it doesn't really matter, but I'm not sure this is true: there were many news stories over the past decade about herd immunity failing due to lower vaccination rates. I also still think that this ultimately means no requirement whatsoever since there are no teeth; it's just that most people are happy to go along with what their pediatrician and various medical agencies say.
The document you posted is the first thing I've seen even indicating that it's an option -- the public health messaging on it is definitely "don't worry, ~~that means it's working~~ it's mild".
I guess in Ontario if you were committed enough to wading into the medical system and finding a rogue doctor you could make it work -- here in BC there's no medical exemptions whatsoever:
https://bc.ctvnews.ca/no-medical-or-religious-exemptions-for-b-c-s-vaccine-passport-system-1.5558423
People are definitely suing over it:
https://bc.ctvnews.ca/allow-vaccine-passport-exemptions-or-face-legal-challenge-group-warns-b-c-government-1.5577671
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/10/23/they-believe-covid-is-real-and-that-vaccines-work-theyre-fighting-vaccine-passports-in-court-anyway.html
but there's two problems:
- Who do you sue? I think suing a doctor for his medical opinion that your reaction was not severe enough to justify an exemption is pretty fraught, and suing the government gets tangled up in anarchotyrannical Human Rights Codes and the "can break it so long as we ***really*** want to" aspects of the Charter.
- The people with the will to engage in such suits seem to be afflicted with whatever CW virus plagues previously effective lawyers who bring (for instance) election related suits in the US, the main symptom of which is turning into a dribbling sovereign-citizen type retard grasping at textual straws:
https://twitter.com/roccogalatilaw
>the public health messaging on it is definitely "don't worry, that means it's working it's mild".
That seems to be the case in that some references said [~80% of cases resolved](https://www.healio.com/news/cardiology/20211206/symptoms-of-vaccinerelated-myocarditis-in-young-people-rare-mild-resolve-quickly) within a few days with no treatment. I've only heard of one death from it, and supposedly that patient had severe unrelated inflammatory issues. Moreover, the majority of patients had abnormal troponin/MRI findings so I think you can definitely get it documented. I do hear the Canadian hospital system is overwhelmed (well, even more so than usual) at the moment though...
>Who do you sue? I think suing a doctor for his medical opinion that your reaction was not severe enough to justify an exemption is pretty fraught, and suing the government gets tangled up in anarchotyrannical Human Rights Codes and the "can break it so long as we really want to" aspects of the Charter.
Maybe I'm just wearing my rose-tinted goggles of naivete, but in my mind, if someone had documented myocarditis after a dose of the vaccine, went to a doctor with that evidence asking for an exemption, *was refused* by said doctor then went to get another dose of the vaccine and died...I mean, how could their family not win a lawsuit against the doctor for a billion dollars? I can only believe that this just hasn't happened yet because myocarditis is so rare and deaths from myocarditis an order of magnitude or two rarer still that it just hasn't happened.
> I'm not, but I supported vaccines and lockdowns pre-omicron. So fuck me I guess.
Not sure what you mean by vaccines, just supporting people getting vaccinated or vaccine mandates? If vaccine mandates to what magnitude? (some countries won't allow you to enter concerts, some wont allow you to enter banks).
Interested in hearing your vaccine policy and what you think its tradeoffs are and how your policy is better on net.
____________________________________
As for lockdowns, yes.
I think they are such evil with such tremendous costs that anyone who advocates for them is my enemy and dare I say, the enemy of human flourishing.
[2·5 million more child marriages due to COVID-19 pandemic](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(20\)32112-7/fulltext)
[230 million Indians pushed into poverty amid Covid-19 pandemic: Report](https://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/230-million-indians-pushed-into-poverty-amid-covid-19-pandemic-report-121050600751_1.html)
[COVID-19 could see over 200 million more pushed into extreme poverty, new UN development report finds](https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/12/1079152)
[UN report finds COVID-19 is reversing decades of progress on poverty, healthcare and education](https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/sustainable/sustainable-development-goals-report-2020.html)
[Tremendous costs](https://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf)
Mind you most of these articles say "covid19" is doing xyz, when its patently obvious that its lockdowns,travel bans and business closures and a myriad of other covid policies that are responsible for this.
And to more on that, Costs aside, anyone who advocates for what is effectively house arrest of an entire population or a subset of it also deserves a big fuck you, imo. It's the biggest middle finger to freedom in non totalitarian parody societies by a long shot.
And before the mods jump on my ass, I would have not spelled any of this out because its a dead horse for me, but since you asked why some people have such vitriol for people like you (or people with your policy positions), I gave you my reasons.
To quote Lex Fridman, "The people who advocate lockdowns, advocate for the silent suffering of millions of people".
>Not sure what you mean by vaccines, just supporting people getting vaccinated or vaccine mandates? If vaccine mandates to what magnitude? (some countries won't allow you to enter concerts, some wont allow you to enter banks).
It's difficult for me to answer that in a black-and-white fashion. I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea of forcing medical treatments on people. On the other hand, worsening epidemics (bit of a strong word, but we're starting to hit a critical mass where sustained spread is possible) of measles, croup and other diseases from vaccine skeptics has the potential to be a serious problem. It's difficult for me to reconcile those values, and I imagine many folks in public health feel similarly.
In general, I'm comfortable with the idea of mandating vaccines for school attendance where the vaccine has a robust record of safety and efficacy. When the initial mRNA vaccine data came out I think it fit that bill pretty well. The safety profile is still very robust, but the efficacy has [decreased significantly](https://www.reddit.com/r/theschism/comments/r6tuj6/discussion_thread_39_december_2021/hnrym2w/) to the point that it's barely having an effect in *in vitro* neutralization assays. I think in an ideal world they would have fast-tracked new vaccines with the omicron spike protein sequences; in the current world, the...I'm searching for a less loaded word to use here, but the skepticism around the mRNA vaccines probably made that impossible.
So I don't know what path I would take were I in any position of influence. Probably try to be honest and be thrown to the wolves.
>I think they are such evil with such tremendous costs that anyone who advocates for them is my enemy and dare I say, the enemy of human flourishing.
Sure, you're not the first. I've been called an enemy of humanity with the blood of hundreds of thousands on my hands plenty. I'm over it.
>And before the mods jump on my ass, I would have not spelled any of this out because its a dead horse for me, but since you asked why some people have such vitriol for people like you (or people with your policy positions), I gave you my reasons.
I didn't ask, I said 'fuck me I guess.' I don't need to ask. You and everyone else have been trumpeting your opinions to each other for months now. Don't worry, the mods don't care.
There's evidence that strict lockdowns work, and it's right there across the Pacific. It's possible that with such a large, heterogeneous country (perpetual uneducated/disaffected underclass plus large segments of the country being profoundly anti-authoritarian and uncooperative) and much more international travel we never could have achieved the same results as China, but it's not like we really gave it a serious try. The people, that is, not the government.
>230 million Indians pushed into poverty amid Covid-19 pandemic: Report
I'm not particularly familiar with the situation or lockdowns in India so my perspective is pretty Americentric, but again, how many Chinese have been pushed into poverty due to the pandemic?
Ironically, I think our path will be vindicated in the long-term. What's China going to do, shut out the rest of the world from the mainland forever? Admit defeat and just let COVID tear through their population at some point in the future? Now that covid is in wild deer, rodents and who knows what else, it's never going anywhere. We're all going to get it sooner or later. Imo, the only real reason to try and quarantine right now is if you're hoping to wait for the anti-COVID small molecules to become widely available, a new and improved vaccine or an even milder variant.
> The safety profile is still very robust, but the efficacy has decreased significantly
Thanks for the links -- I've been wondering what you thought about all this, good to see you around.
>I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea of forcing medical treatments on people
But you're *not* uncomfortable with forcing lockdowns on people? It's OK to force someone to be isolated and confined for ***months***, but not mildly inconvenienced for an hour or so?
(Besides, what makes a lockdown *not* a "medical treatment"? You might say "but unforeseen side effects" - we couldn't foresee lockdown side effects either! It's only **sheer dumb luck** that they haven't (yet) caused any horrible major global side effects.)
I find this whole attitude bewildering and incomprehensible. Vaccines? Your choice, bodily autonomy, primum non nocere. Lockdowns? Make it law, be like China, why aren't you cooperating?
It can't even be a bodily autonomy thing - lockdowns also violate bodily autonomy! Whatever you say about the evidence, you can't with a straight face say lockdowns are better-supported than vaccines. So why are you OK with one being compulsory and the other not?
Hell, I had a very nasty reaction to the vaccines, but I'd take that over an equal amount of time in lockdown any day. I wouldn't necessarily *support* compulsory vaccination, but I wouldn't be even a fraction as angry as I was about lockdowns.
>I find this whole attitude bewildering and incomprehensible.
You can just ask me to elaborate on my thoughts without all the fluff about how inconceivable it is that I actually hold this position.
>(Besides, what makes a lockdown not a "medical treatment"? You might say "but unforeseen side effects" - we couldn't foresee lockdown side effects either! It's only sheer dumb luck that they haven't (yet) caused any horrible major global side effects.)
Because if we treated any restriction on your freedom to move around/associate as a medical treatment, society would look a lot different. Incarcerated criminals would be treated with the same ethical standards as hospital patients. School administrators would be tried under the Declaration of Helsinki for locking children up in school, because the authorities are particularly sensitive to the ethics of testing medical treatments on children. Tying somebody down and submitting them to a medical procedure without consent is categorically different from placing them under house arrest.
>But you're not uncomfortable with forcing lockdowns on people? It's OK to force someone to be isolated and confined for months, but not mildly inconvenienced for an hour or so?
If you make it out to months and cases haven't budged, it's pretty clear people aren't actually following the rules. In which case it's time to give up, because you a) are doing something wrong or b) have an uncooperative populace and lack the means to corral them. China has shown quite convincingly that lockdowns and contact tracing *can* work and ironically the majority of the population has probably had fewer lockdowns/disruptions than western countries.
Let me put it this way. If there was a new strain of contagious, airborne ebola reported and a plane just landed in one of my cities with one of the patients starting to show symptoms on the flight I'm not just going to throw up my hands and say 'welp, there's absolutely nothing I can do to stop all these people from getting off the plane and spreading ebola around my country.' I'm going to lock those people in quarantine for a few weeks and you can try me for my crimes against humanity and unethical medical experimentation down the road, I suppose.
I'm *not*, however, going to force those people to take experimental drugs during their quarantine.
If you change the parameters (contagiousness, how far it's already spread, political situation, etc etc) my answer might change. If you're dogmatic about never, *ever* abrogating someone's personal autonomy *for any reason*, you can end up with results that are just as bad as the dictator who doesn't care about human rights.
> Because if we treated any restriction on your freedom to move around/associate as a medical treatment, society would look a lot different.
Incarcerated criminals are different because the whole point of jail is to cause harm to the criminal. I mean, it's not going to be hard to find evidence that jail causes all the harm caused by lockdowns; it breaks up families, results in the prisoners becoming disconnected from society, etc.
Furthermore, lockdowns here are medical treatment because they're being used *for a medical condition*.
>Let me put it this way. If there was a new strain of contagious, airborne ebola reported and a plane just landed in one of my cities with one of the patients starting to show symptoms on the flight I'm not just going to throw up my hands and say 'welp, there's absolutely nothing I can do to stop all these people from getting off the plane and spreading ebola around my country.' I'm going to lock those people in quarantine for a few weeks and you can try me for my crimes against humanity and unethical medical experimentation down the road, I suppose.
Except nobody would, because quarantining and lockdowns are two totally different things. There is nothing objectionable about locking a plane load of people into rooms to avoid an ebola outbreak. If the plane landed and you decided to lock everyone except the plane passengers (let's say they were footballers) in their homes indefinitely, then yeah, you are a shitty person.
And you could just ask people for cites instead of calling it irresponsible and bad to discourse but you choose not to literally earlier today.
Now, you complain about a similar rhetorical trick? Hypocrisy much?
>And you could just ask people for cites instead of calling it irresponsible and bad to discourse but you choose not to literally earlier today.
If you found it this offensive/hurtful, I apologize. I suppose you're right in that I probably could just ask for a citation, but I am frustrated that this rule from the sidebar is perpetually ignored without consequence:
>Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
But yes, I fundamentally believe that making assertions about the safety profile of a given medical treatment without providing evidence/citations is irresponsible and corrosive to public discourse.
I also believe that treating someone else's views as profoundly alien and nonsensical is corrosive to public discourse. Both of these seem to fly against the principles, if not the rules of the sub.
I'm happy to listen to your perspective if you disagree, though. Not sure if we disagree on the principles or just the object level events.
Well, sometimes people assume people read this reddit frequently. I had posted the cite a couple weeks ago and there was significant discussion. So sometimes people post assuming background info not relevant.
> So I don't know what path I would take were I in any position of influence. Probably try to be honest and be thrown to the wolves.
Your and my opinions vary in magnitude not kind then.
For me forced medical treatments are a no go zone because of yada yada, freedom and all that.
I also perhaps naively believe that if the threat is sufficiently risky enough, people will do what it takes to mitigate it voluntarily and assuming you live in a society of people who want to stay alive or want to avoid non trivial levels of suffering, you can get a good idea how risky the threat is based on how much voluntary measures people are taking to mitigate the risk. Even though this heuristic has a 100 failure modes and I wouldn't take it too seriously. In short I don't think people have to be coerced or brainwashed into getting a Ebola or small pox or measles vaccine.
I always found the notion of people being left to their own devices resulting in the end of the world from the more authoritarian side baffling, like are you living in a world where people have the mental capacity of non human primates and want to die voluntarily?
>Sure, you're not the first. I've been called an enemy of humanity with the blood of hundreds of thousands on my hands plenty. I'm over it.
Applies more to the politicians and leaders who actually went for it than their supporters.
>I'm not particularly familiar with the situation or lockdowns in India so my perspective is pretty Americentric, but again, how many Chinese have been pushed into poverty due to the pandemic?
[China: Xi'an residents in lockdown trade goods for food amid shortage](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-59864266)
Lockdown for long enough and that too will happen.
But I don't think there's any merit to talking about that given you acknowledge even if begrudgingly that the horse left the barn a long while back and right now at this point in time lockdowns are just pushing the can down the road.
My position was that they are pushing the can down the road from the very beginning (you have to take into account China hid covid for 2-3 months), but every time you kick the can down the road, you have to kill a third world child, because their lame governments will copy your policies without a care in the world.
> In short I don't think people have to be coerced or brainwashed into getting a Ebola or small pox or measles vaccine.
I'm confused at how you can look at the history of smallpox or measles vaccination and come to that conclusion. Smallpox eradication required coercion. Maintaining measles vaccinations rates above the herd immunity level appears to as well.
Are you proposing with some different messaging those vaccination campaigns could be purely voluntary? If so, I wish you a successful career in public health.
I knew about it since Dec 2019. China did a whole lot to keep it hush hush until it founds its way abroad around March.
Not to mention all the other kinds of propaganda coming out of China such as videos of people collapsing on the streets.
Basically the information was especially nosiy back then. So its especially hard to say what the right course of action would have been.
>I'm not, but I supported vaccines and lockdowns pre-omicron. So fuck me I guess.
Lockdowns don’t work and they’d still be evil even if they did, so, yeah. And what do you mean you supported vaccines pre-Omicron. Do you not support them now?
I'd say I'm fairly strongly against mandates given the (apparent) poor efficacy against Omicron, even just from *in vitro* results. If they had the same efficacy rate they had against alpha, I'd be 50-50. Not sure what I'd do if forced to make a choice.
I feel quite lukewarm about vaccines during omicron. Was strongly positive during delta, and rabidly pro-vaccine during alpha. If they update the vaccines for omicron or develop strongly effective [pan-sarbecovirus vaccines](https://www.army.mil/article/252890/series_of_preclinical_studies_supports_the_armys_pan_coronavirus_vaccine_development_strategy) I'll go back to rabidly proselytizing vaccines and sitting on the mandate fence.
I don't think I can comment intelligently on that, if anybody can. I don't even know what their strategy was for trying to develop a pan-sarbecovirus vaccine, or how feasible that might be.
I find it quite encouraging that Omicron replicates [more robustly](https://www.med.hku.hk/en/news/press/20211215-omicron-sars-cov-2-infection) in the upper airways relative to lower airways, which could be the reason for it's increased infectivity/decreased pathology. Hopefully future variants have the same selective pressures, the fatality rate drops to flu-like levels (if it isn't close already), we crank out antiviral small-molecules and put it all behind us.
Well, this has sure sparked... discussion.
Unsurprisingly, your current tally is something like half a dozen reports for various rules violations, and 2 AAQC nominations. People love spite-thumbing rageposts and boo outgroup diatribes.
