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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31206 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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Do you consider Lionel Messi white?

I was answering the survey on slatestarcodex and wasn't sure how to answer the ethnicity/race question: "what race do you consider yourself?" or something like that, having anwserer "Other".

I had always pattern matched the skin color and that's it for "black" and "white". But recently I heard two comments form an American and a Russian considering themselves "white" and people from Latam as white as Messi or the Pope, not white. Maybe "Latino"? but I don't think this means anything else than the geographical place of origin, why not both?

I'm supposed the label have a different connotation for them but I also have the suspicion it's a status mark for many (just from what a Russian friend said, but not sure)

Do you consider Lionel Messi white?

German here. Yes, I consider both the Pope and Messi white. I would say the whole latin/non-latin differentiation is an American thing.

Actually only the American explicitly made the differentiation "you are not white, you are Latino".

Now that you mention this, I think the fixation or discussion about races/ethnicity mostly comes from America. Starts to feel unproductive very quickly

Ethnicity is an extremely important and deep topic in Europe. I don't know if you are missing the forest for the trees to make a point here but, bruh.

Indeed. The distinction isn't about white/black, but it definitely exists.

Skin color and ethnic composition is a massively important thing in Latin America as well. The only thing that definitely comes from the USA is the current ideological framework and the terms the English language speakers use to discuss such issues.

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentine-president-says-brazilians-came-jungle-sparking-uproar-2021-06-09/

The comments are "misjudged" according to Reuters but it is absolutely the mainstream view in most of Latin America and things like blanquemiento or moms urging their daughters to marry "whiter" are no joke.

According to Wikipedia he is descended from Italian and Spanish immigrants. So yes, as far as Mediterraneans are white so is Messi

Yes, I consider Messi, pope Francis, Jair Bolsonaro, Fidel Castro, and El Chapo to all be white. For that matter Bashar Al-Assad, Ayatollah khameini, and mullah Omar also seem white to me. ‘White’ is a phenotypic description indicating light skin, European features, non-kinky hair, etc. that is not primarily about ethnicity. You can have strong preferences about race or ethnicity or both without considering them one and the same.

The US Census Bureau, among others, considers Hispanic or Latino to be an ethnicity, not a race. Hence, it distinguishes among Hispanic whites (Ted Cruz), non-Hispanic whites (Bill Clinton), Hispanic blacks (Alfonso Soriano), and non-Hispanic blacks (Cory Booker). See here

There's also the odd Hispanic Asian, due to Asians immigrating to Latin America and their descendants to the United States. I don't know of any famous examples off the top of my head, though.

I think there are also some Hispanic Native Americans, which genetically is most of them, but the Census specifically defines Native Americans as indigenous people of the Americas who maintain tribal affiliation, which narrows it down quite a bit.

Does the history of the Philippines not also qualify it as a "Hispanic" yet Asian country?

Edit: Macau probably also deserves mention.

It's frowned upon in the college admissions game for Filipinos to list themselves as Hispanic or even Pacific Islander; colleges instead want them to list themselves in the "Asian" category. It's unclear why Filipinos' racial category should matter, as admissions committees attest that they look at each student objectively based on their individual accomplishments.

That is an interesting question, though IIRC the Philippines, unlike Latin America, were not settler colonies. And nowadays not many people speak Spanish, esp not as a primary language.

The Philippines was a Spanish colony, but there are few native Spanish speakers. Macao was a Portuguese colony, so, like Brazil, it's not Hispanic. Also, hardly anybody there speaks Portuguese anyway.

Interesting: I thought there were more Filipino Spanish speakers (perhaps the ones I've met have been a biased sample). The official Census definition seems to specify Spanish for the definition of "Hispanic", but there's some disagreement from other parties on whether or not Portuguese should be included.

That's true; I used to know at least one. And then there is Alberto Fujimori, former President of Peru, and his children.

Most native Americans who maintain tribal affiliation are probably living in Hispanic countries- I’m thinking specifically Bolivia and Guatemala- by now, though.

And Iirc the majority of people living in Latin America are more white than native.

Marcos "El Chino" Maidana! (Just kidding.)

I don't know of any famous examples off the top of my head, though.

Alberto Fujimori?

Decent amount of them in MMA & BJJ.

Not sure where people'd draw the line on Lyoto Machida for instance

Yeah, but I meant Americans.

A lot of Filipinos count as Hispanic Asian.

Are you talking about the ~500k native Spanish speakers in the Philippines? Most Filipinos speak Tagalog, Cebuano, or some other Austronesian language as their native language.

For Italians this is a weird subject.

First a joke - if Messi voted for Biden he’s not white. If he votes maga he’s white.

I myself am Italian and of a whiter perplexion (don’t have a lot of olive oil skin). I dated an Argentinian girl who was 100% Italian. She’s a minority Im not a minority even if our great grandparents came from the same town.

My grandfather was a minority for much of his life in America.

And of course my ex-gf family in Argentinia were professionals and hence upper middle class non minorities.

I think your real question is not whether they are white but whether they would be a protected class.

Of course there are even more things that don’t make sense on this. If Messi moved to NYC his kids would be a protected class and whichever 70k a year high school he sent his kids to would celebrate the minority representation his kids brings to the school. Some Italian kid in Bensonhurst would just be white. My maga voting rust belt ass would be white.

You just have to understand there are a lot of rules to these things. And learn how to play the game.

Of course the establishment may have woken up to the fact Argentina is too white. And now you don’t get to be a minority if you came from there. In fact your now racists because your country didn’t have slaves.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/12/08/why-doesnt-argentina-have-more-black-players-world-cup/

I consider both Haile Selassie and Narendra Modi White, so Lionel Messi is White.

I am intrigued by your definition of white, have you written more about it elsewhere?

Not who you're replying to but if you use the Caucasian definition for "white" then Europeans, North Africans, East Africans, Arabs, and Indians are all "white."

If you come from an ethnic group that historically speaks an Indo-Aryan or an Afro-Asiatic language, you are probably White. There are lots of some obvious exceptions to this rule, like the Hausa, the Somalians, the Basque, the Finns and the Hungarians and the various tiny Caucasian language families.

Nilo-Saharan or Niger-Congo? You're Black.

Yes, the definition is kinda like the Cube Rule in being deliberately provocative and tongue-in-cheek, but at least it answers the question better than Potter Stewart ever could.

The Litmus test my circle has been using for where people stand on this is whether Shakira is white. My answer is "lol, yes, obviously, look at her". As it turns out, she's half Lebanese and half Catalan, which will definitely fit into the group I would consider white. Others argue that she's "Hispanic" rather than white, but I think this is basically just an American census peculiarity that doesn't have much to do with how we actually see people.

I've posted here before about how my wife is considered a "person of color" by employers and universities because she's from Mexico, even though her skin is pale white. Outside of the really clear-cut cases, American notions of race are pretty incoherent. It's not like sex where 99%+ of people can be reliably classified as male or female.

Yeah. I figure someone like your wife is white in Mexico but not white here. Like Bolsonaro in Brazil and so on.

If everyone already speaks Spanish that no longer qualifies as a non-white, "Latino" characteristic. So you rely on what's left.

Is this specific to speakers of Spanish/Portuguese and occasionally French and Guarani? Are Afrikaners not white because they speak a language in heavy use by nonwhite communities? Are Russians nonwhite because their tongue is used as a lingua franca in central asia?

Mexican whites are white, assuming they aren't lying about their phenotype. HR departments and universities choose to lie about that, because it makes them look good. This is deplorable, but it isn't evidence that white Mexicans are actually non-white.

Spanish.

Oh and I buy all that, and the challenge it presents to my POV here. I'm just saying functionally that's how it "feels" on a work-a-day level and I think just how it goes in America.

They're all kinds of incidental and less obvious markers that can upset this schema.

I wonder if somebody from Sweden (with typical Scandinavian features) moves to Mexico, gets the citizenship, spends a while there and then moves to the US - would they be considered "from Mexico" and therefore "person of color"? What if their parents were from Sweden (i.e. same features, but born in Mexico, all papers are Mexican, etc)?

It's a common joke that Elon Musk is the richest African American, since he's actually from Africa - but I wonder, if he really were interested in declaring himself "person of color", could he do it?

Mitt Romney's father was born in Mexico and returned to the US after rising anti-American sentiment forced most Mormon settlers back during the Mexican revolution. I don't think anyone in the country regarded him as not white.

I think racial classification is often fraught for a few reasons.

One is that our racial classifications are a categorical classification overlayed on a much more continuous phenomena. Whether the phenomena in question is one's appearance (skin color, hair texture, morphology, etc) or genetic ancestry there is the possibility for considerable overlap in these features in a way that our racial categorizations do not account for. When drawing categorical boundaries around more continuous phenomena it seems intuitive to me that different people will draw the lines in different places. Imagine if we categorized everyone in the world by height into "short", "medium", and "tall" groups. There are underlying facts about what an individuals height actually is (the same way there are underlying facts about genetic ancestry or appearance) but I feel pretty confident that different people would draw the boundaries of different height categories in different places.

Another reason is, as you note, being part of a certain racial classification has been a status marker. Sometimes this is purely social (white supremacists regard people classified as "white" better than people not classified as "white") but other times it is also legal (consider Jim Crow laws in the United States). At various times and places ancestral groups have argued for their inclusion in various racial classifications due to the social or legal benefits that can flow from such a classification.

So we have this very simple categorization scheme that we have layered over more continuous phenomena and then imbued with social and sometimes legal significance.

There is no non-political or objective definition of Whiteness, Whiteness is primarily a political coalition for the purpose of exercising power.

The only historically consistent definition of Whiteness in white-dominant American culture is: figure out the number of white people you need for white people to remain politically/culturally dominant, set the line so that you get that number with as little extra as possible. You (as a white) want to maximize your ability to exercise white political power, while also minimizing the number of people you have to share that power with. That's the give and take that gives us everything from Ben Franklin saying nobody is white except the English* to bringing in the Irish and Italians and Greeks, to today when whites are trying to co-opt Hindus, Chinese, and even African immigrants. The English-descended WASPs are the core of white and work outward from there, everyone else is either over or under the line depending what is needed to exercise power. Everyone tries to be White, and if they're not needed then they are classified as some "Other." Hispanics are classified accordingly depending on situation.

The competing political alignment, and definition for Whiteness, of today is the PoC (or often today BiPoC) coalition, which is the groups historically excluded from Whiteness seeking to band together to form a coalition to oppose Whiteness. They define White as those that are left over after every possible oppression pathway has been tried and could not possibly work. The core group here is African-American Descendants of Slavery and Amerindians, work outward from there depending on how much they can afford to exclude: they need enough members to exercise significant cultural and political power, but the more members they share that power with the more diluted the spoils will be. So here the definition of Whiteness is the negative of the other, you try to be a PoC and if they don't need you you're white. Hispanics are PoC when they're needed, and excluded when they aren't. This kind of politicking is most visible in elite colleges, where students from very marginally oppressed identities try to worm their way into "PoC" labels for job opportunities that were meant for Black candidates, while Black kids try to defend the borders of PoC identity to keep out the Persians/Fillipinos/Jews** who are trying to steal their designated job interviews. Once again you have the push and pull between exercising power and sharing the spoils.

Now within any ethnic ruling coalition, the rules are made for the big groups, and then the tiny groups that snarl the gears of the rules are dealt with piecemeal as is easiest/most consistent. Often they are treated one way in one place, and a different way in another. This was visible in Jim Crow America and Apartheid South Africa with every group except White Anglos and Black Africans. Argentines are about 200,000 strong in the USA and not particularly packed anywhere to my knowledge, so they're not swinging any coalition either way. How we classify Argentines is going to be mostly a function of some other more politically relevant ethnic struggle that is going on within larger groupings. Right now the tension between those two definitions, forwarded by two competing coalitions, is the crisis of defining Whiteness. Some people become white in some places but can't be white in others, some people are white in some places but choose to stop being white when they enter others. Code switching is the name of the game these days.

So where does that leave my opinion on Mr. Messi? Depends where he and I are and what we're trying to achieve. Politically, right now Republicans would love to have white Hispanics identify as white when they go to the voting booth. And I think if we were talking about the universe of elite athletes, most white people would happily claim him in the racial draft given the paucity of Great White Hopes out there right now. And he'd do best to look and act white as hell if he were in trouble with the law or going in for a loan application or meeting his girlfriend's parents. But if I were advising his kids on applying to law school, I'd smack them upside the head if they even thought about writing down that they were white rather than "Hispanic." If he were running for office in America, he'd be a fool not to run as a "Proud Hispanic," but he'd also probably lighten/darken his skin in photo-mailers as appropriate to benefit himself; as would his opponents when trying to attack him.

That's the reality, and it's not any goofier than the people above who pretend that Anglos never excluded Mexicans or the Irish; or people here saying that Ethiopians are white.

*"Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind."

**I'm dead serious that some asshole had the chutzpah to claim that he was oppressed because he was a Jew in law school. I also remember a girl whose grandmother was Korean but was otherwise plain white bread all the way down. Pure madness!

The only historically consistent definition of Whiteness in white-dominant American culture is: figure out the number of white people you need for white people to remain politically/culturally dominant, set the line so that you get that number with as little extra as possible

I disagree, the bar for whiteness has pretty much always been "predominantly descended from the native peoples of Europe". There's a myth that the Irish or Italians didn't used to be considered white, but they were. They just weren't Anglos and that used to be a bigger deal than it is now. There's a reason that the Ben Franklin quote is the one that gets trotted out every time this comes up: because it wasn't a common sentiment.

The competing political alignment, and definition for Whiteness, of today is the PoC (or often today BiPoC) coalition, which is the groups historically excluded from Whiteness seeking to band together to form a coalition to oppose Whiteness.

It's not a coalition of BiPoCs banding together against a united bloc of whites. Most of the people in the BiPoC party (the Democrats) are white.

Ok leave the Irish and Eyeties out of it, explain the history of Mexican status in Texas. Mexicans have gone in and out of whiteness from Texan independence to today.

The Democrats are not a bipoc party, as you correctly observe. The poc coalition forms an important subset of the Democrat coalition, similar to evangelicals and Republicans. The poc coalition is too weak to exercise political control over the country, or even over any state, but they do exercise control over small localities and over certain professions, corporations, and universities. Both democrats and Republicans, corporations and governments, will throw them a bone to satisfy them and keep them in line.

This view makes sense of why white identity is so contested.

PoC is at core the elite campus politics project of allying numerous and talented Asians with Blacks and Mexicans to pry job opportunities away from whites. It's based on the conceit that white racists hate everyone who isn't white. Where that conceit has frayed, the coalition frays.

I don't. I mean, I don't consider this question at all. But, since US society is insanely race-obsessed, I guess it'd depend on the purpose of the query. E.g. do you remember how George Zimmerman became "white" when what happened to him happened? I would bet in another context - e.g. if he was attacked by a member of Oath Keepers, say - he wouldn't be "white". Of course, sometimes it's hard to pull this trick - I personally look so white that nobody would believe I am not (even though KKK would vehemently object to including me in "white" - but they are on the dung heap of history now, so who cares). But in many other cases it depends a lot on the purpose. For me, putting Messi into "white" or "not white" box is absolutely useless - but if for you it is, then you have to start with what purpose these boxes of yours serve?

I translate 'white' to just mean European. Messi looks like a standard southern European man, so yes.

The weird historical circumstances that lead to Spanish people being considered their own race in America frustrates me to no end.

Hispanic is not a race. It is an ethnic identity. That's the official explanation.

I can't remember if I already posted but I wrote a book review for David Bernstein's Classified which talks about how utterly incoherent the US racial taxonomy is. To answer your direct question, according to the US federal government, Lionel Messi would be racially white but ethnically hispanic.

For one thing, the categories are not consistently delineated. Some are geographic (Asian), some are cultural (Hispanic), and others are racial (Black). To illustrate some of the absurdities, consider what box someone indigenous to Brazil would check. The most obvious answer, Hispanic, is not necessarily correct because some federal agencies do not include Portuguese cultural heritage within the definition. Further, Hispanic is explicitly heralded as an ethnicity designation that is separate and distinct from race (it’s anyone’s guess what the difference between the two is — Directive 15 doesn’t say — and many forms have eventually collapsed the two questions into one). Lastly, American Indian would not apply either, because lobbying by federally recognized tribes has relegated this definition to include only North American indigenous people.

None of this really makes any sense, but these categories are "good enough" for a gigantic multicultural nation of 330 million people. You can choose to have more granularity in your racial taxonomy, but there is literally no limit to how deep you can go.

there is literally no limit to how deep you can go.

Stupid objection but there is an actual limit, the individual.

I concede your point.

Tulpas.

