FirmWeird
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User ID: 757
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1d ago
War is brutal. Israel has done many bad things, perhaps more than necessary, but that's how war goes.
This was in response to claims that the Israelis were being meek and timid - you can absolutely play the "people do bad things during war" card, but you also just wiped out the claim I was arguing against in the process.
If Native Americans started randomly suicide
That situation and history are so different as to make the comparison moot - and if this was an attempt at emotional appeal, I'm also not American.
FirmWeird
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1d ago
There's some argument just how far USA procurement has gone to the expensive, precise, and hard-to-produce end of the scale.
What argument? US military procurement is full of corruption and various other concerns that have long since taken priority over actual combat effectiveness and efficiency. China has 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US and the US military supply chain is full of Chinese products - if there's an actual conflict between the USA and the Global South, the US would lose the ability to repair or even maintain their current fleet of ships, let alone manufacture new ones. In the USA-vs-Russia proxy war that's happening right now the west is being dramatically outcompeted in terms of ammunition supply/manufacturing, and on top of that there's a technological gap between the US and Russia - the US still hasn't bridged the hypersonic weapons gap.
FirmWeird
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1d ago
Id disagree with that characterization of Israeli war efforts. They are being meek and timid from my POV.
The most recent story I've seen about the war is US doctors talking about how many Palestinian children have been shot in the head by sniper fire, and the parents of those children say they were shot when playing, outside or inside. The story before that was the killing of Mohammad Bhar, where an intellectually disabled man was attacked by an Israeli military dog before they kicked his family out and made sure he died without receiving medical treatment (which the family discovered when they were finally allowed back to their house to see his maggot-ridden corpse).
Most people I know in real life consider those stories and the countless others like them barbaric and disgusting - we think members of our own armed forces who do those things deserve to go to prison for the rest of their life and lose all their honours and awards in the process. If that's what qualifies as meek and timid from your POV, I'd hate to see what it would take for you to actually criticise them.
FirmWeird
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1d ago
There is no threat that the US can make - there's no amount of funding the US can provide that would make up for the current situation. If they deploy force in the amount required to change the outcome of the Ukraine war, they would be unable to defend Israel and Taiwan... and there's a very decent chance that they would actually lose the conflict militarily to boot (assuming no nukes are used, because if they do get used the world just ends). As for removing sanctions, they're already moving to systems of trade and exchange that bypass the US' hold on the financial system because they don't trust it anymore (and can you blame them?) - they'd view it as nice, but they would presumably then just take all their money out and leave anyway.
Sure, Trump would probably be able to negotiate a surrender, but what could the US actually do to change the situation beyond giving up? When you take into account other commitments like Taiwan and Israel there's no stick at all - Trump would just be negotiating the US exit and surrender. That said, my personal view is that the Ukraine war was a terrible idea, a massive waste of blood and treasure, so the sooner that happens the better.
FirmWeird
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1d ago
Trump has it, and part of the appeal is that he doesn't cross the aisle well at all. To his core supporter the problem is with the bureaucrats not listening to their sort of people and someone who's overly democrat-friendly can't very well be expected to fix that problem.
I agree with this and have made the same point before. One of the reasons for Trump's support is that he is so obviously not a member of the existing political class that people don't expect him to behave like other politicians and get subsumed into the blob the moment he takes office. Loudly advertising and broadcasting that he doesn't give a shit what these people want or respect is one of the ways he got the immense loyalty that he now commands.
FirmWeird
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3d ago
Apologies for the delay in replying - life can get busy sometimes.
I am saying the problems afflicting the rural working class and poor (as distinct from the suburban conservatives who make up much/most of Trump's base and who are generally doing more than fine) are not the product of the urban professional class, immigration, or free trade as Greer hints.
I disagree but neither of us have provided evidence here. I agree with Greer's position that choices about the costs of these changes were not equally distributed across society, and they were the inevitable consequences of the choices that were made.
US manufacturing dominance in the mid 20th century was a bubble of anomalous circumstances that was never going to be sustained.