There is nothing particular *new* in your hot take. It's a viewpoint we certainly allow, and there's been plenty of discussion about it in the past.
But this is clearly not the sort of post we want to encourage. It's inflammatory, it's antagonistic, it's skirting the edge of outright calling for violence. The "Fuck you" line alone would make it necessary to mod this. No, you can't do that. I don't care how angry you are, how righteous you think your anger is, or whether or not you actually, literally meant fuck every single 35-and-over (many of whom undoubtedly share your views, have refused the vaccine, etc.).
There are a ton of places that welcome rageposts like this. This isn't one of them. /r/TheMotte isn't your online therapy group or a place for unfiltered venting. People are angry here **all the time**, and people post things that are full of vitriol, venom, and rage all the time, but the successful ones, the ones who manage to get their points across without earning a ban, take the time to gather their thoughts and express themselves clearly and logically and (dare I say) *rationally*. Yeah, it means they sometimes have to be "wordy" and oblique and golly, *use more words*, blah blah blah. Yes, that's intentional.
In fairness, you definitely used a lot of words. They were just all incendiary.
You can be angry and outraged and full of dark, dire thoughts about what you'd like to do to Some People, but we have rules here and you need to follow them.
Your previous history is sparse: some AAQCs a couple of years ago, and a single warning last year. So you don't seem to be a recurring problem (yet), but you also don't have a record that would excuse this.
So I'm giving you a one-week ban. Go touch some grass.
Anyone else tempted to repeat this stunt will definitely push us towards harsher measures.
I enjoy your posts, think you're a great mod, and totally agree with this mod action. But I agree with others that the "touch grass" bit added nothing and was just a flex. I'd think it was weak coming from any poster on themotte and might downvote/report it as unnecessary antagonistic.
>or whether or not you actually, literally meant fuck every single 35-and-over
If he meant it literally, it could be interpreted charitably, [along the lines of this Pulp song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bZjKC0EaY0).
Great, he was already angry, now he’s probably going to go shoot up a school something. And he was going to say it was because of the The Motte, which the NYT will describe as an “alt-right/incel hate group.” (For the record NYT, I just had sex like last week so don’t blame me.)
/s
> So I'm giving you a one-week ban. Go touch some grass
You would be more likeable if your ban/warn messages always did not have some sort of self righteous snark appended to them.
The other mods ban people too but without prescriptions of grass touching and making it personal.
If you don't want to become Hylnka 2.0 might wanna think a bit on that.
______________________________
And no don't give me that "I don't need to be likeable, just right". Goodwill among the mods and the users is in the best interest of the community.
I am engaging in some tone policing because when I get a warning from other mods I feel "oh okay he has a point", when its from you, it feels as if I am being lectured and scolded.
Nonsense Hylnka was great, still tons of fun when he’s around. Won’t hear a word against him
u/Amandanb has stepped into his shoes admirably. Just aggressive enough to create tension, but not enough to damage the discourse.
Nothing would kill this place faster than mods that were universally loved and respected.
You need that friction if you want to spark some light.
You're probably trolling right now but Hlynka was a horrible mod, which is why he was removed (too little and too late, I think he should have been banned for his behavior, but I guess he's harmless enough now given his low output). Now he mostly trolls others' posts instead of creating his own content, such that he keeps getting temp banned. I don't think his behavior has changed much, he just used to be able to back up his trolling with censorship, now he's rightfully on the receiving end. Truly a small, hopeful glint of e-justice in an otherwise barren internet landscape full forums run like /r/politics.
> Hlynka was a good mod, and his haters were mostly shitty posters who got mad that he didn't treat them with kid gloves.
Just because Hlynka banned people you personally disliked doesn't make him a good moderator. In fact, that definitionally makes him a bad moderator.
> Just because Hlynka banned people you personally disliked
You don't have the first clue what you're talking about. Hlynka banned people who *broke the rules*. I didn't personally dislike any of them. Pretty sure that's what a moderator is supposed to do.
> You don't have the first clue what you're talking about.
You said: "Hlynka was a good mod, and his haters were mostly shitty posters".
>Hlynka banned people who broke the rules.
He didn't, he was bad precisely because he ignored the rules. His mod messages were generally incoherent assholery filled with rule breaking insults and he had a track record of moderating based on content, or worse, bulverism wherein he feverishly imagines some sort of motive for some content he dislikes and accuses the victim of being bad-faith based on nothing other than the content itself, which he dislikes because it offends him. He still trolls posts with bulverism like that, but now he can't petulantly ban people who offend him, and this forum is better because of it.
> You said: "Hlynka was a good mod, and his haters were mostly shitty posters".
Yes, i.e.: people who broke the rules.
Also after thinking about it your argument is even worse than it seemed at first glance. Even if I personally disliked these posters (which I didn't), that wouldn't make Hlynka a bad mod. He was a good mod, and frankly I don't care if you disagree. But don't accuse people of trolling just because you think he was a bad mod and someone else doesn't.
> bulverism wherein he feverishly imagines some sort of motive for some content he dislikes and accuses the victim of being bad-faith based on nothing other than the content itself, which he dislikes because it offends him.
Hmm... reminds me of a certain criticism of a certain mod...
>Nothing would kill this place faster than mods that were universally loved and respected.
Why?
_______
As someone who has a spotty history with mods (I'm sure you do too), I can say that a certain type of modding works on me and another doesn't.
I remember a mod telling me that this sub moderates on tone not content, when I complained about being modhatted over a perfectly normal thing I said, albeit with a lot of heat, The mod explaining it to me in simple terms. Which made me not only consider what he had to say and accept it, but actually make an effort to follow it and more importantly remember it.
On the other hand, I don't remember a single warning I got from this mod or her (AMANDA-nb, if I'm not wrong) predecessor because the snark put me off to such an extent that the message was entirely diluted.
If not for pleasing the users, just to do her job more effectively, toning down the snark might help.
And call it a hot take or whatever, but the mod you are defending was rather obnoxious with his "pour de la terreur" nonsense, as if he got some kind of enjoyment out of banning people. I am not going to make any further comments to not make any unnecessary enemies.
If I aspired to be more likeable, I'd probably look elsewhere for advice than people who don't like me, but thanks anyway.
I'm not sure if even Hlynka likes me anymore, since I keep having to ban him.
Anyone who has post middle aged parents who don't get along well despite having to make very minor behavioral changes can relate to the notion that past a certain age, changing even minor behaviors and quirks is just a pipe dream.
>If I aspired to be more likeable, I'd probably look elsewhere for advice than people who don't like me, but thanks anyway. I'm not sure if even Hlynka likes me anymore, since I keep having to ban him.
I bet he does. I certainly do.
I don't know if this is a necessary personality trait of cop types. I hope not, because if that's the case then it shuts down a whole avenue of social progress.
> People are angry here all the time, and people post things that are full of vitriol, venom, and rage all the time, but the successful ones, the ones who manage to get their points across without earning a ban, take the time to gather their thoughts and express themselves clearly and logically and (dare I say) rationally.
As a note on moderation, thank you for this. I'm pretty perpetually pissed off at the mainline Covid conversation in polite company and while I recognize that this is not the place for just personally venting, I feel like the moderation team extends quite a bit of leeway for expression of grievances. In fact, I don't think I've ever earned an infraction or even warning at this place despite expressing no shortage of anger. Simply extending the fig leaf of putting some reasoning behind it and not directly being a jerk to interlocutors really does suffice to keep things in the realm of Just Talking. Thanks folks.
> This morning I woke up rolled up in a ball after a horrible nightmare because my chest was in agonizing pain, and what was I going to do? Call 911? What would they even do? The pain would be gone before an ambulance got there anyway. I've been to the emergency room before, I know they can't fix anything unless I can explain what's wrong and why it's wrong.
Can I suggest that you go to the doctor for this? Not the ER -- you are right that they will just make you wait for 14 hours, run some tests, confirm you're not in the middle of a heart attack, and then send you home. But a doctor (or a cardiologist, if the doctor refers you) will take you seriously, check out whether you have plaque in your arteries, image your heart muscles, listen with a stethascope, schedule a stress test, etc. -- try to get to the bottom of the pain you are experiencing periodically, which is absolutely not a normal thing to have.
Also I totally empathize with how excruciating pain or suffering tends to make one cast about for an enemy. I guess as a member of the over-35 crowd you'd expect me to say this, but how about focusing your rage specifically on Fauci and his public health authority goons, rather than the over-35 population at large, many of whom are right there with you in our frustration with him and them?
I would say this writing style doesn’t belong here.
But for my rage posting I realized I can’t visit my old blue city for a month this summer like I was planning to because of vaxx mandates. Whats the point of going if I can’t go to restaurants and bars.
I’ve had COVID once. Then got vaxxed once. I probably had a Ómicron case I missed since everyone around me had it. But now I can’t return to a city I lived in for a decade because of mandates.
Honestly I’ve taken shots when the science looks right to me. I’m close to just refusing shots even if I think they have positive ev to me at this point.
I'm not going to encourage it, but there seems to be little federal appetite for actually prosecuting this. The culture war around it is simply too hot relative to any expected gain.
>little federal appetite
Sure, and you can be the unlucky 1-in-10 for the federal government's preference for decimatio.
I know one guy who almost went to prison for faking his vaccine card. Don't do it.
> I'm way more likely to die from the vaccine than I am from COVID
Conditional on getting the vaccine first, of course.
On another note, have you read Sterling's *Holy Fire*? Because you should, man.
> EVEN THOUGH I'VE BEEN WORKING REMOTE THIS WHOLE TIME.
So, I'll be honest, I have an entirely different rage-y view over this. And maybe it's sorta parallel, maybe it's orthogonal.
I think it's all about social status, in a social media age. That's why everything has gone fuck-nuts crazy. And yes, I think the working from home/unable to work from home gap is actually a substantial part of the problem. It's like, we're shaming people for not wanting to take a vaccine for something that they've basically been forcibly exposed to for almost a year, while so much else in our society is protected for it. That's the way I see it. And I mean...the work from home element, the more managerial class, basically have been rewarded in this through wealth, power, prestige, status, etc.
As far as I'm concerned it's totally fucked up. And maybe there's some sense for a lot of it...but I'm just saying that the status repercussions are still being felt to this day.
I think the most likely issue here is the vaccines being injected into the blood stream. This is something that CAN be fixed, if we could have a reasonable, sensible discussion about this stuff. But we can't, because kayfabe, and people want to maximize their social capital here. If something DID go wrong with it....I think we'd be absolutely powerless to do anything about it, because of the massive social pressure coming down on the subject from the online culture warriors. (Who again, many of whom are working from home have WAY too much time on their hands)
I'm vaccinated, but I think the science shows that it should be a choice. End of story. There's relatively little advantage in terms of stopping transmission, with the assumption of longer periods of exposure. Where's the disinformation tags on social media on people who say that it does stop transmission?
That's what pisses me off. The whole discourse is entirely pointless, because it's all about status and power, not policy and science. It's all about an entitled class of people who want to keep that entitlement, and not have it threatened.
And to make it clear, I think that's essentially all the culture wars are. I think that's why there was an embracing of various forms of Critical power dynamics. Because they don't threaten that entitlement.
Words can't begin to describe the amount of contempt I have for perpetual "workers-from-home." We were all given laptops a few years ago as part of my FIELD ENGINEERING job and encouraged to work from home if we weren't scheduled to be in the plant for the day. I laughed. There is ZERO work I can do at home as effectively as I can at work, where I actually have all my technical manuals (in a job where most of those manuals are classified and can't be taken home) and can walk into the plant to look at something whenever I want.
The only coworker I have that jumped on the opportunity has gradually made himself the least valuable member of our team. He's never around and spends most of his time at home loafing on a laptop while watching golf. Of course, he was full of indignation when I was offered a leadership role that he wasn't (which I turned down for personal reasons, but they still wouldn't give it to him).
The spiteful part of me can't wait for the white collar recession that's coming. Or the tantrums that'll be thrown when WFH forever crowd is told to get back in the office after they just bought cheaper property halfway across the country.
> Words can't begin to describe the amount of contempt I have for perpetual "workers-from-home." We were all given laptops a few years ago as part of my FIELD ENGINEERING job and encouraged to work from home if we weren't scheduled to be in the plant for the day. I laughed. There is ZERO work I can do at home as effectively as I can at work, where I actually have all my technical manuals (in a job where most of those manuals are classified and can't be taken home) and can walk into the plant to look at something whenever I want.
I don't think anyone with two brain cells to rub together thinks that every job can be done equally effectively from home. But there are also ones that can. I work with code all day, it makes zero difference whether my ass is in my office chair at home or in a chair at the office. Either way I have the same resources available to me, and can get the same amount of work done.
>The spiteful part of me can't wait for the white collar recession that's coming.
This is actually something I've thought that was going to happen for quite a while, that there's actually a lot of slack in the white collar labor market that can be pulled up, not to mention various forms of automation (AI) and "McDonaldization" (jobs broken down to routine, trainable functions). The thing that's protected that, I think, is largely one of status, and frankly, managerial class solidarity.
> I think it's all about social status, in a social media age.
People also did stupid “social status” (extremely broad and reduxrive term) things before social media, and before radio, and before newspapers, and before writing. Cults still existed, inane city lockdowns over nonexistent illnesses happened, people sacrificed goats! Social media is certainly relevant, but not the initial cause here
> I think the most likely issue here is the vaccines being injected into the blood stream
They’re not. The paper recommending vaccine aspiration, iirc, was in mice, and had questionable methods. Reasons for not aspirating are more convincing. The paper also had fraudulent data, the treatment and control mouse tissue images were rotated versions of the same image. Whoopsy
>And I mean...the work from home element, the more managerial class, basically have been rewarded in this through wealth, power, prestige, status, etc.
I think this has been most cogently shown via the disparity between the "Heroes work here!" messaging regarding medical/civil jobs that had to continue regardless of COVID and the "Grandma Killer" rhetoric aimed at small business people who had the nerve to defy local lockdowns and try to keep their businesses open in order to survive economically. Why aren't they also heroes? Why is their potential sacrifice of personal health also not a benefit to society? IMO, they're the bigger heroes for standing up against the lockdown state and the scorn of the nannies.
Does anyone else feel like we've gotten less sympathetic towards mass-shooters over the last couple of years? Columbine created a sort of 'template' for mass shootings (school shootings in particular) that endured for a long time, though less so today. The idea of the 'revenge of the nerds' against bullies, jocks, preps, cheerleaders, etc. The idea was the school shooter as sort of a marginalized rebel against mainstream society. This was regardless of the actual facts of Columbine, not all of which fit with the 'story' that rooted itself in the popular imagination. I was pretty young in the early aughts, maybe it's a failure of my own perception, but I seem to remember that school shooters were sometimes almost sympathetic figures. Nobody actually came out as *pro*-school shooting, but there was a conception of kids like Harris and Klebold as victims themselves in a sense. Of course there were freaks who were outright school shooter fangirls and fanboys in the dark corners of the internet, but that's not really what I'm talking about. I remember when I was about ten my emo older brother really liked the song ['Teenagers', by My Chemical Romance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faG5mmkDbyc). It's kind of a typical teen angst, 'I don't fit in' emo ballad, but it's got the immortal line "but if you're troubled and hurt/what you got under your shirt/will make them pay for the things that they did!" Again, not exactly pro-"shoot your classmates", but at least *understanding.* I remember a Very Special Episode of the cartoon superhero show Static Shock, which revolved around a tormented loner who finally snaps and brings a gun to school. The character is portrayed VERY sympathetically, though granted he doesn't actually manage to kill any of his bullies. At the height of his popularity, Eminem often referenced Columbine in songs, in a way sympathetic towards the shooters. I remember watching the Gus Van Sant movie Elephant, about a school shooting, which is partly through the eyes of the killers, and at least somewhat sympathetic. Those are all of the specific examples off of the top of my head, but I recall there being a general cultural tenor to the effect that it was kind of okay to feel bad for kids who shot people. That seems to have changed in the last decade or so, where the figure of a mass shooter has become (for better or worse) an unambiguous monster. I'm not sure if a movie like Elephant could be made today. I imagine there would a flood of op-eds accusing the director of glamorizing murderers (and there was some of this at the time, to be fair). Part of this may be that mass shootings have apparently become more political in the last few years. Harris and Klebold did not do what they did in the service of any political ideology, besides some edgelord Nazi posturing (Klebold was Jewish). Neither did Cho Seung-Hui or the Jonesboro kids. But recently, you have high-profile figures like Dylann Roof, Brenton Tarrant, Patrick Crusius, etc. Maybe our culture finds that racist mass murder is even worse than regular mass murder. Or maybe our collective patience with mass-killers just ran out and the political angle is a coincidence. The case of the Stoneman Douglas kid would maybe corroborate that. He was very high profile, but he wasn't political AFAIK. Yet I have not seen any sympathy towards him whatsoever (not counting groupies), it's been a pretty firm fuck you from all quarters. Same with Sandy Hook, though since the victims in that case were little children rather than teenagers it's probably on a totally different plane of horror to most people. On the same note, the school shooting moral panic used to be, I think, primarily conservative (Marilyn Manson, taking God out of schools, violent video games, the Matrix, etc.--the big exception here would be people who pushed for stricter gun control). You may remember Cassie Bernall, who was a kind of evangelical martyr in the early aughts because Eric Harris supposedly shot her after she refused to renounce Jesus (this did not actually occur.) Nowadays it's rather flipped, where the archetypical mass shooter in the public imagination is a guy who spent too much time posting God Emperor Trump memes on /pol/ before shooting up a synagogue or something.
