Crowstep
23d ago
Who are 'the pro-vaccine people', every government and health authority in the developed world? The supermajority of people on the planet who willingly got a vaccine? Humanity is not in a manichean struggle between pro- and anti-vax. Vaccines are just a (very) useful medical technology that unfortunately got tied up with the toxic partisanship and negative polarisation of American politics.
In the less angry parts of the world, we just got our jabs and got on with life once the virus went away because of them.
It's pretty fallacious to split the entire species into 'the pro-vaccine side' and 'the anti-vaccine side' and conclude that because some people or organisations were censoring information (as if this is a new thing for organisations to do) then you can ignore all studies and evidence (and your own lying eyes) about whether the covid vaccines worked.
Germany censors people who think the Holocaust didn't happen. That doesn't mean the Holocaust deniers are right.
Paul Graham says to keep your identity small, and this is a perfect example why. You're wilfully putting yourself at risk for a disease because your political partisanship won't allow you to accept a medical technology that your political opponents might like.
Crowstep
9mo ago
I would say that cultural marxists are those who are biased in favor of progressive favored groups, of intersectional alliance, such as blacks, Jews, women, LGBT, and more, are identitarians in favor of such groups, on the basis of deeming them oppressed.
Based on the last year's events, I can think we can comfortably say that Jews don't fall into that list. In fact, I'm pretty sure Jews haven't been on there since what, the 60s?
Among those who play the oppression olympics game, Jews are super-whites.
Crowstep
22d ago
Can you give examples of these institutions and how they censored information?
Because every developed country (and most undeveloped ones) used COVID vaccines and demonstrated their effectiveness. Is the entire planet in on this conspiracy?
Crowstep
24d ago
we don't have a counterfactual Earth to compare against
No, but we have a counterfactual population to compare against, the population who chose not to get vaccinated. The comparison is gigantic and unambiguous, vaccines saved lives. And that's with the unvaccinated population benefitting from the partial herd immunity provided by the vaccinated population.
the distinct impression I got from the public medical establishment during the pandemic is that if it were happening they would not have been honest about it because of how they took a mortage on their reputations to push the vaccines
If they weren't being honest about side effects, why did you quote an article about them describing side effects and how common they are as a reason for not getting the vaccine? How does that not count as honesty?
There was no scientific curiosity
If that were true, they would have just released the vaccines instead of spending months and months doing exhaustive trials to see whether and to what extent the vaccines reduced infection, and what side effects there were. If scientific curiosity means anything, it means testing your hypotheses with studies. What exactly did you expect them to do beyond that?
but I have no data either way that I would personally trust about this
You have a massive population of vaccinated people, living among a massive population of unvaccinated people. The unvaccinated population had death rates from COVID that an order of magnitude higher than the vaccinated population. What more evidence could you ask for?
Crowstep
3mo ago
You misunderstand me. I'm arguing that successfully following CICO as diet advice is counter-productive. The Biggest Loser study showed that contestants who purposely decreased their CI (through having their food intake managed by the producers of the show) and massively increased their CO through exercise permanently reduced their metabolic rates, even after they regained the weight after the show was over. These people, who absolutely did follow CICO as advice ended up making things worse for themselves.
A person can choose to eat less. But eating less increases hunger (duh) and reduces metabolic rate. Homeostasis trumps willpower.
But obesity isn't caused by a lack of willpower (the whole world didn't get lazy in the 1970s for no reason). It's caused by a broken lipostat. This is the consensus among obesity researchers and it lines up with what we actually see. What caused the broken lipostat is still up for debate, I think it's vegetable oil but it could be something else.
Crowstep
7mo ago
Looking at her other Substack posts, it seems like she only did it for that particular post. I guess she was trying to evoke Zoomer angst.
Crowstep
8mo ago
a 1990s-Bill-Clinton analogue
That's possibly the only take on Trump I've seen that argues he's too moderate.
Left-wingers might say he's a fascist or whatever, right-wingers might say he's boorish or distractable or egotistic. I don't think I've heard any of them say he's not extreme enough.
Could you elaborate?
Crowstep
22d ago
Who exactly is 'they' here?
The survivors, the soldiers who liberated the camps and the historians who studied the Holocaust afterwards are not the ones doing the censoring. Governments (and not most governments) censor Holocaust denial because they know that the only people who question the historical facts do so because they hate Jews, and hating Jews caused the Nazis to kill six million of them. We can argue whether censorship is the right approach or not, but its mere existence isn't evidence that the Holocaust was exaggerated or made up. To believe otherwise fails in the same way that all true conspiracy theories fail, it requires too much coordination from too many people over too long.
Crowstep
23d ago
Contracting and then passing on COVID to my older immuno-suppressed relatives, for whom the vaccine doesn't provide 100% protection. And since the way we ultimately defeated the virus was by achieving herd immunity, me getting a vaccine contributes to that, rather than free-riding as anti-vaxxers did.
As others pointed out, CICO cannot be debunked in so far that thermodynamics is immutably true. It's just different factors can contribute to these variables on either side.
