There don't have to be beneficiaries driving it. RFKj is an actual eugenicist. He's not doing it for hidden reasons. He's doing it because he thinks your child who does not survive measles should have died because that's the better outcome.
For TechCrunch you need to latch onto at least a few trends.
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Prior to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) it was mostly illegal to sell dietary supplements that weren’t legitimate. You couldn’t have homeopathy on the shelves at a drug store since it wouldn’t get through FDA approval. You couldn’t put so-called structure/function claims on the box such as ”for flu symptoms“ either. You couldn’t even do things like sell smoothies and claim that they boost the immune system.
Once the DSHEA passed, snake oil was back on the menu. It has now become a multi-billion dollar industry. If science and facts win out, a lot of people stand to lose a lot of money.
Saying "Everyone but me is lying to you." to ignorant people who are already suspicious of corporations and science is a simple way to consolidate power.
Once power is consolidated, you can then get paid by any snake oil salesman to say their snake oil is the best.
Hacker News is a little hard in these times. That it has kept politics unrelated to tech out is a great achievement, but as scientific method is being equated to flat-earth thinking by elected leaders talking about what's new in Rust seems off.
The distinction that there are separable and unrelated domains of knowledge and activity is a kind of Fordism of the mind that our current society has impressed upon us. It's artificial to not talk about politics in the same breath as science, since science and technology produce the resources that make our political process for distribution of those resources necessary. I think this is a correction for an aberrant distinction in our thinking.
> That it has kept politics unrelated to tech out is a great achievement
I see your point, but is it an achievement? Is there not some amount of civil rights abuse or a breakdown of society that would warrant discussion on all possible spaces?
I say this as someone that feels conflicted to see a daily twitter feed of tech leaders celebrating the performance of their favorite LLM breaking some new record when citizens and residents are being detained or discriminated against in violent and appalling ways... sometimes just meters from a fancy tech office!
Many of those tech "leaders", who are celebrating the performance of their favorite LLM are also large donors to politicians who are enabling the violent abuses of power you mentioned. I don't feel conflicted, because we're seeing exactly what they want to play out, play out.
Can I make a distinction of separating politics (especially US politics) from current affairs?
Shining a light on current affairs, sure. It’s nice to engage with those on this site. I get just as tired of seeing the same posts about LLMs and the Ai BuBbLe as you do. And there are some political stories that are probably worth the real estate here.
But where I’ll draw a distinction is that there will always be a political story grabbing attention on social media. And someone will always be outraged enough about it to deem it important enough for your outrage as well.
For example, I’m sure there are people who would say this is important news: “politician responds to other people who respond to Trump’s ballroom construction”[1].
If we don’t have some line on politics specifically (because that has proven to be engagement-bait high-sugar content for the internet), we will end up with a lot of low quality content here and less interesting / focused discussion with the people that make this site interesting.
Someone will always think every political story is important enough for discussion, but I think it’s healthy to keep HN free of most of it. Most of the low hanging, high-sugar fruit, at least.
It's especially hard given that big tech companies and their leaders are working closely with government and explicitly supporting certain political missions, there are few truly apolitical corners of tech now.
It was easier when "politics" and typical tech news overlapped now and then but not endlessly. You could filter ...
Now the culture wars and loyalty tests of the current government occur just about everywhere. There is no limit to the scope of topics that are part of the test, no objection will be tolerated. Any objection means you're <insert buzzword here>.
We're nearing the point where your point of view might even limit your choice of college (or maybe any college) if the president gets his way.
I guess doctors, scientists, and politicians are going to need to stop pretending COVID never happened then and acknowledge the massive loss in public trust that resulted in the pendulum swinging the other way.
I'm talking the mandates pushed by "experts" to force young K-12 students (Like my sister) into remote schooling that had profound impacts on their social life and education. Or when California arrested people for going to a beach or a public park based on the advice of their respective health experts. Or when Nevada closed Churches, but not Liquor Stores and Pot Dispensaries, because the experts had decided Constitutional Rights weren't an essential activity.
Perhaps when those mistakes are acknowledged things can go back to normal.
A church is literally a place for mass assembly, while a liquor store or dispensary can easily be configured for social distancing, i.e. only let up to N customers in the store at a time depending on the size.
But just think how good of a talking point this is!
Bad government stop CHURCH allow LIQUOR and DRUGS! Want to corrupt your CHILDREN, steal them from GODS arms and deliver to SATAN!
>A church is literally a place for mass assembly, while a liquor store or dispensary can easily be configured for social distancing, i.e. only let up to N customers in the store at a time depending on the size.
This logic makes 0 sense. Churches have the same capabilities to reconfigure, if not more most of them are just one big room. The same capabilities to limit patrons if it was required. They could split services and space the people out, or only let in N numbers of people as you suggested
A liquor store or dispensary functions just fine with as low as 3-5 customers in the store. A church with only 3-5 patrons allowed at a time is effectively closed for most purposes.
Public figures never had a problem with mass assembly.
That's why the Governor of California wined and dined at the French Laundry restaurant in violation of his own COVID protocols at the height of the pandemic. Or why public figures encouraged people to attend large protests. It's pretty obvious in retrospect that they were playing fast and loose with the science for entirely political reasons.
Sure, that doesn't give you license to play fast and loose rejecting science for entirely political reasons.
