domain:felipec.substack.com
Skulldrinker
6m ago
Rather in the same way that a cop killing an innocent person is more outrageous than rando killing someone; the cop is supposed to protect people, and is empowered by the state to do so. I have high standards for the medical and scientific establishment and find it particularly perverse and outrageous when they cave to/follow political pressure. I have very low standards for a populist movement of anti-vaxxers and fox news youtube clip viewers led by Orange Man.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
10m ago
If someone wants to say "well, it's not so clear, maybe it's this, maybe it's that, etc , etc." I don't have anything against that. It's the waltzing in, declaring one theory wrong, and proposing a wronger one as the true explanation, triggers my 'tism.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
10m ago
Is there even a good definition of "autism" at play? I have met enough cases that I kinda grasp it intuitively, but the lack of a concrete measurement for really any characteristic sometimes makes me wonder if in a slightly different world we'd be having the same arguments over "misanthropy" (including prefers things to people), or something like that. Imagine if we let people self-diagnose with something that caused irritability.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
14m ago
That can arise naturally from FPTP without gerrymandering. If a 65-35 city is reasonably homogeneous, then every district will be roughly 65-35 and a majority-party sweep is the default outcome.
Skulldrinker
15m ago
Whenever I envision public transit (based on my experiences on the Blue Line in chicago), there's always one hobo taking up two+ seats because he's sleeping/living there; the homeless person is often black, but somehow no one hassles them for breaking any rules. So slightly funny that Karen picked a fight with someone she had a chance of shaming.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
20m ago
I think the steel-man of the class/subculture argument here would be to point out that clothes and posturing are also doing a lot of work here: we're talking about someone putting their feet on the seats (not a 'proper' behavior). These cases are never about someone in a suit, or even a collared shirt, or about someone quietly reading a book or using headphones. It's always about someone swaggering around like they own the place.
I will absolutely concede that this correlates pretty strongly with race, and I won't take a side here on whether there is causation and in which direction. You can try to do so in a colorblind fashion, but I think it'll look pretty similar to an outside observer regardless.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
26m ago
This isn't to say that ideas are useless. They exist for a reason. As organizing principles uniting a coalition.
The problem comes when people start to believe that the ideas are valuable in themselves, and thus become unable to maintain anything but a single form of coalition, and when it becomes defunct they impotently try to invoke their propaganda as if it were an unchanging law of the universe.
Free speech is something that can exist, and something that I desire. But it is only possible if a powerful group of organized men agree that it benefits them to maintain as a norm, and in no other possible circumstance.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
28m ago
Checking the history, ibuprofen was pharmacy-only in the UK until 1996 (whereas aspirin and paracetamol were on general sale). So when aspirin became contra-indicated for children because of the risk of Reye's Syndrome, a generation of kids grew up with paracetamol as the most available pain relief. The messaging from people who send public health messages (I was too young at the time to be more specific) was "ibuprofen is a stronger version of aspirin", so I assumed that it was also unsuitable for young children until I had kids of my own and bothered to check.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
30m ago
It's a sop to a subgrouping that has been co-opted by the MAGA movement.
Think of it as the RFK equivalent of the Cuba embargo: most don't care, and a subgroup cares A LOT, so you go with what the subgroup wants.
stuckinbathroom
31m ago
Of course, it might also be cover for the recommendation to delay hep b vaccines until 12.
Why would this recommendation need cover at all, let alone in the form of such a red herring?
The case against universal infant Hep B vaccination can be made straightforwardly to the American people: Hep B is quite rare in this country and is generally transmitted vertically or through contact with body fluids, so the vaccine should generally be restricted to infants born to a Hep B-positive mother, or living in close contact with Hep B-positive people. I’m not saying this argument is a slam dunk: although it’s easy to test the mother for Hep B at the time of childbirth, it’s hard to test everyone whose body fluids the neonate might come into contact with, and understandably the mom-to-be may not answer survey questions like “Does anyone in your household shoot up hard drugs, or have lots of promiscuous sex?” honestly. I’m merely saying that this argument is cogent and plausibly defensible on cost-benefit grounds in a way that the “Tylenol causes autism” distraction just … isn’t.
TitaniumButterfly
31m ago
'Black' and 'White' are not proxies for class but for ancestry, and there are plenty of people with light (or dark) skin who are not from the same ancestral groups as the central cases of those categories, in this case Northwestern European or Sub-Saharan African.
Our language is seriously out of date here. Skin color is an increasingly-bad proxy for these things in our increasingly-admixed world, but concluding that race is simply a proxy for class or culture would be a major mistake.
