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The RFK Jr. Thread

Let's see if you can admit that your thread stating the Democrats were going to "steal the election" was completely wrong.

Also, if you think that MAGA - a party literally run by a billionaire - is now the party of the common man, I've got a degree from Trump University I'd like to sell you.
As time goes on I am even more convinced the Democrats stole the election. But it was stolen legally with mail in ballots. During the pandemic the Democrats hired lawyers to change election laws in swing states to allow mail in ballots.


Nor has anyone given a decent reason why electronic voting machines have to be used or why states like Pennsylvania still haven't counted their votes from November 4, 2024 yet.
As even more time goes by there may be other things to change my mind again. But right now I am still in the "not trusting our election process" opinion.
You're just repeating your claims as if that's somehow a rebuttal.

How would they steal the election with mail-in ballots? You already have to be a registered voter to get a mail-in ballot, it's not like there are no checks in place. The only real realm for fraud with mail-in ballots is voting the ballots of those who are out of it. The children voting the ballot of the parent in the nursing home etc.

And the electronic voting machines are a red herring. They don't cause a problem other than making it harder to slip fraudulent ballots into the system. If there really was anything to the fraud claims why was the result consistently that the lawyers would fold at the first hearing because they had nothing? You can lie to the press all day, but when you go to court you don't go making claims you can't support. Legal cases start out with what one intends to prove--and a lawyer who makes claims but then doesn't provide evidence for them is liable to get sanctioned by the court. (This doesn't mean that the judge or jury will find the evidence adequate. If you say "my client is innocent because a witness saw him at Murphy's at the time of the crime" you then need to produce said witness. If the prosecution then shows your witness was mistaken you aren't in trouble.)

I haven't paid attention to what's happened in Pennsylvania, but delays in counting ballots are almost always with paper ballots, not electronic ballots. Electronics are clearly 0 or 1, paper isn't so absolute.
 

Also, if you think that MAGA - a party literally run by a billionaire - is now the party of the common man, I've got a degree from Trump University I'd like to sell you.
Musk and Trump are both billionaires but I trust Musk FAR more than I do Trump. If for no other reason, Musk does not even want to be in politics. He just wants to invent and build things to help humanity.
Musk isn't quite as loony as The Felon. Neither is remotely credible, though.

SpaceX is the result of one important decision: focus on costs rather than performance. The expensive part of the rocket is the engines and the like, a bigger kerolox rocket can be cheaper than a smaller hydrolox one even though the performance penalty of kerolox for upper stages is considerable.
 
Do you think our science was hiding that COVID was designed to target blacks and Caucasians and that the most immune people are Ashkanazi jews and Asians?
And note that Covid is an RNA virus. Only a loon would think they could possibly target it against their enemies. And, while the Chinese government has made a lot of stupid decisions in an attempt to keep society calm they are not loons. While I don't like Xi one bit he's now the sanest of the leaders of the major powers.
 

Also, if you think that MAGA - a party literally run by a billionaire - is now the party of the common man, I've got a degree from Trump University I'd like to sell you.
Musk and Trump are both billionaires but I trust Musk FAR more than I do Trump. If for no other reason, Musk does not even want to be in politics. He just wants to invent and build things to help humanity.
Musk isn't quite as loony as The Felon. Neither is remotely credible, though.

Given his handling of Twitter/X, I think we can put to bed the notion that Leon is just tying to "help humanity." He spent tens of billions of dollars to buy a social media platform for no other reason than that he was butthurt over people being mean to him in tweets. Compare and contrast that with Jimmy Kimmel's "Mean Tweets" bit. A segment where he had celebrities on reading insulting posts and laughing at them. Musk is a spoiled man-baby who can't cope with the fact that all the money in the world hasn't made him one of the "cool kids."
 

Also, if you think that MAGA - a party literally run by a billionaire - is now the party of the common man, I've got a degree from Trump University I'd like to sell you.
Musk and Trump are both billionaires but I trust Musk FAR more than I do Trump. If for no other reason, Musk does not even want to be in politics. He just wants to invent and build things to help humanity.
Musk has never invented one thing in his life. Tesla was a growing company when he invested in it. All of his space innovations are easily obtained in the science fiction section of the public library.
You don't need to look at the sci fi section. Plenty of people saw what was needed, there's very little innovative about SpaceX. It's just the logical consequences of recognizing that most things should not be done at the bleeding edge and recognizing that breaking some test things is a good approach. Keyword: "test". Applying the same approach to the government is a horrible idea. (Contrast with the NASA approach of trying to ensure no test things break--but then dismissing what they learn from experience. Both Challenger and Columbia were known issues that were getting blown off because it clearly "works" despite unexpected bad things happening. Columbia previously had come back with the heat shield scoured almost to destruction.)
 