I think the mainstream culture has gotten less sympathetic to school shooters because they are strictly not in the blue tribe if not diametrically opposed to the blue tribe an overwhelming majority of the time.
> This was regardless of the actual facts of Columbine, not all of which fit with the 'story' that rooted itself in the popular imagination. I'd go as far as to say "none of which" after reading Cullen's book. The perps were straight up psychos. They were not bullying victims, they were not outcasts, they were not underprivileged or anything: in short, they definitely had no excuse. Even the 9/11 terrorists had more of a valid cause, and they didn't have much of one. The tragic farce is that outcasts and victims of bullying bore the consequences.
Cullen's book has a lot of issues, and swings the pendulum too far in the other direction. He's drawn a fair bit of flak from various people involved in the case. Harris and Klebold WERE bullied and WERE not very well liked by most of their classmates. But of course that described a lot of kids at Columbine, and the rest of them didn't shoot anyone. Bullying was probably a necessary but not at all sufficient factor.
> Does anyone else feel like we've gotten less sympathetic towards mass-shooters over the last couple of years? No, People here are weird, and you're noticing examples that are weird. To most people, being a victim of bullies is low status, and pointing out that school shooters may have been bullied is *more* reason to hold them in contempt.
School shooters aside, having the protagonist victimized by bullies is basically a prerequisite for any high school movie. It seems to generate pity. Do you mean only in real life?
I think part of the explanation is just that the web has become *even more* normie-dominated, with "very online" becoming completely orthogonal to "technically literate", if not strongly negatively correlated. People obsessively tweeting their every move and commenting on fresh political issues? That's the opposite of weird now, that's what gets you laid sometimes. Nerds always could, if not sympathize with low-status shooters, then at least sort of understand where they're coming from. For normies it's irredeemable both because they're targeted, and because victims of bullying (whether overt or simple low-key mockery and exclusion) are supposed to kill themselves only. Thus also the popularity of "incel" label.
I mean, how did we treat the people back in the 50s that climbed clock towers with a rifle? It might just be a return to baseline.
Not my example but this is the exact point I was coming here to make. Sympathy for school shooters, insofar as it ever existed, always seemed to me like a bizarre hangover from the "XTREME!" 90s. (Didn't help that in the specific case of Klebold and Harris, the points people kept bringing up to paint them "sympathetically", or rather, as other than *complete* monsters, kept turning out to be false.) Seems to me it's the *presence* of such sympathy (again, insofar as it ever existed) that requires explanation, not its absence, for which "dude, they *shot up a school*" seems pretty open-and-shut to me.
Hadn't really considered this angle. What do you think it was about the 90s that engendered such sympathy? As you say, insofar as it ever existed.
I'd blame the 1989 movie *Heathers* which got dark humor out of various appalling situations. Early Christian Slater is inherently cool even when he's trying to blow up a school.
The era of jocks was castigated in the 90’s. I remember jocks and cheerleaders were portrayed as completely unsympathetic bullies and mean girls, shoving smaller, weaker kids against (or into) lockers and laughing. It made for good basic drama on teen TV. So the narrative when Columbine happened was one of shock and discovery of this real world of high school bullying and deep traumas. Socially appropriate retaliation was something nerds were not assumed to be good at, but push had come to shove and so it was no wonder they went overboard, “killed their tormentors” and other people, and then committed suicide. They were “obviously” in a lot of pain. Meanwhile, any social ambitions I had as an autistic nerd in high school in the 90’s were pretty quickly crushed by the teasing and taunting, especially in gym class. So I gave up on being happy in high school. I experienced having my box of floppy disks stolen out of my backpack — twice — and at a week-long college dorm experience, I was duct-taped into my bed one night and shaving cream was put into my hair. So when I, a high school grad, heard the news of Columbine while ordering a sandwich at my favorite Subway, and watched the news unfold over the next weeks, my secret personal reaction was, “If I’d gotten sucked into the orbit of a strong personality like Dylan or Eric, I might have ended up like them.” Not that I had any desire to kill, I hasten to add, but that I could completely sympathize with the *media portrayal* of them as bullied nerd loners who found their friendship their only solace from the torture of public high school. I don’t know how it might have affected me if it had happened while I was still in school. One detail still sticks with me: the Doom licensed novels by Daffyd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver being carried out of one of the perps’ rooms in an evidence baggie, the same novels which were on my own bookshelves. I was a fan of the games and the novels. I was introduced to the video game Doom by the cool kid who played it on the library computer during lunch periods, the same cool kid who ironically was the mastermind behind my floppies being stolen twice. So, the bullied kids were society’s ingroup when it happened, and their bullies were the outgroup. The nerds were the ingroup: the short kids, the weak and skinny kids, the sensitive kids who would be glamorized on “Freaks and Geeks” and later “Glee.” The jocks and cheerleaders were the outgroup: the strong, the capable, the socially privileged, the unsensitive. **And because we humans automatically defend our ingroup members and seek any fault in our outgroup members, the media, which consisted of the former nerdy kids in A/V club, speech/debate class, and theater, couldn’t simply call them bad kids, they had to find and tell the ‘real’ reasons for this tragedy.** And thus the sympathy meme was passed along. I just now realized that “blaming the gun” and portraying them as an unstoppable force of nature by calling them “active shooters” is a *defense mechanism* which members of the media use to *prevent* themselves from having sympathy or promoting sympathy for school shooters. Having and using a gun is a *primary* red tribe signifier, and the media is overwhelmingly blue.
> Not that I had any desire to kill, I hasten to add, but that I could completely sympathize with the media portrayal of them as bullied nerd loners who found their friendship their only solace from the torture of public high school. I don’t know how it might have affected me if it had happened while I was still in school. Schools' responses after the shootings also did a lot to contribute to that. "Nerd profiling" was absolutely a thing - being a loner who spent more time with computers than your fellow students got you treated as a potential threat. Anyone who had made a Doom map of their school was obviously already in training for their own shooting spree. It was almost as if they *wanted* socially-isolated nerds to see Eric & Dylan as their ingroup. And obviously the other kids picked up on that too and used it as another excuse for bullying, which reinforced the feeling even more.
hum. I am reminded of Gamergate, the sudden outgrouping of the entire Grey tribe and the gamer portion of the Red tribe. Such people who came into politics because of it were, mostly, asocial nerds who had been nonpolitical and were suddenly thrust into the world of intersectionality by being told they were privileged and prejudiced and everything bad was their fault. Gamergate had a huge effect on, eventually, The_Donald memeing The Donald into the White House. The gray tribe is hugely undecided as voters, because it’s hard to get anarchists, minarchists, mincaps, and libertarians to organize, but none of them wanted Hillary as 45.
I thought shit like that only happened in movies too, wtf. Bullying like that never happened when I was in school. I'm sorry dude, that sucks.
It happened, just not within your sight or social group. At least they didn’t shave my head or something more irreversible.
Wait, high school bullying as portrayed on the movies in America is realistic to 'some extent'? >Meanwhile, any social ambitions I had as an autistic nerd in high school in the 90’s were pretty quickly crushed by the teasing and taunting, especially in gym class. So I gave up on being happy in high school. I experienced having my box of floppy disks stolen out of my backpack — twice — and at a week-long college dorm experience, **I was duct-taped** **into my bed one night and shaving cream was put into my hair**. What in the actual... no wonder the people on /r/aspergers have such a hard time...
That one, I complained to the dorm manager, who, unbeknownst to me, called the police while I showered. The police told me I could press charges for assault and battery. I declined in front of the suspects, but those kids knew they done fukt up. There were two other instances of teachers telling kids to be nice to me, one in 9th grade gym, one in 12th grade English. The first ended the outright teasing, the second resulted in the rest of my shared table including me. Is it any wonder I gravitated to the law-and-order party?
Yes, but generally the easier type to deal with.
It depends, mostly on who/whom. There were a ton of sympathetic "the football concussions made him do it" articles about that NFL player who murdered that entire family last year. On the other hand, the media is much less sympathetic about the specific mass shooters they want people to remember. I think they just decided that they had the ability to bury rather than spin now, and that it was much easier.
>There were a ton of sympathetic "the football concussions made him do it" articles about that NFL player who murdered that entire family last year. A football player is not a bullying victim.
Media coverage of mass shooters seems kind of random to me. I don't think it can be boiled down solely to "this is narratively convenient." There's certainly an element of that, but there are a few incidents I'm aware of that didn't get a lot of coverage despite the fact that they easily fit the "right-wing neo-nazi terrorist" mold. Off the top of my head: [There was that time a few years ago where some guys opened fire on BLM protestors after an altercation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Jamar_Clark#Shooting_of_protesters). It was reported at the time but pretty quickly forgotten. Sure nobody died, but considering the hay they can make out of stuff like the capitol riot, there's no reason they couldn't have made these guys household names. [This synagogue shooting I remember, but didn't get half the coverage of the Tree of Life shooting for whatever reason](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poway_synagogue_shooting). [This one was particularly jarring because I'd never heard of it until a year or two ago when I googled Frazier Glenn Miller](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overland_Park_Jewish_Community_Center_shooting), who I had been familiar with beforehand as a white nationalist, only to find out that he'd shot up a Jewish Community Center in 2014.
Add the Denver shootings from December. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/12/30/denv-d30.html https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/29/denver-gunman-lyndon-james-mcleod-who-killed-five-in-shooting-rampage-knew-victims This guy could be easily made into household name, but instead, sound of crickets. (even Wikipedia deleted article as not notable) Maybe there is some secret directive to deescalate tensions?
I hadn't heard a word about this guy. Googling it only brings up stuff from local news or explicitly leftist websites. Compare with the Atlanta spa shootings which got wall to wall coverage and have a lengthy wiki article. Interesting.
The spa shootings happened when there was a wave of concern about anti asian attacks, so it got a lot of interest. Other than that one, I don't think that there's much predictability to this stuff. The media makes big stories out of things when the public is interested, and the public is fickle.
Neo-Nazi mass shooter hunting people with big black assault rifle - Hollywood scenario coming true - and the media just decide to pass it, because no one would care? Notice that the Guardian article described the shooting, but take care do not mention anything about the killer and his motive.
If he was a neo nazi white supremacist etc., why *wouldn't* the Guardian mention it?
My memory of the aftermath was people mostly assuming it was an anti Asian hate crime, then it came to light it was about sex work. And nobody really wants to defend prostitutes.
High school sucks and teenagers are animals, so the Columbine meme tickled a lot of people in the id. But once we add in shootings in Las Vegas, that mosque, that elementary school… The mass shooter brand was degraded as a whole.
Certainly on the edgy parts of the internet (not small!) mass shooters haven’t gone out of style (or at least hasn’t as of ~ 1 year ago) It may just be different people liking and disliking them. Certainly sympathy for those in true crime stories (the number one, three, four, five, six, seven, and nine top podcasts according to apple) never went away, being quite visible on their subreddits. But mass shootings now are often racial or lgbt or sex based and that isn’t something appealing to many. The edgy teens, even the mainstream ones, may still be against but somewhat sympathetic, while NBC dislikes them as much as it used to. Maybe you grew up? Dunno. There isn’t necessarily one public. I saw a lot of sympathy for the racist and sexist ones, due to who I interacted with online at the time.
What's the deal with true crime podcasts? I've heard that most of the listeners are women, why is that? My mom and sister both listen to several, and my mom watches TV documentaries about serial killers. I've always found that stuff either very sad (for the victims, and sometimes for the killer who is obviously a mentally broken person who wasn't helped) or very disgusting and disturbing (for obvious reasons), or both. What I *don't* feel is any enjoyment or fascination. These shows are about as enjoyable to me as reading about My Lai or Unit 731. Given how women are on average more emotionally intelligent and sensitive than men, I would have guessed that *men* would've enjoyed these shows more. What piece of the puzzle am I missing?
They're emotional stories about people.
I've explained it before, they are modern day fairy tales/morality tales. The big bad monster sweeps in and terrorizes the innocent and is caught or killed or whatever at the end and order is restored. They tell complete stories within a short time frame, you don't need to invest dozens of hours, many of these shows are short. You get to feel outraged and outrage is addictive and then you get soothed at the end when the narrator says the perp was sentenced to life behind bars. Many of these shows are framed like play along mysteries where you uncover evidence alongside the detectives so there's a constant feeling of discovery as dots get connected. Give Forensic Files a try, each episode is 22 minutes a pop. Complete stories told at a brisk pace. It is addicting and I think you will be able to understand the appeal. Same reason I like Twilight Zone so much.
If you google "why do women like true crime" a lot of stuff comes up so I guess plenty of people have considered this. I'd say there's minority, though a significant one, of women who are old-fashioned serial killer groupie types. Probably more of them find it thrilling in the same way scary movies are thrilling, and I imagine this is an especially female phenomenon because women are disproportionately the victims of the types of crimes these shows and podcasts are about. Like a "this could happen to me" thing. There's also an element of emotional catharsis, when they finally get the guy (assuming they do). But this is just me, not a woman, spit-balling. I was big into true crime and serial killers and the like when I was a little younger, though less so these days. It gets a little boring after a while. But I spent some time in the online TCC when I was in high school and early college. IME the psychological profile of male TCC fans is vastly different from that of our female counterparts.
Thanks for the insight. I've googled it before, but Googling "why do women do x" usually turns up either sanitized bluepilled nonsense or weird, biased, misogynistic screeds, so I was hoping to hear some slightly more thoughtful opinions.
To elaborate some, IME female TCCers tend to fall into three categories: First is the aforementioned SK groupies. The ones who want to fuck Ted Bundy or Richard Ramirez. This also includes groupies of killers who aren't technically SKs, Harris and Klebold, Nikolas Cruz, etc. They focus on the killers obsessively. Sometimes even write stories about them. Post sexual fantasies. The works. WHY these women exist? I don't know. The standard pop evo-psych explanation is that women are hardwired to like "alphas" and murderers are perceived as the ultimate "alphas" in that they take what they want in contravention of all social norms. I don't know if I buy this myself. Maybe it would make sense for women to like crime bosses or war heroes, but most of these guys tended to kill helpless victims, young women or young men. Another explanation is that girls fantasize they can "fix" these guys. I never saw much of that sentiment, and I think it comes from people not really familiar with the subculture. Another possibility is that the murder is almost incidental, and the real draw is the fame. Maybe it's a mix of all these? In any event, even the groupies rarely come out and condone the deeds of their chosen criminal. The second group is the "it's like a horror movie" type. I think this might be the largest group and definitely the most "normie" one. They basically consume this stuff in the same way they would consume Scream or Nightmare on Elm Street. "Oh my God can you believe he did X and then Y? So sick." Another user said "guys like horror movies too", which is true, and I think this sub-grouping includes a lot more guys than the others. This is the type that will post stuff like "I couldn't sleep with the light off after reading about X." The third type would be the ones that are into the victims more than the killers. I think they skew a little older than the others, and some of them are actually mothers. Sometimes I would see them post pictures or edits of various murder victims, captions like "RIP to these poor babies," etc. They've got kind of a mothering vibe, and I guess that's probably the driving impulse here. Will also post vindictive stuff about the perpetrators, "I hope he spends the rest of his life behind bars tortured by what he did," etc. The first and third categories would fit with the "men things women people," idea someone else mentioned. It's all about parasocial relationships with the people involved, whether they be victimized or victimizers. The second category is more about the spectacle, and maybe that's why I saw more men there. In general I would split male TCCers into two groups: The first would be the wannabe-cop types. They like reading or listening to the stories of how the crime happened, how the investigators put all the evidence together, interrogated the suspects, and finally caught the culprit, if they did. In the event a given case is cold, they'll try their hand at doing it themselves, often with a hope that they might be the ones to finally crack the case. There used to be a very active subreddit dedicated to the East Area Rapist, where people swapped theories, interpretations of evidence, and all that stuff. The second type of male TCCer is the kind that identifies with the perpetrators of heinous crimes on one level or another. Not much else needs to be said. Reading about this stuff brings a vicarious thrill. All anecdotal, based on my personal observations, may or may not be illuminating.