Individuals are fallible, politicians are hypocritical, news at 11. Rather than aim for consistent application of rules and justice, your movement seems to have overextrapolated these failings into a rejection of having any kind of society in the first place.
I think people view it more as an irreparable shattering of the social contract. Society exists, but the rules just don't matter. Many people have become strict conflict theorists, to borrow a term from sociology.
What political goals do you suppose they were trying to accomplish by restricting public gathering establishments? Is the governor of California secretly a Republican trying to help create right wing talking points?
There's a reason that churches were closed. It's an event which encourages lots and lots of people to gather in close proximity for an extended duration of time at the same time.
> Or when Nevada closed Churches, but not Liquor Stores and Pot Dispensaries, because the experts had decided Constitutional Rights weren't an essential activity.
People die from alcohol withdrawal, and dispensaries are medical care for a lot of folks.
> People die from alcohol withdrawal, and dispensaries are medical care for a lot of folks.
This is the exact type of argument that merely helped to inflame the debate.
The real distinction is that church services are mass gatherings of people, whereas liquor and pot are retail establishments that only serve a few people at a given time. Stores can institute policies to make people come into even less contact - whereas for churches the mass of people coming together is intrinsic.
The original argument fallaciously skips over that actual reality, and frames it as if public health administrators are godless heathens more interested in people getting their weed and booze than people going to church. Your counter argument, despite being technically correct, actually buttresses support for the original one.
I'm with you on the idea that fascists will make any argument, and only value arguments as weapons rather than a good-faith attempt to figure things out. But I still believe there are people in the middle who are swayed by better arguments.
Maybe that's just my fatal flaw of being eternally hopeful that people will actually use their intelligence. But if this isn't the case, then what are we even doing?
(as for your actual argument, one can make the same argument that people will die without being able to get their fix of social church interaction. so then we're talking about numbers for hypotheticals, and right back to the dynamic where it's not even about logic)
I think it was more meant as the society is ignoring it like a trauma that no one wants to talk about. This results in missing learnings on decisions that were taken back then.
My understanding is that pasteurization denatures enzymes that would otherwise make the milk easier to digest. Which is true.
The problem is that the stringent production standards that would be required to make raw milk "safe" are incompatible with factory production and the profit motive. Unless you're personally vetting the sterilization of everything the milk comes into contact with and its immediate cooling to a temperature non-conducive to bacterial overgrowth, you probably shouldn't drink it.
It has nothing to do with science really. I don't think "pro-raw-milk people" question safety benefits of pasteurization or doubt germ theory. It's only about people's lack of nuance, totalitarian ambitions and safetism. Some people just can't help but make decisions for other people because they think they are smarter and know better. Ban, ban, unsafe, ban, I know better. The idea that consuming raw milk is somehow "unscientific" is plain stupid and/or propaganda. All I want is to enjoy the taste of raw milk from time to time, I know how germs work, I'm not forcing anyone to drink it, but I'll be fine, please worry about yourself.
I would even appreciate government making sure that companies selling raw milk to me are taking additional (but reasonable) precautions. But anyone just trying to ban raw milk for being unsafe and "unscientific" is just stupid.
Not only that link is a paywall, but I just don't trust propaganda outlets like this. Over and over I've seen these twisting and misinterpreting people's opinions. Quick googling suggests that he does have some unconventional (borderline quackery?) opinions there, though lots of it seems like a typical smearing tactics. Nevertheless, if I need to support even a complete quack to defend my rights, so be it. I wish both sides were more reasonable, so we could slap some warning signs on raw milk bottles, ensure higher safety standards on raw milk producers, so I could enjoy my glass of raw milk in peace, but I guess it is never going to happen.
The WSJ is, if anything, editorially right-wing, and bypassing the paywall is trivial; https://archive.is/n4JZL.
Excerpts:
> “The ubiquity of pasteurization and vaccinations are only two of the many indicators of the domineering ascendancy of germ theory as the cornerstone of contemporary public health policy,” he wrote in the book. “A $1 trillion pharmaceutical industry pushing patented pills, powders, pricks, potions and poisons and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology … fortifies the century-old predominance of germ theory.”
> As his political profile grew, Kennedy made his war on germ theory part of his public platform. As a presidential candidate in 2023, he promised to tell the National Institutes of Health to “give infectious disease a break for about eight years,” NBC reported. On a 2023 episode of Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, Kennedy said “it’s hard for an infectious disease to kill a healthy person with a rugged immune system”—an assertion that runs counter to modern medical consensus. When Rogan said that wasn’t true of the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed more than 50 million people globally, Kennedy replied: “Well, the Spanish flu was not a virus.”
I'm not sure how to share a society with people who think it's OK for the HHS Secretary to be a quack.
That's a really good way to put it. I'll add that in my experience with raw milk, while I can still taste the taste I also think fondly about the relationship I had with the farmer and even (once or twice) the help I got to give at the farm.
How many human lives are worth the cost for you to enjoy the taste of raw milk that has been distributed across state lines from time to time? If possible please answer both in terms of acceptable deaths, but also in terms of hospitalization cases that did not result in death.
If banning the sale of raw milk saves a life is it still stupid and unscientific? What if it saves 10,000? A million?