Greer actually agrees with this and it is a large theme in his work - though he also throws in the energy factor, which I think is a significant element as well. The point actually being made is that the reaction to those changes and shifts involved making decisions that profited some sections of society at the expense of others. Neither me nor Greer are claiming that the managerial class/salary class just decided to fuck over the rural poors for no reason - but that the decisions made in response to crisis hurt those groups to advantage others. All of the factors you identified are real reasons as to why the US would not be able to maintain the success they did and neither me nor Greer would disagree (I think, at least).
I'm not going to say that nothing can be done about the US' relative position in global manufacturing, but it isn't what Trump is promising and it isn't what a bunch of 60 year old ex-factory workers from Ohio want. It probably means more immigration, not less, more international partnerships and less protectionism, more capital/automation-intensive facilities, and more federally directed industrially policy
I think that those policies and ideas, the same ones that have been put in place for the past several decades, will continue to have the same impact they have had for the past several decades. If you want to have that argument I would love to, but I don't think this moldy old conversational thread is the place.
A major distinction is that Trump haters don't say this, whereas many Trump supporters cite the arrogance, condescension, and judgment of 'coastal elites' as a reason for supporting him. They frame it more sympathetically than I do, but it's coming from their own mouths.
I actually think "arrogance, condescension and judgement" coming from someone is a valid reason to hate them and work against them - I know that if I act arrogantly and condescendingly to people while negatively judging their lifestyle it doesn't tend to lead to us becoming best of friends. But that's actually very different to the original claim, which was "Trump supporters have an inferiority complex and feel humiliated when college-educated liberals look down on them."
He was literally four in 1966. If he has any expertise on the socio-economic conditions of the 60s, it is purely incidental to his personal life.
And he also lived in Appalachia and other parts of the country hit by the economic conditions we spoke about later - he's been following these stories for quite some time. The reason I brought it up is that he ha actually lived through all the changes that he's describing.
FirmWeird
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3d ago
I don't think you need any sort of third shooter conspiracy style thinking to get to the real problem here. I'm a big fan of conspiracy theories and love exploring them, but the facts on the ground are damning enough on their own. The secret service rebuffing multiple requests for additional security, ignoring multiple reports of the shooter, ignoring the call from the shooter's parents warning them about him, letting him get through the metal detector with a rangefinder, having a sniper aiming at him before he actually took the shot, ignoring the multiple people who are recorded on camera pointing him out, ignoring the police officer who went onto the roof and saw he had a gun... and worst of all, letting Trump go onto stage for ten minutes when they knew there was somebody with a sniper rifle taking aim at the stage!
The most straightforward conspiracy theory that is practically jumping out of the page and requires no mysterious phantom gunmen or bizarre codes of silence is that they wanted the shooter to succeed. They rebuffed Trump's requests for additional security and then allowed Crooks to take his shot before they did anything. This kind of conspiracy also doesn't require any extremely tortured codes of silence - nobody who isn't directly legally liable for what happened would know anything or need to keep their silence.
I can't see any argument against this other than incompetence, but claiming that this is incompetence not only beggars belief, it raises the immediate counterargument that every single person remotely involved needs to lose their job for gross misconduct. If they actually made all these mistakes earnestly I'm surprised they can put their shoes on in the morning and don't routinely shoot themselves in the head when looking down the barrel of their gun to make sure there's a bullet inside.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
3d ago
Dems lost the Twitter stronghold but if they can shill their narrative on TikTok and insta then they can get a momentum going.
Dems tried to shut TikTok down because of all the Gaza footage that was spreading on there, and Gaza is a toxic issue for the dems - their base hates what is going on but their donors and organisational leadership support everything that's happening. They're not going to have a good time on TikTok and I wouldn't be surprised if they try to go after it again.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
8d ago
And I'm not sure why they abandoned them.
There is an extremely obvious answer that jumps out at me from reading the text - discrimination laws. Even if you just want to keep out the riff-raff and the poor, class-based policies like the one you're suggesting are going to be an absolute goldmine for any lawyer who knows what the phrase "disparate impact" means. A policy which keeps out members of the societal underclass is going to disproportionately impact black people, which means it is then going to have the business which upholds that policy wiped out in court if seriously challenged.
