Pigeon
coo coo
No bio...
User ID: 237
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Even granting that Marxist rhetoric is violent in this way (which I’m hesitant to grant without significant qualifiers) surely you can see there is a difference between:
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A likely explicit order to exterminate a group of people when in paramount power, and
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A discussion of mass murder visited upon one’s political opponents, written not in any sort of office, which then was reinterpreted by various organisations decades after the death of the author, and in one case was perpetuated against a separate ethnic population, which was really not quite the point of the original texts (even if it was justified on those terms at the time).
In any case, it’s undeniable that Marx advocated for violent revolution, but I think there’s a qualitative difference between that and the sort of industrial murder machine created by the Nazis and the Japanese during WW2, as well as between advocacy and, well, actually doing the thing.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I have to say, the line from Hitler to Holocaust is much shorter than from Marx to the Holodomor. On that alone I think it’s more reasonable for people to want to rehabilitate Marx in broader society.
I think most Westerners would look askance about rehabilitating Stalin, though, and tankies who try are generally seen as lunatics.
Pigeon
coo coo
9mo ago
Even the highest quality transit systems (Hong Kong, Japan, and the like) will struggle to get people door-to-door in less than 40 minutes.
I think this needs to be qualified with…something. It’s clearly not true for many things like shopping, restaurants, and not necessarily true for work.
And cars would often be even slower in the same environment!
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
How much of it is due to taking someone else’s perfectly functional uterus? I do wonder how it would be if we could “grow” a womb with the transwoman‘s DNA (replacing the Y with X somewhere somehow), would that be less ick.
Or just a full body transplant? Grow a body with the appropriate chromosomal configuration — again, replacing the appropriate sex chromosome from the original person — but somehow leave out the brain, then transplant the trans brain into the new body.
(I don’t think it would work out very well embryologically or in terms of surgery to reconnect all the nerves, but thought-experiment wise…)
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I mean, there are potentially serious and life-threatening lung injuries that can be caused by vaping, so it's not without basis, even if it is generally better than smoking for public health reasons.
Pigeon
coo coo
9mo ago
That seems remarkable. Where do you live that this is possible?
You even mentioned one of these cities by name!
Hong Kong and Seoul and Tokyo should support such a lifestyle, work-related travel aside (depending on which area you live in and work at). I don’t have experience with mainland Chinese cities, but I’d expect most of the tier 1 cities at least to be similar. I’d also expect other large Japanese cities to be similar.
Pigeon
coo coo
11mo ago
This just all sounds so bizarre, working as a medical professional outside the US.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I think we can agree on that, at least in the sense of “these are people fomenting violent ideologies”.
I do think that Marxist theory probably has more historical relevance even beyond the dictatorships and mass famines, though, in that quite a lot of economic theory was written in response to and in refutation of it, and ideas like dialectical materialism had pretty substantial influence. In that practical sense it makes sense to rehabilitate Marx somewhat, if only to understand why he was wrong (e.g. on labour theory of value) in economic (or other discipline-specific) terms rather than on moral terms.
Even given all that, I do flinch a bit when people openly declare themselves to be Marxist.
I should add that my experience of American food has been pretty shit. The vegetables are tasteless and overgrown, the pork smells and tastes like it was marinated in a sewer (and that’s only an exaggeration most of the time), and the chicken is this spongy tasteless unrecognizable species of meat.
I’ve had good American food as well, but it was definitely the outlier rather than the norm.
Edit: also everything tastes too sweet for some goddamn reason
Pigeon
coo coo
10mo ago
Not very differently. Which is to say, both back then and today the jury would have been quite fair and just, unlike the ridiculous civil rights fantasy the movie portrays.
Like, this isn’t Alabama, and this is just one case, but I dunno, man.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Firstly, the claim was this:
I see a lot more rightists defending Hitler than I do leftists defending Stalin and Mao.
Secondly, that doesn’t hold nearly as well when I hear people say that Mao was “misunderstood”, mm? I think that goes beyond “harmless pastime”.
The amount you would get into your bloodstream through a nasal spray is likely much more controlled compared to, you know, IV chlorhexidine. Bloodstream availability is waaaaaay lower. Not really comparable.
