General Politics

[Cassia]

Meanwhile...u smell sumptin?

[Hydra009]

I'm surprised anyone there can tolerate the smell. But they all seem pretty uneasy, so it can't be fun being at ground zero.

[Cassia]

I'm surprised anyone there can tolerate the smell. But they all seem pretty uneasy, so it can't be fun being at ground zero.

With all the "sleepy Joe" quips he made...

[Hydra009]

With all the "sleepy Joe" quips he made...

Every accusation is a confession with these people.

[Unbeliever]

Trump is "the rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril."
William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well

[Hydra009]

Amnesty International has had issues for a while now, case in point, but this backpeddling is pretty bad and gives the appearance of exonerating people who very much are against not only the rights, but the very existence, of trans people.

Amnesty International's original report on the difficulties trans people face in the UK and the UK media's skewed reporting:

the scale of negative coverage Amnesty’s research found is startling: thousands upon thousands of articles about trans issues, many of which question trans people’s fundamental human rights, did not include the voice or perspective of a single trans person. The only British trans people to feature more than eight times were murdered teenager Brianna Ghey and Isla Bryson, a trans woman who, before transitioning, had been convicted of sexual offences.

Regardless of whatever forced backpeddling is done, it doesn't change the fact that this is a very real and serious problem - anti-trans voices are elevated far above trans people themselves. Who's the expert? Shouldn't their voices be heard?

A guy at work roped me into a "conversation" about trans people. Just what I wanted to do with my lunch break, how'd he guess? /sarcasm He claimed (without evidence, naturally) that trans people often (how often?) regret gender reassignment surgery and therefore it shouldn't be done. I asked him how many trans people he'd talked to about this and he looked at me like I was the crazy one. He genuinely didn't understand the concept of gathering information from the people most in the know first and then coming to a conclusion second, rather than coming to a conclusion first and then finding a way to justify it second.

(I regret that I missed the opportunity to tell him that often times people regret getting married, therefore people should not be allowed to get married. That would've been funny, and possibly embarrassing for him if he was self-aware enough to feel the sting of the mockery)

[Hydra009]

Scientific paper that was a major source of covid disinfo was retracted

A controversial 2024 study that some vaccine skeptics used to argue that millions of people likely died as a result of COVID vaccines has been retracted over misinformation and issues with the research.

The article was originally published in the BMJ Public Health in May 2024. It analyzed data from 47 Western countries and concluded that there had been more than three million excess deaths between 2020 and 2022, a statistic known as excess mortality.

“Overall, the journal concludes that the discussion of causes of mortality is imbalanced, lacks rigour, and includes misinformation,” the BMJ stated in the retraction notice.

The center’s report also alleged that the study’s authors cherry-picked data to support their arguments and ignored data that opposed them.

If I understand this right, the 2024 study found that there were more deaths than would normally occur between 2020 and 2022 (gee I wonder what might cause that) and somehow, I'm not sure how, we get to the conclusion that efforts meant to mitigate covid somehow - again, not sure how - were implied to have caused those deaths.

If it's the masks, I'd love to hear an explanation for how people wear the masks all the time for their job both before and after the pandemic and they're not dropping dead, but when King Orange says they're bad all of a sudden they're strangling people left and right.

So if you've ever encountered a dum-dum in the wild and they claimed with dubious certainty that covid gathering restrictions (dramatically called "lockdowns") were causing covid deaths, you probably encountered someone who listened to a right-wing crank who said they have "evidence" supporting their ideas (though of course, when scientific papers dispute their ideas, science is unreliable, just an opinion, etc) and didn't much mind that the "evidence" was pretty dubious and lacking scientific rigour.

[theantithesis]

If it's the masks, I'd love to hear an explanation for how people wear the masks all the time for their job both before and after the pandemic and they're not dropping dead, but when King Orange says they're bad all of a sudden they're strangling people left and right.

To be fair, the kind of people who would believe this shit are the kind of people who would strangle themselves with their own mask.

[Hydra009]

To be fair, the kind of people who would believe this shit are the kind of people who would strangle themselves with their own mask.

We had a guy hop on AF to discuss "vaccine shedding" with us as if that was a real thing. These people are strangely persistent.

[theantithesis]

And still don't die despite their stupid life choices.

Life is unfair.