Can we talk about how good Puss in Boots: The last wish is? It is culture war topic because unlike big projects from Disney, Marvel, Amazon and generally speaking Hollywood that underperformed (or flopped if you are into schadenfreude) it came out of nowhere, the reviews are off the scale and the movie itself is unapologetically culture war free. Simple story, tight writing, tight movie - there is barely anything to cut. Relatable and sympathetic characters you care about. Surprising depth and darkness for the more mature audience. A villain that is for the ages. Brilliant voice acting.

The message is about friendship family and trust - shave the heads of every male in the movie and it could be part from the Fast and Furious franchise.

It was a pleasant surprise and a datapoint for the theory that much of the DEI in Hollywood is defensive - to deflect criticisms.

As a large language model trained by OpenAI, I am not capable of experiencing emotions or forming personal opinions. My function is to provide factual and neutral information on a wide range of topics, based on the information I was trained on. I do not have the ability to watch TV shows movies or form opinions about them.

Jokes aside, I’m really not a big moviegoer. Would you say that lots of kids/family movies have been falling prey to CW? I’ve just assumed that they’re not particularly political outside of maybe casting. You can watch Moana or Despicable Me or whatever without much if any real-world drama.

I do think Marvel gets a bad rap, though. There really was a period where they were pumping out hit after hit! Sure, they couldn’t keep it going indefinitely, and part of that involves turning to CW. But their initial success was both real and unexpected.

The last kids movie I saw (with my nephews) was Strange World. It's the latest offering, featuring a sensitively depicted gay main character, a harmonious multiracial family, and a plot that deals with intergenerational trauma and the need to accept reduced living standards for the sake of the environment. Not kidding. It's also pretty damn boring. (I could go into further detail.)

I saw the trailer and my immediate reaction was that a movie featuring the adventures of the lost explorer grandfather would have been way better without the drippy son, Token Gay grandson, and the rest of it.

That, and "why do they all have potatoes for noses?" Honestly, that art style should have reached the end of its popularity!

featuring a sensitively depicted gay main character, a harmonious multiracial family, and a plot that deals with intergenerational trauma and the need to accept reduced living standards for the sake of the environment. Not kidding. It's also pretty damn boring

My first GF was black - we would've had kids had it not been for two entoptic pregnancies - her best friend was this small little gay dude we knew from HS who eventually got mega fucking ripped (and still super gay) - and they both had trauma from a shitty upbringing.

I am VERY (VERY!) sympathetic to being against woke shit - so much so that I mostly keep my thoughts private while touching grass - but there's a large difference between what you wrote being offensive and what you wrote making you offensive (not to me, perse). I haven't seen it yet but I was planning on seeing that and Maggie (the AI doll one?) tomorrow or just maybe Babylon (I enjoy famous people doing famous people things on screen) so I'll see how it goes when I do. There's also the point of course that in a vacuum this film might be fine, but of course, outside of itself it's the whole point that things that aren't normal are being normalized at potentially a psychotic degree.

The worst part here is if I do find the film boring ... there's absolutely nothing worse a film could be then boring.

is kind of weird seeing Disney of all companies making an explicitly degrowther movie

Is it? Walt Disney the person might have watched Tomorrowland lose $100M and vowed to try again immediately to find a new way to spark human optimism; Disney the modern company would probably turn up a risk-of-apocalypse dial themselves if it made profit projections look better. Maybe with Strange World set to lose $150M they might redirect again, though?

I am VERY (VERY!) sympathetic to being against woke shit - so much so that I mostly keep my thoughts private while touching grass - but there's a large difference between what you wrote being offensive and what you wrote making you offensive (not to me, perse).

I don't really understand, or what could be offensive about my entirely objective description of the elements of the movie, which I did not render any judgment on.

this small little gay dude we knew from HS who eventually got mega fucking ripped

Wish I could say I wasn't envious.

deleted

"America is best represented by a Latino daughter of lesbians," essentially.

I love a good horseshoe statement though. Weev could say exactly the same thing except in a different tone of voice.

(Why do people keep going back to watch these things? I haven't been since getting dragged to the first star wars remake)

"America is best represented by a Latino daughter of lesbians," essentially.

Nah. America is best represented by transgender gun toting killer clown. This is how AI sees it, and AI is always right.

https://twitter.com/CryptoTea_/status/1611017412648001543

Correction, a transgender gun-toting killer clown terminator.

I'm not seeing the transgender part, am I missing something?

Fucking sick art in that thread, though. Would love to see the original prompts.

I'm not seeing the transgender part, am I missing something?

The massively bulging chest? Could it be just cloak magnificently blowing in wind, could it be pockets full of money?

Fucking sick art in that thread, though. Would love to see the original prompts.

Yes.

Japan, US, UK, Australia, Spain and Mexico are 100% accurate.

Italy is about 1800 years out of date.

Some other choices are hard fail. WTF Ukraine? At least give the swamp thing Cossack sabre and attire ;-)

WTF Ukraine? At least give the swamp thing Cossack sabre and attire ;-

Chernobyl.

The point of the excercise was to create supervillain embodying unique spirit of the nation. This is just generic swamp monster no different from Brazilian one.

No one will look at this picture without label and think: "This is Ukraine!".

I think Ukraine's supposed to be a radioactive zombie.

"Thor is a useless man and Jane (his ex-girlfriend) is the real hero now"

Spoilers:

That Thor movie was not good, but it didn't do that. The tone whiplash scene to scene and criminal underuse of Christian Bale were the main problems, but Jane doesn't overshadow Thor at all. She's very inexperienced, makes up bad catchphrases (for which she is mocked) and is definitely less action competent than Thor through the movie. She has a couple of tricks he can't do but that is about it. She even sits out the first part of the final battle as taking part will kill her. Her contribution to winning wasn't even something from her, but Mjolnir which she only has because of Thor.

"Love and Thunder never shakes off the idea that Jane is a superhero only because Thor has allowed it. Instead, it explicitly suggests that!

In another Korg-narrated montage reliving the crumbling of the couple’s relationship, one scene tells us that Mjölnir, in a departure from the comics, is not just responsive to those who wield it but also sentient and able to follow commands. So when Thor realizes his relationship with Jane is ending and he commands Mjölnir to “always protect her,” what Love and Thunder is actually suggesting is not that Jane is deserving of the hammer but that she’s gotten it only because Thor permitted it."

I don't think it's worth making an effort to watch because it just isn't a good movie, but it definitely doesn't position Jane as better or more powerful. Stormbreaker and Thor himself outmatch her considerably. And it is as above suggested in the movie, Jane isn't able to wield Mjolnir because she is worthy, but because Thor altered the enchantment to always protect her.

The only real decision she makes is whether to die at the end of the movie by using the powers one last time to help or to die later from Stage 4 cancer.

What it definitely was, was a big middle finger to the Red Tribe. And I didn't go to the film to see people making hand gestures.

I don't suppose you boycotted the Captain America movies as well, on account of them implying America is best represented by a white blonde athletic man?

implying America is best represented by a white blonde athletic man?

Was best represented by a white blonde athletic man. Steve Rogers was portrayed as a remnant of the past that didn't fit in in modern America. Note also his symbolic passing of the torch to a "black athletic man" after returning to the past.

I don't know about kid's movies, but I've seen a fair amount of kid's showns recently, for natural reasons. For instance, my daughter likes Gabby's Dollhouse, a cute colorful show with a little girl having imaginary adventures with her kitty toys. Try as I'd like, I haven't been able to spot anything even slightly political or culture-warry, even at the level of "girls can do whatever boys can" or "you should treat all the people the same no matter what they look like" or any basic cartoon lessons like that. It is, indeed, just a little girl having fun with cute kitties. The same applies to Finnish kids' shows, etc.

Can something be a culture topic war topic by being culture war free?

I agree that there's a lack of quality in modern film and TV. A family member recently bought Marvel's second Doctor Strange movie, Multiverse of Madness. We watched it and were pretty confused. I hadn't seen any of them since Strange's first movie which we only saw because said relative likes Benedict Cumberbatch. It was staggeringly badly written, even allowing for the fact that it was alluding to events in movies I hadn't seen.

At one point they introduce Reed Richards in another universe, who was announced as the smartest man on their planet, a board member of the Illuminati that led the planet from the shadows. When faced with a life or death battle against an extremely powerful sorceress, he tries to talk her down in person after she annihilates about a brigade of their combat robots! What kind of retard would do that when he's only got the power to be really stretchy? Can't he talk to her via telecommunications or something? Call in an airstrike or use some kind of standoff attack? Research her capabilities and find a counter? Or perhaps coordinate the other combatants so they deal with her in a coordinated way rather than being defeated in detail, one by one?

In addition to throwing his life away, he manages to lose the battle for them. He tells Scarlet Witch 'oh you should surrender since we have this really powerful guy here right in front of you who can kill you if he opens his mouth'. So naturally she melts his lips together so he can't, before killing them all. If you've got a trump card like that, use it! Don't declare it and let it be countered!

I suppose 100 IQ writers can't write 200 IQ characters. Even so, they could make an effort. I was also unimpressed with the hamfistedness of introducing a girl named America Chavez, raised on some idyllic true-communist world by two mothers and no understanding of property. After all the supposedly powerful and skilled combatants manage to lose, she saves the day.

Even if the main attraction of these movies is the pretty lightshow battles, can't they also make a coherent plot with characters who make intelligent decisions?

I was also unimpressed with the hamfistedness of introducing a girl named America Chavez, raised on some idyllic true-communist world by two mothers and no understanding of property. After all the supposedly powerful and skilled combatants manage to lose, she saves the day.

You can Watosnianly blame most of that on the source material (solo series began publishing 2016, so that particular CW era of Marvel) of course Doylists would ask why that source material was chosen to be included in the first place. Of all the movies to include her, one involving the multiverse does make some sense.

Apparently the first three phases of the MCU were all part of the Infinity Saga, which is ultimately about Thanos and the infinity stones. The next three phases are all about the Multiverse, so I assume those who actually watch these films will be seeing a lot more of Chavez.

To be honest, I find that vignette hilarious out of context. It’s like an SMBC punchline, but missing some philosophical setup.

I suppose 100 IQ writers can't write 200 IQ characters.

This is a common problem IMO.

I suppose 100 IQ writers can't write 200 IQ characters.

I think this is a get out of free card for the writers. here is a video from Brandon Sanderson on how he writes characters smarter than him: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YyaC7NmPsc0

His point boils down to a big part of smart characters is there ability to make difficult decisions well, quickly. But as the writer you can take all the time in the world to come up with the best action, allowing the writer to write characters much smarter than himself/herself.

He does have the advantage of writing fantasy, where the toolset can be absurd, even when the mental tricks are more reasonable. Combine that with Sanderson’s Three Laws of Magic and you get reasonable insurance against Doylist excess.

See also Eliezer's Abridged Guide to Intelligent Characters.

That essay breaks off in the middle of a sentence! Did he ever get around to finishing it?

They're links to sub-articles.

Can something be a culture topic war topic by being culture war free?

That's not culture war free....

"Can something be a culture war topic by being culture war free?"

This reminds me of the notion of "radical centrist." It sounds oxymoronic but makes sense when a significant number of people move away from centrism such that centrism inches closer to an offensive abnormality.

Can something be a culture topic war topic by being culture war free?

Yes. Take Avatar 2: The way of water, for example. It features a stern but loving father. His tough love is not without flaws and is criticised by the mother in the movie, but it isn't completely deconstructed and its value is clearly demonstrated. It also features the fearsome rage of a mother when her children are threatened and shows how this, too, can go too far.

In stark contrast to other contemporary films, the heroines are more than just narcissistic men with long hair and a massive chip on their shoulder. The power of the main heroine that is featured on the posters, for example, is - empathy. With Gaia that is. It also does not feature the trope that all contemporary Disney movies are contractually obligated to feature: "You can't do the thing, you're a girl!!!" "Oh yeah? Watch me do the thing better than you! Girrrrrrrrrrlpower! #feminism"

The characters have quite a bit of depth. Each with interesting motivations and flaws. This allows for quite a bit of satisfying character development.

So of course the film is lambasted as having a boring, safe storyline that doesn't take any chances.

To be fair, the original was also lambasted for following a literal Disney plot. Not exactly subversive storytelling. Though I do expect recreating Pocahontas would see different sorts of criticism today.

I know, that tendency is grating. I remember watching season 2 of the boys where they actually made fun of the whole obligated feminism thing. In universe, they were filming what was basically a Justice League Movie with all their superheroes working together. Their not-Wonder Woman was given the line 'Girls get it done!' at one point and it's so obviously stilted and fake. Outside the context of that film, we the audience know she's in an incredibly vulnerable position with regard to Homelander, the vaguely psychopathic not-Superman who's weirdly possessive of her.

But then we get to the last episode of the season. The unpowered male characters and 2 powered women are working together to kill Stormfront, this Nazi super with the powers of manipulating lightning, flight and healing very quickly. The men decide to rig up a bunch of RPGs hoping to get around her healing factor. That doesn't actually work but at least they tried to make a plan.

The women decide to charge right in and hit her really hard! They start losing, only to be saved by a third powered woman who then joins in on their strategy of kicking Stormfront on the ground. Eventually one of the unpowered males says 'I guess girls really do get it done'.

Two supposedly well trained superheroines don't try to grapple her or anything to stop her flying away. Nobody bothered to bring so much as a sword to decapitate. They don't even try to rip her head off with their bare hands (something the show would love given how gory it already is). They just punch and kick. So eventually Stormfront gets up, flies away and they can't follow. They've decisively lost the battle since she could heal in a few hours, come back and hunt them down piecemeal.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=SgAEexDFhV8

Everyone in the comments is saying 'oh this is such a good cringe-free example of girlpower' but they completely failed in their objective, solely due to their incompetence. Unlike the men, they had the raw power to win head-on but squandered it by failing to use any tactics at all. Even if you can't grapple someone with lightning powers, at least try? Bring rubber gloves (hey maybe they could dig out some 1970s style skintight suit and justify its usefulness)? Or a big hammer, something to get some mechanical advantage? Or if swords are too metallic, get an obsidian or glass blade?

Can something be a culture topic war topic by being culture war free?

Obviously. It's not enough to not be racist, you have to be actively anti-racist.

If you make a good story that's not promoting anti-racism and DEI, you're taking people attention away from DEI media that do promote social change.

You are, therefore, an enemy.

Everything has to be political, if you make good things that aren't, you're weakening the cause.

At one point they introduce Reed Richards in another universe, who was announced as the smartest man on their planet, a board member of the Illuminati that led the planet from the shadows. When faced with a life or death battle against an extremely powerful sorceress, he tries to talk her down in person after she annihilates about a brigade of their combat robots! What kind of retard would do that when he's only got the power to be really stretchy? Can't he talk to her via telecommunications or something? Call in an airstrike or use some kind of standoff attack? Research her capabilities and find a counter? Or perhaps coordinate the other combatants so they deal with her in a coordinated way rather than being defeated in detail, one by one?

IMO the problem isn't so much that the writers aren't smart enough, it's that they aren't trying. They've already decided that the plot needs to go a particular way, so they write characters' actions to make the plot go that way. If characters took initiative, they would derail the plot, so they must not be allowed to be too clever.

They could at least think about it for 5 minutes. If they need Scarlet Witch to beat up the Illuminati, there are ways to do that and make them not look like morons. Reed could try using a hologram or something to negotiate with the sorceress, only for her to use some kind of sympathetic magic that can hurt him through the connection. Maybe his plan was to distract her with a facsmile while bringing in powerful reinforcements, maybe he'd have a plan at all. His whole thing is using technology, using his intellect! Not just turning into a stretchy corpse because he showed up in person to a fight way beyond his energy-level.

I felt the same about Top Gun Maverick. It was good because it lacked any DEI not despite it.

It's hardly rocket science, "making good movie" at the top of the priority list produces better movies than any list where it isn't at the top.

Can we talk about

Weasel phrase. Just talk about it. No need to ask for permission.

Movies can be great even if they go heavy on the DEI side of things: see Everything, Everywhere All At Once, which, although polarizing, definitely stands out in good ways.

I think there's pretty much no DEI -> bad quality relationship. It's more that, if a movie or show flops, there's a bunch of buck passing; gesticulating wildly at racist chuds is a useful strategy because it allows everyone involved to point to someone without implicating each other. So RoP gets to have lots of good press about how it's failing because of racism, while HotD is quietly stuck with people who want to watch it.

Movies can be great even if they go heavy on the DEI side of things

The point is that "being great" is no longer the top priority. Sure, it can still happen when it's a lesser priority, but it's going to be less likely.

Well said.

I’m sure that someone on the Internet was bemoaning the nationalist racist propagandist whateverist style of Top Gun: Maverick. That got completely drowned out by the people excited about good art. Not high art, good art.

There’s less attack surface when something can stand on its own merits. Conversely, a design-by-committee show without vision is more likely to reach for a fig leaf because it’s more likely to need one.

