sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
19d ago
No, that part is very real. (Unlike the vague nonsense that makes up most of the rest of his post.) If Pfizer had followed their planned trial endpoints they would have announced results days before the 2020 election. Instead they chose to leave samples frozen without testing them until afterwards. I wrote about this years ago, it was clear what had happened just from public information, but earlier this year there was also some new evidence via the House Judiciary Committee:
GSK further informed the Committee that Dr. Dormitzer had told GSK employees that "in late 2020, the three most senior people in Pfizer R&D were involved in a decision to deliberately slow down clinical testing so that it would not be complete prior to the results of the presidential election that year."
As I mention in my old linked post, I wonder how much their actions ended up affecting trust in the vaccine, and by extension how many lives it cost.
I don't think it would have reversed the political association, despite people like Kamala Harris and Andrew Cuomo expressing doubts about a vaccine approved during the Trump administrations. Ultimately I think left-wing/mainstream media outlets would probably have still been pro-vaccine, and left-wingers would have still generally listened to them. But I think it might have made a significant impact on right-wingers if Trump had actively campaigned on his administration making it possible for the vaccine to be developed and approved so quickly. Which implies that a world where the trials concluded pre-election would have significantly higher acceptance of the vaccine overall.
You are putting too much weight on second-hand and third-hand quotes. Even when not outright made-up, such quotes tend to be some mixture of out of context and paraphrased in a way that changes their meaning. This is especially true when the people passing along the quotes strongly disagree with even the things the quoted person has actually said, or when you are concerned about something different from the person passing it along. Even when being honest, people tend to repeat the meaning they heard, not the actual words that were said.
For example, lets say he makes a joke that some people think is offensive, will the people telling this to a reporter and the reporter writing both make it clear in the paraphrase used and the context mentioned that he was joking? If the person repeating it thinks making such jokes is "racist", and furthermore that Watson is a "racist crank" anyway because of his comments regarding the IQ gap, he probably thinks it doesn't matter whether the comment is a joke or not. Whether joking or serious, the comment carries the same meaning: "I am racist". (Similar to this misquote from a now-ex Washington Post reporter, to her the fake Charlie Kirk quote and the real one conveyed the same meaning.) Then you come along looking for whether Watson is "kooky" and suddenly it actually matters a lot whether something is a pet theory he passionately believes in, a speculative hypothesis he entertained for a couple sentences, or an outright joke that he never even seriously suggested. Even without deliberate dishonestly, the witness and the journalist can lossily encode his statements in a way that conveys the information their ideology cares about but drops or distorts the information people with different beliefs care about.
Paizo has, among other things, removed slavery from the Pathfinder campaign setting because some SJWs found it offensive (see the edit at the bottom with Paizo's response). In case anyone was wondering why the rulers of Cheliax who worship Asmodeus (the ruler of Hell with Tyranny as one of his divine domains) have canonically abolished slavery. Whatever else is happening, culture war is as well, and not just as a cover for other motives.
I think this is the wrong way to think about it. "Race" as a term for a group with a shared ancestry predates and has a broader definition than modern biological classifications. D&D used the term race and not "species" because Tolkien and other fantasy authors did, and the reason why they used it is due to writing settings that are descended from premodern myths/fairy-tales and that are meant to evoke a premodern sense of the world. Heck, in 3.x (the edition I'm most familiar with) the apes in the Monster Manual literally have claws, I'm guessing because someone made a deliberate decision to not base them on real-life apes but instead inaccurate medieval bestiaries. So there's no reason to assume D&D crossbreeding follows the rules of modern biology in the first place.
One annoying thing about discussions of D&D racial alignments is how rarely they engage with the actual text. "Always [alignment]" was of course invented by 3rd edition and used for outsiders like demons, some undead like ghouls, and a handful of other creatures like dragons and mind-flayers. Orcs by contrast are "Often chaotic evil". Those terms were defined thusly in the Monster Manual glossary:
If they actually engaged with it I wonder if a lot of SJWs would actually find this more objectionable. "Skewed distributions of traits, not absolute rules" are, after all, the sorts of differences based on race or sex that people tend to believe exist in real life.
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