Today, we don't do that kind of screening. That's a level of trust that you see, that is manifest, and it is raised, rather than lowered.
I actually disagree - there is in fact less trust. What happened is that the spread of insurance and large corporations mean that the costs of accounting for those problems that you're talking about are simply spread out and distributed across the rest of society and the rest of that corporation. They aren't trusting you or their customers - structural changes mean that there's just not really anything you could do to seriously inconvenience them. If you go into an Apple store and just wreck the entire place, destroying/stealing every single piece of tech in there, the costs of your actions aren't going to be added to the bills of people who shop there - those customers are already paying for that risk and have been for years.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
8d ago
I mean, how would you even measure this? What would it take to say "okay the temperature is going in the right direction, thanks left", do you think you would be able to recognize it or is it purely a vibes check?
I legitimately haven't thought about this because I didn't actually think there was any way to stop it - I assumed it would just continue to get worse over time until there's an irreversible reduction in societal complexity (good luck cancelling someone whose job is stealing copper wiring from abandoned buildings). Any kind of positive steps in this direction would be extremely negative steps, personally, for anyone on the left who actually wanted to make them. Furthermore, it isn't actually like there's a central authority figure who could speak for the entire left and announce that the days of cancelling people are over - and even if there was, making that kind of announcement would doubtless cause them to lose all that influence and authority. Second, the trust required for such an announcement to be taken seriously or in good faith just isn't there, either. You'd have to come up with meaningful consequences for this kind of behaviour, along with a reliable and trustworthy enforcement body, because a system like this would absolutely get gamed the second it was implemented.
The only workable alternative that I can see would be legislation that mandates incredibly harsh penalties for the employers who actually fire people like this, but that has consequences and a lot of complications as well - a left-wing political group should absolutely be able to fire someone because they found out that he was actually a secret nazi doing his best to sabotage them from within.
Of course, my dream goal would be for the world to adopt my preferred political system (non-catholic environmentalist distributism), which would mean that cancellation can't really happen due to the altered structure of the economy. But that isn't going to happen anytime soon so it isn't really a realistic proposal.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9d ago
Forgiveness is a method of strength and leveraging the good traits of humanity.
I agree! But the concept is a lot more complicated than that and requires that the other person stop doing whatever it is you need to forgive them for. If I go to a concert and there's an active shooter murdering people in the crowd, preventing them from committing more murders is actually the moral course of action when compared to just forgiving them and letting them continue to shoot people.
That said in this specific case, while I think no cancelling would be ideal, I am not going to blame the people on the right for taking advantage of the new rules the left has set up until the left makes a serious effort to go back and dial down the temperature.
FirmWeird
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10d ago
Should we just forget people’s utter hypocrisy? That’s the so-what. In my opinion, Tucker Carlson has been one of the handful of the top most norms-damaging individuals in the United States over the past 5 years. He has shown he is a liar and not trustworthy, so why should we take anything he says now at face value?
Nobody actually cares about people's utter hypocrisy. I have been extremely consistent in my belief that any news organisation or political figure which advocated in favour of the Iraq war permanently destroyed their reputation and legitimacy. The Trump years were full of the same - a mixture of both blatant falsehoods and artful deceptions. Nothing Carlson did even comes close to the WMD case, or the outright lies given professional gloss during the Biden Laptop saga.
That said, if you want to start holding media figures and organisations to account for peddling falsehoods and lies, I'm right there with you - as long as that's your actual motivation rather than some kind of partisan concern.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
15d ago
RationalWiki is (or was?) a legitimately good source on a lot of cranks, especially from way back in the days when things were simpler and the chief debate on the internet was creationism vs evolution. But at the same time if you look at their article on Trump or anything remotely connected to the culture wars you're just looking at the same kind of junk they're so great at calling out when the political valence is flipped.