People act like these things are a personal attack on them and their freedoms. Like they happened in a vacuum. Like a bunch of bros got together in the 40s - 70s and thought to themselves, "how can we deny future raw milk aficionado dpc_01234 his druthers decades from now". Pay no mind to the thousands of lives that could be saved from terrible diseases like tuberculosis.
This type of thinking and commentary (propaganda?) just constantly being thrust into the world is not only ignorant but it's dangerous. Good luck to you and yours man, I hope the worst that happens to you from this willful lack or regard for both science and history is the inevitable food poisoning you'll get from blindly ignoring food safety because "germ milk yummy".
These people do not understand the level of testing that we do; the statistics of efficacy or safety. Perhaps we need to explain it better, but it is really quite complex to explain. There's a trope that if you cannot explain something in a simple way, that thing must not be true. If so I would like someone to explain quantum mechanics and relativity to a 10 year old. Good luck.
It is if you don't understand the germ theory of disease, and how many bacteria can be present in raw milk. There is a reason that pasteurization was revolutionary, and it's because it caused fewer people to die.
If you don't understand the science behind pasteurization, you should absolutely "trust the experts", aka scientists, or if you prefer, trust the old wisdom of previous generations who knew the value of pasteurization and watched people die of preventable illnesses before it came along.
The biggest benefit of pasteurization is extending the shelf life, which is important in an industrialized economy. Dying due to consuming raw milk was not a problem, at least until milk had to be shipped long distances.
Not just distance, but time. If you try to keep milk around for any amount of time after milking the cow, you run risks like Bird Flus and TB and other disease contaminants.
Which is also why in the other direction cheese was invented for time stability of milk.
Really depends on the country and the access to clean processes between milking a cow and your glass tho.
Kind of related I was really shocked when I saw people eating raw pork mince in Germany when I lived there. My first reaction is that I would never do that based on my upbringing but if natural selection is a thing it's working fine for them I guess.
But it's not dependent on the country in this case, it's the US we're talking about. And I absolutely would not trust the US dairy industry to be able to properly produce and sell pathogen-free milk without pasteurization. And I would assume they don't want the liability of selling it anyway, most people and companies avoid selling things that can kill you if possible.
Believing that one should be able to consume raw milk is not anti-science. Yes pasteurization kills bacteria that can be present in milk which can cause serious harm and also it kills bacteria that can be positive and people should have the right to choose to consume it and sell it with proper disclosures.
I never understood the fear of raw milk.
The best cheese are made with raw milk. I don't understand how it can't be safe when both the cow and the milk are
tested for disease and bad germs.
Isn't cheese making just an old process of preserving milk for later consumption, which removes moisture and thus the environment for harmful bacteria?
I have no idea what the rules are, but I'm sure you can make whatever you want. If something is illegal, it's is probably illegal to _sell_ it, which i think is reasonable. I wouldn't trust just anyone to sell me raw milk cheese, and would want them to follow food safely regulations when doing so, which maybe are not compatible with the process of making raw milk cheese.
I know, but the topic at hand is about buying raw milk? From the article
> Powerful anti-vaccine advocates and people selling potentially harmful goods such as raw milk are profiting from the push to write anti-science policies into law across the U.S.
Plenty of things have serious health impacts and we don't mandate it. To go after something as niche as raw milk is weird in my view. Heart disease leads to quite a few deaths and we don't ban McDonalds.
If the fear is actually the drinking of raw milk then they should ban that, not the buying/selling of it.
> Plenty of things have serious health impacts and we don't mandate it.
There are very few things with serious health impacts that are completely unregulated. The closest we get is probably guns.
> To go after something as niche as raw milk is weird in my view.
It wasn't niche when we regulated it. It's niche now because we did.
> Heart disease leads to quite a few deaths and we don't ban McDonalds.
We take plenty of regulatory steps to reduce heart disease. McDonalds is required, for example, to provide nutrition facts. The burger meat gets USDA inspected. The restaurants get health inspections. (And we do try to do more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drinks_portion_cap_rule)
> There are very few things with serious health impacts that are completely unregulated. The closest we get is probably guns.
Guns are more regulated than most everything else? Background checks, age verification, licensed dealers, rules on transporting and storing guns, etc.
> It wasn't niche when we regulated it. It's niche now because we did.
Just not true. It is niche in places where it is not regulated as well and some portion of those who buy raw milk pasteurize it themselves so we don't even know how many people drink raw milk.
> We take plenty of regulatory steps to reduce heart disease. McDonalds is required, for example, to provide nutrition facts.
Almost nobody reads that at a McDonalds...
> The burger meat gets USDA inspected. The restaurants get health inspections. (And we do try to do more.
And yet you can go to a McDonalds and die from a heart attack. Many places do not let you take that risk with raw milk.
Despite all these regulations you mentioned, McDonalds has more stores than ever before. With your reasoning that should be turning McDonalds into a niche place.
This is ridiculous. "Well there is something that people at home could do to make this safe so its no biggie to sell it even though we know that virtually nobody will do that thing."
Not the most anti-science, but clearly foolish. The safety of humans consuming raw-milk was solved long ago by Pasteur. Its all part of the dumbing-down section of the control the people handbook.
The problem with this kind of thing is that the story looks different at the level of a government than at the individual level.
The FDA article mentioned 2,645 illnesses and 228 hospitalizations in a 20-year period, and that was a period during which raw milk was heavily regulated, so would be likely to be significantly higher otherwise.