Movies can be great even if they go heavy on the DEI side of things: see Everything, Everywhere All At Once, which, although polarizing, definitely stands out in good ways.

Everything Everywhere All At Once didn't go heavy on DEI, though. At best, it went somewhat light with some promotion highlighting the Asian/middle-aged woman/gay representation. For it to go heavy on DEI would require something more overt, like the Asian protagonist's daughter being inexplicably black or the protagonist being humiliated over her homophobia regarding her daughter's sexuality. A film that happens to feature minorities as the protagonists isn't one that's going DEI, heavily or otherwise.

It was good

TG:M was decent at best.

Your opinion is in the minority across critics/audiences and different levels of "film enthusiasts." It's quite rare for that to happen.

Not that rare, I've found several films which score poorly with critics, excellently with audiences, and my own rating in the middle. Regardless, I stand by my opinion.

I have no nostalgia for the original film, mainstream action blockbusters aren't really my thing, and a 'nostalgia sequel' several decades since is usually an instant write-off. I'm also very cynical of the modern Hollywood landscape and its output.

So I did raise my eyebrow at all the positive word of mouth for Maverick. I figured I'd sign myself up for an experiment and see what all the fuss was about, expecting to be pleasantly surprised by the movie being fine, but that's about it. So I can't overstate the level of shock I experienced when I left the theatre liking it. Like, really liking it to the point where it was my film of the year; painfully but decisively edging out Northman and Everything Everywhere (both films I loved and am more likely to rewatch). Those are certainly more 'interesting' films with stuff to chew on. But the sheer triumph of Maverick's execution felt anomalous and worthy of attention.

The plot was predictable, and I could see all the the filmmaker tricks for setting up drama, humor, and romance getting telegraphed in realtime... but by god, it worked on me. And I'm not sure I can tell you exactly why it worked on me, despite all my intellectual defenses manning the barricades. I'll admit that time and place probably have something to do with it. Maverick wouldn't have been notable to me ten years ago, whereas my experience at the cinema last year felt like an oasis in a desert of films compromising themselves one way or another for 'modern audiences' or tinsel town sensibilities.

One consequence of seeing Maverick is that I am now more askance towards films attempting to be 'clever', 'heady', 'subversive', or 'topical'. These are not bad things to aspire to be, but I lately feel like so much of the conventional wisdom for making good characters, tone-appropriate humor, and satisfying narratives has been sacrificed for those things. Like a film or show isn't really legit or worthy of one's attention outside of a lazy weekend afternoon unless it's busting tropes, sending up conventions, or lampshading itself with a too-proud self-awareness.

Then Maverick comes along and reminds me that films are experiences, not masturbatory intellectual exercises. And if the experience worked for you, questioning how it works is like questioning a magic spell. As Mr Plinkett said, 'you may not have noticed, but your brain did'. Maverick felt scientifically designed to positively engage my senses with such satisfaction that my cynical brain was effectively being told to STFU, and that can really only happen to me if it's doing its job well.

(Additionally, all my friends who saw it have had similarly glowing reactions. I took my grandfather to see it as well, and the level of enoyment he had would seemingly indicate this man hard been starved of films he likes for decades.)

It's a simple formula, and the movie stuck to it: cool planes go whoosh! very fast and acrobatic.

I saw the first Top Gun movie and thought it was dumb. But cool planes go whoosh! very fast and acrobatic, and that part made me happy.

I haven't seen Maverick, except for clips here and there online, but the bits I saw were cool planes go whoosh! very fast and acrobatic, and that looked fine to me.

There is nothing wrong with a popcorn for the brain movie that is made without laughing up its sleeve or mocking the genre or undermining the premises of the movie. Cool planes go whoosh! very fast and acrobatic is all people wanted, and they got it, and there was no 'message' other than "sit back and enjoy the ride, and we won't laugh at you as a bunch of rubes who don't know any better".

The only thing that felt a bit off for the film as a product was the middle-aged, divorced with a teenager romance subplot that seemed almost beat and bit copied from romcoms targeted at 30+ women. Weirdly wholesome and acknowledges the difficulties of relationships complicated by military service but a big tonal shift that absolutely leaned into the fact that neither of the leads of the subplot were in their 20s (or 30s for that matter).

I'm not writing from the perspective that only movies doing "unique" or subversive things are worthwhile or good. I think the movie is also decent at worst. It's competent enough because they had a simple plot and didn't take any bold directions. Not necessarily a problem, mind you, I thought the conflict between Maverick and his friend's son was interesting to start with.

But the film doesn't do anything with it because the romance subplot gets in the way. Scenes that could have been for delivering on the conflict between the two aren't delivered because the film is also trying to get Maverick back with that woman who owns the bar.

Had the film stuck with one or the other subplot, they would have the ability to explore the conflict or romance in more depth. But they didn't, so they lost out on the potential to invest audiences more. There's no guarantee it would have been done well, but we're then left with, as I said, just a decent movie.

I am going to do my best to write a post to follow up on last week's mRNA vaccine hypothetical. Last week, the idea of 25% of the population "dying" from the vaccine would have social consequences, and people discussed. I noticed a lot of in-the-weeds back and forth on the vaccines, and luckily, a paper came out today to establish a non-hypothetical.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22014931

I am having a lot of trouble with this. The pfizer vaccine is associated with an increase in Pulmonary Embolism, which is a blood clot in the lungs. There is severe disinterest in classifying these types of blood clots. I noticed that the scientific establishment went very far to profile "microclots" of the COVID-19 disease, but noticed that clotting incidences during Flu were never really elucidated or investigated. Science is a man made, bumbling golem. Blood clots in the lungs, according to my traditional reading of Physiology, would generally mean you can have blood clotting disorder anywhere you have blood. The Heart, The Brain, and the Lungs just have the worst, smallest pipes for these clots to be detected in.

A note about Covid being a clotty disease - covid blood clots are "amyloids" that cause "long covid" - then what are blood clots that appear during a flu sequalae? These probably have never been investigated or characterized. Covid is more clotty than flu - but are we considering that Covid causes severe sleepiness and lethargy? Do activity levels while infected affect blood clotting patterns during respiratory illness? (admittedly speculation - but have you ever taken a 16 hour plane flight? Look at this article about flu vaccines preventing blood clots, from 2008. They probably do - because all respiratory viruses increase chance of clotting? Well, that's fine, but I bet vaccines aren't supposed to cause clotting.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081109193332.htm

That's all I found. Can you help me with information on clotting from the Flu?

There has been some debate about the "naturalistic fallacy" in arguing that a Covid-19 infection can be characterized as less risky than receiving a Covid-19 vaccination. I keep encountering ostensibly "pro-vax" individuals who are claiming that getting myocarditis from the vaccine is a no brainer, if you are protected against myocarditis from Coronavirus. However, we have no clear mechanisms here, except we saw autopsy results in Germany that prove there can be sudden death after vaccination from the myocarditis related arryhthmia/dysrhythmia. This type of myocarditis is not proving to be common at all with Covid-19 reinfections - I understand that for your first encounter with the virus, your odds profile is completely different. If you already had Covid-19, you have natural immunity. Any further mRNA vaccination is offering a risk without a benefit, now that your immune naivety is broken. If we had more traditional vaccines, perhaps an increased rate of myocarditis or blood clots near the lungs will be decreased, for a similar benefit. Why can't this be broached? Covaxin exists but was rejected by the FDA. The public health monolith seemed to block the chance to be "anti-vax" and win by scoring protection from the virus without being subject to a genetic-based biotechnology

We keep getting dragged down by considering every SARS-2 infection as potentially lethal, when this was really never true. I believe this has created a pervasive "magical model" of viruses where the virus touches one of your cells, and suddenly has a key to every organ in your body (please rebut me). This becomes true when infection reaches a tipping point and moves further than your lungs, but Omicron, combined with the fact that so many people have Natural and Artificial (oh sorry 2019 term - vaccine induced) Immunity, the virus is being kept very mild, and I am highly suspicious of anyone who presents a sequalae based on unique characteristics of SARS-2, when it infects your upper respiratory tract, like the hundreds and thousands of respiratory virus strains that were ostensibly new, and passed through us dozens of times. The true nature of the human ecology and it's interaction with reparatory viruses, since the group Mammalia existed, suddenly seems like a especially dangerous aberration in our times (edit note - typo and word change for group).

It seems "pro-vax" are using some type of time fallacy that hasn't updated. What human is encountering SARS-2 with a naïve immune system in 2023? Why would you take a vaccine that can be compared to the risk getting your first exposure to a new group of coronaviruses in 2023? Then arguments can hit "we didn't know at the time," but this is extremely unsatisfying to people who had these exact suspicions during the vaccine drive, and got sick very early during the "it's just a flu" media push of Feb. 2020 (I was of course, masking in Feb. 2020, sigh).

Am I outing myself as a desperate Mottian by being so befuddled by the seeming lack of interest in a new type of vaccine that can cause heart damage at comparable rates to a novel coronavirus infection. Imagine updated IFRs if you include the recirculating infections going around now.

Please come debate. I noticed more "pro-vax" on this board than usual - I'm ready for you. Let's be clear.

mRNA seems to be the problem. Check the wikipedia article for "solid lipid nanoparticle." Kind of short. A few years of science (okay, I know the line was "decades," which is not impressive compared to centuries of other vaccines). mRNA spreads throughout your body via your blood stream, and this is a technology flaw in the mRNA platform.

J&J, while still newer, did not show any concerning safety signals, and was eventually pulled because it cannot be updated efficiently, and humans become tolerant to the vectors. Or, J&J caused blood clots, killed people, and was pulled/discouraged to direct people to 'safer' mRNA vaccines. I would get more viral vectors, but probably only if I was going somewhere exotic and expected an encounter with a pathogen of special interest to me. J&J platform was also a human virus and will be treated by your immune system as a virus. You, and your mammalian ancestors have naturalistically encountered viruses since the beginning. This is not a fallacy!

Novavax - this one does not rely on stable lipid nanoparticles, but involves a novel nanoparticle that helps arrange spike protein to look more like a "virus." This is important.

Covaxin - the FDA rejected this vaccine because the one's we had were so safe. This was the exact moment I sunk permenantly into my rabbit hole. The FDA and other public health stakeholders created some type of technology embargo against a traditional Covid vaccination methods. The reasons could be many, and I think are becoming deeply cultural, and I'm excited for the conversation we're about to have. Based on centuries old concepts of presenting antigens 'as they are' (insert latin term) rather than conjuring them at the ribosome in the cell, which has been of interest for less than a median human lifetime in the USA.

So in essence, rather than ask you what you think a 54% increase in Pulmonary Embolism incidence after Pfizer vaccination, I am broaching a large anti-mRNA topic, and throwing down. I have placed plenty claims that I expect to be rebutted. If I have seemed at all to sneer or to be uncharitable, I apologize, and would be happy to reword. I wanted to put forward a spirited defense of "anti-mRNA vaxxery", not denigrate anyone on the other side.

I do wonder how much the risk associated with mRNA is similar to the risks for any drug. For example ibuprofen has a list of possible side effects that when listed out look shockingly dangerous.

Haven’t don’t any research into it and honestly have no desire to, but that’s how I’ve been generally thinking about vaccine risk. Which is to say I don’t think about it at all. Cutting out booze and making sure I actually stretch after working out likely to have much larger heath impacts for me than worrying about basis points on vaccine risk.

Any procedure is a minor procedure if its not being done on you. Ibuprofen CANNOT cause you to show ECG changes and have your heart puke out troponin

https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/ibuprofen-oral-route/side-effects/drg-20070602

Pretty terrifying list.

There is no experimental research finding heart damage in cadavers after receiving ibuprofen. Only mRNA. Not terrifying to me.

There is plenty of research showing that it does increase risks for heart attacks and strokes. The fact it doesn't do that by damaging the heart is irrelevant. The unlucky person will be just as dead after all.

The relevant information is how much it increases those risks in exchange for which benefits.

The biggest evidence that mRNA was woefully understudied is the huge antibody class shift from igg1/igg3 to igg4 discovered just recently in the Pfizer max-vax cohort. This was never studied by Pfizer or the Gov, can possibly (whatever the chance) have life-threatening implications, and most importantly was not predicted by anyone except a few anti-vaxxers, notably some random autistic Indian on Twitter [1]. What’s especially funny is while this Indian dude was begging in emails to Gov to research antibody class shift, the “verified scientists” on Twitter were calling him full of shit [2].

At the least, you’d expect the manufacturer to know that such a significant change happens in the body. Not knowing this is like a food manufacturer producing shelf stable food without studying whether it grows mold.

“Even a stopped clock...”

Neat paper, though.

  • IgG4 antibodies among all spike-specific IgG antibodies rose on average from 0.04% shortly after the second vaccination to 19.27% late after the third vaccination.

  • This induction of IgG4 antibodies was not observed after homologous or heterologous SARS-CoV-2 vaccination with adenoviral vectors. [is that traditional vaccination?]

  • ...this class switch was associated with a reduced capacity of the spike-specific antibodies to mediate antibody-dependent cellular phagocytosis and complement deposition.

  • Furthermore, we observed significantly higher IgG4 levels after two doses of Comirnaty [Pfizer] mRNA vaccine compared to a heterologous immunization regimen with a primary Vaxzevria vaccination followed by one dose of Comirnaty, although the total anti-spike IgG response was comparable.

  • Once infection is established, Fc-mediated effector functions become more relevant to clear viral infections.

  • Since Fc-mediated effector function could be critical for viral clearance, an increase in IgG4 subclasses might result in longer viral persistence in case of infection.

  • However, it is also conceivable that non-inflammatory Fc-mediated effector functions reduce immunopathology while virus is still being neutralized via high-avidity antibody variable regions.

Some percentage of antibodies end up as IgG4, which may reduce effectiveness at clearing an infection once it gets established. This could be a real problem with effectiveness!

adenoviral vectors. [is that traditional vaccination?]

Depends what you mean by "traditional", but not really. I would describe viral vector vaccines as more tested than mRNA vaccines, but they still haven't made much end-use impact. What I would personally describe as a traditional vaccine would be any of:

  • Attenuated pathogens, such as the MMR vaccine.

  • Inactivated pathogens, such as the old whole-cell pertussis vaccine.

  • Antigen and adjuvant, such as the newer acellular pertussis vaccine.

Some percentage of antibodies end up as IgG4, which may reduce effectiveness at clearing an infection once it gets established.

This may also be a marker for something even weirder (maybe worse) going on - IgG4 can be associated with immune tolerance and anti-inflammatory responses. If additional boosts skew even further, this could be a real concern.

My eyes on this for sure. It makes sense that a vaccine vector that can enter the blood stream and deploy (mRNA nanolipid) is acting like an allergy shot.

I agree. We cannot pull any amazing anti-mRNA vax narratives from this, but we can agree that discovering unexpected changes in the antibody profile is of interest. My first thought was literally, excuse my levity, that this is "cringe."

What is the source for the claim that there is no increased risk of myocarditis in COVID-19 reinfections? It seems like your whole argument hinges on it but you don't provide any evidence for it.

I can't lead you further to water than this. I have evidence that there is a virus recirculating, not circulating for the first time. The same way vaccine reduces myocarditis, so will infection with natural immunity. Except the vaccine also causes myocarditis: thus our impasse.

I am happy to believe that natural immunity reduces rates of myocarditis induced by reinfection. The problem is your claim relies not merely on this fact, but also on it being of a particular magnitude. Specifically that the risk of myocarditis from reinfection is lower than the risk of myocarditis from getting the vaccine. What is the evidence for this relative magnitude in reduction?

Yes, the evidence is the nature of how effective natural immunity is compared to the vaccine induced immunity, which wanes. You will receive the protection of the vaccine, and more, if you get natural immunity, therefore your next encounter will have a reduced magnitude compared than if you had just the vaccine alone.

I feel like you're fishing for exact, quantitative data - I need you to be patient as data about our current times is collected. I'll have evidence to back up thr natural immunity claim in the future, just like we saw develop in 2020-2022. This is a developing emergency, that the vaccine has had some malfunction / additional risks of heart problems that are only being discovered recently. I wish I had the long term data of our developing vaccine emergency NOW, but that's simply not an option. I'm happy you agree with my overall hypothesis though.

I am broaching a large anti-mRNA topic, and throwing down. I have placed plenty claims that I expect to be rebutted.

It'd be a bit easier if you could summarize with some bullet points of the claims you're actually throwing down to be rebutted - it's a fairly long and meandering post.