FirmWeird
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16d ago
As someone who saw his descent happen in real time and even helped push him along by trolling Rationalwiki a few times, I really appreciated this article. It was nice to read a confirmation of all the things I'd recognised about him years ago backed up by real evidence and investigation - though at the end it just made me want to give him a smirk and a "We're not so different, you and I" speech for our seemingly shared efforts at disinformation.
FirmWeird
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16d ago
When Gamergate became a culture-war issue, the anti-Gamergate people started talking about ants (a Gamergate is actually a type of ant, as well as an internet argument) to prevent pro-Gamergate people from seeing what they were talking about.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
16d ago
Ok, great. So you agree with Purdue's materials.
This doesn't even reach the level of a bad faith attempt to understand my position or argue with the ideas I actually hold. If you think that's an honest estimation of my views on the topic then I don't think there's any point talking anymore because we clearly aren't communicating with each other.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
18d ago
But, still .... how the hell are either of these guys mad about anything?
Most people on the internet find getting into the weeds and dirty details of the various bad faith prosecutions of Trump to be unbearable - imagine having to live through them. I'm honestly surprised he isn't angrier when I picture myself in his position, sitting across from someone who knowingly lied in order to start a fraudulent criminal prosecution against me while threatening my family, reputation and legacy. Throw in the fact that he's now a constant target for mockery in public and in culture, and I can absolutely see why he's angry.
FirmWeird
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18d ago
Ok, great! Quick question, though... how come Scott talks about adjusting the dose of various medications up/down, depending on how it's going? He's a doctor, and a trained medical professional to boot. Shouldn't he like, just "know" the appropriate amount of whatever drug to give to his patients?
No? Regular supervision and adjustment of the dosage is part and parcel of responsible medical care. If he gets it right on the first go, great, and if he doesn't part of his job is adjusting the dosage or even pulling the patient off the drug. Sometimes the patient's condition can change as a result of medication and they don't need as much of it as they recover - a patient recovering and thus not needing as much of a certain medicine as they did before is not evidence that they were never sick and never needed medication.
I mean, no? Did they, like, jump into the exam room, and when doc was "just knowing" the "appropriate" amount, they interfered and somehow made him increase it?
And because it covers the same ground...
What large financial incentives? Come on, man. Stop hiding the ball.
There's no need for scare quotes. Doctors are in fact legitimate medical professionals, and making decisions about dosage is part of their professional responsibility and skillset. There's nothing magical about an anaesthesiologist determining the appropriate level of painkillers for someone based on sex/weight/pre-existing conditions. But yes, they did actually interfere. To quote from one of the legal documents involved...
Purdue’s most powerful tool of deception was sending sales representatives to promote opioids to Massachusetts doctors, nurses, and pharmacists face to face. During sales visits, Purdue reps made false and misleading claims directly to the professionals who care for Massachusetts patients. Purdue assigned reps to specific territories in Massachusetts and gave them lists of Massachusetts doctors to visit.
They sent people out to lie to medical professionals in order to encourage them to sell more Purdue pharmaceuticals.
Each of these in-person sales visits cost Purdue money — on average more than $200 per visit. But Purdue made that money back many times over, because it convinced doctors to prescribe its addictive drugs. When Purdue identified a doctor as a profitable target, Purdue visited the doctor frequently: often weekly, sometimes almost every day. Purdue salespeople asked doctors to list specific patients they were scheduled to see and pressed the doctors to commit to put the patients on Purdue opioids. By the time a patient walked into a clinic, the doctor, in Purdue’s words, had already “guaranteed” that he would prescribe Purdue’s drugs. Purdue rewarded high-prescribing doctors with coffee, ice cream, catered lunches, and cash. Purdue has given meals, money, or other gifts to more than 2,000 Massachusetts prescribers.
And they were actually just paying and bribing doctors who prescribed large doses of opioids. Literal kickbacks! They actually made up fake case profiles and patients in order to convince doctors to hand out oxycontin even when it wasn't necessary or dangerous.