I mean, there’s also dermal absorption, right? But I think most of us would be pretty doubtful of the idea that washing our hands is essentially IV soap, and nasal spray is probably significantly closer to washing hands than it is to IV.
Same/similar goes with the eyewash, really.
Pigeon
coo coo
8mo ago
Isn’t climate change being expensive and uncomfortable in the long run a good enough reason to think about it, though?
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Fair enough! I found the claims for coeliac and eczema and disc herniation absurd also.
I speak English, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Japanese to varying degrees of fluency; I’d like to pick up a couple more languages someday (maybe something very similar like Korean - my understanding is also that Japanese and Korean are syntactically very alike, and Cantonese sounds quite close to Korean for the same words in many cases, I’m told).
I do browse the internet in Japanese and set most of my display languages to Japanese (the language I am least familiar with), and I read Chinese texts when I can. Even then, it’s difficult trying to maintain proficiency — the lack of a good conversation partner in Mandarin and Japanese in my social circles means that my ability to converse beyond daily chitchat is slipping hard.
It doesn’t help that life is too busy for me to set aside an hour every day just to practice languages!
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
You would be right.
Has anyone even actually used MSG? I have, and I can tell you that a very small amount (compared to salt) goes a long way. I would put money on needing less MSG, compared to pure NaCl, by Na content or by weight, in order to bring out flavours in a dish.
All in my nose, in my mucosa, maybe slightly deeper in my lungs, idk the details of covid infection.
Try "lungs, upper respiratory tract, heart, brain, liver, intestines, kidneys, gonads, adrenals, really anything that expresses ACE2".
My nose, my mouth, my mucosa were created by God to expect such aggression.
...
Was the fat of my arm or my blood stream made by God to receive a dose of RNA? No.
Is this what it is? A naturalistic fallacy justified by religion?
In any case, the body is in fact pretty equipped to deal with weird rogue RNA, so much so that an mRNA vaccine would need to be made to be less detectable to the immune system so it can work! So you're even right on this point, even if only by complete chance!
And in any case, you can probably just opt to take a non-Pfizer/Moderna vaccine? There is Novavax, after all. You'd want to steer clear of J&J and Astrazeneca as well, since those are vector vaccines.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Obviously a natural infection of a certain dose of particles through the nose or mouth is not the same as an injection in the arm in terms of dose, immune response, affected tissues...
Viruses replicate, in a way that the mRNA vaccine...doesn't? And goes into your bloodstream? And the receptor implicated in viral entry in COVID is expressed throughout the body.
Conversely, you get less systemic action (though still some) with the jab, because much of it stays pretty local to the injection site.
Covid doesn't have it but a lot of viruses do.
What happens when somebody that was previously infected with a virus gets the injection?
Most likely not very much, because:
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Viral integrases are particular about what sequences they integrate, and...
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A cell that is that actively translating viral reverse transcriptase is a cell that's...dying to the virus (if it wasn't being transcribed+translated and instead is in a provirus state, then there would be no issue), while a cell that is actively translating human reverse transcriptase is probably a cancer (or you're quite old, or it's differentiating, etc), and...
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The mRNA vaccine might not even be readable, given that it isn't made with normal RNA nucleosides, and...
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Even if it gets integrated it likely wouldn't do very much!
This is all talking about viral RTs; we humans have reverse transcriptase sequences in our genomes as well, from ancient retroviral infections (as you allude to). COVID itself possibly could be reverse transcribed into a small number of cell lines post-infection in a much less controlled manner, producing chimeric human-viral proteins. This would likely affect a small minority of people, and the actual health effects are pretty unclear.
Based on this, I would be much more worried about sequence integration post-infection compared to post-vaccine. At least you can engineer synthetic RNA-like molecules to be less recognisable by LINE1 retrotransposon RTs, and even if it happened, you can control the sequence being inserted.
If for whatever reason the RNA is getting concentrated in a given cell, perhaps a certain amount of them can end up spontaneously turning into DNA and getting captured by the cell machinery and getting integrated into the genome.
It wouldn't just spontaneously turn into DNA. Reverse transcription is not a modification of the RNA sequence, it is a synthesis of new DNA strands based on the old one. Good luck doing that without an enzyme turning ATP into energy for that synthesis.