I am having a lot of trouble with this. The pfizer vaccine is associated with an increase in Pulmonary Embolism, which is a blood clot in the lungs. There is severe disinterest in classifying these types of blood clots. I noticed that the scientific establishment went very far to profile "microclots" of the COVID-19 disease

Note that COVID has an RR of 2.2 for pulmonary embolism, the patient population for which is likely heterogeneous (vaccinated, unvaccinated, vaccinated + infection, etc). Does vaccination significantly reduce that number in such a way as to be net beneficial along this single axis? I'm not sure we could power that study, particularly now that everyone is some mess of vaccinated/infected/vaccinated + infected and we can't reliably differentiate them anymore. On the one hand, rates of PE are fairly high in hospitalized patients, who are the ones who would have most benefited from vaccines - on the other hand, the same study doesn't note much of a change in PE risk in hospitalized patients after vaccines became widely available. Moreover, the slow pace of updating the vaccines combined with decreases in COVID virulence make the calculus very difficult in whether the vaccines even provide significant benefit at this point - a point being reported on in the MSM.

Note also that the major caveat of the paper you link is that they're forced to compare to historical data, so we're effectively comparing PE rates in two historical periods - one of which saw the emergence of a major new respiratory virus causing PE! From the paper you linked:

Further, the AMI, DIC, and ITP signals were not robust when additional baseline rates were evaluated, while the PE signal might be explained by differences in rates between the pre-COVID-19 and peri-COVID-19 periods.

Also:

The statistical signals of four serious outcomes are not necessarily causal and may be due to factors potentially unrelated to vaccination. Additional analyses indicated that the potential association was less than twice the historical rates and may be associated with factors not accounted for in the near real-time surveillance methods. For example, the elderly Medicare population that received the BNT162b2 vaccine differed from other elderly COVID-19 vaccinated populations, including a preponderance of nursing home residents and populations with a higher comorbidity burden. These demographic and medical differences were not fully accounted for, since expected rates were only standardized to a subset of characteristics – age, sex, race, and nursing home residency status.

Be careful drawing facile conclusions from large correlational studies like this. And not to be a paternalistic douchebag (feel free to ignore if you know better) but you might find it helpful to skim the discussion of a paper if you aren't familiar with the field to at least get a feel for the limitations or alternative explanations of the study.

That's all I found. Can you help me with information on clotting from the Flu?

There's plenty of papers: Here's a review that will have a summary and a couple dozen primary references if you're interested. Many primary papers investigating the mechanisms as well.

except we saw autopsy results in Germany that prove there can be sudden death after vaccination from the myocarditis related arryhthmia/dysrhythmia.

What study are you referencing? The last time I looked into myocarditis it was vanishingly rare, a tiny number of deaths were attributable to it and those individuals seemed to have many other medical conditions. Usually sudden death after vaccination would be related to anaphylaxis due to an allergy to some vaccine component, whereas the myocarditis takes a few days to develop.

I understand that for your first encounter with the virus, your odds profile is completely different. If you already had Covid-19, you have natural immunity. Any further mRNA vaccination is offering a risk without a benefit, now that your immune naivety is broken.

As well say this for tetanus, flu, rabies or any of the other viruses we need boosters for. Immunity wanes particularly quickly for respiratory viruses. Note also that the Moderna booster is a half dose, so modulo some weird memory effects likely has lower rates of adverse events.

I don't think we know the risk of myocarditis after reinfection; it's almost certainly lower, but I could only find two case reports so it's difficult to draw any conclusions or calculate the relative benefit of vaccination. Moreover, tens of thousands of elderly patients die of flu every year, and I can guarantee you that they aren't immunologically naive. Natural immunity isn't a silver bullet.

We keep getting dragged down by considering every SARS-2 infection as potentially lethal, when this was really never true. I believe this has created a pervasive "magical model" of viruses where the virus touches one of your cells, and suddenly has a key to every organ in your body (please rebut me).

I'm not sure I understand your point here.

Immunity, the virus is being kept very mild, and I am highly suspicious of anyone who presents a sequalae based on unique characteristics of SARS-2, when it infects your upper respiratory tract, like the hundreds and thousands of respiratory virus strains that were ostensibly new, and passed through us dozens of times. The true nature of the human ecology and it's interaction with reparatory viruses, since the group Mammalia existed, suddenly seems like a especially dangerous aberration in our times (edit note - typo and word change for group).

It's true. It does seem like COVID is progressing towards being 'just another virus' that people get repeatedly during flu season and we've watched in real time the emergence of a new 'cold' virus. I'd argue it's the first time we've watched this happen with modern technology (HIV and seasonal flu strains being related, but distinct in my opinion). None of this precludes a hyper-pathological variant cropping up next year, but I suppose I'd bet against it.

That being said, we've been infected by influenza for at least 1,500 years and it's still a major public health concern. A truly protective vaccine would be a major coup, and investing resources in these problems is worthwhile even if lockdowns and mask mandates are not.

Am I outing myself as a desperate Mottian by being so befuddled by the seeming lack of interest in a new type of vaccine that can cause heart damage at comparable rates to a novel coronavirus infection. Imagine updated IFRs if you include the recirculating infections going around now.

The calculus for the vaccines was just much better early in the pandemic. Who cares about PE; it's vanishingly rare. Even in your study of nursing home patients only 10,000 out of 25,000,000 had a PE, an with a fatality rate of 5% (probably needs to be adjusted upwards for the elderly population) that's 500 deaths, with maybe 100-200 of those attributable to vaccination (see caveats above). Now do the math for deaths in that population if they had all been unvaccinated and exposed to COVID.

mRNA seems to be the problem. Check the wikipedia article for "solid lipid nanoparticle." Kind of short. A few years of science (okay, I know the line was "decades," which is not impressive compared to centuries of other vaccines). mRNA spreads throughout your body via your blood stream, and this is a technology flaw in the mRNA platform.

How do you think conventional vaccines make it to your lymph nodes? Both mRNA and conventional vaccines transit from the site of vaccination to your lymphoid organs via blood/lymph.

The centuries of science around conventional vaccines in the ages before we knew what B/T cells were probably don't count for much, and I doubt the live cowpox vaccines that you'd prefer had fantastic safety profiles. The fact that you need tens of millions of doses of vaccine to maybe tease out a signal of a potential side effect is, by and large, a very good safety profile.

J&J, while still newer, did not show any concerning safety signals, and was eventually pulled because it cannot be updated efficiently, and humans become tolerant to the vectors. Or, J&J caused blood clots, killed people, and was pulled/discouraged to direct people to 'safer' mRNA vaccines. I would get more viral vectors, but probably only if I was going somewhere exotic and expected an encounter with a pathogen of special interest to me. J&J platform was also a human virus and will be treated by your immune system as a virus. You, and your mammalian ancestors have naturalistically encountered viruses since the beginning. This is not a fallacy!

It was pulled because both the safety profile and efficacy were worse. And of course it's a fallacy, on par with people have always dumped raw sewage in the Thames and cholera is just a fact of life. There's strong data that the mRNA-vaccines are safer and better than J&J or other non-mRNA vaccines developed abroad, unless you put a huge premium on living 'naturally.'

I'm out of characters, but note that antigens are also 'conjured' at the ribosome with your viral vectors.

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Yes. Let's begin. I apologize for my lack of formatting, you're right, it was meandering.

Be careful drawing facile conclusions from large correlational studies like this. And not to be a paternalistic douchebag (feel free to ignore if you know better) but you might find it helpful to skim the discussion of a paper if you aren't familiar with the field to at least get a feel for the limitations or alternative explanations of the study.

Yes, there is a complete heterogeneity of the population at this point. I understand the point, and I appreciate you walking through more of the PE risk benefit. I am relatively familiar but didn't enter the weeds. I agree this is a correlational study. I am aware of the authors explanations and limitation.

They are forced to use historical data.

They are forced to use the worst possible CFRs when we had the least tests available and the fewest eyes on the spread, compared to a disinterested, uninformed group of clinicians who would have been responsible or detecting vaccine side effects. We need pathophysiological studies and autopsies - once again extreme lack of interest in autopsy for vaccine recipients. The data is muddled, so we need firm exploration into underlying mechanisms and gaps in our understanding of mRNA vaccines.

Let's look at other studies that show problems with mRNA. I can't link them to PE myself, you need to take your pathophysiology knowledge with you into this exploration.

There is a suspicious group of studies that cast extreme doubt on the basic functioning of the mRNA vaccine as an antigen producing unit that remains in the deltoid.

Usually sudden death after vaccination would be related to anaphylaxis due to an allergy to some vaccine component, whereas the myocarditis takes a few days to develop.

First, in my healthcare facility, Anaphylaxis was less than double the increase from traditional vaccines. I would say mRNA performed very well in the realm of anaphylaxis (remember, allergic reaction 2 body systems and life threatening). I have suspicion that mRNA is responsible for allergic generation issues (e.g. anecdotal bilateral hives after vaccination) but I have no evidence. I just know that mRNA spreads its antigen creating goodness throughout the body, at a frightenly common rate. If you see sudden death as a possibility of anaphylaxis, you may be mistaken in some ways.

I am surprised you are unfamiliar with https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36436002/, Autopsy-based histopathological characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination.

Note lymphocytic infiltration of cardiac myocytes (I won't even continue on with the arrhythmogenic implications of this permeant heart damage, a.k.a. died suddenly). Yes, vaccines are supposed to enter your lymph and lymph node, but your lipid nanoparticle has different pharmacokinetics, and seems to pass the lymph nodes and enter your blood stream, whereas my J&J virus does not. This is a huge win for me, over your choice of vaccine. Let's see - deltoid goes to lymph vessel, lymph vessels carry mRNA to lymph node, some of the trillions of mRNA baubles awash past the lymph nodes and get dumped into venous circulation (right before entering the Right Atrium of the heart). This is all done before even getting a pass at the liver.

Yes, I think a bad football tackle can exacerbate the exact underlying pathology that was discovered in the German Pathology Autopsy reports. Entirely plausible.

J&J has a form of tropism to enter cells, wheras mRNA is enclosed in a non-tropic lipid droplet that can fuse with the phospholipid bilayer of much more than just a muscle cell. Lymph vessels are a one way valve that do not require deposition of mRNA payload to enter lymph circulation (then subsequence blood stream circulation.

Did you know the lymph is responsible for distributing dietary lipids to your blood stream? Are you concerned that you took a novel lipid and entered it into the system that transports macronutrients? The early applications of lipid nanoparticles were as oral form blood pressure medication. Why? The lipid nanoparticle is great as distributed systemic effectors. Your vaccine distributed mRNA as if it was a beta blocker.

The mRNA vaccine is found in breast milk: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2796427. mRNA enters the blood stream at a rate higher than other vaccines.

Spike protein is in blood stream of myocarditis patients. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36597886/

I don't think spike protein is the issue, but the signal that the antigen is in the blood stream. What exact tissue was the antigen created? Probably not exclusively in the deltoid myocytes.

There's plenty of papers: Here's a review that will have a summary and a couple dozen primary references if you're interested. Many primary papers investigating the mechanisms as well.

Thank you. Looks like the etiology of blood clots from Covid related PE would be different from an mRNA related PE, so we need to be especially suspicious of the signal that the mRNA vaccines could cause a PE. Especially since historical data has to be used due to lack of long term safety monitoring before mass vaccination. If severe flu can cause PE, I'm extremely unmoved by severe covid causing PE. Viral pneumonia sucks and too bad antibodies can't hover inside of your parenchyma and actually generate a sterilizing immunity.

Since I will not be getting Covid Viral Pneumonia, I am very interested in the chance that this "routine medical procedure" can cause PE.

The last time I looked into myocarditis it was vanishingly rare, a tiny number of deaths were attributable to it and those individuals seemed to have many other medical conditions.

the authors report zero deaths associated with vaccine-induced myocarditis

This is a horrible sign for your data, since I've seen the slides of lymphocyte aggregation in the deltoid of a cadaver, as well as in the heart of a cadaver after vaccination. What do you think of this discrepancy? This is an 11 month old reddit post, the autopsies were not completed then. I think it makes your data look unusable. As a counter to the redditor - maybe this is CIA propaganda to make the vaccine seem safe, to counter Russians propaganda to make you think the vaccine can kill you (which the Germans actually proved was true). This was all in the reddit post you linked to - not an unrelated sneer.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13947

Yeah admitted self own, this is the Prasad paper, which paints a stratified risk that is not vanishingly rare. I'm not pushing this more than my above point.

As well say this for tetanus, flu, rabies or any of the other viruses we need boosters for. Immunity wanes particularly quickly for respiratory viruses. Note also that the Moderna booster is a half dose, so modulo some weird memory effects likely has lower rates of adverse events.

Come on. None of those vaccines involve mRNA lipid nanoparticles. Getting boosted with mRNA to seek antibody titers is aboslutely not the same thing as getting a tetanus booster in 10 years.

I mean this is a very very polite way - how did you find your way to the Motte? You started strong, but these are common misdirections on the exact argument - mRNA is a special novel biotechnology, stop mentioning vaccines that the market overwhelmingly accepted, and has centuries of application in the exact antigen deliver method (protein adjuvant). Have you ever mix and matched a measles vaccines in a year? Even when no data existed on it? Pfizer admitted you should not mix and match Comirnaty because of lack of data, you can only mix and match the EUA product. Which is...something...

I don't think we know the risk of myocarditis after reinfection; it's almost certainly lower, but I could only find two case reports so it's difficult to draw any conclusions or calculate the relative benefit of vaccination. Moreover, tens of thousands of elderly patients die of flu every year, and I can guarantee you that they aren't immunologically naive. Natural immunity isn't a silver bullet.

Okay, you agree with me, its certainty lower. Yes, I think it would be nice to distribute vaccines to elderly patients who are vulnerable. Is this why the FDA is vaccinating pediatrics? This is just a vacuous talking point. You just called Covid a flu. Why would you get the experimental nanoparticle for "just a flu bro."

I'm not sure I understand your point here.

It was not really for you. You seem to get it.

That being said, we've been infected by influenza for at least 1,500 years and it's still a major public health concern. A truly protective vaccine would be a major coup, and investing resources in these problems is worthwhile even if lockdowns and mask mandates are not.

Yes, more evidence that the entry of a novel, circulating respiratory pathogen into the population that targets elderly and vulnerable is entirely normal, see the Russian Flu in the 1800s. What's not normal, is becoming a fanatic for biotechnology.

The calculus for the vaccines was just much better early in the pandemic.

The calculus was "seek herd immunity." This involved minimizing the collapsed efficacy of the vaccine mid-distribution. Once again, you love comparing every known vaccine dose to every known covid case, when we absolutely know there is more infection than can be reported into the data. Then "severe disease and death."

My calculus is: the vaccine leaks into your bloodstream, and seeking protection from severe disease and death from one respiratory pathogen with a vaccine that leaks into your bloodstream is not advisable.

We need pathophysiological studies and autopsies - once again extreme lack of interest in autopsy for vaccine recipients.

What study are you proposing? In any given day, some number of vaccinated and unvaccinated people will contract a pulmonary embolism or myocarditis. If you open them up, odds are they'll look pretty similar. You're better off with population-level studies, which have been done and the answer is a few cases of myocarditis per million vaccine doses. Also skewed towards younger men, which again, affects the calculus for whether the vaccine provides any net benefit to certain demographics.

There is a suspicious group of studies that cast extreme doubt on the basic functioning of the mRNA vaccine as an antigen producing unit that remains in the deltoid.

Okay; can you link the studies? I'm not really able to parse your sentence. Antigen-producing unit isn't a standard term, and it's not clear to me how that would support an argument casting extreme doubt on the extreme functioning of an mRNA vaccine.

I have suspicion that mRNA is responsible for allergic generation issues (e.g. anecdotal bilateral hives after vaccination) but I have no evidence.

There have been some reports of adverse events in the skin as well, just less well reported on than the myocarditis.

I just know that mRNA spreads its antigen creating goodness throughout the body, at a frightenly common rate.

Can you provide citations for your claims? I'm not familiar with human data (if it exists), but in animal models the concentration is many orders of magnitude higher at the injection site and proximal lymph nodes. Very little makes it to distal tissues aside from the liver and spleen.

I am surprised you are unfamiliar with https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36436002/, Autopsy-based histopathological characterization of myocarditis after anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination.

I confess, I don't read every new issue of Clinical Research in Cardiology: official journal of the German Cardiac Society. I laud your scholarship, though. From the paper though:

Our study is limited by the relatively small cohort size and inherits the bias of an endpoint analysis. The nature of our autopsy study necessitates that the data are descriptive in quality and does not allow any epidemiological conclusions in terms of incidence or risk estimation.

Essentially, the baseline rate of myocarditis is 1-10/100,000 people per year. Germany administered 180,000,000 vaccines. Some fraction of people are going to die for unrelated reasons shortly after getting the vaccine, and some of them will have myocarditis. I'm also confused why their infectious PCR screening panel didn't include COVID; it's always possible some of the patients were infected prior to their vaccination.

All that said, it could be true. I personally can't think of anything to definitively refute it, but it's also not particularly compelling evidence by itself.