Purdue trained its reps to show doctors charts emphasizing Medicare coverage for its opioids and use profiles of fake elderly patients, complete with staged photographs, to convince doctors to prescribe opioids. As a Massachusetts sales rep observed, a fake patient profile “brings the heart into it” and helps get the doctor to say: “Yes, they need this medication.”
I mean, also no? They produced (maybe just promoted?) a concept that may, indeed, be wrong.
Could it be possible that they made an accurate and true scientific discovery while faking data in order to sell more of their product? I doubt it. The core idea of their marketing was that drug addiction was actually just something that happens to "untrustworthy" people when exposed to drugs, and that "trustworthy" people can be prescribed whatever dose of painkillers you want without any risks. They created numerous bodies to create the misleading impression that pseudoaddiction was a real concept and convince doctors to ignore their actual training. Furthermore, they knew they were lying!
Purdue knew its campaign to push higher doses of opioids was wrong. Doctors on Purdue’s payroll admitted in writing that pseudoaddiction was used to describe “behaviors that are clearly characterized as drug abuse” and put Purdue at risk of “ignoring” addiction and “sanctioning abuse.” But Purdue nevertheless urged doctors to respond to signs of addiction by prescribing higher doses of Purdue’s drugs.
And remember, the thing you're trying to show is that they "were ultimately responsible for and made substantial profits from a legal and corporate structure that heavily encouraged and even induced addiction in cases where it wasn't necessary". So, I'd definitely like to hear some things about their legal and corporate structure.
The Massachusetts document is the best source for that.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
18d ago
Hey, I missed this reply, but the answer to this is actually yes, contra to the reply you received.
Each of these in-person sales visits cost Purdue money — on average more than$200 per visit. But Purdue made that money back many times over, because it convinced doctors to prescribe its addictive drugs. When Purdue identified a doctor as a profitable target, Purdue visited the doctor frequently: often weekly, sometimes almost every day. Purdue salespeople asked doctors to list specific patients they were scheduled to see and pressed the doctors to commit to put the patients on Purdue opioids. By the time a patient walked into a clinic, the doctor, in Purdue’s words, had already “guaranteed” that he would prescribe Purdue’s drugs. Purdue rewarded high-prescribing doctors with coffee, ice cream, catered lunches, and cash. Purdue has given meals, money, or other gifts to more than 2,000 Massachusetts prescribers.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
19d ago
Edit: to clarify a bit, i dont think Biden did as bad as he has been portrayed in some circles, but after months of the official narrative being that "Joe's sharper than ever, anyone suggesting otherwise is a russian troll" his debate performance might've well been a public execution.
I agree with this and I think you gesture at an important point - a lot of credibility was put on the line and invested in the claim that Biden is doing just fine and any claims of mental health decline are just misinformation, and now that credibility is going up in smoke. Sure, a lot of people will just not care or forget, but some will remember this the next time the party needs them to believe something that doesn't quite seem true.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
19d ago
I guarantee that you, the plaintiff, the FDA, nobody has any sort of rigorous line on when it is "necessary".
As Armin pointed out what counts as "necessary" is dependent upon the situation, patient etc.
But, while it appears you have read the article, you didn't read the links contained within it. I don't blame you for not doing so, legal documents are really long and boring, but that's what you're actually looking for. The meat of the accusations is in fact contained within them. So when you make a comment like
And it's not like their marketing is ever going to be like, "Hey doctors, you should prescribe a higher dose even when your patient responsibly wants a lower dose,"
We can actually turn to the prosecution and see what they were doing.
Together, these drug manufacturers (the “Manufacturer Defendants”) collaborated to falsely deny the serious risks of opioid addiction generally, and high-dose opioid prescriptions specifically. At the same time, they created and promoted the concept of “pseudoaddiction”—a made-up term designed to re-cast familiar symptoms of addiction as signs that patients needed more opioid drugs. They falsely claimed that their opioid drugs could be counted on to improve chronic pain patients’ function and quality of life, and that their extended-release opioid formulations would provide effective pain relief for 12 hours, when they knew there was no scientific support for those claims. And they misleadingly suggested that other pain relief methods were riskier than opioids, while falsely claiming that opioid dependence and withdrawal could be easily managed and effectively prevented with unproven screening tools and management techniques.
