Facebook Propaganda And Other Bullshit

[GenesisNemesis]

A thread for ridiculing and demolishing Facebook propaganda of all kinds! And other bullshit you might find.

Here's one my Earth science teacher from high school posted, he's a libertarian:

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So apparently, Obamacare is bad because of pre-existing medical malpractice that has nothing to do with Obamacare. Right. What's worse is he's a science teacher. He should understand how statistics can be misused. Yet when it comes to politics, people are completely blind to this. Somehow he had enough confidence to call this one of the "facts" that both liberals and conservatives should accept.

 

[smokeyrabbit]

By the age of 14, there were no teachers in my school system that were more intelligent than I or my classmates in the AP program. Science teachers are (GENERALIZAtioN ALERT) all the people that flunk out of engineering, medicine, etc.

Now, I know that's a sweeping statement and certainly not applicable to a lot of science teachers, but still, my experience bears it out.

Also I posit that the 195,000 by malpractice is artificially inflated by the number of frivolous lawsuits rather than only the actual deaths caused by gross negligence and/or chiropractic/homeopathic medicine

 

[Duke Leto]

I'm familiar with meme and actually took the time to research and debunk it.

There are several ways it is horseshit.

First, the meme leaves out handgun and probably shotgun killings, which would not create the desired effect.

Second, it assigns all the deaths attributed by the FBI to "hammers and other blunt instruments" and "knives and other cutting instruments" to hammers and knives explicitly, because representing a hammer as more dangerous than an assault rifle creates the desired comic effect.

Third, it eliminates from the conversation the majority of people involved in blunt or cutting instrument attacks who do not die from these attacks, whereas a much higher percentage of those attacked with rifles and handguns die.

Fourth, it misappropriates a statistic on the incidence of "medical malpractice" that should obviously be causing a cry of "bullshit". If the 195,000 number were accurate, than one in every 11 deaths would be the result of bad medicine. The number comes from a survey of deaths of Medicare recipients who are admitted to American hospitals and posits that 195,000 deaths per year are aggravated by inadequate hospital sterilization and nursing procedures. Like a lot of studies that troll for attention, it's a number intended to shock, and it actively redefines malpractice down to the absence of actions it deems that practitioners ought to be responsible for. Reflecting on what it is actually saying, I mentally reviewed the list of the last dozen or so elderly persons of my acquaintance who passed away in the last 15 years, and identified my maternal grandmother as the one the study was talking about. At age 80, she fell and broke her hip in her home after my grandfather had to be placed in a nursing home for a neurological disease, contracted pneumonia while in traction, and then died in the night before being put on life support after braindeath. Had there been better sanitation and more frequent nurse inspections at the hospital, it is arguable that she would have survived and lived another five or ten years. It is preposterous to hold the hospital at fault for her death though. Had she had no medical care, which would have been likely 100 years ago, she would likely have died where she fell had she lived to reach age 80.

Fifth, and most egregious, it extrapolates this comparatively minor way hospitals fail the elderly and concludes that the Affordable Care Act somehow extends that risk of death to healthy working age adults.