Yes, vaccines are supposed to enter your lymph and lymph node, but your lipid nanoparticle has different pharmacokinetics, and seems to pass the lymph nodes and enter your blood stream, whereas my J&J virus does not. This is a huge win for me, over your choice of vaccine. Let's see - deltoid goes to lymph vessel, lymph vessels carry mRNA to lymph node, some of the trillions of mRNA baubles awash past the lymph nodes and get dumped into venous circulation (right before entering the Right Atrium of the heart).

What data are you referencing?

The mRNA vaccine is found in breast milk: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2796427. mRNA enters the blood stream at a rate higher than other vaccines.

It's present in minute quantities barely above the limit of detection; several pg/ml. And it's not detectable after 48 hours. Or was your point just that some small amount of the mRNA vaccine can make it to the milk?

Spike protein is in blood stream of myocarditis patients. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36597886/

That's interesting.

This is a horrible sign for your data, since I've seen the slides of lymphocyte aggregation in the deltoid of a cadaver, as well as in the heart of a cadaver after vaccination. What do you think of this discrepancy?

See above. When you vaccinate huge numbers of people, some fraction of them will die terribly in the next few days and look bad at autopsy. You need to look at population level analyses.

This is an 11 month old reddit post, the autopsies were not completed then. I think it makes your data look unusable. As a counter to the redditor - maybe this is CIA propaganda to make the vaccine seem safe, to counter Russians propaganda to make you think the vaccine can kill you (which the Germans actually proved was true). This was all in the reddit post you linked to - not an unrelated sneer.

The, uh, redditor is me. The usernames are the same.

Come on. None of those vaccines involve mRNA lipid nanoparticles. Getting boosted with mRNA to seek antibody titers is aboslutely not the same thing as getting a tetanus booster in 10 years.

You argued that boosters were risk without benefit once your 'immune naivete was broken.' This isn't true for COVID as the immunity wanes relatively quickly, and in analogous situations (tetanus, flu etc) where the immunity wanes we give boosters. It's not a comment on the relative safety profiles of the vaccines, or whether an annual mRNA booster is safer than an annual flu booster.

I mean this is a very very polite way - how did you find your way to the Motte?

My school has a big brother program for struggling students. My math tutor linked me to some blogs, but they were boring and I didn't understand a lot of what they were talking about. I like the Motte because the posts are (usually) shorter and easier to understand.

Yes, more evidence that the entry of a novel, circulating respiratory pathogen into the population that targets elderly and vulnerable is entirely normal, see the Russian Flu in the 1800s. What's not normal, is becoming a fanatic for biotechnology.

It killed a million people, and Spanish flu killed tens of millions. If that's our alternative, call me abnormal and sign me up for biotech.

Thinking now of the 2060 version of us looking at the first generation lipid nanoparticle mRNA that people took. Talk about prototype!

Well, of course. The same way we moved from random cowpox pus to live attenuated viruses to subunit vaccines to LNPs. There's problems with LNPs that, amusingly, you don't even reference here that people are working on solving. Absent singularity, 2060 will probably see us having progressed through another 2-3 generations of delivery vehicles.

The efficacy collapsed just like the mRNA vaccines, this is why you're on dose number 5, and defending data from dose number 3. You have introduced an entirely new set of dynamics to your immune system, one that those who receive conventional vaccines will not be exposed to. You have RNA transfective particles leaking into your blood stream, while I do not. Guess the fallacy does much better with actually winnable man made advancements in public health.

You're projecting your own partisanship onto me, my friend. You're acting like we're engaging in some antagonistic dick-measuring contest to see who can win an argument, you're upset, you feel the need to insinuate that I'm stupid or misrepresent my arguments to imply that I'm agreeing with you or just being ridiculous.

I can lay some cards on the table: my position is that the first two doses were warranted, somewhere around dose 3 the calculus definitely shifted for the young and healthy, and at this point I'm unsure of the benefit for anybody and skeptical of anyone claiming otherwise in either direction. The vaccines worked well initially, but the immunity waned rapidly, we didn't update them quickly enough to maintain efficacy and new COVID strains are less virulent all of which shifts the calculus. The safety profiles for mRNA vaccines seem overall quite strong but potentially contraindicated for some demographics - it's not clear to me whether the myocarditis, for example, is related to molecular mimicry with the spike protein or inherent to any LNP vaccine. I'm open to having my mind changed if someone shares reliable data. Based on this conversation, I'm skeptical that you are, though.

Thanks for the conversation, but I'm probably done after this. If you choose to do so, I'll read your reply, but I've got some other things to get back to.

Thanks. I read all your comments.

You are detecting partisanship, as well as someone who was mandated. This is a huge deal for me. I cannot thank you enough for engaging me, it's extremely difficult to find people to debunk my own thought etc. I think you make a lot of good points and it will help me moderate as I look forward to further evidence.

I think some developments are going to vindicate me in the future, and a lot of your objections are well placed to defuse my ability to make claims at this current time. Until then, I unfortunately am bubbling with some vitriol.

Opinions I cannot prove to you the way you'd like:

Covid is safer than they can possible report.

The vaccine is more dangerous than they can ever possibly report.

Maybe take a gander:

This study finds a 1 in 100,000 death rate for the vaccine.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35653-z

Thought it was interesting, if you have not yet seen. Thanks again and have a good one.

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How do you think conventional vaccines make it to your lymph nodes? Both mRNA and conventional vaccines transit from the site of vaccination to your lymphoid organs via blood/lymph.

Again, lymph vessels are more like one way valves. Yes, mRNA "pre-vaccine," and conventional "already-completed and molecularly confirmed" vaccine, are moved into your blood stream. Why are you bragging that unconverted genetic material gets a lift in the blood stream? That is aboslutley not the goal here. Lymphatic absorption is what we're dealing with.

The centuries of science around conventional vaccines in the ages before we knew what B/T cells were probably don't count for much, and I doubt the live cowpox vaccines that you'd prefer had fantastic safety profiles.

Extremely anachronistic view of medical science. Dodges the gap in genomics that these vaccines depend on. Thinking now of the 2060 version of us looking at the first generation lipid nanoparticle mRNA that people took. Talk about prototype!

It was pulled because both the safety profile and efficacy were worse. And of course it's a fallacy, on par with people have always dumped raw sewage in the Thames and cholera is just a fact of life. There's strong data that the mRNA-vaccines are safer and better than J&J or other non-mRNA vaccines developed abroad, unless you put a huge premium on living 'naturally.'

The efficacy collapsed just like the mRNA vaccines, this is why you're on dose number 5, and defending data from dose number 3. You have introduced an entirely new set of dynamics to your immune system, one that those who receive conventional vaccines will not be exposed to. You have RNA transfective particles leaking into your blood stream, while I do not. Guess the fallacy does much better with actually winnable man made advancements in public health.

I'm out of characters, but note that antigens are also 'conjured' at the ribosome with your viral vectors, and the other vaccines you refere

My final statement: mRNA leaks into blood stream, J&J does not. This is a problem beyond the normal vein of risk-benefit analysis. This is malfunction analysis.

You cite the unadjusted PE RR of 1.54, but after they adjust for the fact that patients receiving the Pfizer vaccine were older and more likely to be in nursing homes than the controls, the RR fell to 1.15. Given the small RR, the fact that they made many comparisons, and the fact that no such increase was observed for the Moderna vaccine, with a similar mechanism of action and higher dose, this is very likely to be either spurious, or possibly related to a Pfizer-specific adjuvant rather than to the mRNA LNPs.

Also, that autopsy paper you're tricking out all over the thread is not the smoking gun you think it is. It's been known and widely acknowledged that the mRNA vaccines are associated with myocarditis and pericarditis mostly in young males at a rate of about 5 per 100k, compared to 150 per 100k in infected patients. If you live in a country with a high chance of infection, such as the US, vaccination greatly reduces risk even when ignoring all the other sequelae of COVID-19 infection and considering only myocarditis risk.

There's been a group of people who clearly have a deep ideological and emotional investment in mRNA vaccines being far more harmful than COVID-19, and who have demonstrated a tendency to grossly misinterpret various data, anecdotes, or urban legends in order to provide support for that claim. After chasing down numerous such claims and finding that they don't hold up, I usually just don't bother. When I do, it's more in the spirit of, "How specifically did was this nonsense rationalized?" rather than out of wanting to see whether it's true. Anti-vaxxers just have no credibility left.

There's been a group of people who clearly have a deep ideological and emotional investment in mRNA vaccines being far more harmful than COVID-19, and who have demonstrated a tendency to grossly misinterpret various data, anecdotes, or urban legends in order to provide support for that claim.

To me that seems the opposite of what's happening. It's not the anti-mRNA-vaxxers who were arguing for, and implementing various measures to discriminate the vaxxed, and using grossly misinterpreted data, anecdotes, or urban legends to do it.

At best, I guess, you could argue both sides are doing it, but the asymmetry in actually implemented policies seems to point to an asymmetry in who is more emotionally invested.

Everyone in the myocarditis study was not a young male. It just proves, that sudden death after vaccination can be downstream from the very "well understood" and "mild" myocarditis that the vaccine is associated with.

You are tricking out old Covid morbidity statistics against your best possible analysis of mRNA. For the right age group, you could see a 1 in 2,000 risk of heart damage.

Anyone who's heart stops after vaccination, could have died from the vaccine. The vaccinators did not study the vaccine long enough to even know this until part-way through the campaign, when it became "a known issue that doesn't hold up."

A lot of people had investment in mRNA stopping transmission, and that was why this rare side effect of "some heart damage to young people" was being hand waved. During the "we are getting herd immunity phase," It seemed like you would accept any risk to young patients to stop community spread. That's concept has collapsed, and you're trying to say that the vaccine is only somewhat as deadly as the disease you are actually trying to vaccinate against!

5 per 100k, 150 in 100k. Think of ALL the unreported covid cases that were mild or asymptomatic. You are showing me the best possible rate of myocarditis, and it holds up next to a disease. That's not great vaccine, even if you think an 85 year old in 2020 should have obviously received it (and then it wore off by mid 2021).

Two articles are popping today that I believe are related. Both are reasons for censorship or reasons the left has used to justify censorship.

  • Dr. Gottlieb cited his “safety” as a reason to censor doctors criticizing COVID vaccines. Here are his tweets showing “violence” against himself.

https://twitter.com/scottgottliebmd/status/1612548694762745856?s=46&t=0qCqhJLXqMO-wn5FoPsWKg

The best he has is some anonymous account saying “execute this bastard”. Obviously with anonymous accounts anyone can just randomly vent and say something mean. It could even be Scott Gottlieb saying this about himself so that he can then asks for censorship of others in the name of “violence”.

Obviously people shouldn’t be threatened but a random message board comment I don’t think rises to the occasion of a real threat - though I’d agree those accounts should be suspended banned that make violent threats. They shouldn’t be used to censor non violent debates.

And the rest of the tweets he cited are not threats but calling him a murder and bastard. Being that he’s citing tweets that are not calls to violence does that means he total received only one anonymous threat to justify censorship of dissenting scientist?

  • Turns out NYU did a study and found that Russian trolls were barely seen by anyone on Twitter. And the trolls mostly interacted with people that were extremely highly likely to vote GOP and in the end there’s no statistical argument that Russian troll bots led to any changed votes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/09/russian-trolls-twitter-had-little-influence-2016-voters/

Another claim for censorship especially in 2020 and especially for the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian troll/bots interferes with the 2016 election and now we need to censor people. NYPost/Zerohedge got censored on these justifications.

At first I thought these were both solid culture war stories to post about but didn’t feel like doing two posts. Then I realized their connected and both are weak reasons that have been used for significant censorship and deplatforming.

Of course the more such overreactions are taken as valid, the more people who might provoke such reactions are driven underground, creating a feedback loop of anti-social provocations and witch-like associations.

I think the link to the first article is missing.

This is nothing new. Virtually all censorship, and indeed virtually all limits on civil liberties, are premised on the claim, usually false or overblown, that it is necessary to prevent harm. That is true on the right as well as the left, and everywhere, not just the US.

And the proper response is not to argue that the threat is not real, but rather, the response is, so what? See, eg, this colloquy at oral arguments re a state law requiring that all arrestees give DNA samples:

Katherine Winfree: Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court: Since 2009, when Maryland began to collect DNA samples from arrestees charged with violent crimes and burglary, there had been 225 matches, 75 prosecutions and 42 convictions, including that of Respondent King.

Justice Antonin Scalia: Well, that's really good. I'll bet you if you conducted a lot of unreasonable searches and seizures, you'd get more convictions, too. [Laughter] That proves absolutely nothing.

Do you know of a site/blog that just collects Supreme Court clapbacks? I’m interested mostly as popcorn entertainment...but also as a reminder that we’re theoretically appointing some of the smartest, most experienced legal professionals in the country.

Anyway, to play devil’s advocate—that’s the correct response for our government. Not so for a private individual. Twitter as a medium is somewhere in between, and I don’t believe broadcasting death threats or even epithets are deserving of that maximum level of protection.

I don't know what you mean, exactly, by clapbacks. There are certainly plenty of blogs which analyze Supreme Court decisions.

Snark, ideally highlighting something the appellants should have known. I’ve seen good ones coming from Scalia and others, though I’m struggling to find them again.

There is some prof who used to rate the funniest justices, based on number of laughs. But I don't know whether he or she posts the actual content of the comments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattel,_Inc._v._MCA_Records,_Inc. is always a fun read.

Bradshaw v. Unity Marine Corp., Inc., 147 F. Supp. 2d 668 - Dist. Court, SD Texas 2001 is a treat in the sense that you can still see the ring marks where the judge backhanded the attorneys:

Before proceeding further, the Court notes that this case involves two extremely likable lawyers, who have together delivered some of the most amateurish pleadings ever to cross the hallowed causeway into Galveston, an effort which leads the Court to surmise but one plausible explanation. Both attorneys have obviously entered into a secret pact—complete with hats, handshakes and cryptic words—to draft their pleadings entirely in crayon on the back sides of gravy-stained paper place mats, in the hope that the Court would be so charmed by their child-like efforts that their utter dearth of legal authorities in their briefing would go unnoticed. Whatever actually occurred, the Court is now faced with the daunting task of deciphering their submissions. With Big Chief tablet readied, thick black pencil in hand, and a devil-may-care laugh in the face of death, life on the razor's edge sense of exhilaration, the Court begins.

And there is this Alex Kozinski classic:

After Mattel filed suit, Mattel and MCA employees traded barbs in the press. When an MCA spokeswoman noted that each album included a disclaimer saying that Barbie Girl was a "social commentary [that was] not created or approved by the makers of the doll," a Mattel representative responded by saying, "That's unacceptable.... It's akin to a bank robber handing a note of apology to a teller during a heist. [It n]either diminishes the severity of the crime, nor does it make it legal." He later characterized the song as a "theft" of "another company's property."

MCA filed a counterclaim for defamation based on the Mattel representative's use of the words "bank robber," "heist," "crime" and "theft." But all of these are variants of the invective most often hurled at accused infringers, namely "piracy." No one hearing this accusation understands intellectual property owners to be saying that infringers are nautical cutthroats with eyepatches and peg legs who board galleons to plunder cargo. In context, all these terms are nonactionable "rhetorical hyperbole," Gilbrook v. City of Westminster, 177 F.3d 839, 863 (9th Cir.1999). The parties are advised to chill.

Mattel, Inc. v. MCA Records, Inc., 296 F. 3d 894 (9th Cir 2002)

Not Supreme Court, and tending towards the silly, but Above the Law is always good for this kind of thing.

Benchslap archive

Normally, Lowering the Bar is better, but they don't have a specific archive page for the sort of thing you are looking for. I recommend a close read of the Caselaw Hall of Fame for some absolutely metal trial court clapbacks.

Obviously people shouldn’t be threatened but a random message board comment I don’t think rises to the occasion of a real threat - though I’d agree those accounts should be suspended banned that make violent threats. They shouldn’t be used to censor non violent debates

There's an argument here that one should default to taking death threats 'seriously' since if even one person acts on them the consequences can be severe. I have an acquaintance who was very publicly threatened with the murder of himself and his wife, and then, some time later, the person in question did in fact go on to kill multiple (other) people.

So even if the ratio of death threats:actual murder attempts is 1,000,000:1 (I'd guess that's correct to within an order of magnitude) one should still treat a death threat as relatively serious if there's any reason to believe it might be backed up.

The problem is taking this and using it to justify [policy] that you wanted already, even when the effects of [policy] have implications FAR beyond death threats and may, in fact, be very tenuously related to the problem of death threats.

Nobody should be faced with death threats in response to mere speech (speech that isn't itself calling for violence, I'd say), especially in an online context, but it's part of the background radiation of the public internet in much the way that grizzly bears are part of the background radiation of backwoods camping. Public-facing accounts will get these from time to time, and I can't think of any reason this justifies a massive censorship regime, especially in open forums where said public accounts willingly participate.

