This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Last night I watched a spooky video interview with a UK mortician who claims he has been pulling out larger than normal blood clots that don't look like normal blood clots during embalming. There are a couple of other morticians and a pathologist around the world who are saying the same thing.
The way the morticians are describing this phenomenon seems alarming. Is this some sort of congealing happening after death or is this something that might have contributed to the cause of death? Is this something caused by Covid, by any of the vaccines, or all of the above? Is it affecting a large part of the population, is anyone looking into treatment? Is it even happening at all or is it a hoax? So many good questions to ask.
When I checked the Internet the only question I saw people asking was if it was caused by the vaccine or not. And most of the time they weren't even asking. One side is absolutely certain it is the vaccine, the other side is absolutely certain it is caused by Covid and vaccines can't have contributed at all. No discussion on detection or if it's treatable or anything that I would consider a higher priority than finger pointing. Do people care more about culture warring than survival?
There are 24,000 "morticians, undertakers, and funeral directors" in the US, and probably as many in europe. Assuming half of those are morticians, that's more than enough room for one or a few of them to notice an uptick in blood clots that should be surprising, while just being noise overall. If one in every two or even five morticians is noticing this, that'd be worth looking into in some sense, but things like this constantly happen everywhere. A billion people x ten thousand possible strange combinations of things that can happen = a lot of one in a billion events. Covid itself was reported to cause blood clots or something a bunch early in the pandemic.
According to Politifact;
and;
So it's more than just "one or a few" noticing. Politifact chalks it up to COVID. I seem to remember someone saying something like "COVID-19 is the first airborne vascular disease" when the pandemic first popped off.
It's hard to tell if 'embalmers in the network' in that quote means 'one in five members' or 'five members total', so it's hard to tell what that means. But even correct conclusions can be supported by poor evidence, and it's entirely possible the clots in OP are noise (especially if he started noticing them now, as opposed to 2 years ago - will skim the video to check). Also, steven crowder is a good get for 'exclusive content' on rumble, and 871,071 Views is quite a few!
[at this point, i just watch the video, then decide to comment on the article instead]
The video links this article. (the guest in the video is named "John O'Looney!") It's probably more informative and takes less time to go through than the video (I'm listening to the video, and they put spooky music over their 'calls with local morticians'...). It's a ... very strange article! Between the hint hinting that it's the vaccine, a few clearly false claims provided by experts interspersed with a bunch of other believable but weird claims by experts, and the generally big if true nature of the claims. Point by point, I guess ...
... what? a blood clot that isn't formed from blood? I'm not sure how to evaluate the claim (they give 'evidence' based on mineral content later), but that doesn't seem that plausible? Maybe someone said something sensible and then the article writer interpreted it one way and decided to make a darkly foreboding paragraph? idk. (They imply many times later the clots are spike protein. If that was true, it'd be very easy to prove in a lab)
Obviously, big if true (i.e., if the frequency claim is true of the significance claim - if 75% of bodies have one 1mmx1mmx1mm clot and .2% of bodies have "as long as a human leg or as a pinky finger" ones, and that was the status quo, that is different).
Is this trying to imply that the spike protein is causing the clots? It's not actually saying that, and nothing about 'the spike protein makes structures' indicates that the clots are made of spike protein (lots of proteins have "cross binding" and "structures"), so the two sentences don't really connect
Even if the clots are real, trends in the rate over time are harder to detect than just a change from 'absent' to 'present', because the thresholds you're discriminating are lower, both in quantity and time, so each 'bin' has less 'data', and noise is magnified.
... alright
Of course, everything is correlated with everything else when you change geographic reasons, so 'if the overall effect is real' that could have a number of causes. Another way to interpret this (correct or not) is that Hirschmann was the biggest noise blip, and as we get farther away from him the magnitude of the effect will decrease (25% vs 75%).
Even if Thorp did have a coherent argument, the 1-paragraph blurb for the Epoch Times would still sound like this - but this doesn't make sense as is, COVID itself also "diverts energy away from the physiologic processes in the body towards the production of the toxic spike protein", probably moreso than the vaccine, the connection to the randomly named diseases is just not present, and the "the effect of the vaccine would be 100- to 1,000-fold greater than that of COVID-19 disease" is also just not justified at all
Thorp also (this is linked in the article) spoke about vaccine hurting pregnant woman earlier. IIRC data didn't bear that out, but i've already pressed a lot of keys writing this, so someone else can search that. (And - is there's somewhere I can just put in a few variations of 'miscarriage rate by week' and get an updated time series? Statistia has a few things but they're all old)
"who has been analyzing vaccine adverse reactions for about three decades" was strangely phrased, and - "Sherri J. Tenpenny is an American anti-vaccination activist who supports the disproven hypothesis that vaccines cause autism.[1] An osteopathic physician, she is the author of four books opposing vaccination" yeah.