What I need, instead of 'fact-checking' by 'experts' with no physical, scientific evidence that for example 'RNA cannot integrate the genome', is studies.
Show me that after looking at the cellular, tissue level among hundreds or thousands of people that you could not find one cell producing spikes long after the injection. That you can't find one sample of tissue affected by long-term injection consequences.
Have fun with that, biology is messy, and proving a negative is....well.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
The problem is the precision of your language; a nasal spray is not an injection in a medical setting, unless you define "injection" so widely that it ceases to have any useful meaning, and this imprecision is letting you get away with great differences on actual facts of medical treatments.
I know, blue-aligned publications made what was an off-the-cuff statement that was more supposed to generate a mood than be any real advice, by Trump who is notoriously foot-in-mouth and probably had a vague idea that disinfectants is something to wash body parts in and that the lungs were Where Bad Things Happened, some sort of half-formulated thought with a quarter of a clue of what he's saying.
And truth is BlueAnon likely caused excess deaths twisting his words and making the valid treatments seem kooky.
This is even probably true.
But fact remains that Trump proposed doing this:
And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.
So he's talking about injecting disinfectant into the lungs.
That at best is bronchoalveolar lavage with disinfectant instead of saline, and at worst is giving someone a lung stab injury and a pneumothorax with a needle then filling the lung parenchyma or thoracic cavity with disinfectant, neither of which are remotely close to, you know, nasal sprays, and both bad ideas. (I'm not actually sure 1 is even better than 2, now that I think about it.)
That Trump probably didn't actually mean for people to drown themselves I'm quite sympathetic to, and I can even appreciate that he's saying this out of a sense of optimism and approval of modern medicine...but I think it's difficult to deny that - taking what he said literally - the treatment is not a valid medical treatment.
To respond to your other reply, then:
Sure there are degrees of injection.
Not at all. You are miscategorizing medical treatments in a way that benefits your interpretation of Trump's statements.
The point is Trump was referring to a valid medical treatment.
Not at all. By leveraging the above, you're equivocating between a sensible treatment and a silly one.
And truth is BlueAnon likely caused excess deaths twisting his words and making the valid treatments seem kooky.
"Valid treatments seem kooky" aside, whatever blue tribe aggrandisement on this front was probably bad, I agree.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I honestly couldn’t tell you. I certainly found them a bit difficult, but the use of mixed pronouns didn’t give me a good first impression to begin with.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
That seems like a very particular definition of meritocracy to me. Care to explain?
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Sheer weight of numbers. At that time western european powers were already far ahead, capable of fighting and winning wars on multiple continents with superior technology, while the mughals sat satisfied counting their starving peasants.
Although I cautioned BurdensomeCount on using GDP reconstructions too liberally, I would also push back against something like this, since the technology disparity between Europe and the rest of the world wasn’t that pronounced, and states with some degree of organization outside of Europe often were able to maintain some level of parity with European arms (e.g. 16-18C was the era of gunpowder empires in the Near East and South Asia, and neither China nor Japan had issues in adopting western improvements to guns during the Ming and early Qing and the Warring States period respectively). Many of these wars (at this stage) were limited, and many were pretty embarrassing, too, like the Anglo-Mughal war.
This is not to mention things like patterns of trade; the global silver trade in this period had not Europe as its most important agent, but China. (I am to understand that the most, uh, ?industrialised? and mercantile regions of China and (maybe) South Asia, for example, were also not really that far behind in per-capita terms vis a vis e.g. Britain.)
All of this doesn’t really tell a story of Europeans pwning everyone effortlessly. Conclusive departure from the norm such that the rest of the world was unable to easily catch up probably only started sometime in the 18th century (and only really solidified in the 19th with the industrial revolution), even if per capita conditions in Europe were already favourable leading up to that, and even though many of the preexisting institutions and intellectual currents that led (?) to these changes were being built centuries before (though not with growth and industrialisation in mind).
(All I mean to say is that to presuppose obvious European dominance of the world pre-sometime-in-the-18/19C is pants-on-head historically silly, even if the conditions that would lead to their future dominance were planted early; there is also a separate argument that you are discounting advances made elsewhere in the world with the sole focus on European domination, but that is for another time.)
Yeah, but we can recognise what is being referenced as being unhelpful hyperbole, right?
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