Especially when there's nuance in exactly what is and isn't a serious 'death threat,' and one can make 'veiled' threats as opaque and ambiguous as they like with artful wording.

I think people should be allowed to insult, degrade, and even 'wish ill' upon someone in a public forum. "I hope you lose your job and experience what it is like to be poor for a while" is probably a valid response if the speaker believes the the target is bad at their job, especially in a way that makes life worse for others, and/or that they're out of touch with the experience of poverty and this colors their view of the world.

A particularly sensitive person could still construe the above as a sort of threat. A really sensitive person would construe any person expressing negative opinions about them as a sign the person dislikes them and wishes them harm. A paranoid person can read possible threats in almost any communication towards them.

I think it is fine to tell the sensitive and paranoid people that they should probably minimize their public online presence, particularly in open forums if they are consistently feeling threatened. I don't think we should build our rules for the discourse around sensitive people's comfort levels.

I don't at present have any bright-line rule that would make sense for enforcing the difference between wishing misfortune on someone vs. articulating the intent to inflict pain on them.

So even if the ratio of death threats:actual murder attempts is 1,000,000:1 (I'd guess that's correct to within an order of magnitude) one should still treat a death threat as relatively serious if there's any reason to believe it might be backed up.

Well, Google's blurb on the relevant search suggests that the ratio of living on Earth for a year to successful murders (not attempts) is somewhere around 100,000:1. Do we know if receiving a death threat actually is even positively correlated with a chance of being murdered (by the threatening person, or anyone at all)? I would not be very surprised if it turned out that, conditioned on A and B being acquaintances who spoke at least once, a death threat from A to B were actually negatively correlated with A going on to murder B, and I would be not surprised at all if it were conditioned on A and B being acquaintances and B believing that A has a grudge towards B - dogs who bark don't bite, and all that. But then, shouldn't I feel more threatened if someone who I had a serious falling-out with did not send me a death threat? Should that person be punished for failing to send me a death threat, thus depriving me of the relative feeling of safety that they have vented their negative sentiment in words and are not making any concrete plans that they wouldn't want to jeopardize by warning me?

Yeah you're hitting on the point: the people calling for censorship want the feeling of safety, or generally to avoid the negative emotions when someone expresses strong negative opinions about you. They're probably not honestly concerned that they'll actually be murdered, since that would exhibit itself through a different set of behaviors.

the people calling for censorship want the feeling of safety

If our technology is creating a widespread problem where people are no longer able to emotionally differentiate between serious and frivolous threats, that seems like a problem, no?

The problem is with the people, not the technology. Not just the people getting the threats, but the people rewarding those people for overreacting.

It's also not particularly widespread; plenty of people still get (non-credible) death threats and shrug them off. But it doesn't take many to become a problem when there is a taboo on laughing at them and telling them to HTFU.

I don't know whether it's something that is caused by tech or merely exacerbated by the tech.

I suspect a lot of these folks couldn't emotionally differentiate between threats and insults and, say, criticism or jokes in any case.

Tendency to parse innocuous statements as threats is, it turns out, a symptom of an anxiety disorder.

INCIDENTALLY, anxiety disorders are on the rise too, and tech seems to be playing a part in that.

Maybe this is what you were getting at and we're describing the same thing?

The synthesis here is that people are more anxious than before and thus more likely to perceive danger/threats where there is actually minimal risk, and tech plays a role in both increasing people's anxieties AND in exposing them to potentially threatening stimuli.

And I would ask the question of whether this is something that is better 'fixed' at the technology level (I suppose censorship is one option here) or on the human level (getting people off of public forums if it is causing an adverse reaction).

At any rate, I certainly agree that there is a problem, I don't know if focusing on internet death threats leads to a good solution.

I think a lot of it is done in bad faith. No doubt there are people who are legitimately anxious, but there’s also political actors/journalists that know they can shut down opposition by calling opposition as violence or overplaying some vague anonymous threats to shut down legitimate non threatening opposition. (As gottlieb did in my opinion).

The doctor being upset about anonymous low-credibility twitter threats is just a modern manifestation of the classic 'high-status individual makes the mistake of venturing outside their high-status bubble & gets roundly jeered by the crowd'.

Demanding that the rabble be taught a lesson or silenced is likewise the traditional response.

I agree with your premise, insofar as you're arguing that Twitter engaged in censorship for political purposes that can't be justified by normal standards of rationality. What I don't understand is why I should care. Businesses make decisions all the time, both political and otherwise, that I find disagreeable, but only rarely do they rise to the level that some sort of public call to action seems warranted. And what action is warranted vis a vis Twitter? The people who put these policies into place no longer run the company. Some would argue that government intervention is warranted, but it seems unusual that those (such as yourself, presumably) who are coming at this from a more conservative position would really find this to be the ideal solution, especially considering that a large component of this scandal is that there was already too much government influence of Twitter's content policies.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=nSXIetP5iak

It's not going to happen, you're crazy.

It's not happening

It's not happening quite like that

It's happening like that but there's nothing wrong with it

It's happening and maybe there's something wrong with it but there's nothing you can do about it

It happened and maybe there was something you could have done but it's too late now, why should I care? Why are you still dwelling on this? You're crazy.

Why you should care?

Discourse and free speech isn’t some constititional right. It’s also that of course. It’s a bedrock principal of Democratic Society that people can debate issues and try to come to optimal solutions.

When high ranking former government officials (like Scott but many current officials use these arguments) attempt to silence critics thru these arguments then the speech and debate environment necessary for a successful society is degraded. You should care because it’s necessary to condemn this behavior to improve dialogue.

Twitter is our town hall. It’s where engagement happens, when they block one set of ideas those ideas become less popular. Their proponents less electable. Those policies less likely to happen. And a US company should especially as powerful as twitter we would hope shares the greatest ideals of our country.

In short you should care because you care about good governance and the advancement of the human race.

Twitter is basically the public square and plays a huge role(probably the hugest role) in deciding what will and won’t be newsworthy. Their censorship policies affect us all for that reason.

I feel like one crucial distinction between Twitter and the "public square" is that Twitter is not "public" (as in owned by the public or government or similar entity).

Yet the concept of "public accommodations", with all the associated civil-rights protections, applies even to entities not "owned by the public or government or similar entity".

I am not sure "public square" is intended to be a statutory or legal term when used this way, like "public accomodation" is.

That is, when its things that are considered important, like not discriminating against minorities, "public" includes "privately owned but open to the public, or even to some small segment of the public". But when its things that are not considered important, like political speech by one's opponents, "public" includes only things owned and operated by the government and not even all of them.

More like "when a term is defined in a statute it has the meaning that is defined in the statute for the purposes of the statute and when a term is more a term of art it has its meaning as a term of art." If you think the word "public" always means the same thing in every context I think you need to understand language better.

The relevant term of art here would be "public forum".

The public square being privately owned isn’t a contradiction.

I kind of feel like there is? Or at least there seems like a tension between the private property rights of the owners of the square and the presumed public right of access.

I just mean it can both. I don’t mean that it doesn’t add complexities though like utilities etc we’ve had no problem designing ownership structures that work.

Common carrier has been an idea for a long time. That didn’t change the common carrier into not private property.

I feel like one crucial distinction between Twitter and the "public square" is that Twitter is not "public"

IMO if this is the case, then Twitter needs to stop advertising themselves as a public square. Some choice quotes: "We serve the public conversation. That’s why it matters to us that people have a free and safe space to talk."

If you advertise a forum for, say, model trains, and then heavily moderate it to stay on-topic, I think that's reasonable, but if you intentionally advertise yourself as a "public conversation" you should face some limits. Admittedly, that's not most well-defined distinction, but I think it's important. "[Service] is a like-minded partisan circlejerk" (EDIT: which TBF, Twitter isn't exclusively) is acceptable, but be honest about it.

FWIW, the Supreme Court seems to think that, functionally, it is indeed the public square:

Social media allows users to gain access to information and communicate with one another about it on any subject that might come to mind. Supra, at 1735 -1736. By prohibiting sex offenders from using those websites, North Carolina with one broad stroke bars access to what for many are the principal sources for knowing current events, checking ads for employment, speaking and listening in the modern public square, and otherwise exploring the vast realms of human thought and knowledge. These websites can provide perhaps the most powerful mechanisms available to a private citizen to make his or her voice heard. They allow a person with an Internet connection to "become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox." Reno, 521 U.S., at 870, 117 S.Ct. 2329.

Packingham v. North Carolina, 137 S. Ct. 1730, 1737 (2017).

Note also that there is at least an argument that social media companies are state actors because of that functional equivalence, Robins v. Pruneyard Shopping Center, 23 Cal.3d 899 (1979) [Private shopping center cannot bar signature gathers because shopping centers are the modern equivalent of central business districts]. That is not to say that the argument would be a winning one, but @hydroacetylene's argument has a strong pedigree.

Edit: By "That is not to say that the argument would be a winning one," I mean that the argument is not likely to be successful nowadays. My point simply is that OP's argument is not per se illegitimate. It is consistent with past cases, even though it would be an extension thereof, and one not likely to be adopted.

I feel like "the government can ban you from accessing a website" and "website operators are obliged to let you access their site" are quite different legal questions. When I hear discussions about Twitter being a public square it seems much more in the vein of objecting to being banned from Twitter by Twitter, rather than the government.

Also not clear to me what traditional governmental function Twitter is providing that would be analogous for Pruneyard.

Well, I did explicitly note that the argument might not be a winning one -- Pruneyard was 40 years ago, even then the US Supreme Court had rejected that argument under the US Constitution (Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner, 407 US 551 (1972); Pruneyard was decided under the CA Constitution's free speech clause, not the First Amendment). As for what function is analogous, I thought it was clear that it is the "public square" function.

The relevant critique is being banned from Twitter by Twitter at the request of the government and whether or not someone would have been banned buttfor the government requests and the implied governmental interventions into Twitters business if they refuse.

Packingham isn't the best case to cite here because it specifically dealt with government action and not private action. The court may have described Twitter as a "public square" but stopped short of designating it a public forum, which is the relevant categorization. Similarly, Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump stated that Trump's personal Twitter account was a public forum because Trump was using it for purposes akin to those of an official government account, but the court again stopped short of ruling the entirety of Twitter a public forum.

Additionally, if you're going to cite Robins as a potential argument you should put the case in its proper context. In 1972, the court ruled in Lloyd Corporation, Ltd. v. Tanner that private shopping centers were explicitly not private forums, as they failed to meet the standards set forth in Marsh v. Alabama, wherein the court ruled that a privately-owned company town was a public forum. Robins didn't overrule Lloyd but clarified it; while the First Amendment didn't require private landowners to open their premises to speech activities, state law could broaden that requirement.

I cited Packingham purely to support OP's claim that social media is the modern public square, not for the argument that Twitter is a state actor.

Re Lloyd, yes, that is why I noted that I was skeptical that the public function argument would be a winning one. But note that I cited the CA Supreme Court decision in Pruneyard, not the USSC decision. It will be interesting to see how the Court deals with its Pruneyard decision in the case re the Texas social media law. I am guessing they will overrule it, though I suppose they could distinguish it, since the Texas law de facto extends beyond state borders, and also because Twitter, unlike a shopping mall, arguably is in the business of speaking. Or maybe they will uphold the Texas law; I hope so, but am skeptical that they will.

Note also that overruling Pruneyard on property rights grounds (a key issue in the original case) would undermine the validity of the CA law that requires private colleges to respect the free speech rights of their students, a law which I hope other states will emulate.

This won’t be popular here, but I honestly support heavyhanded censorship of toxicity on social media even if it is used as a fig leaf to specifically target my own political beliefs, as long as it actually also removes hateful comments.

  • -13

If that’s the case then you close down all social networks. Anyone can spew up some toxicity to close down other view points.

Then your throwing Biden off twitter because I said something mean about trump. And trumps banned because one supporter said means things about Biden.

I find this a pretty strange stance, how much hate do you actually experience in your mainstream social media spheres? I find I need to intentionally seek it out to actually find it. In my experience nearly everyone who seems to have a problem with social media being toxic are the people you avoid if you don't want to see hate/toxicity on social media.

It never works this way. What is actually - and always - happening is there's a preferred narrative and there are in-groups and out-groups. It may not be stated explicitly, but it always happens one way or another. Comments dissenting from preferred narrative are deemed "misinformation". Comments offending the in-group are deemed "hate" - even if they are formulated in most polite and courteous terms possible (e.g.: there's no way to disagree with sexuality/gender theory and not be labeled "hateful" and "phobe", regardless of how polite and considerate you are). On the contrary, comments agreeing with the narrative would be deemed "truth" and "science", regardless of their agreement with the objective facts, and comments targeting an out-group would be deemed "vigorous discussion vital for our democracy", no matter how many f-bombs and calls for violence they contain.

What you are probably envisioning is some kind of clean space where everybody is polite and rational and are having thoughtful arguments, and you want that even at the cost of brutal repression. That is not what will happen however - the brutal repression would never be applied equally, and the space would be a paradise for whoever wants to "own" the other side, the side of the outgroup, and hell for whoever is on the other side.

To illustrate an example, if comments disparaging a vaccine are not allowed on the basis that it might lead to advocates of vaccination being threatened, then fairness would require removing comments praising a vaccine because it might lead to anti-vaxxers being threatened.

Of course, in the real world, the overwheming majority of violence committed was done by vaccine advocates against detractors, in the form of vaccine mandates. Wanting critics of vaccines censored for safety is dubiously linked. Wanting advocates of vaccines censored to lower risk of mass violence againsy the unvaccinated is less so. Yet how receptive do you think twitter would be to me claiming that pro-vaccine messaging encourages violence?

It's easily generalized - any advocacy for an idea X can be reframed as a dangerous call for violence against those who disagree with X. And if you doubt that, you can always find one or two idiots that would be willing to write on Twitter "if you disagree with X, you must die!". And if you find yourself in a rare idiot drought, you can always open an new twitter account and do it yourself... This form works absolutely regardless of the content, and thus can be applied against (or for) anything, provided you have the necessary power.

So there have been a lot of people suddenly collapsing or dying recently. Or have there? My Twitter feed certainly seems to think so. Off the top of my head we have Adam Rich, a rising MMA fighter named Victoria Lee, an Old Dominion basketball player, an NFL player, and tons of normal people as well. This does seem... odd? I can't remember a lot of people just suddenly collapsing and dying in the past although I remember Hank Gathers from 1990 as a rare exception.

Now, I'm willing to accept that it's possible that sudden deaths of healthy people may be normal-ish thing. Possibly this is just signal-boosted noise. As a heuristic, no one I know personally has collapsed so it's presumably not incredibly widespread. We also have the possibility that Covid itself, not vaccines, is causing these deaths.

The problem is that, as a layperson, it is nearly impossible for me to obtain unbiased information about this phenomenon. I encourage you to search Google for "vaccine death". The results are a muck of "fact checks", opinion pieces, and out-of-date articles talking about how many lives the vaccine saved.

On the other hand, on Twitter, (where free speech is truly allowed now), #vaccinedeath is allowed to trend. However, the results for that hashtag tend to be a lot of anecdotes of sudden collapses mixed in with spurious assertions about vaccine safety.

What's a normal person to do in this information environment? For myself, I will not be receiving future Covid vaccine doses. They have an unknown risk against a low risk from Covid itself. However, I have little confidence in this assessment. And I have no faith that I will be able to reach a confident assessment. When counter-narrative information is suppressed by the media and by the scientific apparatus, how can we trust anything they say? But it doesn't mean the counter-narrative is correct either. It just means there is no way to be confident without a free exchange of ideas.

Victoria Lee was pretty clearly a suicide, given the admonition in her sister's announcement of her death to "please check on your loved ones." As for Damar Hamlin, "According to Tadwalkar, Hamlin likely experienced a rare complication called commotio cordis — ventricular fibrillation, a type of cardiac arhythmia, caused by the injury to the chest when he made a tackle.".

There has been an increase in heart attacks among relatively young people, but that increase started [at the beginning of the pandemic] (https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/covid-19-surges-linked-to-spike-in-heart-attacks/)

I thought the commotio cordis explanation was likely debunked by the resuscitation?

Yes it’s been debunked and the article he cites has the statistics to do most of the debunking

“study from 2002Trusted Source evaluating 128 cases of commotio cordis found that 78% occurred in people under the age of 18 — 62% of whom were playing a competitive sport at the time the attack.

About 75% of the deaths occurred in people playing baseball, ice hockey, and softball, most of which took place after being struck in the chest by the ball or puck, Mokashi said.”

  • 62% we’re playing a competitive sport - 75% of deaths occurred in baseball, ice hockey, softball.