Still, the odds of you as an individual getting sick from raw milk would be relatively low. Does that mean it shouldn't be regulated? It's not a purely scientific decision.
Perhaps another way to go would be warning labels on raw milk. Still, I bet that would produce much higher illness numbers than the ones quoted above.
In the end the question is whether the government should be trying to help people stay healthy or not. If the goal is actually "Make America Healthy Again," then requiring milk to be pasteurized is an obvious choice.
Pasteurization has been settled science since the 1860s. It's benefits are extremely well known and well studied. We understand the contamination issues it solved in trying to sell things across large distances and/or from grocery shelves that may take some amount of time to sell. We see those contamination issues in "Raw Milk" sales, exactly as predicted.
It seems pretty anti-science to me, going against such foundational food and health science.
It also seems directly related to anti-vax anti-science efforts because Louis Pasteur was also a critical early scientist involved in vaccines (through efforts against Cholera and beyond).
And Republicans! Damaged/hurt/frightened humans tend to vote for right wing and fascists. This is because going left wing is expensive, it requires time to know, like and trust your neighbors.
I wish people would stop with the whole “X is a distraction from Y” thing. It’s too optimistic: It makes it sound like the reason people aren’t “doing something” about Y is because they’re distracted by X, when in reality people have no ability to stop X or Y and are just helplessly and knowingly watching both happen.
It's about disillusion with everything that is established. It has a strategic component to it as well, sowing chaos to upend the power structures and overtake them. Contrarian thinking in all domains, challenging something as foundational as the scientific method, even. This is the moment of postmodernism, just for the political right.
Is it a long time for the vaccine thing? I thought anti-vax was a California vaguely hippie-ish thing in the 90s. It's actually weird that conservatives picked it up. I guess the throughline is being anti-flouride in the 60s?
Trumpists aren't actually deserving the label "conservative". They're the complete opposite - a mashed together hodgepodge of anti-everything grievance politics. Trump's main feature is a stream of drivel that sounds honest, opinionated, and assertive if you only listen to part of it. If you try to listen to everything he says and logically reconcile the statements, it's all contradictory. The only consistency is that grievance emotion. So it has created a big tent of follower-type people who value emotion over intelligence (think the stereotypical mind-blown hippie, man), from all sorts of (what are effectively) counter cultures. It doesn't matter that they aren't implementing good solutions, and that a lot of time there aren't any good solutions. The followers are just happy "someone is talking about it [, man]".
The only difference I see between Trump and Reagan or Thatcher, for example, is how blatant Trump is about killing the people he sees as undesirable. Just get ICE to grab them instead of slowly turning off welfare and deregulating everything that pollutes, for example.
Through a narrow lens like that, sure. I'm not saying Trumpism isn't something that has been building in the Republican party for decades. I often say this is their talk radio monster that they had been harvesting the energy of, finally escaping its cage and devouring the party.
Reagan was a bit before my time as an adult, so I don't have a solid opinion of the emotional content of his speeches. But I don't think it was a bunch of everything about the US is broken and wrong, and we need to tear it down. I feel like the cognitive dissonance was much more narrowly scoped to those specific social issues you're talking about.
Also note that conservatism is necessarily a product of the times. A position that was considered conservative in the 1980's is likely not conservative a generation and a half later.
I don't know about that. Does a schizophrenic "really want" to stop the CIA from implanting bugs in their teeth?
I think there are a hugely under appreciated percentage of people who are essentially fantasy based too. They've been encouraged to pick a cause, some of them decide that they know the secret that scientists are using vaccines to control the population or something.
If you talk to them they won't give you any more of a rational defense than the tooth bug guy. RFK Jr is just another resource Trump and the Republicans use to distract and degrade anyone in their way.
>I've been drinking raw milk probably since I was 3 year old, like most kids in my relatively underdeveloped country before I moved to the US.
Why do you think this is a strong enough reason to allow a dangerous product that used to kill people onto the market? This anecdote isn't a strong empirical justification for the safety of raw milk, just like saying that you often don't crash your car isn't a good argument for the unnecessity of seatbelts. Food poisoning incidents are not that common, even in unsanitary conditions - pasteurisation is about making it so that kids don't get unlucky.
Just because you've done something with clearly demonstrable problems without encountering the rare but serious issue with it does not mean the rest of society has to be ok with it.
The attitude "if something is rare enough that I don't personally see a problem means there IS no problem" is dumb in a country with 300 million people or a world with 9 billion people.
Like smoking: most people who smoke don't get lung cancer. But the risk increases enough that it ends up costing the public coffers quite a lot of money. Thus it is within the remit and interest of the public to curtail smoking, even if your grandmother smoked every day of her life till she died at 100 in a bungie jumping accident.
It is one thing to believe that it would be better to have libertarian system that let you personally take the risk of drinking raw milk. But its dumb to call the regulation totalitarian.
Drinking untreated water also only has the _potential_ to cause disease. Playing Russian roulette with a loaded revolver only has the _potential_ to cause death.
Luckily, science can quantify those potentials and determine when the reward outweighs the risks.
If we, as a country, decided to let people who drank unpasteurized milk or untreated water to die without burdening the medical system, it would truly be their own choice. Once a society decides it will care for those people at a cost to the general public, it becomes necessary to protect the public from the burden of their ignorance.