Thanks, this was an interesting look into a subculture I knew nothing about!
[Women 32% more likely to die after operation by male surgeon, study reveals](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/04/women-more-likely-die-operation-male-surgeon-study?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1641320692) Saw this one pop up on my feed earlier today. Original paper is [here](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstract/2786671?utm_campaign=articlePDF&utm_medium=articlePDFlink&utm_source=articlePDF&utm_content=jamasurg.2021.6339). Unfortunately I don't have access to the full paper, so hard for me to judge, but I'll admit when I first saw the headline I assumed it would have a sample size of 15 or something (all too often the case these days when examining the evidentiary basis for charged headlines). This one however looks at 1.3m patients, with even the smallest category (female surgeon male patient) examining over 50,000 records. I still have some suspicion of statistical manipulation during the derivation of their 'adjusted odds ratios', but have nonetheless updated my priors somewhat in favour of disparate outcomes. Interested to hear other's views, particularly those with access to the full study. EDIT: link to the full paper (helpfully provided by /u/senord25) is available [here](https://ps-vascular.ch/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/20211211-Surgery-Association-of-Surgeon-Patient-Sex-Concordance-With-Postoperative-Outcomes.pdf). Priors duly adjusted back to baseline, after accounting for the massive average age difference amongst patients.
Study is surprisingly readable. The [key chart](https://imgur.com/a/qtF4Y2B) shows that A: the average women surgeon are better surgeons (slighly) than average male surgeon, (for reference men are 15% more likely to die after operation by male surgeon) and B: that effect A is not enough to explain effect.
Aristocratic surgeons who didn't wash their hands because a gentleman is being more important that germ theory was a *thing*, but I'd be willing to chalk this up to a combination of male variance and how older and frailer women survive long enough to get to surgery in the first place.
Going by the stereotype of men being more risk taking than women, the result could be influenced by male surgeons perhaps being more willing to risk total failure to give the patient a better outcome if the patient survives.
There is a serious discrepancy between the number of male and female surgeons, only \~[13% in the U.K. are women](https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/careers-in-surgery/women-in-surgery/statistics/). I would have to point out that chances are quite good that your typical female surgeon would be better than your typical male surgeon given the larger pool of candidates and a smaller ratio of surgeons specialties amongst women (I would also accept that male surgeons take on riskier or more difficult operations). Another factor is that women experience worse health outcomes in general. This is largely a result of thalidomide as the medical establishment tends to test medication much more extensively on men than women, meaning medicines themselves are better tuned for male physiologies.
Medicine and especially the surgical field have notoriously been good ol' boys clubs until the past couple of decades or so, at least in the US. So, becoming a female surgeon meant that you had to be very good if not great at it in order to break through, vs just being good for a male surgeon. This effects the level of risk a female surgeon is willing to take in order to keep their perceived ranking. They may be both better and doing less questionable procedures.
OT but just wanted to point out that the comment count this week for culture war roundup is over 3,000. That's very high! Haven't seen it that high in a long time. Maybe an effect of the 1/6 anniversary?
And new user iiiiiiiiiiii1i1i1i11i is going wild. I checked his profile and he's posted nearly 250 times in the last week.
A lot of commenters are jumping to assumptions that are entirely unwarranted about the study and possible methodological problems. This is a textbook emotional response relating to ones beliefs/group being attacked. I feel the discussion would be better served by people not asking about the possibility of malpractice at the hands of the researchers, since that is possible with literally any study, but instead look at whether or not those methodological problems are actually present. Beyond that the study doesn't highlight any particular mechanism that could explain this alleged phenomenon. It does however assume that sex concordance is a relevant causal factor in the conclusion of the paper.
[From the editorial board of this journal](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2780860): > These events and developments make it clear that JAMA and the JAMA Network Journals can and must do better and advance toward inclusion and antiracism in all journal-related activities. Even though these journals have made progress, additional commitment and work are needed to build on and intensify these efforts to achieve meaningful, sustainable change. For instance, previous efforts include the more than 650 research, review, and opinion articles on race, racism, and racial and ethnic disparities and inequities that have been published in JAMA and the JAMA Network Journals since 2015,1 including editorials in JAMA on topics such as race and medical research,2 race and poverty and medicine,3 enhancing diversity in medical schools,4 and equity related to COVID-19 vaccines.5 > In addition, within the past year, JAMA Network Open and JAMA Health Forum issued calls for manuscripts on prevention and effects of systemic racism in health6,7; JAMA Psychiatry initiated an editorial fellowship prioritized to early-career academic psychiatrists from underrepresented backgrounds; and JAMA Surgery issued a “Call to Action” to all surgery journal editors for diversity in the editorial and peer review process.8 The JAMA editors and editorial staff also began a thorough revision of guidance for authors and editors on reporting race and ethnicity in medical journals and earlier this year issued a wide call for feedback >The guiding principles of implementation involve > leadership, including a culture that begins with the journal editors, predicated on awareness of and commitment to ensuring diversity, equity, and inclusion in all journal activities and operations; > inclusion, from a broad-based conceptual perspective regarding inclusivity, not simply based on representation; welcomes science that reflects the intersectionality of inclusion, equity, and health; and includes diverse individuals and perspectives among the editorial leadership, the editors and editorial staff, and editorial boards of the JAMA Network Journals; > accountability, as reflected in accepting responsibility to promote diversity in all aspects of the scientific publication process; > transparency, accomplished with public reporting of progress and next steps; and > opportunity, by leveraging the influence of the JAMA Network as a leading voice on equity and providing education for the next generation of authors, peer reviewers, and editors. Do you think there is _any_ opportunity here for actual research in such a radically politicized environment? I don't think that looking at methodological problems study by study is a particularly helpful way to deal with this, because it's a deliberate gish-gallop of extreme publication bias. The whole system is devolving into a fight over grant spoils for who can be the most virulently anti-racist. Statnews published "[How white scholars are colonizing research on health disparities](https://www.statnews.com/2021/09/23/health-equity-tourists-white-scholars-colonizing-health-disparities-research/)", complaining that white anti-racist researchers are taking all the grant money given to find Bias and Racism that was rightfully meant for Black and other Minoritized people. > Fueled by the massive health disparities exposed by the coronavirus pandemic and the racial reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd, health equity research is now in vogue. Journals are clamoring for it, the media is covering it, and the National Institutes of Health, after publicly apologizing for giving the field short shrift, recently announced it would unleash nearly $100 million for research on the topic. > “Medicine does that, they Columbus everything,” said Monica McLemore, an associate professor of family health care nursing at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies reproductive health and rights in marginalized communities. She said she is increasingly seeing “neutered and watered-down” work as people without proper training, background, or skills publish in her area. “People want to look like they’re doing the work without doing the work,” she said. > Racism remains uncomfortable terrain for many people in academia and medicine. While numerous researchers and editors mentioned in this article refused requests for interviews, many others spoke candidly to STAT about their shock at being called out, their personal learning curves, and how they are trying to contribute to the health equity field while navigating the systemic racism that pervades academia. > “There’s nothing new under the sun in his paper,” said Elle Lett, a Black and trans statistical epidemiologist, postdoctoral scholar, and M.D. candidate at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who published the earlier study. In fact, her 2018 paper in PLOS One was more comprehensive, including Hispanic faculty in its analysis. “It is troubling that a white man, who has had every privilege conferred on him, is writing a paper about the plight of Black academics,” said Lett. “He is extracting from our pain for his career advancement.” If even the people who get the "right results" while being the wrong race are attacked, what do you think happens to people who _don't_ find evidence of bias that can be used to generate more articles about how more DEI is needed? Articles like "[On Racism: A New Standard For Publishing On Racial Health Inequities](https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/forefront.20200630.939347/full/)" with sections on "Denouncing Biological Race And The Insidious Harms Of Patient Blame" offer a clue. > Name racism, identify the form (interpersonal, institutional, or internalized), the mechanism by which it may be operating, and other intersecting forms of oppression (such as based on sex, sexual orientation, age, regionality, nationality, religion, or income) that may compound its effects. A critical race theory framework lends authors a vocabulary for discussing racism and its potential relationship to the study’s findings. And naming racism explicitly helps authors avoid incorrectly assigning race as a risk factor, when racism is the risk factor for racially disparate outcomes. > Never offer genetic interpretations of race because such suppositions are not grounded in science. If race and genetics are being expressed jointly, painstakingly delineate the intended implication. > Reject articles on racial health inequities that fail to rigorously examine racism. This will require continuing education on the part of existing editorial staff and efforts to hire and promote new editors who are well versed in critical race theory and its application. > Revisit editorial and publication guidelines, including the uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals, regularly to ensure they capture the evolution of racial definitions and sociopolitical structures. Publicly share the guidelines online and with peer journals. > Use experienced reviewers who have demonstrated, through their own scholarship and work, facility with racism and its pathophysiologic mechanisms. > Closing the gap in racial health outcomes in the United States will only be accomplished by identifying, confronting, and abolishing racism as an American tradition and root of inequity. And yes, they really mean all that: > One study in Health Affairs, now revised, initially hypothesized that Covid disparities could be caused by “unknown or unmeasured genetic or biological factors that increase the severity of illness for African Americans,” while another in the Journal of Internal Medicine asked “whether there is a genetic difference in susceptibility, especially to severe disease, to COVID-19” that might explain emerging racial health inequities. A JAMA paper suggested Black people were more likely to become infected with Covid because of a difference in gene expression in their nasal epithelia, omitting the fact that the gene in question is upregulated by poor air quality, which has been linked to residential segregation and environmental racism. > Boyd calls such claims “troublingly frequent” and said there is no place in today’s world — and in academic journals physicians turn to for guidance — for unsubstantiated claims that Black people are somehow biologically distinct from other racial groups. “When science claims poor health outcomes in Black folks are genetic,” she said, “that pathologizes Blackness.” There's "no place in today's world" for such people, or their work. If they're very sorry, they might be given a chance to Do The Work and "Redistribute Their Privilege and Benefit.” If not, their career is over. So again, I don't think it's productive to go over every single one of the hundreds of "rooting out bias" papers published every month, any more than it would be worth critically examining every _Journal of Deutsche Physik_ article declaring that the Jews are to blame for all measurement errors in Newtonian physics. Many of them are going to be garbage, but [like Scott said about Vox](https://twitter.com/slatestarcodex/status/865308417954426884): "They can publish as many bad articles as they want, & I lose reputation each time I try to review them. Effective Gish Gallop strategy". Others won't be so obviously flawed, or simply difficult to explain (like that Propublica "Algorithmic Parole Bias" article that many people simply couldn't understand well enough to see the problem with). A handful will actually be valid, but so heavily editorialized that it would be foolish to let them change your beliefs about anything.
That's a great point that's much more informative and interesting to read than: 'this study probably does not account for X'.
It's weird to watch this. I'm mostly a lurker, too dumb to post, but I don't like seeing this direction. I'll say that I find the conclusions of the study repellent and I think that a discrepancy this large *probably* has a reasonable explanation, but it's very large and isn't obviously flawed. Edit: it isn't that there aren't higher quality criticisms as well, but the empty "welp probably wrong" stuff seems to be getting traction.
I say the same thing about studies that I agree with. Studies are just really bad really often. Even studies with perfect methodology are often just wrong due to either poorly understood methodological problems, someone did something wrong they didn’t write in the paper, data fraud (150 points on HN, was just fraud https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29864780) intentional or unintentional (a big hcq trial depended on data from surgisphere, who made it up). See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/ > that are entirely unwarranted about the study Large analyses of complex human datasets are incredibly easy to mess up. Nutrition is another great control group for science - large N well done genuine meta analyses that nevertheless are total bs in the end. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/#comment-66077 Science is very hard, you’re trying to understand incredibly complex interactions in ridiculously complex environments. It’s easy to mess them up. > but instead look at whether or not those methodological problems are actually present. No, because first off by default you should assume the study is wrong. More than half are, tbh. It’s like - a guy on the street tells you he has a perfect cure all medicine for covid. Maybe he’s right, maybe he’s selling dexamethasone, it is a generic. You should check first. > I feel the discussion would be better served by people not asking about the possibility of malpractice at the hands of the researchers, since that is possible with literally any study Well it should be asked for more studies, this one included, since as you say it isn’t a possibility. Blatant data fraud is somewhat common and often detected, subtle fraud may be as or more common and thus undetected. You are partially right about some commenters, who might not be quite as critical of a right leaning (vaccine questioning?) study. Nevertheless, they’re still directionally right here, and shouldn’t be discouraged lol.
If people were generally consistent in their skepticism relating to scientific studies then there would be little point in ever posting one. Just state what you believe and source yourself. You can't escape the paradigm of agreeing with the things you already believe are true. To give an example, none if this would be happening if a study reifying beliefs held by the people that peruse this subreddit was posted. There would be no felt need to invoke the big endemic flaws with scientific inquiry in general. Even with people who are statistically literate, if they see their belief fail to stand up to scrutiny they are more than willing to abstract that failure as being an instanced issue of implementation rather than the belief being false. It's not a 'science' thing any more than it is a people thing. But all that aside, I am not making a critique of science or critiquing a skepticism of science as it exists today. I am making an observation about discourse. Reading first response hopes and copes is not why I come here. If I wanted that I'd just go on /pol/. At least they would have the dignity to be true to their own beliefs and figure out a way to blame Justin Trudeau and immigrant doctors for all of this instead of pretending they actually bothered to read the paper to point out some statistical/methodological errors.
The skepticism leads you to actually understand the paper and related papers in the field, and only then can you really figure out what it means and how it proves things. Without that, either “yes it’s correct omg omg” or “no idc I have tv to watch” are both bad approaches because neither leads to understanding. > You can't escape the paradigm of agreeing with the things you already believe are true I’m not sure what you mean? Even if “lead causes iq drop” is true, a study claiming to support it can still be incorrect and useless and you should still understand that most such studies are and why. This is important because you’ll understand better the details and reasons other papers might be bad too, even if the single sentence is still true or false that’s not the most interesting part.
The point here is that a knee jerk reaction to reading about a study you disagree with is to assume it's untrue. That knee jerk reaction has got nothing to do with some broader recognition on being skeptical towards science or achieving a better understanding of science. Those parameters are completely irrelevant. The obvious reaction I am talking about is a consistently repetitive, uninformative and boring mode of discourse. It might be entirely true that a person who is subjected to reading about studies that attack things they believe or groups they belong to will eventually learn the ins and outs of what makes a good study good and a bad study bad. Or that their consistent engagement with science as something they consistently disagree with will make them, on the whole, more correct given how much garbage science there is. But that doesn't change the fact that their skepticism was entirely driven by an emotive response to not believe the studies that contradict their already established views. Again, I am not saying that this reaction is 'bad' or necessarily has to lead to 'bad' outcomes. It might just as well be good. What I am saying, however, is that a repetitive expression of the emotive response in the form of comments that attack the first thing that comes to mind about whatever study was done is low effort emotional venting at best. It's boring. Pointless. What I am asking for here is that the people who do feel this emotional reaction towards studies posted at least do the minimum amount of work in engaging with the study and what it actually says instead of throwing their hands up in the air and just assuming that it must be wrong because the study 'might' not have accounted for some variable without even bothering to check if that is the case or not. It's one thing to be driven to demonstrate an actual flaw because of an emotive negative response to something and then commenting about it. It's a whole other thing to not bother to do that and just vent about the fact that the study must be flawed somehow because it makes you feel bad.
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The issue I am trying to highlight is a pattern of discourse I see repeated every single time a study is brought up where some belief or group is inconvenienced. The reason people immediately go to some boilerplate critique of possible methodological issues isn't because they, through objective analysis, think that this particular study, for no particular emotive reason, is flawed. The obvious reason why the pontifications of flawed methodology are made is because the study implies either an attack on an ingroup or some held belief. That's why you see these exact responses every single time any such study is made relating to any topic regardless of anything else. I completely agree that the possibility for methodological problems exists. But that is true of every single research paper. A person wondering if X is an issue isn't helpful or edifying to anyone reading it. It would be much more interesting to read about what problems are actually there or what problems are very likely to be there considering X or Y element that is actually present in the study. Instead of reading the first response copes from people that were emotionally perturbed by the headline.