Science is the one field where trust is neither expected nor ever given. If you trust someone else, you are not doing science.

Science doesn't want people to trust it. Politicians, media personalities, and large corporations, on the other hand, want nothing else.
Unfortunately you can not get to real science without corrupt people being in the middle of it. When the scientist livelihood depends on not doing real science they can not be trustworthy. And that happens so often in politics you really can not put complete trust in anyone.
So your solution is to replace them with even more corrupt people who know nothing about it.

Once again, I find considerable similarity with the Cultural Revolution. China could survive losing 10% of it's population that way, but they were basically agrarian at the time. I think it unlikely that we could survive such a loss.
 
It sounds scary, and that's all that matters to me.
What matters to me is my son born with mild autism and I would not wish disorder on any other other child or parent raising that child. Certainly not for the sake of pharmaceutical profits.
Wakefield was a quack. His "research" outright fabrications.

Furthermore, one of the smaller European countries (which one doesn't come to mind at the moment) absolutely put the nail in the coffin on this: nationwide electronic medical records. They could actually do a complete tabulation of autism diagnosis vs vaccination. The relationship was negative (but not significant.)
 
It sounds scary, and that's all that matters to me.
What matters to me is my son born with mild autism and I would not wish disorder on any other other child or parent raising that child. Certainly not for the sake of pharmaceutical profits.
Autism is a pain, but "autism" is a much more broad diagnosis than it was 40 years ago when they let it umbrella then entire Asperger Spectrum.
And recognizing that many who were thought mentally deficient are actually interaction deficient. It's a recategorization, the actual increase is small.
 
It sounds scary, and that's all that matters to me.
What matters to me is my son born with mild autism and I would not wish disorder on any other other child or parent raising that child. Certainly not for the sake of pharmaceutical profits.
Autism is a pain, but "autism" is a much more broad diagnosis than it was 40 years ago when they let it umbrella then entire Asperger Spectrum.
And recognizing that many who were thought mentally deficient are actually interaction deficient. It's a recategorization, the actual increase is small.
Is there evidence there has been an increase at all?
 
It sounds scary, and that's all that matters to me.
What matters to me is my son born with mild autism and I would not wish disorder on any other other child or parent raising that child. Certainly not for the sake of pharmaceutical profits.
Mate, I was born with mild autism, though it wasn't diagnosed until I was in my forties. As a result, my school life was hell, and I wouldn't want anyone else to go through that.

However, as diagnosis is now routine, life with mild autism is not much of a hardship. The neurodivergent brain even has employment advantages in some fields (particularly computing).
It still screws you over in interpersonal situations.

The only study ever to find a link between MMR vaccine and autism was authored by Andrew Wakefield, who stood to earn up to £43 million a year from the sale of test kits.

That's right - the link between vaccines and autism was a lie told for the sole purpose of the "pharmaceutical profits" you rightly despise as a motive.

Wakefield was struck off, and the paper withdrawn, but the legacy of his fraud lives on. The idea that there is any link is a dumb rumour started by a known fraudster, but (unlike the unprotected children it is harming) that rumor just will not die.
And note that his "studies" would never have passed muster with the ethics board--so he simply pretended they were. That alone is enough to basically damn anything he "found". His actions look an awful lot like Theranos. Or the scumbags that "proved" silicone breast implants caused problems--even when given blood samples that could not possibly have such problems. (And, once again, when the science was in the idea was utterly disproven. The problems blamed on implants are actually less likely amongst those with implants than those without. There were a few legit cases when one ruptured and that wasn't the silicone itself, but rather the body's reaction. The same thing would have happened with any inert filler material--saline is slightly safer in this regard because it gets absorbed, but the original risk is very low anyway.)
 