It was a very interesting article in the sense that 'this is the kind of thing hundreds of thousands of conservatives are reading', but not a very interesting article in the sense of actually understanding if these clots are happening and how that matters.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
FWIW I remember this blood clot story floating around as far back as mid-2020. I don't doubt it's true, but I feel like someone would've made hay with this by now if it actually proved anything of consequence.
More options
Context Copy link
Absolutely and they're absolutely right to do it.
There is one threat historically that will kill you, your friends, your family, and all of your children... and that's your political enemies.
The lesson of the 20th century is well over 250 million people were murdered by their own governments because they didn't hate their political opponents hard enough. They were willing to give their political opponents the benefit of the doubt, they were willing to try and live in a country in which their political opponents held power supreme power rather than resort to violence.
That was a mistake. it was a mistake of the landed farmers in Ukraine and Russia to try to live with the soviets in charge of them instead fighting to the death against their class enemies forming a government, it was a mistake of the Jews to not actually participate in terrorist conspiracies against the German government, and it was a mistake of the educated Chinese to try and live with their poltitical opponents trying to implement a cultural revolution.
No ethnicity has ever died out from having too much hatred and obstinacy in their heart. The occupants of the Stans and the Caucuses have surived thousands of years through mutual paranoia and hatred... Cooperation? Compromise? Working with your fellow man? Trusting that everyone ultimately wants what's best everyone? Not being tempted by extremism or alarmism?
250 million died making those mistakes. over 10% of the 1930 population.
No, that is not the lesson of the 20th century. People didn't get murdered by their governments for not hating hard enough, they got murdered by their governments because their opponents were better at cooperation and unity than they were.
This is just wrong, like all your ahistorical hot-takes.
Sure, tribal societies full of hatred for their neighbors survive, in an environment of hostility and paranoia and violence. They survive in miserable squalor, except the ones who don't and get wiped out. They watch as empires rise around them and then come and put a boot on them because people who cooperate outcompete those who don't.
People who live in societies that learn how to compromise and cooperate survive and win. That doesn't mean those societies are always nice ones, but they do make rules like "You cannot just kill anyone weaker than you and take their stuff because you can." This makes KulakRevolts sad but it vastly improves the lives of everyone else.
Cooperation and compromise is how we climbed out of the mud and built civilizations that can put people on the moon. Cooperators dream of going to the stars, people following your principles dream of murdering each other over the last rats in the ruins.
Wars start because people want to exterminate their political enemies. You observe 250 million dead and claim it's because they simply didn't hate their enemies hard enough (they should have killed more people first). In fact if everyone had followed your principles, there would have been many many more dead, but fortunately, most civilizations do not try to annihilate themselves in the orgy of mutual hatred that you advocate.
More options
Context Copy link
That's just false though. The Turks only took over the Stan countries less than two thousand years ago. They intermarried and cooperated with the Iranian peoples who lived there plenty. Lots of Turkish groups just seem like Iranians who culturally assimilated to a Turkish identity.
Do you actually know anything about the history of the Caucasus or Central Asia? Your spelling of 'Caucasus' doesn't inspire hope.
More options
Context Copy link
Couldn't it just as easily be called a mistake that many of them fought their political enemies ten years earlier and overthrew the Czarist government to put in place a better system, allowing the Bolsheviks to hijack the situation? The petit-bourgeoisie implemented a bourgeois revolution against the aristocratic state, only to open the door to their real class enemies who were hiding behind door number two in Switzerland. The mistake wasn't not hating Bolsheviks enough, it was hating the Czar too much. Putting Kerensky in charge to settle scores with the aristos left the state too weak to defend itself against Lenin and Trotsky.
Equally, the two clauses of this sentence contradict each other:
Well what option did bourgeois German Jews have? Committing to terrorist conspiracies against the Nazi government would have meant inviting Country Joe for Sunday brunch, committing to keeping their class enemies out of power would have meant supporting the Nazis. Quite the pickle.