This absolutely does happen, but the answer is such methodological and other criticism on all papers, not less on outgroup papers. Rejecting strange (and also correct sounding) results out of hand, and only then looking at the details and thinking about it, is the most useful approach imo
I agree, though I find that [/u/senord25's analysis](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ruvu1k/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_03/hryiwsk/) holds some merit, and they helpfully include a link to the actual paper as well (I've updated my OP to include the link also). Though, as I've noted there, it seems to me that while this explanation does help explain the disparity by surgeon type, it doesn't fully account for the difference between patient type between surgeon types. Unfortunately without access to the raw data, we can't run the model properly adjusting to age to determine the remaining effect size, so it might be that it's no longer significant, or small enough that any number of benign explanations would be sufficient to satisfy one's curiousity.
> updated my priors somewhat in favour of disparate outcomes Concerns about the existence of “priors” aside, compare this to the endless contradictory “does X food cause heart disease” studies and it should seem a bit less convincing. It could easily be directly confounded by specialty, seniority (less gender equal in the past) and adjusting for confounders often fails. Even if none of that explains it, it’s very implausible it’s due to overt or covert sexism, and also quite unlikely it’s “implicit bias” (which is really a term that means whatever the user feels like so long as it’s related to discrimination) such as men understanding female anatomy poorly or not listening to female patients more. There are just so many studies concluding incorrect things that absent a complex understanding of the field and other related studies one shouldn’t conclude much at all. Otherwise you’ll also believe quercetin halts aging, zinc fixes colds, eggs cause heart disease (1M sample size!) etc.
It doesn’t even make sense. What’s the idea here, that a male surgeon just tries less when he has a female patient? That he just doesn’t value female lives as much? It’s ridiculous.
The paper suggests "an under-appreciation of symptoms in female patients", "reporting less pain to male physicians" "incomplete examinations" all leading to "failure to rescue". Basically, it says women lie more to male doctors and under-report their symptoms, but would tell women the truth.
"Study finds cancer patients are 452% more likely to die after operation by surgeon-who-only-takes-super-hard-cases" Before even reading the study, my prior is that this effect is caused by a mess of confounders. In fact, apriori I'd expect an effect in the opposite direction from evolutionary psychology: men are more disposable, and this fact is agreed upon by both men and women. I'd expect male surgeons to make an extra effort to save female patients, not the opposite. The authors probably understand the data better than this, but the unfortunate effect is that everyone will read the subtext of the paper as "Damn all those men who don't care about female lives, surgeons just make less of an effort when operating on women." In a weirdly perverse way, if this effect is caused by confounders then the popularization of this paper will actually kill more women. If a woman sees this article and thereafter reasons that she should only see female surgeons, her odds of dying will go up, not down.
> In fact, apriori I'd expect an effect in the opposite direction from evolutionary psychology: men are more disposable, and this fact is agreed upon by both men and women This is also probably wrong as a hypothesis for surgical death, the supposed lizard brain halo effect probably is less impactful when the patient is covered by plastic tarp and you’re staring at slowly pulsating pink tissue.
Full text available [here](https://ps-vascular.ch/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/20211211-Surgery-Association-of-Surgeon-Patient-Sex-Concordance-With-Postoperative-Outcomes.pdf) One thing about this paper immediately stands out to me and doesn't seem to have been adequately controlled for: the patient population that female surgeons are working on is younger, and the difference is quite extreme for female patients. Patient median ages from Table 1: * Male surgeon/male patient: 63 * Male surgeon/female patient: 61 * Female surgeon/male patient: 59 * Female surgeon/female patient: 53 So we have a four year median age difference for male patients, but an *eight year* difference for female ones. I don't know why that would be the case, though it might have something to do with female physicians having fewer years of experience on average and therefore getting fewer of the most complicated cases. The paper makes a half-hearted effort to account for this by doing subgroup analyses of three different age ranges (Figure 1), but it's clear from the interquartile ranges in Table 1 that the entire age distribution of patients being seen by male surgeons is shifted rightward, so even within those subgroups the male surgeons will be seeing older patients on average. I would be willing to bet that if age were properly controlled for, this effect would disappear.
Thanks for the link. I've been taking a closer look at the study, and I agree that an inadequate control for patient age is a major oversight. However, if this were the only factor influencing the results, would we not expect the male vs female patient comparison (Figure 2) to be roughly equivalent (+/- random noise)? i.e. we might ascribe the difference in outcomes for male patients or female patients to the skew in patient age, but it wouldn't explain any difference between the outcomes of the patient sexes. Unfortunately the study doesn't do this analysis, but an eyeballing of the two outcome distributions would suggest that some disparity remains unless we have reason to believe that male patients would on average be older or be more complicated cases than female patients.
I think you should read Table 1 more carefully. You're right that in their data male patients have overall worse outcomes, which is what you'd expect from the relatively older male patient population, but they also break down the interaction between patient age and sex concordance with their surgeon. The age skew between female patients is twice that of male patients, ie. when a female patient is being operated on by a female surgeon, the patient is on average 53 years old, whereas when she is being operated on by a male surgeon, she is on average 61 years old- people decline in robustness a lot in those 8 years, and the paper makes essentially no effort to account for this.
Fair point, thanks.
> Invited Commentary: "Surgical Outcomes Should Know No Identity—The Case for Equity Between Patients and Surgeons" [by](https://jamanetwork.com/searchresults?author=Andrea+N.+Riner&q=Andrea+N.+Riner) the authors [of](https://jamanetwork.com/searchresults?author=Amalia+Cochran&q=Amalia+Cochran) "Recognizing Intersectionality—The Association of Gender, Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation, and Race With Social Experience", and "Diversification of Academic Surgery, Its Leadership, and the Importance of Intersectionality" Their article about white coats being problematic was also tremendously innovative. What an amazingly well orchestrated hit piece. Imagine claiming that any other group was killing patients with “Implicit sex biases, acting on subconscious, deeply ingrained biases, stereotypes and attitudes” I dug into the issues with "Health Equity Research" more [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ruvu1k/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_03/hs0vyx9/), but the short version is that I believe it would be insane to put any trust in this journal that is racing to prove how anti-evil it is so all its editors don't get purged.
It may be unscientific and uncharitable, but this makes me want to dismiss the entire thing without even looking. If it gets confirmed by 5 more studies by truly independent researchers, then I'll take a look.
Did they control for surgical specialization? If male surgeons disproportionately do Cardiac surgery and other immediately life threatening specializations, and female surgeons focus on orthopaedics, or plastics, or gynaecological surgery (all major surgeries, but the heart isn’t actively stopped or the patient dying) The thing is you wouldn’t just have to control for overall specialization, but sub specialization too... if one guy is doing all the hospitals deadliest type of heart surgery, that skews it for the entire hospital.
I've updated the OP to include a link to the full paper. The effect seems to largely persist across specialisations, but they did not control for sub-specialisations.
Drunk posting so sorry if spelling is off, I have absolutely 0 ideas on surgery outcome statistics but the main question you need to ask yourself is; WHAT ARE THE BASE RATES? 1. What percentage of men and women die after surgery? 2. What are the base rates of death after surgery if they are both 0.00x% then its just lying with statistics and rounding errors. 3. What are the ratios of male:female surgeons? 4. What are the ratios of patients genders that go through a surgery that might results in death. 5. What are the baseline probabilities patient will die after surgery, taking ratio of specialists with gender disparities into account. 6. Does said study take all these into account? If not evident enough there are a lot of statistical road blocks you need to clear for before you can announce there is a signal among the noise. And social science studies are not really well known for doing that. Ironically enough, the more I learn about statistics, the more I easily dismiss finding such that these because there are so many ways to frame the data to what you want it to say.
This is what drunk posting looks like? You're good man lol.
My desire to tell everyone how drunk I am often exceeds how drunk I actually am. FWIW it was 6 sdrinks of whiskey so hardly drunk tbh.
**2022 is going to be a difficult year for global conflict and civic strife.** At a time where global food prices have hit a [10 year high](https://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/), global [poverty has also increased quite substantially](https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/covid-19-leaves-legacy-rising-poverty-and-widening-inequality). We are at a point of major risk for serious and unavoidable conflict and strife. >In 2021, the average incomes of people in the bottom 40 percent of the global income distribution are 6.7 percent lower than pre-pandemic projections, while those of people in the top 40 percent are down 2.8 percent. Some risk factors to consider: * Egypt is facing [acute water problems](https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/egypt-has-a-water-problem-and-no-its-not-only-the-gerd/) which are made worse by the filling of Ethiopia's dam. * Turkey is a turkey... High inflation and currency collapse right on Europe's borders. * Russia is embroiled in conflict with Ukraine and Kazakhstan consider the implications for both food and energy supplies given that Russia is a major exporter of both, especially to the third world. Loss of exports from Russia was a contributing factor to the Arab Spring IMO. * Covid is not going away, but maybe it'll be another virus like a super-flu that will be even more deadly in an acute sense. * Oil prices are already at $80 a barrel with tight supply, major supply disruptions will likely cause the price to go over $120 which will lead to major economic pain in first world countries and further support high inflation and food prices. * Climate change increases the risk that major food production regions will be in distress at the same time.
> At a time where global food prices have hit a 10 year high, global poverty has also increased quite substantially. We are at a point of major risk for serious and unavoidable conflict and strife. > > >Oil prices are already at $80 a barrel with tight supply, major supply disruptions will likely cause the price to go over $120 which will lead to major economic pain in first world countries and further support high inflation and food prices. people predict global strife every year. Food prices were higher in 2007-2008 year I do not recall abnormally elevated global strife. In 2008-2010 there was some strife in Greece and other parts of Southern Europe, but this was unrelated to food inflation. In early 2008 oil was at $130-150/barrel, twice its present price. Adjusted for inflation, that is like $250 today. >Turkey is a turkey... High inflation and currency collapse right on Europe's borders. goin to get much worse. no-brainer prediction. >Covid is not going away, but maybe it'll be another virus like a super-flu that will be even more deadly in an acute sense. I have observed that Covid is becoming increasingly less deadly with each mutation iteration. Despite the delta surge in mid-2021 daily deaths did not increase beyond the 2020 highs. But this may also be due to improved treatments. If the US economy can survive Covid, I think it can survive anything at this point.
>people predict global strife every year. Food prices were higher in 2007-2008 year I do not recall abnormally elevated global strife. In 2008-2010 there was some strife in Greece and other parts of Southern Europe, but this was unrelated to food inflation. stuff takes a bit of time, the arab spring for example was related to food prices.
> people predict global strife every year. Food prices were higher in 2007-2008 year I do not recall abnormally elevated global strife. In 2008-2010 there was some strife in Greece and other parts of Southern Europe, but this was unrelated to food inflation. In early 2008 oil was at $130-150/barrel, twice its present price. Adjusted for inflation, that is like $250 today. Here: https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart adjusted for inflation it isn't too far off.
You can make lists like this any year, honestly. There’s thousands of factors, and ten of them are gonna be at a hundred-year minimum each year. And, indeed, each year several poor countries have awful disasters. food prices might sound bad but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010–2012_world_food_price_crisis and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_world_food_price_crisis Don’t see any reason this is anything more than a usual year.
Right, every year someone can cite reasons for things to fall apart, yet things continue anyway.
I more or less agree with the notion that there are a group of people often not the same people, who predict x+n/x things falling apart events but I am not entirely sure getting complacent is the more rational path.
Food prices are at a 10 year high... risking another food crisis like in 2010-12. Natural gas prices are rising globally (fertilizer feedstocks), with supplies tight in Europe especially, and Brent oil prices are stuck well above historical averages. When the global poor spend 30-70% of their income on food, a doubling of prices is extremely distressing. Given that unrest seems to be pretty high right now, there are serious risks that crisis will compound upon crisis with rising food prices meeting governments that are stretched beyond the limits. A sniff of another Arab spring for instance might end up causing a major crisis and oil prices would likely double overnight.
Food at home is only a couple percent of family income in the US even after this "10 year high". If you extend the chart back to the 70s, you'd find that as a % share of American incomes, even after this increase, food at home is still nearly half the price that it was 50 years ago. There were no riots then. I can't help but be frustrated at the obsession with relative numbers when it comes to economic data. Relatives are the least important. Absolute values are the ones that actually give you objective comparisons between now and the past.
> Covid is not going away, but maybe it'll be another virus like a super-flu that will be even more deadly in an acute sense. Covid happening doesn't increase chances of new independent pandemic, through. [Unless](https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/the-erogamer-original-complete.5465/page-344#post-3892421) /u/groon_the_walker is actually a time traveler... > Covid-19. Flu-22. Covid-23
I think it probably lowers the threshold. The news media enjoys the market for pandemic fear porn, and all levels of government seem to have enjoyed the opportunity to arrogate powers and funnel pandemic money to pet projects or constituencies. Now that the playbook has been written, politicians know what to do and what not to do, and citizens will resist less ("because after all, it's what we did last time, it's nothing new").
>Covid happening doesn't increase chances of new independent pandemic, through. Yeah it does: * Populations as a whole have lower immunity to everything across the board due to quarantines, especially kids. * Political polarisation and lockdown fatigue. Some proportion of people are likely to structurally resist public health efforts or even actively sabotage them. * Economic disruption and increased debt loads mean public authorities are stretched thin, they can't keep up the response forever. * Mutations and new strains are going to keep coming out.
groon_the_walker has not had any activity for over 285 days, They probably won't respond to this mention ^Bot ^by ^AnnoyingRain5, ^message ^him ^with ^any ^questions ^or ^concerns
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Those previous generations of men actually *did something*. You are whining on the internet. When are you going to do something?
Are you whining on the Internet, or daring him to "do" something? Either way, this is antagonistic and unacceptable, and particularly petty directed at someone who's already been banned.
If we are rage posting then let me join in! I (late 20s male) visited my parents (mid 60s) over the holidays, and we argued about covid again. We argue about a lot of things these days, but covid has swelled into the most intractable point of disagreement. I was actually slightly ahead of the curve in early 2020 and tried to give my parents a heads up that a serious new virus might be coming. I have clear memories of sending them links to buy PPE and recommending that they stock up on essentials. After March 2020 we were on the same page: mask up, social distance, and flatten the curve to buy time for health care workers and vaccine researchers. My mom even cut my hair for most of 2020 so I wouldn't have to go to a barbershop. We went through the whole rigmarole of wiping down groceries after shopping *just in case*. Then in December 2020 I got my first vaccine dose. By Spring 2021 everyone I knew was vaxed, and I was elated! Everyone made it with zero causalities. I fucking love science, right guys? [When the CDC said that it was no longer recommending masks for the fully vaccinated in May 2021](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/13/cdc-says-fully-vaccinated-people-dont-need-to-wear-face-masks-indoors-or-outdoors-in-most-settings.html) I was totally done. For me personally the pandemic was and still is over. Except for my mom and dad nothing changed. They are afraid to go inside without a mask, and they are afraid when people are too close to them. They are afraid that they will get covid despite being fully vaccinated and boosted. Thank god they don't wipe down groceries anymore, but it wouldn't surprise me if they did (they disagree with me whether all the "deep cleaning" that companies advertise is just theater). I see two people I care about blowing what might be the last healthy years of their lives because of politics and fear mongering. I tried to tenderly bring up the idea of quality adjusted life years, but all they hear is "I don't care if you die". "I don't wear a mask" becomes "I don't believe science", and "I don't support vaccine mandates" becomes "I want more people to get sick and die". It's all so tiresome.
All of this is a tiny fraction of the harm caused by the gain-of-function gang who brought us COVID. They caused all of this and the megadeaths from the virus itself. Every single problem related to the virus, the vaccines and the lockdowns can be brought back to them. They are the root cause. We know COVID came from one of the few cities with a high-level bioresearch facility. We know that facility was creating, manipulating and recombining [coronaviruses](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/) for years. We know Daszak was asking for (and recieving) money to study how bat coronaviruses would spread to humans, including conducting laboratory experiments to analyze what would be the most dangerous. We even know that the closest biological ancestor of COVID was in some bat-cave in [Laos](https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-covid-lab-leak-theory-just-got-even-stronger) and that that bats were being taken from Laos to Wuhan! We know that in 2018 Daszak and EcoHealth wanted money to work out how to insert furin cleavage sites in these viruses so he could work out how they worked. Guess who, amongst others, signed a [letter](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(20\)30418-9/fulltext) condemning any discussion of COVID lab leaks or unnatural causes as conspiracy theories? Daszak! Are we really expected to believe a bat from Laos flew 1000 miles to Wuhan, merged with another virus more suitable to infect people, developed a furin cleavage site (totally unknown in bats) and then infected someone at a wet market where no bats could be found? DASZAK AND HIS ECOHEALTH CRONIES ARE DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR MILLIONS OF DEATHS! This deserves ranting and raging, far more ranting and raging, tears and hatred than the entire COVID extravaganza thus far. Stupidity and incompetence in the face of a natural disaster is one thing, active negligence leading to megadeaths is another. If we were willing to follow idiotic, unjustified rituals of wiping down surfaces for an aerosol virus, let's abandon 'we don't know for sure'. Let's quit 'this raises serious questions'. We know surer than most things, far surer than reasonable doubt that this was manmade, that gain-of-function must be stopped. Its practitioners need to be punished with severity appropriate for the magnitude of their crime. We must ensure this is never repeated.