Yet, some people think that Covid was a lie, that a lot of people didn't die, that the vaccine failed. People wanted to take alternative medicines that had no demonstrated link to treating Covid. At least one place was handing out livestock medicine! Why? Because that is what bullshit they were told via right-wing media, likely far left-wing websites. Covid was a test of our national intelligence, and we failed.
If you look at the history of epidemiology, it's mostly failures, but the moments of victory save millions of lives that would have otherwise been lost. It's grim but important business, and at a certain point you just have to learn what you can from the previous failure and design a better response the next time. COVID was both a success and a failure, but overall I think we were more successful in stemming the tide of the crisis than you are intimating here. Certainly, compared to its last mass pandemic, the COVID response in the US was damn near miraculous in its efficacy.
The death tolls in Australia and New Zeeland imply America was a First World failure due to human nature and the irrepressible American sense of privilege.
Disagree. The virus got a head start here, we didn't have a hope of a success like Australia. We could have done better but not at Australia's level.
 

I wont hunt down a citation (and never saw an estimate of the relevant absolute numbers of "excess deaths") but studies showed that the death rate among Republicans was MUCH higher than among Democrats, at least after vaccines were available. The Ds followed science, while the Rs went out and bought bleach for injection or whatever.

Unfortunately the excess deaths among Republican voters were insufficient to save democracy.
Yeah, post-vaccine the difference is huge. Note, though, that they were measuring red/blue, not the person's party.
 
Yet, some people think that Covid was a lie, that a lot of people didn't die, that the vaccine failed. People wanted to take alternative medicines that had no demonstrated link to treating Covid. At least one place was handing out livestock medicine! Why? Because that is what bullshit they were told via right-wing media, likely far left-wing websites. Covid was a test of our national intelligence, and we failed.
If you look at the history of epidemiology, it's mostly failures, but the moments of victory save millions of lives that would have otherwise been lost. It's grim but important business, and at a certain point you just have to learn what you can from the previous failure and design a better response the next time. COVID was both a success and a failure, but overall I think we were more successful in stemming the tide of the crisis than you are intimating here. Certainly, compared to its last mass pandemic, the COVID response in the US was damn near miraculous in its efficacy.
The death tolls in Australia and New Zeeland imply America was a First World failure due to human nature and the irrepressible American sense of privilege.
Disagree. The virus got a head start here, we didn't have a hope of a success like Australia. We could have done better but not at Australia's level.
Bullshit! It took off in NYC and NJ. GOP controlled states made it a pearl clutching issue and so it went from medical pandemic to political potato and a lot more people died than needed to.
 
I quite disagree. Being against the MMR vaccine (especially if you got it as child oneself) is quite stupid and not that much different than against the Covid-19 vaccine. Yes Covid-19 was an immediate threat and measles, mumps, rubella, etc... are further back from being a direct threat, but that is due to constant immunization.
His point is that if everyone else is vaccinated it's in your interest not to be. Riling up the immune system always carries a slight risk no matter what the infectious agent or even if the agent is real. If everyone else is vaccinated you gain nothing from taking the risk.

The far left has long had an issue with science. While some aspects they have about unregulated big business and science being manipulated for corporate gain are not unfounded, those issues do not trump the fact that immunizations are the second most important development in human history, just behind the Haber-Bosch process development.
The far anything are nuts.
 
Please watch the video I posted above. It is a sanity check for your mind. Do you find yourself agreeing with what RFK Jr. says, or is that part of your mind that screams "this is utter unhinged bullshit." going active? There is no lukewarm position here.

If you find yourself agreeing with RFK Jr. in that video, or simply unable to tell the difference, I have to break it to you but the rational part of your brain is completely broken.
Do you believe people who have seen UFO's and say they have seen alien spacecraft are batshit crazy? Maybe they are but I don't have enough evidence to know. I know I have never seen an alien or UFO myself but does that mean these other people are batshit crazy? Eespecially when some of these sightings were recorded by our government.
They're not batshit. They're just jumping to conclusions.

Consider my "UFO" encounter. I kept seeing fairy-like things moving along in the distance--but they always vanished when I looked at them, everything looked completely normal. Being of a scientific bent I set out to figure out what was happening rather than thinking fairies or UFOs or the like. On the night in question I was wearing progressive glasses and looking at a spot high in the sky. It is simply impossible to cut a lens with a varying curvature and a clear focus across the whole surface. The reality is that in the areas to the lower left and lower right the lens does not resolve a proper image. Those of us who wear them learn to tune this out--but that night my head was in a position that put the bad patch above the horizon--and my brain was not tuning out the aircraft lights being turned into 5-pointed, vaguely humanoid figures. There was a consistent parade of aircraft on horizon.

