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Cake day: October 3rd, 2024

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  • So, let me get this straight.

    Iran does tons of gender affirming surgery (the thing the trans campaigners are pushing for more of)

    It does as much surgery as the US plus more.

    And all of that surgery (the entire current US surgery docket plus more) is for the wrong reasons.

    So what protections are in place in the US to prevent surgery being done for the same ‘wrong’ reasons?

    Is that US healthcare system is so notorious for its concern for people over profit and never ever advises treatments that benefit the insurance companies more than the patient?

    Is the the notoriously open and friendly attitude some states have toward gays and lesbians so that those people grow up completely comfortable with expressing who they are?

    Is the notoriously healthy mental state of our nation’s teenagers so that every decision they make is well thought through and not at all influenced by their peer group, parents, social media, or culture?

    No. It’s fuck all. It’s blind ideological faith that something being legally mandated and something being well marketed have radically different effects on people’s willingness to comply.

    Well, they do. People are far less willing to comply with something that is legally mandated and will often risk their lives to resist.


  • That’s all very true.

    I said “…that the Nazis did it”, not “…when the Nazis did it” for that very reason.

    They say those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it. I guess those that do are too. In a few years when Gaza has been wiped off the map, it’s people killed or displaced, I expect everyone will suddenly find a mass agreement that it was terrible and should never happen again.

    Trouble with most progressives is it’s always that last war that was unjust, never the current one.

    I wonder who Netanyahu has a picture of…



  • Well, the AP there doing an amazing job of promoting Russia’s interests.

    Instead of ten bullet points showing how and why Swann is factually wrong about Zelenskyy and the Ukraine war, they go off on a rant with barely concealed nationalist overtones about how his work was “funded” and people were “paid to promote it”. Well, stop the fucking press. Journalists influenced by governments and money! Headline fucking news.

    If he’s wrong he’s wrong. Doesn’t matter who paid him, who he paid, who else agrees, who else those who agree also agree with… It matters if he’s wrong. If he is, just say it.

    Trying to play cold-war era patriotism just plays directly into the hands of the conspiracy theorists who will, as we speak be saying “notice how they couldn’t actually deny any of his claims…”



  • Antibiotics and other prescription medications are more often prescribed to older folks

    But https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6996207/

    In this study, we also analyzed antibiotic prescription rates according to age. The highest prevalence rates were observed in patients aged 71 years (80.3%) followed by 4-year-old children (60.7%).

    Since 71 year olds wouldn’t show any long term effects, that leaves the four year old group.

    as a prescriber, I do warn my patients of the dangers of taking antibiotics willy nilly.

    Of course you do, I’ve no doubt you’re very diligent. Because now we know they have serious negative consequences. 40 years ago, however, the people this article is about would have merely been told they were “safe and effective”. That’s exactly the point I’m making.

    You now have to take precaution with a medicine because of new information about its safety that wasn’t known at the time it was developed.

    Same is true for every other factor mentioned in the report. Human innovation is absolutely suffuce with things we thought were safe and effective at the time, but later turn out to be quite unsafe.

    Yet taking this unequivocal fact and applying it to a rational scepticism about new medicines has, since 2020, become ‘misinformation’.







  • None of it is ‘clear’, and of course we don’t ‘know’. The question is what on earth you have on your list of reasons to give Antony Blinken the benefit of the doubt.

    I’d love to know what it is about his record in office that inspires such trust.

    Honestly, the level of fawning obsequiousness to the government these days is like something from Mccarthy’s America, I thought we’d moved on as a society.

    The point isn’t whether he actually did approve bombing aid trucks. The point is that he, like any government official, should be terrified of the response if he did, because it’s only that fear that reigns in the abuse of power.

    Do you think Antony Blinken is going to be terrified of “oh, we don’t have absolutely conclusive proof he actually said those exact words so we’ll just drop it”?