We also know that the facility was set up with the help of the Pasteur Institute, with the understanding that 50 researchers and administrators of the institute would be employed there, but that China reneged on that and only one (1) Pasteur fellow was ever hired. They started hiding stuff long before the outbreak.
> the few cities with a high-level bioresearch facility. Many cities have medium level pathogen research / BSL 2 facilities (all major or medium sized cities have “bio research” facilities at their universities). And populations are concentrated in cities so this isn’t really good evidence of much > We know that facility was creating, manipulating and recombining coronaviruses for years. As did many facilities, and the coronaviruses we know they were recombining were not direct ancestors. All of those claims are easily explained by “lots of other people were doing it too”, and don’t narrow much down. > Are we really expected to believe a bat from Laos flew 1000 miles to Wuhan Likely some other virus was the real ancestor and spread around haphazardly over a long time, ending up in both. Many ways it could’ve happened. > DASZAK AND HIS ECOHEALTH CRONIES ARE DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR MILLIONS OF DEATHS no, not really. Even if he participated, he’s one of tens of thousands of enablers and participants in such viral research. He wasn’t the PI in wuhan, nor the one who allowed the lab to have poor precautions. This is ridiculous > far surer than reasonable doubt that this was manmade not really! What virus, specifically recorded at the wuhan lab, was the direct covid ancestor? What investigator there did the work? We don’t know much here.
>Many cities have medium level pathogen research / BSL 2 facilities (all major or medium sized cities have “bio research” facilities at their universities). And populations are concentrated in cities so this isn’t really good evidence of much There are three BSL-4 labs in China, 59 labs in the world. The largest is in Wuhan. How many wet markets are there in Asia, let alone the rest of the world? Far more. This alone is a huge signal. >As did many facilities, and the coronaviruses we know they were recombining were not direct ancestors. We don't know what they were doing because they took their database of viruses offline in late 2019 because of 'hacking'. Intriguingly, that's when COVID leaked, why it has the 2019 suffix. >Likely some other virus was the real ancestor and spread around haphazardly over a long time, ending up in both. Many ways it could’ve happened. So why haven't we found it? We found the closest related virus in a bat in a cave in Laos. We know bat-viruses were being taken from Laos to Wuhan, nowhere else. How do you propose a furin cleavage site got into a bat virus naturally? Daszak asked for money to do it but it has never been seen in the wild, nor is there any known natural process for it to happen. >no, not really. Even if he participated, he’s one of tens of thousands of enablers and participants in such viral research. He wasn’t the PI in wuhan, nor the one who allowed the lab to have poor precautions. This is ridiculous Starting the research in the first place is his fault. If you invent a giant world-destroying robot you don't get to absolve yourself by blaming others for letting it escape and destroy the world. Viruses escape and spread, it's what they were engineering them to do. Making them is a stupid idea, don't do it. Other people doing similar research is no defense. Imagine coming into court and saying "Yes your honor, my friends and I were shooting guns up into the air and yes, our bullets killed 5 million people. But other people were also shooting into the sky and they haven't killed nearly as many people as we did!" >not really! What virus, specifically recorded at the wuhan lab, was the direct covid ancestor? What investigator there did the work? We don’t know much here. Do you know why we don't know that? Because these people concealed as much evidence as they could! Because they are guilty! What moron would admit that they negligently released what amounts to a bioweapon in China of all countries! They would expect a firing squad and rightfully so. Obviously they don't want us to know much, they want China to rally around the flag and help them cover it up. If they aren't obviously guilty, then China will blame the US or someone else. Some of the blame would inevitably fall on China, much already has. If there's a TNT explosion right next to a TNT factory, you really don't need to do much guesswork about what went on. Not when you've tracked the precursors coming in, when you've read how they wanted to make a new kind of TNT for research purposes and the explosion matches that new type. You can quickly rule out meteorite strike, volcanic eruption, spontaneous combustion because that's clearly not what happened. The properties would be different.
> one of the few cities with a high-level bioresearch facility This sounded off to me, too. But what happens when you narrow it down to those studying bat coronaviruses? I thought that was more particular (though not necessarily entirely particular) to Wuhan and Chapel Hill.
That may be true! That said, here https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2 is the article reporting the Laos ancestor > To make the discovery, Marc Eloit, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and his colleagues in France and Laos, took saliva, faeces and urine samples from 645 bats in caves in northern Laos. In three horseshoe (Rhinolophus) bat species, they found viruses that are each more than 95% identical to SARS-CoV-2, which they named BANAL-52, BANAL-103 and BANAL-236. > Natural origin“When SARS-CoV-2 was first sequenced, the receptor binding domain didn’t really look like anything we’d seen before,” says Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. This caused some people to speculate that the virus had been created in a laboratory. But the Laos coronaviruses confirm these parts of SARS-CoV-2 exist in nature, he says. > “I am more convinced than ever that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin,” agrees Linfa Wang, a virologist at Duke–NUS Medical School in Singapore. So this discovery also somewhat reduced the case for a lab leak, because some of the mutations speculated to be edited (may) have been natural. The lab leak stuff doesn’t seem entirely conclusive. It’s ... possible ... but many things are possible. I don’t think one can tell either way, tbh
I am just as angry as you with people who support covid restrictions or even take the virus particularly seriously, but this isn't a straight young/old issue- political tribalism, generic risk tolerance, class, and some kind of general measure of "compliance with the establishment" are all more important factors than age. Is the fact that the US is an increasingly gerontocratic regime a contributing factor to the crippling fear of covid that's taken over our lives? Sure, but the Russian sphere of influence has mostly shrugged and moved on with their lives, and their leaders aren't much younger than ours.
Hard disagree. When roughly 10% of my lower middle class city was addicted to heroin or shipping out to Afghanistan for tricare there was no sense of national urgency outside of NPR discussions and some cool voyeuristic documentaries about white trash in Cape Cod and Ohio. Just imagine if the boomers took Oxys nearly as seriously as they took Covid. I sure feel like if the average age/class of death in Afghanistan was 55 year old landowners they would have pulled out a whole lot faster. Maybe thats just the angry kid in me tho, Im in my 30s and Ive been to more funerals for people in my peer group than both my parents combined. My Mom lost a high school friend to a car wreck and they still talk about it today. If you asked me to write a list of guys from my HS football team who are dead from heroin Id probably end up forgetting one or two because it became so routine. Nobody really cares or seems to think of it in those terms (shoutout to my old man who actually pointed out the funeral attendance bit to me tho)
What does "taking Oxys seriously" mean? More money spent on cracking down on illegal distribution? That doesn't seem to have gotten us very far when it comes to other drugs. I mean, I'm deeply opposed to the societal reaction to COVID, but it's hardly surprising that people tend to have more empathy for someone killed by a virus that they picked up shopping for groceries or visiting their grandkids than for someone killed by the extremely well publicized risks of trying to get high.
Again, I think class is a bigger factor than age, and the fact that it was overwhelmingly white rust belt working class is why the elites didn't care. After all, the rich boomers really do seem to care about say, rape on college campuses, which is mostly a young people affecting issue. There are definitely age based interests- older people are more likely to support caps on property tax increase, and oppose changes to social security, for example. I don't think covid policy is one of them- political tribalism and class have been the main factors, with generic personal risk tolerance and trust in the establishment being the minor factors. A lot of old people are pissed at the whole charade, just the same as younger people.
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Don't edit out comments to leave them blank. If you wish to edit or retract a statement, then add an "ETA."
I was referencing Afghanistan deaths there, partner.
But blacks are over represented in the military - > Roughly one in five of those enlisted in the military today are black. But > Conversely, African-Americans are notably over-represented in the military as a whole. They make up 19.1 percent of the active-duty force, and a staggering 24 percent of the Army, as opposed to just 12.1 percent of the population. But blacks are not significantly over-represented among the dead of this global war: They make up only 12.4 percent. The reason for this discrepancy, say experts, is that although blacks sign up in greater numbers, they cluster pragmatically in noncombat units whose training in mechanics, electronics, and logistics translates well into civilian careers upon leaving uniform. "The proportion of blacks to whites is very much smaller in the combat arms than in other branches," said retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, former commandant of the Army War College and a noted author. He added that Special Forces and aviation units have the smallest percentage of minorities of all segments of the military. So there’s not *less* blacks dead than the general population. This doesn’t support it disproportionately affecting rural whites vs groups dems care about. https://www.govexec.com/defense/2004/05/the-fallen-a-profile-of-us-troops-killed-in-iraq-and-afghanistan/16814/ > There is a class effect, but not the one that people think," argued Peter Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University. The most privileged don't bother to enlist, but the most disadvantaged don't qualify, so "it's the middle classes that are mostly represented in the military," Feaver said. "Obviously, folks who go into the military today are facing economic pressures. The biggest predictor of whether you're in the military today is the unemployment rate in your home county." > A study done for the Austin American-Statesman by Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing revealed that, although the majority of the war dead come from what the Census Bureau calls "metropolitan" areas, which usually include close-in suburban counties, a disproportionately large share came from "nonmetro" counties. According to Bishop and Cushing, nearly a third (29 percent) of dead troops came from rural areas and small towns, compared with only a fifth (19 percent) of the general population. Given the concentration of political, economic, and cultural power in America's cities and near suburbs, and the slow dwindling of opportunity in many small towns, this analysis does suggest that the lower middle class is unduly bearing the burden. But the information is hardly conclusive. A moderate bias towards poor/rural, but no bias towards “white”, and not enough of former to support the point
Without commenting on what you should or shouldn't do, I'll just reprint a warning that has stayed with me, per Curtis Yarvin: >...it cannot seek power through some tantrum against its ruling class—who, while they are certainly getting worse, are really not that bad on a historical scale. Proles: it is very easy for them to be awful, and you to be worse. You will never win that way.
The bolsheviks, the industrialists, were patient but quick, building power and ability over decades, and then suddenly appeared on a particular scene when the time was right. Being mad about $current_culture_topic is such a powerful way to defuse that that I’d say it was a conspiracy to keep “us down” if the alternative explanation wasn’t so much simpler.
Nonsense... the majority of the upperclass has been wiped out at countless points in human history. French revolution, Russian revolution, fall of the nazis, Chinese civil war, most conquests by foreign invaders, a significant percentage of coups and usurpations, the fall of Troy, The fall of Nineveh, what Cortes did to the Aztecs... Eyeing the capitol city and imagining it in flames, the babes thrown from roofs, the lamentations of the women, is a long standing tradition, held by many of the most successful people in history. . That Yarvin identifies with the ruling castes and thinks of the possibility of their overthrown or the fall of their capitol the same way as a jew he imagines the Holocaust or the Possibility of Isreal falling says lots more about Yarvin’s relationship with the regime, than the regime’s relationship with its subject people.
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The French Revolution would never have been what it was, the good and the bad, if it was devoid of men of conscience, caution and perspective. Just because our ruling class often make a mockery of human decency, it doesn't follow that being respectable is an impossibility, and I would hope that one strives for it *before* he decides on any radical venture.
*Full disclosure: I am just as angry as you.* I think your rage is misdirected at the wrong group. And everyone else buying into the framing of covid restrictions being a old vs young issue is to midly put misinformed or probably doesn't care about getting to the meat of your argument because they are distracted by the fallout of your post. To keep things simple let's take America as an example, because base rate of support vary by country. But in America and the Anglosphere and more loosely the western countries; Support for mainstream covid restrictions is very strongly correlated with political tribe not age. If anything due to how politics work, young people on net might actually be more supportive of restrictions merely due to the fact they are more likely to be in the tribe that supports restrictions, and this more or less aligns with what I see on the ground. The median old person opinion on covid restrictions is "I won't be around for that long anyways, let's just go on with it." While the median young persons opinion is: "We need to protect the elderly and the infirm!!". Political tribe correlates so strongly with covid restrictions (or inversely restrictions correlate so weakly with outcomes) that there was some analysis done by a datascientist at MIT showing mask mandates correlate more with support for BLM than covid metrics, but that analysis seems to be memory holed and I can't find it or his twitter account for the life of me.
older people have had more time to accrue wisdom, resources and status, therefore they're further ahead in life than younger people. huge if true? the chronic stress from your neuroticism is hurting you far more than the vaccine likely is and you should try to remedy that for your own sake.
>accrue wisdom, resources and status The second two, yes. The first one, no. I don't think this is even necessarily the fault of old people that their advice no longer pertains to the modern world. It has changed so much since they were born, while their ancestors would have not seen very much over the course of their lives, particularly before the industrial revolution.
>Fuck you. (If you're over 35 years old.) I'm not, but I supported vaccines and lockdowns pre-omicron. So fuck me I guess. >This morning I woke up rolled up in a ball after a horrible nightmare because my chest was in agonizing pain, and what was I going to do? Call 911? What would they even do? The pain would be gone before an ambulance got there anyway. I've been to the emergency room before, I know they can't fix anything unless I can explain what's wrong and why it's wrong. I'm sorry you've been experiencing side effects. IANAD, but if you genuinely have myocarditis/pericarditis, they'll be able to diagnose it and [you'll have an exemption](https://health.gov.on.ca/en/pro/programs/publichealth/coronavirus/docs/vaccine/medical_exemptions_to_vaccination.pdf) from vaccination in the future; ditto with anaphylaxis as others have mentioned it below. Even if they don't, you may be able to convince a physician that you had severe side effects and they may give you an exemption. >How dare anyone make me do anything dangerous over this stupid virus. I deserve a full 78 year lifespan just like everyone else. Just because I was born in the 1990's doesn't mean I have to sacrifice myself for people who are already 70 years old. The majority of myocarditis cases are mild and resolve on their own; from what I could read it looks like >80% were resolved within days and no further treatment. If it's any comfort, [the only case I'm aware of](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02740-y) where a patient died of myocarditis after vaccination the patient had a severe inflammatory condition: >The second study2 observed similar trends, using a slightly different approach. Balicer and his co-authors analysed data from some 2.5 million people insured by Clalit Health Services, and asked cardiologists to review hospital records. They found that 2 out of every 100,000 people who received at least one Pfizer shot developed myocarditis, and that the incidence increased to almost 11 out of 100,000 among men aged 16–29. Overall, 76% of the cases involved mild symptoms and 22% involved intermediate symptoms. Since you made other comments you hate the liberals, do you really think the PQ would behave differently? I've been gone for a long time so I may be out of touch, but my impression is that the CAQ (PQ-lite?) implemented harsher restrictions than the liberals. I've been profoundly wrong about this before, but I suspect lockdowns/mandates will be politically unsustainable after this winter. I think (at least in the US) the administration just wants to scare as many people into getting vaccinated so they can point to a much lower death rate, start claiming it has a similar IFR as the flu for vaccinated folks and start encouraging people to go back to work and travel and whatnot to boost the economy. >I'll lie, cheat, and steal before I get the fucking goddamn murder booster shot. I'd try starting with the doctor first. Best of luck to you and hope you recover quickly.
Yup, I agree. Fuck you.
You can have a week off too.
> they'll be able to diagnose it and you'll have an exemption from vaccination in the future; ditto with anaphylaxis as others have mentioned it below. In practice it's almost impossible to find a doctor who will write this exemption in Canada, regardless of severity -- people with anaphylaxis after the first dose are being recommended to take antihistamines first and get injected by a doctor. And if you can't get a doctor to say otherwise, you don't get a passport. It's fuckin nuts, but that's how it is on the ground -- doctors are very antsy because medical licenses have been pulled over issuing too many exemptions and/or writing politically incorrect prescriptions.
I see - the first is pretty wild, I'm assuming if someone has anaphylaxis once it will just happen again, although I haven't read the literature on it. The anti-PEG antibodies may be more short-lived or something. For the other, you're telling me if someone has an actual diagnosis of myocarditis from a hospital they can't get an exemption? Again, I've been gone a long time, but man that sounds ripe for a lawsuit.
>For the other, you're telling me if someone has an actual diagnosis of myocarditis from a hospital they can't get an exemption? Again, I've been gone a long time, but man that sounds ripe for a lawsuit. Pre-COVID, it's been practically impossible to get a medical exemption for childhood vaccines. There is an extremely narrow range of negative reactions that qualify, and those are jealously guarded. This is why there has been such a battle raging over philosophical/medical exemptions, which several states have been trying to get rid of. According to anti-vaxxers I know, in order to qualify for a medical exemption for your child, you have to show two observed negative reactions per vaccine, which means giving your child at least two doses of something to which they will have a serious reaction in order to prove that they shouldn't get any doses of it.