Honestly the overburden to the health system sounds like lame excuse. We don't have an overburden there because of the massive consumption of raw milk. Try to buy some legally and you'll get the picture of how hard it is to find and how expensive it is. I'll happily wave any rights to be emergency treated for any reason (traffic accidents included) if you grant me the right to live in peace and buy the milk and meat from sources I like because that's what this freedom is worth to me.
Anyone that I know that drinks raw milk, raw uncured meats, untreated water hasn't seen a doctor in over a decade.. not terribly scientific but a good indicator that I won't buy pharma-money backed "scientific" studies that show that low-fat, low-sodium and oats-in-cereal-bars are the solution to health issues. I'm all for science and capitalism but they're both not substitutes for common sense.
The article (no surprise from AP) goes a long way to make sure the negativity vocabulary soup is complete against all conservative voices that advocate self-determination.
Please don't take away my freedom by dictating my health choices, esp. when you live in a concrete jungle and eat fast food at least five days a week.
I think it's wrong to think of MAHA as "anti-science" because science is all about questioning. Something as important as medicine should be questioned and questioned again and again. Simply dismissing them out-of-hand with such a term is more anti-science than what they're doing.
Now having said that, it's perfectly fair to criticize some of their assumptions and methods. The article, for instance, talks about raw milk. Pasteurization seems like a smart idea to me, but to assert that anyone who drinks raw milk is "anti science" is wrong. They're just approaching science differently.
Asking questions doesn't mean making policy changes or public health announcements before you have any answers.
It's important to understand that some people use "healthy skepticism" and "I'm just asking questions" as a cover screen to promote their desired policy. That isn't the scientific method.
I hear you and I once cringed at a "believe in science" sign at a liberal protest.
But science is about questions demanding proof and rigor, verification, reproducible results. It's not about blindly saying "Yeah my questioning makes a bunch of unsupported claims equally valid".
>But science is about questions demanding proof and rigor, verification, reproducible results. It's not about blindly saying "Yeah my questioning makes a bunch of unsupported claims equally valid".
Asimov's take[0] on stuff like this is just as relevant as ever:
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov
Although it seems to concisely describe more and more (and far too much, IMHO) of our public discourse these days. And more's the pity.
Questioning is great, but to generate scientific knowledge, we need a few more steps, roughly speaking:
1. Ask a question
2. Form a hypothesis
3. Experiment to test it
4. Analyze results
5. Draw conclusions
6. Repeat
The MAHA folks essentially disregard this as a valid process for gathering knowledge. They occasionally talk about experiments and studies, but they are selectively chosen to support their conclusions in a posthoc way, ignoring both evidence to the contrary and basic methodological issues. When people describe them as "anti-science," I believe this is the kind of thing they have in mind.
Questioning your own beliefs isn't a requirement to science. Just sayin'
You question mine, and I'll question yours completes the cycle but if you don't let me question yours because you already did that, where's the science in that?
An experiment is essentially a way to question ones own beliefs by probing how well they align with reality. There are some theoretical scientists, who don't experiment, but I think they also benefit from counterfactual reasoning to do their work.
I see that and I'm not trying to pick a fight but that argument only covers 50%: am I allowed to not question my beliefs when they are held true by my experiments and observations? (Rhetorical)
Beliefs become religion when you have that choice to make and then you should absolutely not publish against your better judgment for any sum of money but work on your belief system.
What I'm saying is that it still is not a requirement to science to challenge your beliefs because when you miss or omit that part your experiments and observations are still of scientific nature ergo challenging your beliefs is not a requirement to science [my original claim].
You're free to challenge them down the line with your own experiments and observations for me, giving me a chance to reevaluate my beliefs.
RFK, Jr.'s assessment of medical evidence is bad, and he doesn't seem to have spent a second on ending public advertising of prescription drugs. I personally don't like him and have never liked him. But also, medical evidence is bad and wrong, the modern anti-vax movement was started by the low standards of The Lancet, and big pharma really does run our media (through that advertising) and consistently suborns all medical research.
Watching that fake Alzheimer's drug get repeatedly reintroduced as a miracle for a change of 1.5 questions on a subjective checklist, even after a bunch of experts at the FDA who had a moral center quit over it, was depressing. Putting this quack rich kid at the head of the agency will at least have some effect on it other than the effect of big pharma cash.
I think the proof for the effectiveness of the MMR and HPV vaccines is indisputable. I also think that big pharma lobbying for vaccine indemnification against lawsuits, and the consequent explosion in the number of vaccines, was an opportunity to push a lot of stuff in that the "science" defenders never seem to bring up. They always defend the entire class of "vaccines," and avoid the harder to defend specifics. This is something you have to be paid to do, because it is a deliberate rhetorical distraction.
Also, the classes of drugs that make the most money (not vaccines) have the least evidence of effect. Not just the real evidence, but even the claimed effects are tiny and take a bunch of suspicious math to find. This is a sign of a system that runs on corruption. Not that you need signs, because the companies are making direct payments. Just like we legalized bribery in our politics, we normalized bribery in medical literature, practice, and journalism.
[*] like Ioannidis taught us before he got canceled for being more right (or at the worst equally wrong in the other direction) about covid than everyone else. Remember when HN worshiped the science, rather than "the science," and posted every Ioannidis paper?