If you'd like an excellent and not particularly politically charged exploration of this phenomenon, Albion's Seed is still pretty great and Scott has a review up somewhere so that you don't even need to read the book.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
32m ago
This was my biggest culture shock moving to the city. Where I grew up the working class was mostly white, the diner waitress and the customer had about equal odds of being white or black. Moving to NYC, lower end retail has entirely black employees serving mostly white customers.
rae
33m ago
I’m actually in agreement that there is political distortion from the left in the social sciences (less so in medicine), but the American right has not presented any credible alternative and instead doubled down on even worse distortions of their own, and burning down the whole thing. The American medical establishment supporting protests (perhaps due to internal political pressures?) does not mean you should distrust the whole institution when it comes to non politically influenced matters.
I’m transgender myself, and I would love for the left to stay out of my medical condition, and for there to be actual studying of the phenomenon and treatment options without political bias influencing it. Unfortunately the right does not offer any solutions and seems interested in stopping research and putting laws that restrict treatment.
I was a fan of the anti-woke movement early on - the intellectual dark web so to speak - but it really feels like Americans just traded one flavour of woke for another.
hydroacetylene
50m ago
The underclass is not primarily black, although in NYC I guess it might be. It’s probably 40-50% black, which is a massive overrepresentation, yes, but you’re about as likely to see someone white or Hispanic behaving in similarly antisocial ways. We call some of them ‘wiggers’.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
51m ago
Conservatives are the ones having kids and so are the more concerned now about what they're putting into their kids bodies.
They are also more aware of the breakdown in classroom behavior, increase of violent outbreaks, and having a medical reason to pin it on is useful.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1hr ago
It might be cultural, my parents always preferred ibuprofen. But also migraines run in the family, and ibuprofen is more useful for that sort of pain.
In the US there was an infamous Chicago Tylenol Murder spree when my parents were in the 20s, which probably gave the brand a bad name.
pigeonburger
1hr ago
be a fan of measures which promote public safety?
If they knew for sure that they did, they might. But when they see the medical establishment visibly torturing the science to fit the progressive agenda in subfields that are legible to laypeople (see again, transgenderism, or the immediate endorsement of BLM protests from the american medical establishment despite the pandemic), the result is distrust of the pronouncements in the subfields that are not as legible. If you're lying to my face about something that I can independantly observe, why would I just shut up and believe you when it comes to something I'm not able to observe?
roystgnr
1hr ago
Politics is about group interest, not ideas.
Ironically, the idea that we can benefit our own interests by engaging in political activity out of group interest is, itself ... (pause for drama ruined by the spoiler at the start of the sentence) ... an incredibly idealistic idea.
If you're lucky enough to be registered in a swing state, the odds that your state carries the crucial electoral votes multipled by the odds that your vote will break a tie in the state is only as high as 1/10,000,000. Most of us are closer to the 1/1,000,000,000 range.
It sounds irrational to fight for an idea even at short-term cost to your group, but anybody who expends time and effort on politics without being paid for it has already self-selected to be the sort of person who will fight for at least one romantic abstract idea, the idea that they can and should try to sway the course of the whole nation even at the expense of their own self-interest. The other abstract ideas we try to make win, like "free speech is good even if I disagree" or "deaths are bad even among people I have no connection to", aren't nearly as irrational as anteing up to play the game in the first place.
rae
1hr ago
I’m not American so I’m not too familiar with what you’re describing. Where I live the vaccination enforcement and lockdown measures were significantly harsher than anywhere in the US, and there was broad social support from all political parties. Shouldn’t conservatives, i.e. the party of law and order, be a fan of measures which promote public safety?
And the right in the US, especially in its current MAGA incarnation, is just as gleeful in its authoritarian tendencies. It doesn’t even feel economically right wing anymore; tariffs, protectionism, anti-immigration, the government having ownership of major companies… that was all leftist policy 50-60 years ago.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
With all due respect, that’s fucking ridiculous.
Have you met someone with serious, not-the-photogenic-kind autism?
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
It may be that poor orthodox organization leads to their miracles going uninvestigated, but there are also some high profile orthodox miracles which are confirmed fakes(eg thé Easter fire. Now thé odd pious fraud is not proof against, but there is AFAIK no counterbalancing from well-investigated phenomena.
Protestant miracles seem like a general mish mash, and in fact using the term ‘Protestant’ in such a way seems like a sin against proper argumentation. Y’all are a varied bunch- is there a branch/denomination/movement within Protestantism that has repeated verifiable miracles? Any equivalent to the blood of st Januarius or thé spring at Lourdes or the series of Eucharistic miracles?
Mormonism’s supernatural claims have been investigated and falsified. The golden tablets are, per their own internal investigation, gobbledygook.
It took me exactly this long to go "Oh, fucking theater kid!"
How many progressive speech writers / communications staffers are just wannabe writers who failed to get a real job after taking six years to graduate from Bard with a B.A. in "comparative critical choreography"
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