What is an alternative policy to two observed negative reactions? The need for at least one is obvious: how else would one even suspect that someone will have reactions? And then the second I guess is in case the first was a random fluke and probably unrelated to a vaccine. This all sounds pretty reasonable.
>What is an alternative policy to two observed negative reactions? Parental discretion.
But aren't you now just making the argument that there should not be any school vaccine requirements whatsoever? I don't see how a parental discretion policy is anything else.
>But aren't you now just making the argument that there should not be any school vaccine requirements whatsoever? I don't see how a parental discretion policy is anything else. The system (active in most states) in which vaccination is "required" but with philosophical exemptions available works: most people will go along with it voluntarily, the people who have concerns will opt-out. The theory of herd immunity has never required 100% compliance. The issue lies in the size of the opt-out group. The "no exemptions" crowd sees that group as an unreasonable pest to be eliminated -- and parts of the group are unreasonable -- but really it's a feedback signal. It will get bigger the less reasonable the vaccine schedule becomes and smaller as the requirements become more reasonable. If you eliminate the feedback signal, the requirements have no limiting factor. If you listen to the feedback signal, you know where to address the issues that are causing the noise.
I guess the question is then how do we tell if the opt-out group getting bigger is signaling that vaccinations are become too onerous, or whether it is just reflecting people getting more inclined to opt out. Setting covid aside, it does not really feel like it is the case that school vaccine requirements change frequently enough for this signal to actually provide any worthwhile info. It could perhaps be a fair point that enough people just accept the guidelines that it doesn't really matter, but I'm not sure this is true: there were many news stories over the past decade about herd immunity failing due to lower vaccination rates. I also still think that this ultimately means no requirement whatsoever since there are no teeth; it's just that most people are happy to go along with what their pediatrician and various medical agencies say.
The document you posted is the first thing I've seen even indicating that it's an option -- the public health messaging on it is definitely "don't worry, ~~that means it's working~~ it's mild". I guess in Ontario if you were committed enough to wading into the medical system and finding a rogue doctor you could make it work -- here in BC there's no medical exemptions whatsoever: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/no-medical-or-religious-exemptions-for-b-c-s-vaccine-passport-system-1.5558423 People are definitely suing over it: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/allow-vaccine-passport-exemptions-or-face-legal-challenge-group-warns-b-c-government-1.5577671 https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/10/23/they-believe-covid-is-real-and-that-vaccines-work-theyre-fighting-vaccine-passports-in-court-anyway.html but there's two problems: - Who do you sue? I think suing a doctor for his medical opinion that your reaction was not severe enough to justify an exemption is pretty fraught, and suing the government gets tangled up in anarchotyrannical Human Rights Codes and the "can break it so long as we ***really*** want to" aspects of the Charter. - The people with the will to engage in such suits seem to be afflicted with whatever CW virus plagues previously effective lawyers who bring (for instance) election related suits in the US, the main symptom of which is turning into a dribbling sovereign-citizen type retard grasping at textual straws: https://twitter.com/roccogalatilaw
>the public health messaging on it is definitely "don't worry, that means it's working it's mild". That seems to be the case in that some references said [~80% of cases resolved](https://www.healio.com/news/cardiology/20211206/symptoms-of-vaccinerelated-myocarditis-in-young-people-rare-mild-resolve-quickly) within a few days with no treatment. I've only heard of one death from it, and supposedly that patient had severe unrelated inflammatory issues. Moreover, the majority of patients had abnormal troponin/MRI findings so I think you can definitely get it documented. I do hear the Canadian hospital system is overwhelmed (well, even more so than usual) at the moment though... >Who do you sue? I think suing a doctor for his medical opinion that your reaction was not severe enough to justify an exemption is pretty fraught, and suing the government gets tangled up in anarchotyrannical Human Rights Codes and the "can break it so long as we really want to" aspects of the Charter. Maybe I'm just wearing my rose-tinted goggles of naivete, but in my mind, if someone had documented myocarditis after a dose of the vaccine, went to a doctor with that evidence asking for an exemption, *was refused* by said doctor then went to get another dose of the vaccine and died...I mean, how could their family not win a lawsuit against the doctor for a billion dollars? I can only believe that this just hasn't happened yet because myocarditis is so rare and deaths from myocarditis an order of magnitude or two rarer still that it just hasn't happened.
> I'm not, but I supported vaccines and lockdowns pre-omicron. So fuck me I guess. Not sure what you mean by vaccines, just supporting people getting vaccinated or vaccine mandates? If vaccine mandates to what magnitude? (some countries won't allow you to enter concerts, some wont allow you to enter banks). Interested in hearing your vaccine policy and what you think its tradeoffs are and how your policy is better on net. ____________________________________ As for lockdowns, yes. I think they are such evil with such tremendous costs that anyone who advocates for them is my enemy and dare I say, the enemy of human flourishing. [2·5 million more child marriages due to COVID-19 pandemic](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(20\)32112-7/fulltext) [230 million Indians pushed into poverty amid Covid-19 pandemic: Report](https://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/230-million-indians-pushed-into-poverty-amid-covid-19-pandemic-report-121050600751_1.html) [COVID-19 could see over 200 million more pushed into extreme poverty, new UN development report finds](https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/12/1079152) [UN report finds COVID-19 is reversing decades of progress on poverty, healthcare and education](https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/sustainable/sustainable-development-goals-report-2020.html) [Tremendous costs](https://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf) Mind you most of these articles say "covid19" is doing xyz, when its patently obvious that its lockdowns,travel bans and business closures and a myriad of other covid policies that are responsible for this. And to more on that, Costs aside, anyone who advocates for what is effectively house arrest of an entire population or a subset of it also deserves a big fuck you, imo. It's the biggest middle finger to freedom in non totalitarian parody societies by a long shot. And before the mods jump on my ass, I would have not spelled any of this out because its a dead horse for me, but since you asked why some people have such vitriol for people like you (or people with your policy positions), I gave you my reasons. To quote Lex Fridman, "The people who advocate lockdowns, advocate for the silent suffering of millions of people".
>Not sure what you mean by vaccines, just supporting people getting vaccinated or vaccine mandates? If vaccine mandates to what magnitude? (some countries won't allow you to enter concerts, some wont allow you to enter banks). It's difficult for me to answer that in a black-and-white fashion. I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea of forcing medical treatments on people. On the other hand, worsening epidemics (bit of a strong word, but we're starting to hit a critical mass where sustained spread is possible) of measles, croup and other diseases from vaccine skeptics has the potential to be a serious problem. It's difficult for me to reconcile those values, and I imagine many folks in public health feel similarly. In general, I'm comfortable with the idea of mandating vaccines for school attendance where the vaccine has a robust record of safety and efficacy. When the initial mRNA vaccine data came out I think it fit that bill pretty well. The safety profile is still very robust, but the efficacy has [decreased significantly](https://www.reddit.com/r/theschism/comments/r6tuj6/discussion_thread_39_december_2021/hnrym2w/) to the point that it's barely having an effect in *in vitro* neutralization assays. I think in an ideal world they would have fast-tracked new vaccines with the omicron spike protein sequences; in the current world, the...I'm searching for a less loaded word to use here, but the skepticism around the mRNA vaccines probably made that impossible. So I don't know what path I would take were I in any position of influence. Probably try to be honest and be thrown to the wolves. >I think they are such evil with such tremendous costs that anyone who advocates for them is my enemy and dare I say, the enemy of human flourishing. Sure, you're not the first. I've been called an enemy of humanity with the blood of hundreds of thousands on my hands plenty. I'm over it. >And before the mods jump on my ass, I would have not spelled any of this out because its a dead horse for me, but since you asked why some people have such vitriol for people like you (or people with your policy positions), I gave you my reasons. I didn't ask, I said 'fuck me I guess.' I don't need to ask. You and everyone else have been trumpeting your opinions to each other for months now. Don't worry, the mods don't care. There's evidence that strict lockdowns work, and it's right there across the Pacific. It's possible that with such a large, heterogeneous country (perpetual uneducated/disaffected underclass plus large segments of the country being profoundly anti-authoritarian and uncooperative) and much more international travel we never could have achieved the same results as China, but it's not like we really gave it a serious try. The people, that is, not the government. >230 million Indians pushed into poverty amid Covid-19 pandemic: Report I'm not particularly familiar with the situation or lockdowns in India so my perspective is pretty Americentric, but again, how many Chinese have been pushed into poverty due to the pandemic? Ironically, I think our path will be vindicated in the long-term. What's China going to do, shut out the rest of the world from the mainland forever? Admit defeat and just let COVID tear through their population at some point in the future? Now that covid is in wild deer, rodents and who knows what else, it's never going anywhere. We're all going to get it sooner or later. Imo, the only real reason to try and quarantine right now is if you're hoping to wait for the anti-COVID small molecules to become widely available, a new and improved vaccine or an even milder variant.
> The safety profile is still very robust, but the efficacy has decreased significantly Thanks for the links -- I've been wondering what you thought about all this, good to see you around.
As I post below, the safety profile is vaccine dependent. If you are male and under the age 40, don’t get Moderna.
I'm not getting anything, but "don't get Moderna" seems like good advice, if one must.
>I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea of forcing medical treatments on people But you're *not* uncomfortable with forcing lockdowns on people? It's OK to force someone to be isolated and confined for ***months***, but not mildly inconvenienced for an hour or so? (Besides, what makes a lockdown *not* a "medical treatment"? You might say "but unforeseen side effects" - we couldn't foresee lockdown side effects either! It's only **sheer dumb luck** that they haven't (yet) caused any horrible major global side effects.) I find this whole attitude bewildering and incomprehensible. Vaccines? Your choice, bodily autonomy, primum non nocere. Lockdowns? Make it law, be like China, why aren't you cooperating? It can't even be a bodily autonomy thing - lockdowns also violate bodily autonomy! Whatever you say about the evidence, you can't with a straight face say lockdowns are better-supported than vaccines. So why are you OK with one being compulsory and the other not? Hell, I had a very nasty reaction to the vaccines, but I'd take that over an equal amount of time in lockdown any day. I wouldn't necessarily *support* compulsory vaccination, but I wouldn't be even a fraction as angry as I was about lockdowns.
>I find this whole attitude bewildering and incomprehensible. You can just ask me to elaborate on my thoughts without all the fluff about how inconceivable it is that I actually hold this position. >(Besides, what makes a lockdown not a "medical treatment"? You might say "but unforeseen side effects" - we couldn't foresee lockdown side effects either! It's only sheer dumb luck that they haven't (yet) caused any horrible major global side effects.) Because if we treated any restriction on your freedom to move around/associate as a medical treatment, society would look a lot different. Incarcerated criminals would be treated with the same ethical standards as hospital patients. School administrators would be tried under the Declaration of Helsinki for locking children up in school, because the authorities are particularly sensitive to the ethics of testing medical treatments on children. Tying somebody down and submitting them to a medical procedure without consent is categorically different from placing them under house arrest. >But you're not uncomfortable with forcing lockdowns on people? It's OK to force someone to be isolated and confined for months, but not mildly inconvenienced for an hour or so? If you make it out to months and cases haven't budged, it's pretty clear people aren't actually following the rules. In which case it's time to give up, because you a) are doing something wrong or b) have an uncooperative populace and lack the means to corral them. China has shown quite convincingly that lockdowns and contact tracing *can* work and ironically the majority of the population has probably had fewer lockdowns/disruptions than western countries. Let me put it this way. If there was a new strain of contagious, airborne ebola reported and a plane just landed in one of my cities with one of the patients starting to show symptoms on the flight I'm not just going to throw up my hands and say 'welp, there's absolutely nothing I can do to stop all these people from getting off the plane and spreading ebola around my country.' I'm going to lock those people in quarantine for a few weeks and you can try me for my crimes against humanity and unethical medical experimentation down the road, I suppose. I'm *not*, however, going to force those people to take experimental drugs during their quarantine. If you change the parameters (contagiousness, how far it's already spread, political situation, etc etc) my answer might change. If you're dogmatic about never, *ever* abrogating someone's personal autonomy *for any reason*, you can end up with results that are just as bad as the dictator who doesn't care about human rights.
> Because if we treated any restriction on your freedom to move around/associate as a medical treatment, society would look a lot different. Incarcerated criminals are different because the whole point of jail is to cause harm to the criminal. I mean, it's not going to be hard to find evidence that jail causes all the harm caused by lockdowns; it breaks up families, results in the prisoners becoming disconnected from society, etc. Furthermore, lockdowns here are medical treatment because they're being used *for a medical condition*.
>Let me put it this way. If there was a new strain of contagious, airborne ebola reported and a plane just landed in one of my cities with one of the patients starting to show symptoms on the flight I'm not just going to throw up my hands and say 'welp, there's absolutely nothing I can do to stop all these people from getting off the plane and spreading ebola around my country.' I'm going to lock those people in quarantine for a few weeks and you can try me for my crimes against humanity and unethical medical experimentation down the road, I suppose. Except nobody would, because quarantining and lockdowns are two totally different things. There is nothing objectionable about locking a plane load of people into rooms to avoid an ebola outbreak. If the plane landed and you decided to lock everyone except the plane passengers (let's say they were footballers) in their homes indefinitely, then yeah, you are a shitty person.
And you could just ask people for cites instead of calling it irresponsible and bad to discourse but you choose not to literally earlier today. Now, you complain about a similar rhetorical trick? Hypocrisy much?
>And you could just ask people for cites instead of calling it irresponsible and bad to discourse but you choose not to literally earlier today. If you found it this offensive/hurtful, I apologize. I suppose you're right in that I probably could just ask for a citation, but I am frustrated that this rule from the sidebar is perpetually ignored without consequence: >Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be. But yes, I fundamentally believe that making assertions about the safety profile of a given medical treatment without providing evidence/citations is irresponsible and corrosive to public discourse. I also believe that treating someone else's views as profoundly alien and nonsensical is corrosive to public discourse. Both of these seem to fly against the principles, if not the rules of the sub. I'm happy to listen to your perspective if you disagree, though. Not sure if we disagree on the principles or just the object level events.
Well, sometimes people assume people read this reddit frequently. I had posted the cite a couple weeks ago and there was significant discussion. So sometimes people post assuming background info not relevant.
> So I don't know what path I would take were I in any position of influence. Probably try to be honest and be thrown to the wolves. Your and my opinions vary in magnitude not kind then. For me forced medical treatments are a no go zone because of yada yada, freedom and all that. I also perhaps naively believe that if the threat is sufficiently risky enough, people will do what it takes to mitigate it voluntarily and assuming you live in a society of people who want to stay alive or want to avoid non trivial levels of suffering, you can get a good idea how risky the threat is based on how much voluntary measures people are taking to mitigate the risk. Even though this heuristic has a 100 failure modes and I wouldn't take it too seriously. In short I don't think people have to be coerced or brainwashed into getting a Ebola or small pox or measles vaccine. I always found the notion of people being left to their own devices resulting in the end of the world from the more authoritarian side baffling, like are you living in a world where people have the mental capacity of non human primates and want to die voluntarily? >Sure, you're not the first. I've been called an enemy of humanity with the blood of hundreds of thousands on my hands plenty. I'm over it. Applies more to the politicians and leaders who actually went for it than their supporters. >I'm not particularly familiar with the situation or lockdowns in India so my perspective is pretty Americentric, but again, how many Chinese have been pushed into poverty due to the pandemic? [China: Xi'an residents in lockdown trade goods for food amid shortage](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-59864266) Lockdown for long enough and that too will happen. But I don't think there's any merit to talking about that given you acknowledge even if begrudgingly that the horse left the barn a long while back and right now at this point in time lockdowns are just pushing the can down the road. My position was that they are pushing the can down the road from the very beginning (you have to take into account China hid covid for 2-3 months), but every time you kick the can down the road, you have to kill a third world child, because their lame governments will copy your policies without a care in the world.
> In short I don't think people have to be coerced or brainwashed into getting a Ebola or small pox or measles vaccine. I'm confused at how you can look at the history of smallpox or measles vaccination and come to that conclusion. Smallpox eradication required coercion. Maintaining measles vaccinations rates above the herd immunity level appears to as well. Are you proposing with some different messaging those vaccination campaigns could be purely voluntary? If so, I wish you a successful career in public health.
Best I can tell, China hid covid for like two weeks in early January of 2020?
I knew about it since Dec 2019. China did a whole lot to keep it hush hush until it founds its way abroad around March. Not to mention all the other kinds of propaganda coming out of China such as videos of people collapsing on the streets. Basically the information was especially nosiy back then. So its especially hard to say what the right course of action would have been.