The quack rich kid is breaking the parts of NIH/CDC/etc that were working correctly. Writing that off as "some effect" ignores what we can already plainly see.
There don't have to be beneficiaries driving it. RFKj is an actual eugenicist. He's not doing it for hidden reasons. He's doing it because he thinks your child who does not survive measles should have died because that's the better outcome.
Why did he not treat his brain parasites the same?
The same reason that RFK uses TRT for "anti-aging": they're hypocrites and don't care.
These folks are all selling supplements or some other quackery, they profit from it.
Since I feel powerless to stop it I wonder if I should shift my portfolio to the funeral industry and try to profit from it.
I'm only kind of joking.
From the front page of Bloomberg today
> "Disaster Spending Has Become an $8 Trillion Engine for US Growth"
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For TechCrunch you need to latch onto at least a few trends.
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Prior to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) it was mostly illegal to sell dietary supplements that weren’t legitimate. You couldn’t have homeopathy on the shelves at a drug store since it wouldn’t get through FDA approval. You couldn’t put so-called structure/function claims on the box such as ”for flu symptoms“ either. You couldn’t even do things like sell smoothies and claim that they boost the immune system.
Once the DSHEA passed, snake oil was back on the menu. It has now become a multi-billion dollar industry. If science and facts win out, a lot of people stand to lose a lot of money.
the eternal struggle of big corporations lobbying. Before it was big pharma now its big supplement.. in the end the consumer gets the stick
Saying "Everyone but me is lying to you." to ignorant people who are already suspicious of corporations and science is a simple way to consolidate power.
Once power is consolidated, you can then get paid by any snake oil salesman to say their snake oil is the best.
Hacker News is a little hard in these times. That it has kept politics unrelated to tech out is a great achievement, but as scientific method is being equated to flat-earth thinking by elected leaders talking about what's new in Rust seems off.
The distinction that there are separable and unrelated domains of knowledge and activity is a kind of Fordism of the mind that our current society has impressed upon us. It's artificial to not talk about politics in the same breath as science, since science and technology produce the resources that make our political process for distribution of those resources necessary. I think this is a correction for an aberrant distinction in our thinking.
> It's artificial to not talk about politics in the same breath as science
No its not, its weird to talk about politics without science, but its not weird to be interested science without wanting to care about politics.
> That it has kept politics unrelated to tech out is a great achievement
I see your point, but is it an achievement? Is there not some amount of civil rights abuse or a breakdown of society that would warrant discussion on all possible spaces?
I say this as someone that feels conflicted to see a daily twitter feed of tech leaders celebrating the performance of their favorite LLM breaking some new record when citizens and residents are being detained or discriminated against in violent and appalling ways... sometimes just meters from a fancy tech office!
Many of those tech "leaders", who are celebrating the performance of their favorite LLM are also large donors to politicians who are enabling the violent abuses of power you mentioned. I don't feel conflicted, because we're seeing exactly what they want to play out, play out.
Can I make a distinction of separating politics (especially US politics) from current affairs?
Shining a light on current affairs, sure. It’s nice to engage with those on this site. I get just as tired of seeing the same posts about LLMs and the Ai BuBbLe as you do. And there are some political stories that are probably worth the real estate here.
But where I’ll draw a distinction is that there will always be a political story grabbing attention on social media. And someone will always be outraged enough about it to deem it important enough for your outrage as well.
For example, I’m sure there are people who would say this is important news: “politician responds to other people who respond to Trump’s ballroom construction”[1].
If we don’t have some line on politics specifically (because that has proven to be engagement-bait high-sugar content for the internet), we will end up with a lot of low quality content here and less interesting / focused discussion with the people that make this site interesting.
Someone will always think every political story is important enough for discussion, but I think it’s healthy to keep HN free of most of it. Most of the low hanging, high-sugar fruit, at least.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5566872-donald-trump-whi...
I really hope it doesn't become the norm. Check r/technology on reddit and it's 90% US politics posts
It's especially hard given that big tech companies and their leaders are working closely with government and explicitly supporting certain political missions, there are few truly apolitical corners of tech now.
That is a very good point. The big tech leaders have politically soiled the industry.
It was easier when "politics" and typical tech news overlapped now and then but not endlessly. You could filter ...
Now the culture wars and loyalty tests of the current government occur just about everywhere. There is no limit to the scope of topics that are part of the test, no objection will be tolerated. Any objection means you're <insert buzzword here>.
We're nearing the point where your point of view might even limit your choice of college (or maybe any college) if the president gets his way.
I understand the frustration but the people on this board have real ability to make change so I think it’s worthwhile.
I guess doctors, scientists, and politicians are going to need to stop pretending COVID never happened then and acknowledge the massive loss in public trust that resulted in the pendulum swinging the other way.
I'm talking the mandates pushed by "experts" to force young K-12 students (Like my sister) into remote schooling that had profound impacts on their social life and education. Or when California arrested people for going to a beach or a public park based on the advice of their respective health experts. Or when Nevada closed Churches, but not Liquor Stores and Pot Dispensaries, because the experts had decided Constitutional Rights weren't an essential activity.
Perhaps when those mistakes are acknowledged things can go back to normal.
A church is literally a place for mass assembly, while a liquor store or dispensary can easily be configured for social distancing, i.e. only let up to N customers in the store at a time depending on the size.
But just think how good of a talking point this is!