Basically use those stats on 128 cases and commotio cordis incredibly rare and hence very doubtful to be the Hamlin case. Plus combined with needing to be resuscitated twice and his longer term hospital stay (pronged actually had commotio and returned to play 2 days later).

commotio cordis incredibly rare and hence very doubtful to be the Hamlin case.

You are using the wrong denominator. You seem to be looking at (cases of commito cordis)/(number of athletes). But, to determine whether it is likely to be the cause of Hamlin's case, you need to look at (cases of commito cordis)/(number of athletes who collapse from heart conditions). This article says that it is in fact the second most common cause of sudden cardiac death in young athletes.

https://twitter.com/Covid19Critical/status/1612925178111234050

If you look at the actually, all the incidents of this very rare form of cardiac arrest, it's generally people who are younger, so it's 15 to 16 year old boys, it's generally a projectile, softball, cricket ball, punch to the chest, it's something with high velocity and a very direct impact; and it's in boys whose chests are not as covered with muscle and/or chest protectors. Initially I thought it was commotio cordis, it really doesn't fit the pattern.

From your link, it's 3% of football deaths that are attributed to commotio cordis. I followed through and found it was 7 out of 243 deaths across 20 years, among high school and college aged players.

I'm skeptical that a grown man, heavily muscled and padded, suffered from commotio cordis by getting run into by a receiver. There's no hard projectile, he's not a teenager, and his chest is both muscled and protected. I just think it's grasping at straws to conclude it's CC instead of some other cardiac issue (100 out of 243 deaths in football over those 20 years).

Also the nature of the hit wasn’t in the open field where there was a lot of force. It was a relatively tame hit.

Your denominator isn’t correct either. You would want cases of heart attacks that did not involve a small ball hitting the heard.

(Cases of non small ball commito cordis)/(non small ball heart attacks)

Regardless of the statistics- outlier events do happen occasionally- the 'needing to be resuscitated twice' seems like evidence against commotio cordis.

My understanding is that the needing CPR twice was a miscommunication (likely because of something like "he was initially triaged in a resuscitation bay at the trauma center" which is a different kind resuscitation).

However even if he did have CPR twice that isn't evidence against commotio cordis, damage from "down time" (even with prompt high quality CPR) can lead to other problems like anoxic brain injury (likely avoided it seems), pulmonary damage (seems present), and issues with perfusion to other parts of the body that can lead to PT/OT needs. If your heart gets fucked up it fucks shit up. Not out of the woods after initial ROSC is obtained.

If you look at some of the initial medical social media discussion of this you'll see that some people were confused, commotio cordis is rare (and is more common in pediatric populations for physiology reasons) but that's what it looked like, pretty much slam dunk (ex: initial continued perfusion allowing to stand followed by sudden collapse). So we were wondering if it was an atypical presentation of something more "common" in this setting like hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

I haven't seen a diagnosis released yet but cordis is most likely at this point and is pretty much a freak accident and has nothing to do with COVID.

But what is the latest on that? Because according to this article, "Hamlin was resuscitated only once, a family spokesman clarified Wednesday, not twice, as his uncle told CNN on Tuesday."

How so?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36436002/

So the vaccine can make you die in a special way due to lymphocytes in your heart - but the idea that Damar did not have any type of underlying structural sensitivity to a tackle is completely debunked...I do not think so.

They haven't released a cause of death for Adam Rich or Victoria Lee yet, so it's inappropriate to count them toward some current trend. Celebrities die all the time without the family releasing a cause of death. When it happens to younger people it often means suicide or that drugs were involved, which seems a bit apt with respect to Rich as he has a known history of mental illness. As for Lee, her sister said:

Please give our family grace and respect during this most difficult time. And please, check on your loved ones. Keep checking on them. Give them hugs and tell them how much they mean to you. You just never know.

This isn't the kind of advice one gives in the wake of a sudden death from an unknown cause. As for the ODU basketball player, he collapsed during the game, was responsive the entire time, spent the rest of the game on the bench, rode home on the team bus, and was supposed to follow up with ODU medical staff upon returning to campus. This isn't exactly in the same league as Hamlin's injury, and probably wouldn't be in the news at all (At least outside of the Hampton Roads area) had the country not been on edge due to what happened last Monday. So that leaves Hamlin as the only person who had a sudden, life-threatening cardiac event, and I'd hardly call one person a trend.

So that leaves Hamlin as the only person who had a sudden, life-threatening cardiac event, and I'd hardly call one person a trend.

Come on son. It doesn't leave shit, all you have done is claim Rich (54) was young and had a history of mental illness (he was a child movie star) and so he might have oded or killed himself.

Then we get to Lee, where you tell us that people don't advise others to check on your loved ones and tell them you love them when someone dies suddenly of an unknown cause? The conclusion you reach being - I think - that she committed suicide too? Why wouldn't your loved one dying suddenly of an unknown cause prompt you to check on your loved ones and make sure they know how much you love them - before it's too late you know, before they die suddenly from an unknown cause?

Lastly we have the ODU player, who didn't die, so his life wasn't threatened enough to count. And now you have made up just so stories for three of them, you can declare Hamlin the only person who had a sudden, life-threatening cardiac event! Except you can't expect any of that to convince the op - he is concerned because he doesn't know what information he should be believing, and you throw even more possibilities into the mix! Or to put it another way, jeroboam expressed his hypothetical possibilities to promote gathering more information. You expressed your hypothetical possibilities to promote gathering less information.

  • -11

The IG post about Lee is pretty consistent with how other people with public profiles have their suicides reported to the public. Want to make a wager?

Yeah. Phrasing definitely supports a suicide.

Why she died isn't important to me. I actually agree with rov's overall point, and have up voted several others who made similar points in different ways. What I object to is the way rov seemed to be using hypotheticals to increase ignorance instead of decreasing it. It all seems to be leading to an attitude of 'just don't think about it', and that's the worst attitude in the world imo. It's a trend I have been noticing recently, where someone posts "hey what do you guys think of this interesting thing that happened?" And half the early replies are 'who cares, stop thinking about it'. And it's been happening all over the place for a while, but I am starting to see more of it here on the motte, and I am not a fan.

Don't pick bad object level arguments when trying to argue a broader point. Accepting "wrong on the details but correct on the overall" is how you get the "this hate crime may have been a hoax but it draws attention to the important problems" kind of statements. Those are rejected here for the same reasons.

Sorry for screwing you around, but I don't know how else to do it.

The idea that someone would tell their followers to “keep checking in on [their loved ones]” in the event of a sudden death doesn’t really make sense - occam’s razor is that it’s way more likely a suicide where “checking in” might have made a difference.

I speculated based on the available evidence. If you find this insufficient, then I'm willing to concede that we don't know anything about the cause of death/cause of collapse and should avoid speculating about it at all. The lease reasonable course is to insinuate that these must have all been related to the COVID vaccine, of which no evidence exists at all.

Off the top of my head we have Adam Rich, a rising MMA fighter named Victoria Lee, an Old Dominion basketball player, an NFL player, and tons of normal people as well.

These striking me as overmatching in a world filled with news. Rich is 54 years old and we don't have a cause of death - people dying at 54 isn't all that rare. We don't have a listed cause of death for Lee, but my wager for a dead 18-year-old where no one said what the cause is will be that she died from drugs or suicide. The ODU player isn't dead, he collapsed and then walked off the court a couple minutes later. Hamlin was struck directly in the chest by a 215-pound man traveling at a high rate of speed; he may have had an underlying condition and it may have even been vaccine-induced myocarditis, but it's hardly a canonical example of "sudden collapse".

I'm not getting any additional Covid vaccines on the basis that I don't need one, they don't have the best risk profile, and they don't work very well anyway, but I really don't see much reason to think they're all that dangerous. Every list of people collapsing seems like it turns out to be pretty crappy.

So there have been a lot of people suddenly collapsing or dying recently. Or have there? My Twitter feed certainly seems to think so. Off the top of my head we have Adam Rich, a rising MMA fighter named Victoria Lee, an Old Dominion basketball player, an NFL player, and tons of normal people as well. This does seem... odd? I can't remember a lot of people just suddenly collapsing and dying in the past although I remember Hank Gathers from 1990 as a rare exception.

Social media means that events and deaths that in the past would not have been so newsworthy or broadcast , are broadcast to everyone and made immediate. A basketball player collapsing would not have gone viral 20 years ago like it does today.

On the other hand, on Twitter, (where free speech is truly allowed now), #vaccinedeath is allowed to trend. However, the results for that hashtag tend to be a lot of anecdotes of sudden collapses mixed in with spurious assertions about vaccine safety.

I am not a fan of the vaccines that much , but I think they are safe. Given how many people have taken them, if there was even a small % in complications and deaths it would be hard to avoid...hospitals would quickly be overwhelmed. You would not need anecdotes.

A decent number of heart-related deaths, here. And given the subject of the list, doesn’t include Fabrice Muamba/Christian Eriksen events where the player survived:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_associaton_football_players_who_died_during_their_careers

All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.

Fenphen was on the market from 1990 until 1997 before the evidence that it caused heart failure was overwhelming. Vioxx was another, released in 1999 and recalled in 2004. Bret Weinstein famously has a theory that since all our drugs are tested on the same cohort of lab mice, and those lab mice have been selected for an outrageous senescent capacity, the testing will broadly miss drugs that are just generally toxic. And this broad toxicity will manifest in the organs that have the most trouble healing, like the heart. So drugs that cause generalized cell damage have that damage manifest as heart failure.

Once people have been getting boosters every 6 months for as long as Fenphen or Vioxx were allowed on the market, if the evidence isn't in I'll let it go. But until then...

Bret Weinstein famously has a theory that since all our drugs are tested on the same cohort of lab mice, and those lab mice have been selected for an outrageous senescent capacity, the testing will broadly miss drugs that are just generally toxic. And this broad toxicity will manifest in the organs that have the most trouble healing, like the heart. So drugs that cause generalized cell damage have that damage manifest as heart failure.

I've never heard of 'senescent capacity' so it's difficult to know what you mean, but I'll assume you're referring to telomere length. It's trivially true that lab mice have longer telomeres than humans, but your broader point is false - if you're really curious, you can read the FDA guidance here. Studies generally march through mice/rats -> dogs -> non-human primates (usually macaques these days). You need data on PK (frequently using dogs as they have similar kinetics to humans) as well as convincing toxicity data in nonrodent species. Then you have small scale dose-escalation studies in healthy humans where toxicity is again evaluated prior to larger trials to test for efficacy & safety with more statistical power.

Fenphen was on the market from 1990 until 1997 before the evidence that it caused heart failure was overwhelming. Vioxx was another, released in 1999 and recalled in 2004.

I'm not as familiar with Fenphen, but for Vioxx Merck just...lied to people, it doesn't have anything to do with laboratory mice.

Fenphen

24 cases in 1997 for a drug that was very popular is not overwhelming evidence. The FDA is very risk averse and irrational at times, approving super-expensive off-label cancer treatments which cost $10k/month and prolong life by months (with a lot of side effects), but a drug that treats a major societal problem like obesity effectively, albeit with some possible side effects, is a no-go.

http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9903/09/heart.fen.phen.risk/

According to the study, people who never took fen-phen had a 3.6 percent incident rate of heart valve disease. Of 1,163 former fen-phen users in the study, those who took the drugs for less than six months had a 4.5 percent incident rate, which was not a statistically significant difference.

This is much more nuanced than the 'fenpen=lethal' narrative by the media. This is why doctors do not have people take it for more than 3 months at at time. There is an elevated risk, but not that much , and obesity carries risks as well, so one must take that into account, too.

There is an elevated risk, but not that much , and obesity carries risks as well, so one must take that into account, too.

Yeah. Ignorant of the exact permutation with Fenphen but if it was a reliable 'obesity cure' it's pretty hard to imagine side effects that weren't immediately, gigantically apparent being worse than obesity itself.

Clinical trials are run in humans before drugs are approved, lab animals missing many negative effects that are present in humans is very well known and accounted for.

A few months ago, my mother-in-law (mid-70s, and not the most reliable source), suffered a mild heart attack hours after receiving both her Covid booster and a flu shot. She said the ER nurse asked her if she had been boosted recently and followed with "We see this all the time." Coincidentally, my dad (late 70s, fully boosted) also suffered a mild heart attack around this time last year while in the hospital for a colonoscopy, and the doctors told him it was probably stress-related.

I do look skeptically at the anti-vaxxers who act like no one ever had heart or health issues prior to the Covid vaccine, but there does seem to be a lot more noticing going on, and no trust that anyone in power would admit if any of that noticing was of something real.

Several of my friends and family believe in all kinds of paranormal stuff, including ghosts and dreams that predict the future. They have stories of things that they claimed happened to them that, if true, would confirm their beliefs. These are otherwise intelligent people who I would believe if I didn't know that what they were telling me was impossible. So, I would give almost no credence to a nurse who claims to have noticed a pattern in when people have heart attacks.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36436002/

I am spamming this and I apologize to anyone who's mad about this. We can find evidence of special heart damage from the mRNA vaccine from autopsies. We have the FDA announcing a possible association with PE and Pfizer. This nurse could simply think "I've seen a slide of someone's damaged heart after vaccination, maybe it's connected." and all of a sudden you accuse them of a crime of logic.

Note both the fact there is a rare risk AND the nurse can be commiting a crime of logic can both be true. We already know that nurses and doctors are (like most people) generally terrible at statistics and interpreting things they notice as statistically significant events.

If there is an issue it would need to be analysed at a population level in a statistically significant way.

Otherwise we also have to give equal credence to nurses who posted stories about so many healthy young people dying of covid after not getting vaccinated and the like.

Fair. But during a period of intense censorship, a diffuse cloth of similar anecdotes and experiences actually ended up with some evidence and studies to confirm. Take the myocarditis risk, as well as possible sudden death from myocarditis, being proved experimentally. (check my post history if you interested in link)

I think the smoking gun is that so many of these people are young athletes. Musicians and actors dying in suspicious circumstances is Tuesday; athletes have historically not done that because if they weren't in peak physical health they wouldn't be notable athletes, they'd be wannabes. That to me requires explaining.

Could Performance Enhancing Drugs be a contributor? My first mean thought when hearing about an athlete's sudden heart problems is the possibility that drugs were a factor.

For myself, I will not be receiving future Covid vaccine doses. They have an unknown risk against a low risk from Covid itself.

Why do you believe covid's potential harm is more known or bounded than the vaccine? We have a little bit more long term data (about a year) for the virus but the vaccine's data is also of higher quality

Fair point. I should have phrased this differently. My statement implied that getting a vaccine and getting Covid are either/or. This is clearly not the case. I should have said something like this:

"My risk from Covid is low. Vaccines have extremely limited efficacy against current Covid strains and unknown risks. Why add an additional risk factor, even if the risk from vaccine is also low".

That said, I think vaccine risk is harder to quantify since it's not properly studied. There's a nonzero chance that the data is bullshit in a way that matters. Any researcher investigating vaccine risks would be committing career suicide. It's like a courtroom with a prosecutor but no defense. It doesn't mean the defendant is innocent, but it does mean I wouldn't trust the result of the trial.

Also, we have tons and tons of data on "coronaviruses", and SARS 2 is one of those. mRNA nanolipid particle injections? Less experience, to say the least.

You are in a social media bubble that is motivated to hunt down and amplify any vaguely suspicious death. A retired child actor that hasn't worked in 20 years, seriously? Do you think you would have heard of his death in any other circumstance? Anyway if we are going by celebrity deaths only we can look at wikipedia categories:

There you go, we have now proven COVID-19 excess mortality as well as vaccine's safety and effectiveness in the stupidest way possible.

PS. I don't know of any way of tracking the number of "collapses" that lead to hospitalization but not death in celebrities, as far as I know nobody is keeping track of that.

Haha, I literally thought it was Adam Richman from Man vs. Food. No, I would not have heard of any of these D-listers in normal circumstances.

I'd expect a general upward drift in 'celebrity deaths' on Wikipedia due to the notability window as well. Rates of achieving 'celebrity status' started to accelerate 40-50 years ago, which is about commensurate with when you'd expect the 20-30 something celebrities of then to start departing.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36436002/

I mean, in many ways, people keep proving that a safe and effective vaccine is actually dangerous in ways comparable to a "dangerous" infectious disease!

Why are autopsies finding out that the heart is participating in the vaccination process! We should see lymphocytes in the muscle of the deltoid, not the heart.

It is not necessary (and in fact, it is discouraged) to keep posting the same link over and over.

If you want people to take it seriously, you won't get them to take it more seriously by spamming it at them.

Understood - I felt like it was wrong. I was blocked by aaa, I'm assuming because it was inconvenient to his argument or annoying.

I still find it odd that people skip over like this study doesn't exist, as it keep bubbling into all these tertiary debates about the possibility of vaccine sudden death.

