This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Trump and RFK blame acetaminophen for childhood autism. I couldn’t find a transcript yet, but the meandering press conference is recorded here. Was this on anyone’s bingo cards?
I’m confused. I vaguely knew that the Trump campaign had decided to fight autism at some point, but I always figured it was appeasement for the antivaxxers. Is there an untapped pool of Tylenol haters out there? Is this a stalking horse for a broader wave of FDA guidelines targeting the usual suspects?
Maybe there’s some sort of political smokescreen going on. We don’t appear to have started any new wars, and domestic hate for Trump looks more or less like it did since last week. If it’s a distraction, it’s not a very efficient one; I had a hard time finding reporting on it, and all the sites that bothered were also eagerly blasting his abuses of the Justice Department and the Supreme Court. That leaves the old-fashioned political motive of throwing meat to the base. Maybe Trump is just checking off campaign promises. But again, it’s so niche.
I suppose there could be some sort of personal beef. If Trump is trying to tank someone’s stock, uh, this is still a pretty weird way to do it.
That’s not even touching the medical case. The administration doesn’t appear to have provided much substance behind their claim. This will dissuade approximately no one. Enjoy your fresh CW battleground.
Why is the American right so obsessed with autism and discovering some unknown or suppressed cause for it?
Politicising medicine in general is baffling to me, like how Ivermectin is right-wing while vaccines are left-wing (and I remember 20 years ago most antivax people were leftwing). At some point it feels like American politics is about picking any conceivable topic and flipping a coin to declare one side Republican and the other Democrat.
It's simple, over the last decades, the left has succesfully taken over multiple fields through academia, including medicine, and there is a fear from conservatives that this political capture is tainting the quality of the science that comes out of it. In some fields of medicine, particularly those at the intersection of hard sciences and social sciences, for instance study of the transgender phenomena, it's hard to argue that the conservatives don't have a massive point. In more hard science aligned ones, such as which drugs are effective/dangerous, it's less legible, but the conservatives do have (IMO) a smaller point that the left relishes the power to force public policy and is not wielding it objectively. The gleefulness with which they they resorted to coercive methods to force people to vaccinate during COVID is a great example.
The problem is that MAGA offers no credible alternative. If they had a trans-skeptic secretary of health who would cut down woke excesses back to the level of empiricism, that would be one thing.
Instead they have someone whose whole point was to bring in the votes of the anti-vaxxers and a president who joins him in announcing their big medical discoveries.
I mean, sure, if one believes that the medical priesthood is made up out of charlatans who talk about make-believe concepts like proteins, p-values, PCR or the like, then there is no problem in replacing them with different charlatans who can make just as convincing a show of knowing the secret language of the priesthood.
I will grant you this. For a lot of vaccines, the social benefit is that the immunized can no longer transmit the infection. Not so for COVID. So the main public health effect is not present.
A fair solution, in my opinion, would have been to announce that vaccination would be entirely voluntary, but that in triage situations, the willfully unvaccinated would simply get a penalty in their QALY-based score. Say divide their expected QALY gain from interventions by a factor of two, so that you might be indifferent between putting a 40yo unvaccinated patient or a 60yo vaccinated patient on oxygen.
This has good precedent: we already allow people to engage in a lot of dangerous activities such as smoking, drinking, or base jumping, which frequently kills them. The idea is that everyone has their own risk appetite, and as long as they just kill themselves we should generally let adults do what they want. Only when they endanger others is when we should restrict their behavior.
So if someone decides to gain immunity to COVID the natural way instead of getting microchipped by Bill Gates, let them. Just don't let them take a spot in the ICU from someone who followed the recommended vaccination schedule if spots are limited, send them home with a bucket of Ivermectin or something.
Sadly, our society is utterly incapable of discussing care prioritization in triage situations at all. The closest we get to it is probably taking current alcohol abuse into account when deciding who gets a new liver first.
How many academic journals would even consider a well-researched trans-skeptical study? Not even publish, but get to the point of doing a serious peer review? And going down the list of other things MAGA/MAHA takes seriously, tge same question— if a journal received a paper that was well-researched but says ivermectin is an effective treatment for Covid, do they send it out for peer review, or is it simply circular filed and ignored? In order to start doing the serious alternative research you want MAGA/MAHA to do, they need access to the journals and conferences that give legitimacy to the science. Furthermore, could a secretary go back to empirical evidence if the studies are strongly biased and the journals are captured? If the medical and science establishment were radically traditional Catholic, you aren’t going to be able to roll back to “evidence backed monotheism” because anything that isn’t in line with traditional Catholic teachings hasn’t gotten through.
In theory, a fair amount.There was the Cass Review, which included many published and peer reviewed papers, and the recent Gordon Guyatt drama resulted from trans-skeptical studies being published, though as the authors would have it, the issue was not the studies themselves, but the fact that they were used in a trans-skeptical way, which is why the customary activist pressure was applied.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link