Bad government stop CHURCH allow LIQUOR and DRUGS! Want to corrupt your CHILDREN, steal them from GODS arms and deliver to SATAN!
>A church is literally a place for mass assembly, while a liquor store or dispensary can easily be configured for social distancing, i.e. only let up to N customers in the store at a time depending on the size.
This logic makes 0 sense. Churches have the same capabilities to reconfigure, if not more most of them are just one big room. The same capabilities to limit patrons if it was required. They could split services and space the people out, or only let in N numbers of people as you suggested
It does not make 0 sense.
A liquor store or dispensary functions just fine with as low as 3-5 customers in the store. A church with only 3-5 patrons allowed at a time is effectively closed for most purposes.
It is literally a gathering space.
Public figures never had a problem with mass assembly.
That's why the Governor of California wined and dined at the French Laundry restaurant in violation of his own COVID protocols at the height of the pandemic. Or why public figures encouraged people to attend large protests. It's pretty obvious in retrospect that they were playing fast and loose with the science for entirely political reasons.
Sure, that doesn't give you license to play fast and loose rejecting science for entirely political reasons.
Individuals are fallible, politicians are hypocritical, news at 11. Rather than aim for consistent application of rules and justice, your movement seems to have overextrapolated these failings into a rejection of having any kind of society in the first place.
I think people view it more as an irreparable shattering of the social contract. Society exists, but the rules just don't matter. Many people have become strict conflict theorists, to borrow a term from sociology.
What political goals do you suppose they were trying to accomplish by restricting public gathering establishments? Is the governor of California secretly a Republican trying to help create right wing talking points?
There's a reason that churches were closed. It's an event which encourages lots and lots of people to gather in close proximity for an extended duration of time at the same time.
Remember this?
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/13/us/coronavirus-washington-cho...
> Or when Nevada closed Churches, but not Liquor Stores and Pot Dispensaries, because the experts had decided Constitutional Rights weren't an essential activity.
People die from alcohol withdrawal, and dispensaries are medical care for a lot of folks.
> People die from alcohol withdrawal, and dispensaries are medical care for a lot of folks.
This is the exact type of argument that merely helped to inflame the debate.
The real distinction is that church services are mass gatherings of people, whereas liquor and pot are retail establishments that only serve a few people at a given time. Stores can institute policies to make people come into even less contact - whereas for churches the mass of people coming together is intrinsic.
The original argument fallaciously skips over that actual reality, and frames it as if public health administrators are godless heathens more interested in people getting their weed and booze than people going to church. Your counter argument, despite being technically correct, actually buttresses support for the original one.
“People will die if we do x” is important, even if it hurts the fee-fees.
“It’s a mass gathering” arguments met the same resistance. Any argument would have.
Whatever your own feelings on the matter are, condescending to people with terms like "fee-fees" only engenders more conflict and outrage.
It's a fraction of a drop in an ocean of online hostility and malevolence, but is still a contributor nonetheless.
I'm with you on the idea that fascists will make any argument, and only value arguments as weapons rather than a good-faith attempt to figure things out. But I still believe there are people in the middle who are swayed by better arguments.
Maybe that's just my fatal flaw of being eternally hopeful that people will actually use their intelligence. But if this isn't the case, then what are we even doing?
(as for your actual argument, one can make the same argument that people will die without being able to get their fix of social church interaction. so then we're talking about numbers for hypotheticals, and right back to the dynamic where it's not even about logic)
Who’s pretending COVID didn’t happen?
I think it was more meant as the society is ignoring it like a trauma that no one wants to talk about. This results in missing learnings on decisions that were taken back then.
Dying of Covid is worse than a bad impact to social life and education.
Raw milk doesn't seem to me the most anti science thing to me
But I believe the premise that financial interests aren't being challenged
It’s scientifically valid to want to drink raw milk in some cases.
However pasteurized milk allows for factory production and raw milk does not. That’s the real reason why it’s banned.
The same government that banned raw milk allows Doritos to be sold in the billions and even bought with Snap/EBT, btw.
Imagine believing articles like this and thinking somehow allowing a product that's legal in most advanced European countries is "Anti science"
Now ask yourself why.
Their farms can’t get away with the same conditions we put American cows in. Because of regulation.
Same reason chicken sashimi can be safe in Japan.
What’s the scientific reason to choose raw milk over pasteurized milk?
My understanding is that pasteurization denatures enzymes that would otherwise make the milk easier to digest. Which is true.
The problem is that the stringent production standards that would be required to make raw milk "safe" are incompatible with factory production and the profit motive. Unless you're personally vetting the sterilization of everything the milk comes into contact with and its immediate cooling to a temperature non-conducive to bacterial overgrowth, you probably shouldn't drink it.
It has nothing to do with science really. I don't think "pro-raw-milk people" question safety benefits of pasteurization or doubt germ theory. It's only about people's lack of nuance, totalitarian ambitions and safetism. Some people just can't help but make decisions for other people because they think they are smarter and know better. Ban, ban, unsafe, ban, I know better. The idea that consuming raw milk is somehow "unscientific" is plain stupid and/or propaganda. All I want is to enjoy the taste of raw milk from time to time, I know how germs work, I'm not forcing anyone to drink it, but I'll be fine, please worry about yourself.