The best way of thinking about it is that, CICO as an accounting tautology may be true, since it just describes weight loss/gain. But CICO as actionable dietary advice absolutely can (and has been) refuted. Simply deciding to eat fewer calories or exercise more (without doing something hacky like keto) doesn't work.
Crowstep
3mo ago
How did the people who founded these institutions get kicked out of them within a single generation?
They didn't get kicked out, they got outcompeted. The average European IQ is 100, the average Ashkenazi IQ is 114. In an institution that selects for IQ people, you shouldn't expect representation to match the census, any more than you should expect a room full of physicists to be 50% female.
Crowstep
5mo ago
Crowstep
7mo ago
Crowstep
8mo ago
We have not seen "peak woke". We probably won't live long enough to see "peak woke." It's going to just keep getting worse for the rest of our lives.
There's a lot of data suggesting that we really have passed peak woke. 2020 seems to have been the inflection point.
Crowstep
9mo ago
I think you're talking past me. The sole point I was making was that Jews are not part of the progressive stack of oppressed identities among Cultural Marxists. Whether the Jewish-Israeli lobby is particularly powerful in the US is irrelevant.
It's possible for Jews to be considered an oppressor class by these people and also have the US government be very pro-Israel, because most Democratic congressmen are not hardcore wokes, even if they do tolerate it as an ideology.
You clearly think that Jews are too influential in American politics, fine. You're not the only guy on this forum who doesn't like Jews. But your statement that they are considered part of the progressive stack with all the other intersectional identities obviously isn't true.
Just like the American Office is a much more popular adaptation of the British original, the Haitians eating cats thing is really just a rip-off of Bangladeshis eating serving cats in their curry houses.
Or maybe it was gypsies eating swans.
You've done away with any entitlement noncitizen babies have to citizenship, but in the process also removed any entitlement citizen babies have to citizenship.
No I haven't.
Would you agree that if the state is to give out citizenship on exclusively a rational basis.
I reject the idea that states could or should give out citizenship to reward prosocial behaviour, as least as the primary mechanism. It's not practical. Every nation has its indigenous underclass, and they need to have citizenship somewhere.
I think that the citizen body should reflect the nation (typically, an ethnic group that shares a landmass, although there are of course immigrant nations like those in the Americas which have to use fuzzier definitions). My ideal citizenship laws would be those practiced by the Gulf states, where citizenship can only be inherited from citizen parents and never given out to the children of non-citizens. Dual nationality isn't allowed. Failing that, simply getting rid of birth right citizenship would be good.
I'm not suggesting anything radical. I'm suggesting that the countries of the Americas abandon a system which produces an obvious moral hazard and do what the rest of the world does.
Crowstep
17d ago
That doesn't explain why its female dominated now though. Medicine and law used to be male dominated. Now women make up a majority of new doctors and lawyers. These things can and do change.
A better explanation is that nursing, a caring profession, is majority female because all caring professions are majority-female, because women enjoy caring (for obvious biological reasons relating to maternity).
Crowstep
18d ago
because it pays very well
This study suggests its appeal lies in it being a caring profession. This one too. I don't know how things are in every country but in the UK, nursing doesn't really pay well. The average nursing wage is only slightly above the average wage for the country as a whole. Also, we see in other jobs that higher salaries attract more men than women, relative to the pleasantness of the job. High salaries should make nursing more male, not more female.
and is female gendered
That's tautological, surely? I'm asking why is it female gendered.
Crowstep
22d ago
You don't need to know who is pushing something to notice it's being pushed
If you're positing a worldwide, decades long conspiracy to fabricate or exaggerate a genocide that never happened, then yes you need to actually say who (specifically) is pushing it and how they are doing so. Otherwise all you're doing is noticing that millions of eyewitnesses and all serious historians agree that the Holocaust happened, and that many government censor its denial, without actually demonstrating the conspiracy you're positing.
but you should probably not trust the survivor's testimony too much
Crowstep
23d ago
I have literally personally spoken to a Holocaust survivor who was in a death camp as a girl. I believe her (and the entirety of the historical field) over internet jew-haters.
Crowstep
23d ago
I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you suggesting that I need to personally know doctors, scientists and scientifically literate people to believe that vaccines work?
Crowstep
24d ago
So you're avoiding a vaccine which stopped a global pandemic that killed millions because four out of every million (that is, 0.0004%) people who get the vaccine develop a heart condition because of it?
It feels like your position is based more on political contrarianism than statistical sense.
Like, I get it, governments got authoritarian and petty when it came to vaccines. I couldn't buy a beer in a German biergarten because I didn't have the right vaccine passport app, while all my friends (who I was sitting with) were allowed to, as if the beer somehow facilitated the transmission of the virus. That was dumb. But you're not sticking it to the wokes by not getting a vaccine, you're just increasing the chance that you get ill or (God forbid) die from a preventable disease.
Just to clarify, what do you think the average Ashkenazi IQ is? It's not really possible to have this conversation unless we're on the same page with that.
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