Each Manufacturer Defendant spent millions of dollars over the following decade to push these fraudulent messages. They pushed their own name-brand drugs by “detailing” their sales representatives to target susceptible doctors with in-person visits, flooding medical publications with deceptive advertisements, and offering consumers discount cards to entice them to request treatment with their products. And they collaborated to promote the overall expansion of the opioid market by sponsoring misleading Continuing Medical Education (“CME”) seminars and manipulating seemingly independent organizations (“Front Groups”) that the manufacturers funded and disguised as “unbiased” sources of cutting-edge medical research and information. Both the Front Groups and CME seminars depended on co-opted doctors—so-called “Key Opinion Leaders” (“KOLs”)—that the manufacturers recruited and paid.
They were, in fact using aggressive marketing techniques and deception to convince doctors to prescribe higher doses when their patient responsibly wanted a lower dose. They took the symptoms of addiction and claimed that they were actually signs of a condition which required more opioids!
But in any event, what does your magic, yet-unknown line of "necessary" have to do with addiction? What's the model connecting this completely unknown thing to rates of opioid addiction?
There's nothing magic about the opinion of a medical professional. There's nothing unknown or mysterious about the idea that a trained medical professional or doctor would know the appropriate amount of painkillers to give to their patient. Purdue Pharma interfered with this and produced fraudulent research which gave both large financial incentives and a figleaf of justification to encourage inappropriately high doses of opioids (see the Pseudoaddiction concept above). That's the connection, and it is outlined clear as day in the charges against Purdue and the Sacklers.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
22d ago
Uh, sure? They used a variety of financial incentives to encourage doctors to prescribe higher and higher doses of Oxycontin even when it wasn't necessary, because that made them more money. They were directly(and indirectly) paying doctors to hand this stuff out even when it wasn't strictly necessary, taking advantage of the prestige and respect rightfully given to medical professionals in order to generate vast profits while directly fostering opioid addictions.
Maybe I'm missing your point, because I don't know what kind of intermediate steps you need to get from "Inducing doctors to unnecessarily prescribe high doses of opioids" to "Opioid usage epidemic".
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
22d ago
Did you actually click the link? I didn't include the sordid details but they do actually explain what happened and how it worked. A magic sentence like that is totally fine when you include the explanation in another part of the text.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
23d ago
Rather than non-public information leaking in, I think this is actually just public information taking a while to leak in. I've been on the record as claiming that Biden was suffering from age-related cognitive decline since this site was on reddit - if you take off the partisan blinkers the decline is obvious, undeniable and easily predicted even without any video evidence of his gaffes.
How exactly can the US deploy in sufficient force to defeat Russia without immediately creating gigantic openings in the Middle East and Asia Pacific that would be taken advantage of by their enemies? Russia is a dangerous, nuclear-equipped opponent that is actually ahead of the US in at least one category of weapon (hypersonics) and the stories I've seen coming out of Ukraine make the case that they have the edge in electronic/signals warfare as well (though stories coming out of an active warzone should be taken with a few grains of salt). They're a serious threat that would require significant investments of materiel and personnel to deal with - Russia and Iraq are not the same. Making a serious attempt at defeating them would involve pulling resources from the rest of the empire which in turn means that he moment this conflict starts the US would lose 90% of their existing military manufacturing capacity as they lost the ability to import semiconductors from a China who would be in the middle of invading Taiwan, safe and secure in the knowledge that the US military was busy elsewhere.
Of course that entire discussion is academic, because in order for that to even happen you need to find some way of turning off the nuclear option - Russia and the US going into direct conflict just means the world ends and the survivors get to experience Threads for themselves. Sure, the Russians don't actually win, but the US doesn't either. Serious military conflict between Russia and the US just means the end of the world, and unserious military conflict (like a proxy war) means the US is unable to bring enough force to bear to actually beat the Russians. If you disagree, I'd be more than happy to bet that Russia wins the war in Ukraine.
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