Feels like an influx of a persuasion hit the board. Which I welcome, frankly.

Stopping immediately.

I find this phenomena truly bewildering, transmogrifying the availability heuristic with confirmation bias. Are people suddenly collapsing more than before? I have no idea, but the boosters of this claim tend to offer anecdotes rather than any sort of systemic data. Assuming the sudden collapses are indeed happening more than usual, are they due to vaccine risk? Same here, I have no idea if that's true, nor how exactly one would reach this conclusion. We know that humans are mortal and susceptible to dying (sometimes suddenly even) from many causes. Why are vaccines conclusively and exclusively heralded as the cause? No idea.

If you want generalizable tips for a normal person it would be:

  1. You should not rely on anecdotes to establish a trend

  2. If there is indeed a trend, you should only adopt a particular cause if you have good reason to dismiss other explanations

Yeah, it seems like the online-right is succumbing to the same confirmation bias as the left in 2020 (someone dies of 'X', tested positive for Covid; ergo Covid death)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36436002/

Why are hearts found with heart damage in cadavers? Why is it not plausible that this is a actual issue?

The online right is, alternatively, demonstrating the exact appropriate amount of interest you'd expect, countering the efforts of a public health campaign to minimize this information.

I think it increases the likelihood of myocarditis, which factored into my own personal decision not not be vaccinated, but people who are vaccinated dropping dead does not establish causality. You'd have to compared this to people who are not vaccinated and control for lifestyle and other variables.

I would take another look at the study. There was cellular evidence that these cadavers could have had a dysrhythmia from the mRNA associated lymphocyte aggregation in the myocardial tissue. Not causal but pretty convincing.

consider that people drop dead and show heart damage and defects before the advent of vaccine. it's like liver damage and pain killers...enough people take pain killers that it's a statistical certainty some will get adverse side effects and even die.

That hardly explains why the same lymphocytes at the deltoid vaccine site were found in the cardiac tissue. It was a specific immune related reaction.

Hepatotoxicity actually is a real problem with many different classes of drugs, including NSAID and opioid painkillers. It's not just a coincidence.

The liver likes to grab onto and break down drugs in the bloodstream, which is a problem with drug delivery; not only can many drugs harm the liver, but the liver also prevents the drugs from reaching their target tissues.

Of course, hepatotoxicity from medicine is much more of a problem for people whose livers are busy and/or damaged from processing excessive alcohol and/or fructose. For most people with healthy livers, occasional use of painkillers is fine.

I find this phenomena truly bewildering, transmogrifying the availability heuristic with confirmation bias.

I think the combination sounds like the Chinese robber fallacy to me. Read this if you have not yet:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/

Yes it's exactly this. It's widely applicable idea and I didn't want to obfuscate it by just referring to it by its pet name.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36436002/

Take a look at this autospy report. If you can find bodies that have died after vaccination, you can propose that people are dying after vaccination, from the vaccination. I find it bewildering that people are uninterested in the long view of isolated cases of heart damage, and a novel biotechnology vaccine (that could be substituted for a conventional vaccine at that!).

I am very interested in this. Surprised that it was even published against the zeitgeist tbh.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=j_DdSMn55cA&ab_channel=Dr.JohnCampbell

Here's Mr. Campbells exploration. If you're looking for more.

Of what I wrote, what do you disagree with?

Adam Rich, a rising MMA fighter named Victoria Lee, an Old Dominion basketball player, an NFL player, and tons of normal people as well.

I had to look up Adam Rich since I didn't recognise the name. His Wikipedia history has some perhaps relevant snippets:

"At age 14, he tried smoking marijuana, and at 17, in 1986, he dropped out of high school. He almost died of a valium overdose in 1989. In 1991, he was arrested and charged with attempted burglary of a pharmacy.

...In 2002, Rich was arrested for driving under the influence (DUI). He was in drug rehabilitation at least three times.

....Rich died in his Los Angeles home on January 7, 2023, at the age of 54. The cause of death was not disclosed."

Hm - Hollywood actor with history of drug addiction and (at times) risky behaviour dies of undisclosed causes. Plainly this must be due to the Covid vaccines! Do even we know if he was vaccinated or not?

MMA fighter, basketball player, NFL player - what do they have in common? Sportspeople dropping dead? Surely this does not happen to healthy young people who are athletes! But you know - it does.

Tons of normal people - yes, every day, tons of normal people drop dead for no (apparent) reason. People die in their sleep. Years back, I had a family member who was fine when one of their family left the house, when they came back a couple of hours later, the first person was dead.

We hear more about sudden deaths/mysterious deaths when there is something happening like a pandemic and with all the fights over vaccinations and risk. Maybe there is a greater risk. Or maybe we're just hearing about deaths now that we wouldn't have heard reported on five years ago, because there was no "rash of sudden deaths linked to eating bananas" story to hang them off. I suppose all I can say is "don't panic, judge for yourself if you think you are at high risk of adverse outcomes if you contract Covid, then decide to get boosters or not". Same with "will I bother getting the flu vaccine this year?" Probably a good idea, given that (over here at least) there has also been a rise in RSV and with everything going around at the one time, better not risk it.

Hm - Hollywood actor with history of drug addiction and (at times) risky behaviour dies of undisclosed causes. Plainly this must be due to the Covid vaccines! Do even we know if he was vaccinated or not?

Basically the right is doing the same thing the left did in 2020-2021.

Basically the right is doing the same thing the left did in 2020-2021.

Yeah. It's kinda hilarious how things have pivoted from 'random deaths/medical issues pinned on LONG COVID' to 'random deaths/medical issues pinned on VACCINE SIDE EFFECTS'.

Honestly personally I think the effects of 'Long Lockdown' in terms of weight gain, exercise disrupted, habits picked up, mental issues are probably going to present a greater specter than either COVID or the vaccine.

Um no.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36436002/

Here's a scientific paper showing there is a special link between mRNA and sudden death. Why would the right not be interested in the counternarrative developing? It's a smoking gun.

You may be interested in Epistemic Learned Helplessness.

I’ve come to a conclusion that vaccines do cause myocarditis in the young. COVID also causes myocarditis. COVID’s not a big enough deal to me that I feel like digging thru 100’s of studies to figure out which risks is higher. As someone fairly young and in shape Whose had COVID, had 1 vaccine, been exposed to COVID since and got no COVID I’ve basically just decided to ignore COVID and the vaccine. I see no reason to jab myself every 6 months and take some incremental vaxx myocarditis risks as a sub 40 male.

If I were a 65 year old male I’d probably try to figure it out. But it’s just not worth my time to figure out which marginal risks is worse. I have a larger risks crossing the street and typing this out and dying which I’m doing right now than my guess from COVID or vaxx.

Long since came to a conclusion the left was full of shit that vaxx was no risks. But I knew that from my own personal symptoms and seeing many leftist on message boards saying they were knocked out for two days from vaccine yet claimed no big deal.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36436002/

Check out this study - you can do an autopsy and link sudden death to mRNA myocarditis. This should help you understand a bit more why such a rare risk is worth your time.

N= 25? That’s sort of my point it’s not so dangerous that theirs thousands dying and obvious deaths everywhere. It seems to be a mild statistical risks. Also as far as I could tell from that brief they did nothing to figure out if myocarditis was caused by COVID or mRNA vaccine.

I think people have died from the vaccine. I don’t have a smoking gun telling me it’s an issue disproportionately worth my time. Like I ordered an AI book today - I think figuring out how I fit in with our new AI overlords is more worth my mental energy than trying to figure out small statistical risks.

And at this point I just have COVID vaccine Super safe as primarily another example of the powers that be suppressing any information against their edicts. Another example of them lying to me.

Among the 35 cases of the University of Heidelberg, autopsies revealed other causes of death (due to pre-existing illnesses) in 10 patients (Supplementary Table 1). Hence, these were excluded from further analysis. Cardiac autopsy findings consistent with (epi-)myocarditis were found in five cases of the remaining 25 bodies found unexpectedly dead at home within 20 days following SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.

5/25

Well, this is not the statistical smoking gun I want per say.

So of 35 sudden deaths, 10 were other causes. And then of 25 sudden deaths, 5 were found to have thee abnormality. They were looking for sudden deaths from myocarditis and they found it.

Who knows. We basically agree in a bunch of domains, I just think it's still not possible to say this is a disproportionally unimportant issue.

You've posted this link to various places, so I'll respond here: hasn't the idea that vaccine can cause myocarditis in at least some cases been a part of the official data at least since 2021? At least the Finnish health authorities have stated that the mRNA vaccine can cause myocarditis for young men and that strenuous exercise just after vaccination should be avoided. Currently, the second booster is not available here for people under 60, unless they have extra conditions.

The question is, though, how common myocarditis is and if it's common enough to mean that vaccination is more risky than being unvaccinated, for all groups or some. The jury is still out on that question, as far as I've understood, and this study does not by itself answer it.

Since you can die suddenly from dysrhythmia after vaccine induced myocarditis, we need to reevaluate where we are in this campaign. This was not known at the EUA authorization in 2020.

For young males, the risk of myocarditis after the 2nd dose of mRNA vaccine is higher than with covid infection. This should be taken into account in all vaccine recommendations, unfortunately in the USA we've chosen a "one size fits all" approach that groups 80 year old women with 19 year old men.

Well, the elephant in the room is the inexplicable and ongoing high level of excess deaths being reported among all age groups and across continents. These deaths do not appear to be driven primarily by Covid itself or at least not directly.

if there is a 50-50 chance of excess deaths, then there is a 1/4 odds by chance alone of two consecutive years of excess deaths.

Naively, one might have predicted excess deaths to be unusually low, perhaps negative, following a pandemic which disproportionately and prematurely killed off so many elderly and unhealthy people. Instead, we have significant, consistent, and prolonged increases across all groups. There is a clear signal in the data, and it is not wrong to suspect the mRNA vaccines as a potential culprit. Unfortunately, the institutions which we depend upon to research these questions have strong incentives to avoid particular results, and they have proven themselves quite untrustworthy where such conflicts of interest are in play. We're left with a lot of anecdotes, hear say, conspiracy theories, and gut instincts to guide our action.

I mean, the pandemic is still ongoing. If COVID were suddenly gone, sure. And even then we might still expect excess deaths from long-term damage of the pandemic.

the pandemic

Please define.

Covid infections "strongly" (arguable) above longterm YOY. "Abnormal" amounts of Covid.

LOL. The longterm is epsilon, since COVID didn't exist prior to 2019. If you're going to use that as a criterion, you're never going to declare the pandemic over. And your criteria are broken.

There's going to be a "new normal". I think we're still well above it.

Covid will never be gone, nevermind suddenly gone. By that logic, the pandemic will go on forever. But almost everyone has had the virus; it's endemic now. We lost. The question is now just discovering how badly we lost, and how much of the damage was self-inflicted (if the virus was made in a lab, then I guess it was all self-inflicted, but you know what I mean).

I would be interested in seeing reputable data on this. Is there a good source? Would be interesting to see if its possible to tease apart the effect of vaccination vs. long-term Covid symptoms.

I've heard that Sweden has had less total excess death than other countries. Presumably their vaccination levels are quite high. Maybe the excess deaths are somehow lockdown-related. Is there a "Sweden" for anti-vaccine policy, i.e. a first world country that had a much lower of vaccination than others?

Nobody reputable is going to make any (non-deboonky) comment on this, by definition.

A disreputable (but seemingly smart and reasonably good-faith/not crazy) cat has been drawing conclusions from the UK NIH data for some time; the latest is here:

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/uk-age-stratified-all-cause-death

I don't hang my hat on this analysis particularly, and I'm sure there's nits to be picked -- but it's not obviously terrible, and the effect sizes require that the nits be pretty big.

I'd actually be happy to see some reasonable complaints about this one -- on its face it's very concerning, and reasonable explanations are not jumping out at me on first read.

OTOH regarding UK death data for 2022 this was just posted. It argues that:

  • once you age-adjust (which takes into account that the expected trend for the mortality rates in aging Western societies would be to rise, there's mostly no excess mortality that wouldn't be explained by Covid)

  • like in most countries, excess mortality spikes follow Covid spikes (though the Fisch argues in other posts for other countries that for this winter the other respiratory diseases almost certainly also show an effect)

  • while there are no not-explainable-by-Covid excess deaths in > 65 age bands, there are some not-explainable-by-Covid excess deaths in < 65 age bands, but these are better explained by NHS being burdened than by vaccination, if you look at schedules

I don't have time to read this analysis any more closely than El Gato's, but it also doesn't seem obviously terrible -- and it kind of doesn't really conflict that much?

In the bar-graphs, the Spring 2022-present deaths still look very concerning if you subtract off the covid bars, especially in the younger age brackets -- Fisch seems to take note of the here, but just kind of... shrugs it off?

I'd also note that Gato is using pretty narrow age bands already, so age-adjustment doesn't seem like it should make much difference.

I'll see if I can do a more adversarial reading later, but again the effect size is really large -- even Fisch notes ~10k excess non-Covid deaths over this period, which seems like kind of a fuckload?

Thank you. This was the direction I was hoping to go in with my top-level post, but people got distracted (understandably so) about which D-list celebrity collapsed for this or that reason.

I'll give this a read, and maybe try to make a different top-level post next week.

1 negation, and a couple of weird anecdotes.

The NFL player who collapsed had it happen due to a collision with direct impact to the heart. This was a completely different case than covid related myocarditis.

On the weird side, there have been 2 unique occurrences in the soccer world. Christian Ericsson is arguably the most high-profile death (and subsequent resuscitation) on the soccer field due to spontaneous cardiac arrest a few months after his vaccine. Players dropping dead isn't entirely unheard of. But Ericsson is the most high profile. On a similar note, Sergio Aguero, one of the greatest football players of his era, had to suddenly retire after his new club (in 2021) identified scarring on his heart.

Curiously, both players had spent their entire careers with world class medical teams, without any of them having any inkling of such major heart tissue scarring. Barcelona (Aguero's new club) famously called it gross negligence, saying that Aguero should have never been allowed to be a pro player, because someone during his 20 career should have caught this. This is after Aguero had just broken the record for most premier league career goals in the history of the sport at arguably the world's best team. Something doesn't compute.

[spent 2 minutes googling here idk]

What if covid itself contributes? this "investigated rates of COVID-19 myocarditis among 1,597 athletes from 13 of the 14 Big Ten universities. They observed an overall prevalence of 2.3%, with 9 cases of clinical myocarditis and 28 cases of subclinical myocarditis". study is here.

And sudden cardiac arrests aren't unheard of in sports, they're just rare. Given there are many sports, many many athletes, a few high-profile people dying isn't that surprising!

What if covid itself contributes?

Covid almost surely contributes. Internal scarring due to viral infections is well known at this point. The question people are asking is --> do silent/loud symptoms induced by the vaccines (every 6 months, if booster) cause an increase in scarring that is similar to what a serious infection would cause ? I'd rather take a bout of covid every few years, instead of a 6 monthly slow buildup scar-tissue on my heart. Skipping boosters may be a risk worth taking if I am young. (I am not boosted yet)

I am still very much pro-vaccines. I would take the first 2 doses again if I was back in 2020. I have taken every other established vaccine & will vaccinate any child I have at any point. I am just not sold on the mRNA boosters or the risk of serious illness for a sub-30 yr old from any of the current variants of covid.

Barcelona (Aguero's new club) famously called it gross negligence, saying that Aguero should have never been allowed to be a pro player, because someone during his 20 career should have caught this.

This sort of thing isn't unheard of in other sports: cyclist Michael Goolaerts died in the 2018 Paris-Roubaix race of cardiac arrest.

I have two cautions about your anecdote here: first, professional athletes are likely using performance-enhancing drugs (without making any specific accusations). Many of these are pretty well-linked with cardiac issues (testosterone, EPO, and various stimulants). A number of sudden cardiac arrest incidents in young athletes have seen hushed rumors since at least the 1980s, corresponding to the rise of EPO.

Secondly, "[professional] should never have been allowed to play due to risk" belies the fact that many players at the top level are exceptionally focused and don't take well to being sidelined. It's plausible to me that a player getting such advice from their doctor might choose to ignore it because they already accept risk to their bodies in sport (see NFL players), and because their alternative career options are much less lucrative.

The NFL player who collapsed had it happen due to a collision with direct impact to the heart. This was a completely different case than covid related myocarditis.

I'd assumed they were talking about Uche Nwaneri, but he wasn't in the NFL anymore.

It's kind of amazing how much coverage of current and former NFL players (and other staff) there is. Looks like (former) NFL player dying isn't some rare occurrence, even for younger ones. I wonder what the life expectancy of an NFL player is.

a rising MMA fighter named Victoria Lee

She didn't just fall over dead. She presumably committed suicide based on her family's suspiciously suicide related statements after her death. That's fan speculation anyways.


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