Numerous ethnicities have died out for that exact reason, because like the smallhold Russian farmers they harbored too much hatred against the wrong enemies, or failed to redirect their hatred in time and stuck to old grudges instead of recognizing new threats.
Huascar and Atahualpa hated each other too much to realize they were ruining their kingdom in civil war just in time for Pizarro to step in and destroy and mystify the Inca lineage forever, enslave the people and replace the majority of them, leaving only fragments and hill tribes claiming descent. (To be fair, the Tlaxcala did much better for themselves, there are still a few thousand Nahuatl speakers around)
When the Helvetii invaded Gaul, the Aedui knew how to hate the invaders and defend their independence, so they called on Rome for assistance; leading to the extinction of Gallic culture, the permanent loss of Gallic independence, and the death or enslavement of between one quarter and one half of all the Gauls living. Quite the fumble.
The Portuguese and the British both conquered significant Indian possessions with laughably small armies, because the bulk of their forces were made up of Indian auxiliaries who were in it to settle Indian scores. The country would live to regret it.
When you look at the history of European colonization, the strongest predictor that a country would avoid colonization was maintaining a unified state that could resist the Europeans. China and Japan were never colonized despite their riches, because despite occasional internal wars there was never a faction willing to submit itself to a foreign power to win an internal political battle, arguably until Mao. Ottoman Turkey held much of the Muslim world together until WWI, when the British were finally able to trigger the Arab revolt and tear the last of its colonies away from it. Even little Ethiopia would never be truly eliminated as a state, despite its weakness.
It's not enough to hate, you have to guess right as to who you should hate and how and when, and be ready to switch if circumstances change.
More options
Context Copy link
...But the governments did the murdering because those running them hated their political opponents too much, so it's just straight-up wrong to say that the killing happened due to insufficient hatred.
Hittites? Philistines? Mohicans? Lots of little peoples who got in the way of Genghis Khan or the Persians or the Romans and were annihilated too thoroughly to even be known? If we slice the term "ethnicity" narrowly enough, I'm pretty sure there are quite a few that got a little too warlike and got themselves wiped out. If we slice the term more broadly, have any ethnicities ever died out at all?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't have any relevant training or education, but if I had to guess this is most likely nothing. There have probably been lots of unusual blood clots of this variety that occur normally from time to time and are typically not noted as anything worth investigating further by morticians. People have been very concerned about COVID and about vaccines for years now: in such an environment a weird blood clot that would have been ignored otherwise might now become an object of interest. There's a lot of seemingly random noise and variation in existence: if you're not worried that vaccines could secretly be causing problems, then you don't notice odd things that might point in that direction. When you are worried about it, an atypical blood clot becomes a red flag lending evidence to your concern.
I mean it could be something, but you'd need a proper study. More compelling Anecdata than this has proven to be nothing before.
More options
Context Copy link
According to EuroMOMO, the European mortality rates are currently elevated, but I'm not sure if the pattern doesn't really fit into the prognosis of these being primarly vaccine deaths. The past winter mortality rates have generally tended to conform with COVID waves for the last years.
More options
Context Copy link
These guys seem to think so: There are thousands more UK deaths than usual and we don’t know why. I don't know how unusual it is to have 11% more deaths than the period before COVID though, seems like it's small in absolute values and could be related to health getting worse during lockdowns.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't know that a handful of morticians and pathologists noticing something rises to the level of being notable enough that it attracts lots of real investigators to actually look into it as some widespread phenomenon, which is likely why all you see online is culture war stuff right now. If some undeniable pattern or trend comes out, maybe we'll see some real inquiry into this, but as of now, it's not surprising to me that almost no one has asked even the most basic question of "Is it even happening at all or is it a hoax?"
And speaking of the culture war,
I know this is rude, but blindingly obviously yes? One of the things about the culture war is that it manipulates people into believing that their own culture winning is synonymous with their own survival. As such, people become convinced that caring about the culture war is how one guarantees one's survival, with the result being that they care more about culture warring than their own survival.
I don't think it's "manipulation" so as much as an official doctrine, "the personal is political" put into practice.
Fair point, but I'm referring to phenomena like "buying into the official doctrine that the personal is political" when I refer to "manipulation."
Fair enough
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link