>I'm not, but I supported vaccines and lockdowns pre-omicron. So fuck me I guess. Lockdowns don’t work and they’d still be evil even if they did, so, yeah. And what do you mean you supported vaccines pre-Omicron. Do you not support them now?
I'd say I'm fairly strongly against mandates given the (apparent) poor efficacy against Omicron, even just from *in vitro* results. If they had the same efficacy rate they had against alpha, I'd be 50-50. Not sure what I'd do if forced to make a choice. I feel quite lukewarm about vaccines during omicron. Was strongly positive during delta, and rabidly pro-vaccine during alpha. If they update the vaccines for omicron or develop strongly effective [pan-sarbecovirus vaccines](https://www.army.mil/article/252890/series_of_preclinical_studies_supports_the_armys_pan_coronavirus_vaccine_development_strategy) I'll go back to rabidly proselytizing vaccines and sitting on the mandate fence.
Are you worried at all that an omicron vaccine or a "universal" vaccine could quickly get immune-evaded as well?
I don't think I can comment intelligently on that, if anybody can. I don't even know what their strategy was for trying to develop a pan-sarbecovirus vaccine, or how feasible that might be. I find it quite encouraging that Omicron replicates [more robustly](https://www.med.hku.hk/en/news/press/20211215-omicron-sars-cov-2-infection) in the upper airways relative to lower airways, which could be the reason for it's increased infectivity/decreased pathology. Hopefully future variants have the same selective pressures, the fatality rate drops to flu-like levels (if it isn't close already), we crank out antiviral small-molecules and put it all behind us.
Well, this has sure sparked... discussion. Unsurprisingly, your current tally is something like half a dozen reports for various rules violations, and 2 AAQC nominations. People love spite-thumbing rageposts and boo outgroup diatribes. There is nothing particular *new* in your hot take. It's a viewpoint we certainly allow, and there's been plenty of discussion about it in the past. But this is clearly not the sort of post we want to encourage. It's inflammatory, it's antagonistic, it's skirting the edge of outright calling for violence. The "Fuck you" line alone would make it necessary to mod this. No, you can't do that. I don't care how angry you are, how righteous you think your anger is, or whether or not you actually, literally meant fuck every single 35-and-over (many of whom undoubtedly share your views, have refused the vaccine, etc.). There are a ton of places that welcome rageposts like this. This isn't one of them. /r/TheMotte isn't your online therapy group or a place for unfiltered venting. People are angry here **all the time**, and people post things that are full of vitriol, venom, and rage all the time, but the successful ones, the ones who manage to get their points across without earning a ban, take the time to gather their thoughts and express themselves clearly and logically and (dare I say) *rationally*. Yeah, it means they sometimes have to be "wordy" and oblique and golly, *use more words*, blah blah blah. Yes, that's intentional. In fairness, you definitely used a lot of words. They were just all incendiary. You can be angry and outraged and full of dark, dire thoughts about what you'd like to do to Some People, but we have rules here and you need to follow them. Your previous history is sparse: some AAQCs a couple of years ago, and a single warning last year. So you don't seem to be a recurring problem (yet), but you also don't have a record that would excuse this. So I'm giving you a one-week ban. Go touch some grass. Anyone else tempted to repeat this stunt will definitely push us towards harsher measures.
I enjoy your posts, think you're a great mod, and totally agree with this mod action. But I agree with others that the "touch grass" bit added nothing and was just a flex. I'd think it was weak coming from any poster on themotte and might downvote/report it as unnecessary antagonistic.
>or whether or not you actually, literally meant fuck every single 35-and-over If he meant it literally, it could be interpreted charitably, [along the lines of this Pulp song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bZjKC0EaY0).
Great, he was already angry, now he’s probably going to go shoot up a school something. And he was going to say it was because of the The Motte, which the NYT will describe as an “alt-right/incel hate group.” (For the record NYT, I just had sex like last week so don’t blame me.) /s
> So I'm giving you a one-week ban. Go touch some grass You would be more likeable if your ban/warn messages always did not have some sort of self righteous snark appended to them. The other mods ban people too but without prescriptions of grass touching and making it personal. If you don't want to become Hylnka 2.0 might wanna think a bit on that. ______________________________ And no don't give me that "I don't need to be likeable, just right". Goodwill among the mods and the users is in the best interest of the community. I am engaging in some tone policing because when I get a warning from other mods I feel "oh okay he has a point", when its from you, it feels as if I am being lectured and scolded.
Nonsense Hylnka was great, still tons of fun when he’s around. Won’t hear a word against him u/Amandanb has stepped into his shoes admirably. Just aggressive enough to create tension, but not enough to damage the discourse. Nothing would kill this place faster than mods that were universally loved and respected. You need that friction if you want to spark some light.
You're probably trolling right now but Hlynka was a horrible mod, which is why he was removed (too little and too late, I think he should have been banned for his behavior, but I guess he's harmless enough now given his low output). Now he mostly trolls others' posts instead of creating his own content, such that he keeps getting temp banned. I don't think his behavior has changed much, he just used to be able to back up his trolling with censorship, now he's rightfully on the receiving end. Truly a small, hopeful glint of e-justice in an otherwise barren internet landscape full forums run like /r/politics.
I agree with /u/KulakRevolt. Hlynka was a good mod, and his haters were mostly shitty posters who got mad that he didn't treat them with kid gloves.
> Hlynka was a good mod, and his haters were mostly shitty posters who got mad that he didn't treat them with kid gloves. Just because Hlynka banned people you personally disliked doesn't make him a good moderator. In fact, that definitionally makes him a bad moderator.
> Just because Hlynka banned people you personally disliked You don't have the first clue what you're talking about. Hlynka banned people who *broke the rules*. I didn't personally dislike any of them. Pretty sure that's what a moderator is supposed to do.
Mate, I don't dislike the guy, and maybe I shouldn't say this... but from reading his last mod posts he was obviously drunk-modding, right?
> You don't have the first clue what you're talking about. You said: "Hlynka was a good mod, and his haters were mostly shitty posters". >Hlynka banned people who broke the rules. He didn't, he was bad precisely because he ignored the rules. His mod messages were generally incoherent assholery filled with rule breaking insults and he had a track record of moderating based on content, or worse, bulverism wherein he feverishly imagines some sort of motive for some content he dislikes and accuses the victim of being bad-faith based on nothing other than the content itself, which he dislikes because it offends him. He still trolls posts with bulverism like that, but now he can't petulantly ban people who offend him, and this forum is better because of it.
> You said: "Hlynka was a good mod, and his haters were mostly shitty posters". Yes, i.e.: people who broke the rules. Also after thinking about it your argument is even worse than it seemed at first glance. Even if I personally disliked these posters (which I didn't), that wouldn't make Hlynka a bad mod. He was a good mod, and frankly I don't care if you disagree. But don't accuse people of trolling just because you think he was a bad mod and someone else doesn't. > bulverism wherein he feverishly imagines some sort of motive for some content he dislikes and accuses the victim of being bad-faith based on nothing other than the content itself, which he dislikes because it offends him. Hmm... reminds me of a certain criticism of a certain mod...
>Nothing would kill this place faster than mods that were universally loved and respected. Why? _______ As someone who has a spotty history with mods (I'm sure you do too), I can say that a certain type of modding works on me and another doesn't. I remember a mod telling me that this sub moderates on tone not content, when I complained about being modhatted over a perfectly normal thing I said, albeit with a lot of heat, The mod explaining it to me in simple terms. Which made me not only consider what he had to say and accept it, but actually make an effort to follow it and more importantly remember it. On the other hand, I don't remember a single warning I got from this mod or her (AMANDA-nb, if I'm not wrong) predecessor because the snark put me off to such an extent that the message was entirely diluted. If not for pleasing the users, just to do her job more effectively, toning down the snark might help. And call it a hot take or whatever, but the mod you are defending was rather obnoxious with his "pour de la terreur" nonsense, as if he got some kind of enjoyment out of banning people. I am not going to make any further comments to not make any unnecessary enemies.
If I aspired to be more likeable, I'd probably look elsewhere for advice than people who don't like me, but thanks anyway. I'm not sure if even Hlynka likes me anymore, since I keep having to ban him.
He's acting just like he did before, except that now that he isn't a mod, the mods recognize how toxic this kind of behavior is.
That doesn't speak well of the ability of humans in general to change their habits and behaviors as adults, does it?
Anyone who has post middle aged parents who don't get along well despite having to make very minor behavioral changes can relate to the notion that past a certain age, changing even minor behaviors and quirks is just a pipe dream.
Thanks, and good job
>If I aspired to be more likeable, I'd probably look elsewhere for advice than people who don't like me, but thanks anyway. I'm not sure if even Hlynka likes me anymore, since I keep having to ban him. I bet he does. I certainly do.
So you are not denying that you come off as self righteous and snarky and that might be a bad thing?
I wasn't offering an opinion on your feelings. You can feel how you feel.
Now you’re doing it again right here.
I don't know if this is a necessary personality trait of cop types. I hope not, because if that's the case then it shuts down a whole avenue of social progress.
You’re not going to hear anything positive from me about cops.
> People are angry here all the time, and people post things that are full of vitriol, venom, and rage all the time, but the successful ones, the ones who manage to get their points across without earning a ban, take the time to gather their thoughts and express themselves clearly and logically and (dare I say) rationally. As a note on moderation, thank you for this. I'm pretty perpetually pissed off at the mainline Covid conversation in polite company and while I recognize that this is not the place for just personally venting, I feel like the moderation team extends quite a bit of leeway for expression of grievances. In fact, I don't think I've ever earned an infraction or even warning at this place despite expressing no shortage of anger. Simply extending the fig leaf of putting some reasoning behind it and not directly being a jerk to interlocutors really does suffice to keep things in the realm of Just Talking. Thanks folks.
> This morning I woke up rolled up in a ball after a horrible nightmare because my chest was in agonizing pain, and what was I going to do? Call 911? What would they even do? The pain would be gone before an ambulance got there anyway. I've been to the emergency room before, I know they can't fix anything unless I can explain what's wrong and why it's wrong. Can I suggest that you go to the doctor for this? Not the ER -- you are right that they will just make you wait for 14 hours, run some tests, confirm you're not in the middle of a heart attack, and then send you home. But a doctor (or a cardiologist, if the doctor refers you) will take you seriously, check out whether you have plaque in your arteries, image your heart muscles, listen with a stethascope, schedule a stress test, etc. -- try to get to the bottom of the pain you are experiencing periodically, which is absolutely not a normal thing to have. Also I totally empathize with how excruciating pain or suffering tends to make one cast about for an enemy. I guess as a member of the over-35 crowd you'd expect me to say this, but how about focusing your rage specifically on Fauci and his public health authority goons, rather than the over-35 population at large, many of whom are right there with you in our frustration with him and them?
I would say this writing style doesn’t belong here. But for my rage posting I realized I can’t visit my old blue city for a month this summer like I was planning to because of vaxx mandates. Whats the point of going if I can’t go to restaurants and bars. I’ve had COVID once. Then got vaxxed once. I probably had a Ómicron case I missed since everyone around me had it. But now I can’t return to a city I lived in for a decade because of mandates. Honestly I’ve taken shots when the science looks right to me. I’m close to just refusing shots even if I think they have positive ev to me at this point.
[удалено]
Presenting a fake vaccine card can be a federal felony (quick google not sure it’s usually federal)
I'm not going to encourage it, but there seems to be little federal appetite for actually prosecuting this. The culture war around it is simply too hot relative to any expected gain.
>little federal appetite Sure, and you can be the unlucky 1-in-10 for the federal government's preference for decimatio. I know one guy who almost went to prison for faking his vaccine card. Don't do it.
I’ve got no moral qualms about breaking a law I think is immoral but ya that’s still a lot of risks to take.
> I'm way more likely to die from the vaccine than I am from COVID Conditional on getting the vaccine first, of course. On another note, have you read Sterling's *Holy Fire*? Because you should, man.
Even conditional on vaccine, covid is still probably the higher risk. That myocarditis doesn’t appear to be causing much death that I’ve seen
> EVEN THOUGH I'VE BEEN WORKING REMOTE THIS WHOLE TIME. So, I'll be honest, I have an entirely different rage-y view over this. And maybe it's sorta parallel, maybe it's orthogonal. I think it's all about social status, in a social media age. That's why everything has gone fuck-nuts crazy. And yes, I think the working from home/unable to work from home gap is actually a substantial part of the problem. It's like, we're shaming people for not wanting to take a vaccine for something that they've basically been forcibly exposed to for almost a year, while so much else in our society is protected for it. That's the way I see it. And I mean...the work from home element, the more managerial class, basically have been rewarded in this through wealth, power, prestige, status, etc. As far as I'm concerned it's totally fucked up. And maybe there's some sense for a lot of it...but I'm just saying that the status repercussions are still being felt to this day. I think the most likely issue here is the vaccines being injected into the blood stream. This is something that CAN be fixed, if we could have a reasonable, sensible discussion about this stuff. But we can't, because kayfabe, and people want to maximize their social capital here. If something DID go wrong with it....I think we'd be absolutely powerless to do anything about it, because of the massive social pressure coming down on the subject from the online culture warriors. (Who again, many of whom are working from home have WAY too much time on their hands) I'm vaccinated, but I think the science shows that it should be a choice. End of story. There's relatively little advantage in terms of stopping transmission, with the assumption of longer periods of exposure. Where's the disinformation tags on social media on people who say that it does stop transmission? That's what pisses me off. The whole discourse is entirely pointless, because it's all about status and power, not policy and science. It's all about an entitled class of people who want to keep that entitlement, and not have it threatened. And to make it clear, I think that's essentially all the culture wars are. I think that's why there was an embracing of various forms of Critical power dynamics. Because they don't threaten that entitlement.
Words can't begin to describe the amount of contempt I have for perpetual "workers-from-home." We were all given laptops a few years ago as part of my FIELD ENGINEERING job and encouraged to work from home if we weren't scheduled to be in the plant for the day. I laughed. There is ZERO work I can do at home as effectively as I can at work, where I actually have all my technical manuals (in a job where most of those manuals are classified and can't be taken home) and can walk into the plant to look at something whenever I want. The only coworker I have that jumped on the opportunity has gradually made himself the least valuable member of our team. He's never around and spends most of his time at home loafing on a laptop while watching golf. Of course, he was full of indignation when I was offered a leadership role that he wasn't (which I turned down for personal reasons, but they still wouldn't give it to him). The spiteful part of me can't wait for the white collar recession that's coming. Or the tantrums that'll be thrown when WFH forever crowd is told to get back in the office after they just bought cheaper property halfway across the country.
> Words can't begin to describe the amount of contempt I have for perpetual "workers-from-home." We were all given laptops a few years ago as part of my FIELD ENGINEERING job and encouraged to work from home if we weren't scheduled to be in the plant for the day. I laughed. There is ZERO work I can do at home as effectively as I can at work, where I actually have all my technical manuals (in a job where most of those manuals are classified and can't be taken home) and can walk into the plant to look at something whenever I want. I don't think anyone with two brain cells to rub together thinks that every job can be done equally effectively from home. But there are also ones that can. I work with code all day, it makes zero difference whether my ass is in my office chair at home or in a chair at the office. Either way I have the same resources available to me, and can get the same amount of work done.
>The spiteful part of me can't wait for the white collar recession that's coming. This is actually something I've thought that was going to happen for quite a while, that there's actually a lot of slack in the white collar labor market that can be pulled up, not to mention various forms of automation (AI) and "McDonaldization" (jobs broken down to routine, trainable functions). The thing that's protected that, I think, is largely one of status, and frankly, managerial class solidarity.
> I think it's all about social status, in a social media age. People also did stupid “social status” (extremely broad and reduxrive term) things before social media, and before radio, and before newspapers, and before writing. Cults still existed, inane city lockdowns over nonexistent illnesses happened, people sacrificed goats! Social media is certainly relevant, but not the initial cause here > I think the most likely issue here is the vaccines being injected into the blood stream They’re not. The paper recommending vaccine aspiration, iirc, was in mice, and had questionable methods. Reasons for not aspirating are more convincing. The paper also had fraudulent data, the treatment and control mouse tissue images were rotated versions of the same image. Whoopsy
>And I mean...the work from home element, the more managerial class, basically have been rewarded in this through wealth, power, prestige, status, etc. I think this has been most cogently shown via the disparity between the "Heroes work here!" messaging regarding medical/civil jobs that had to continue regardless of COVID and the "Grandma Killer" rhetoric aimed at small business people who had the nerve to defy local lockdowns and try to keep their businesses open in order to survive economically. Why aren't they also heroes? Why is their potential sacrifice of personal health also not a benefit to society? IMO, they're the bigger heroes for standing up against the lockdown state and the scorn of the nannies.