Its not fair to call RFK a nut just yet unless we uncover all the truth. And thats not easy to do unless the US and Chinese governments become a whole lot more transparent.
But this is self-fulfilling. If you don't get the answer you want clearly they haven't been transparent enough. Never mind that there's nothing to find. The genetics have confirmed that there were at least two separate origin points. A lab leaked two different versions of the virus to the same wet market without ever infecting anyone else in the process?!?! (Note, though, that this does not completely exonerate the lab. If someone were diverting incoming lab animals to the wet market the infection could have passed through the lab without the lab being the origin point.)

Also, let's look at some admittedly iffy evidence:

1) 2012? A group of miners. Something that looked an awful lot like SARS, 50% mortality, no onward infections.

2) I have seen multiple reports of some sort of lung infection in Wuhan in the months before the blow-up, but disconnected incidents.

3) My wife has Chinese medical training--and Covid looks familiar to her but not as an infection.

And more solid but going a bit farther afield:

4) SARS. The origin was never found. The epidemiologists were able to defeat it but something is out there.

5) MERS. Even more deadly than SARS but minimal human-to-human transmission.

All of this says to me there's something out there that causes such symptoms in humans but that it generally does not transmit from humans to humans. Sometimes a human catches it, though. And even less commonly it mutates into a form more capable of human to human transmission. (We have seen multiple waves of this with Covid--what devastated us was not from China, but a mutation that appears to have arisen in Europe. And then there's Omicron.)

Such a case doesn't need a lab involved. There's no hint of a lab in anything other than the Wuhan case.
 
It sounds scary, and that's all that matters to me.
What matters to me is my son born with mild autism and I would not wish disorder on any other other child or parent raising that child. Certainly not for the sake of pharmaceutical profits.
Autism is a pain, but "autism" is a much more broad diagnosis than it was 40 years ago when they let it umbrella then entire Asperger Spectrum.
And recognizing that many who were thought mentally deficient are actually interaction deficient. It's a recategorization, the actual increase is small.
Is there evidence there has been an increase at all?
I haven't paid attention to whether that's been conclusively resolved. The thing is it wouldn't be meaningful if it were--it appears to be at least somewhat hereditary. The thing is those of us on the spectrum are strongly drawn towards the low-interaction STEM fields as they play to our strengths and reduce our weaknesses. Our interpersonal weaknesses don't apply to much with others on the spectrum--such grouping will end up producing marriages and thus babies.
 
Yet, some people think that Covid was a lie, that a lot of people didn't die, that the vaccine failed. People wanted to take alternative medicines that had no demonstrated link to treating Covid. At least one place was handing out livestock medicine! Why? Because that is what bullshit they were told via right-wing media, likely far left-wing websites. Covid was a test of our national intelligence, and we failed.
If you look at the history of epidemiology, it's mostly failures, but the moments of victory save millions of lives that would have otherwise been lost. It's grim but important business, and at a certain point you just have to learn what you can from the previous failure and design a better response the next time. COVID was both a success and a failure, but overall I think we were more successful in stemming the tide of the crisis than you are intimating here. Certainly, compared to its last mass pandemic, the COVID response in the US was damn near miraculous in its efficacy.
The death tolls in Australia and New Zeeland imply America was a First World failure due to human nature and the irrepressible American sense of privilege.
Disagree. The virus got a head start here, we didn't have a hope of a success like Australia. We could have done better but not at Australia's level.
Bullshit! It took off in NYC and NJ. GOP controlled states made it a pearl clutching issue and so it went from medical pandemic to political potato and a lot more people died than needed to.
As you say, it took off in NYC. That alone exceeded what happened in Australia. And it's pretty clear that it was at CES. 6-figures worth of people from all over the place jammed together in a few vast buildings--and before anyone knew there was a threat. Pandemic heaven. And because everyone went home afterwards we didn't have any one doctor seeing a bunch of similar patients (which is what caused China to realize it wasn't just a bit atypical pneumonia.)
 
the fact that immunizations are the second most important development in human history, just behind the Haber-Bosch process development.
I agree that they are very important, but your choice of first and second place in the list of most important inventions is an opinion, not a fact.
You are right. I should have said third to doughnuts. Fourth is printing press. Fifth is Doughnut holes. Sixth would be fried dough in general.
 
It sounds scary, and that's all that matters to me.
What matters to me is my son born with mild autism and I would not wish disorder on any other other child or parent raising that child. Certainly not for the sake of pharmaceutical profits.
Are you not using pharmaceuticals to treat your son?
 
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