I would even appreciate government making sure that companies selling raw milk to me are taking additional (but reasonable) precautions. But anyone just trying to ban raw milk for being unsafe and "unscientific" is just stupid.
> I don't think "pro-raw-milk people" question safety benefits of pasteurization or doubt germ theory.
The HHS Secretary of the United States does. https://www.wsj.com/health/rfk-jr-what-is-terrain-theory-66b...
Not only that link is a paywall, but I just don't trust propaganda outlets like this. Over and over I've seen these twisting and misinterpreting people's opinions. Quick googling suggests that he does have some unconventional (borderline quackery?) opinions there, though lots of it seems like a typical smearing tactics. Nevertheless, if I need to support even a complete quack to defend my rights, so be it. I wish both sides were more reasonable, so we could slap some warning signs on raw milk bottles, ensure higher safety standards on raw milk producers, so I could enjoy my glass of raw milk in peace, but I guess it is never going to happen.
The WSJ is, if anything, editorially right-wing, and bypassing the paywall is trivial; https://archive.is/n4JZL.
Excerpts:
> “The ubiquity of pasteurization and vaccinations are only two of the many indicators of the domineering ascendancy of germ theory as the cornerstone of contemporary public health policy,” he wrote in the book. “A $1 trillion pharmaceutical industry pushing patented pills, powders, pricks, potions and poisons and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology … fortifies the century-old predominance of germ theory.”
> As his political profile grew, Kennedy made his war on germ theory part of his public platform. As a presidential candidate in 2023, he promised to tell the National Institutes of Health to “give infectious disease a break for about eight years,” NBC reported. On a 2023 episode of Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, Kennedy said “it’s hard for an infectious disease to kill a healthy person with a rugged immune system”—an assertion that runs counter to modern medical consensus. When Rogan said that wasn’t true of the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed more than 50 million people globally, Kennedy replied: “Well, the Spanish flu was not a virus.”
I'm not sure how to share a society with people who think it's OK for the HHS Secretary to be a quack.
That's a really good way to put it. I'll add that in my experience with raw milk, while I can still taste the taste I also think fondly about the relationship I had with the farmer and even (once or twice) the help I got to give at the farm.
How many human lives are worth the cost for you to enjoy the taste of raw milk that has been distributed across state lines from time to time? If possible please answer both in terms of acceptable deaths, but also in terms of hospitalization cases that did not result in death.
If banning the sale of raw milk saves a life is it still stupid and unscientific? What if it saves 10,000? A million?
People act like these things are a personal attack on them and their freedoms. Like they happened in a vacuum. Like a bunch of bros got together in the 40s - 70s and thought to themselves, "how can we deny future raw milk aficionado dpc_01234 his druthers decades from now". Pay no mind to the thousands of lives that could be saved from terrible diseases like tuberculosis.
This type of thinking and commentary (propaganda?) just constantly being thrust into the world is not only ignorant but it's dangerous. Good luck to you and yours man, I hope the worst that happens to you from this willful lack or regard for both science and history is the inevitable food poisoning you'll get from blindly ignoring food safety because "germ milk yummy".
These people do not understand the level of testing that we do; the statistics of efficacy or safety. Perhaps we need to explain it better, but it is really quite complex to explain. There's a trope that if you cannot explain something in a simple way, that thing must not be true. If so I would like someone to explain quantum mechanics and relativity to a 10 year old. Good luck.
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Pasteurization was discovered in 1860s, so she probably didn't have to. It was made mandatory starting in the late 1940s in the US.
Prior to that, a whole bunch of folks got TB from it. Here's a PSA about making milk safe for babies from 1912; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Give_The_Bottle-Fed_...
If you're referring to breast milk, your mother probably wasn't raised in a dairy farm.
Are you directly sucking the cow? If yes, I'd support you drinking raw milk.
> her milk
Are you seriously equating breast milk with cow milk? Or did I misinterpret your post?
I read it more as a suggestion that the parent poster's mother was a cow
It is if you don't understand the germ theory of disease, and how many bacteria can be present in raw milk. There is a reason that pasteurization was revolutionary, and it's because it caused fewer people to die.
If you don't understand the science behind pasteurization, you should absolutely "trust the experts", aka scientists, or if you prefer, trust the old wisdom of previous generations who knew the value of pasteurization and watched people die of preventable illnesses before it came along.
The biggest benefit of pasteurization is extending the shelf life, which is important in an industrialized economy. Dying due to consuming raw milk was not a problem, at least until milk had to be shipped long distances.
Not just distance, but time. If you try to keep milk around for any amount of time after milking the cow, you run risks like Bird Flus and TB and other disease contaminants.
Which is also why in the other direction cheese was invented for time stability of milk.
this is a shockingly false thing to see someone say, I have family members who have died due to drinking milk from their own farm
pasteurization and vaccination are the crown jewels of modern civilization
I'm sorry for your loss. I have people in family who died in a car accident. I still drive a car.
And have you removed the seat belts and disabled the airbags in it?
Really depends on the country and the access to clean processes between milking a cow and your glass tho.
Kind of related I was really shocked when I saw people eating raw pork mince in Germany when I lived there. My first reaction is that I would never do that based on my upbringing but if natural selection is a thing it's working fine for them I guess.
But it's not dependent on the country in this case, it's the US we're talking about. And I absolutely would not trust the US dairy industry to be able to properly produce and sell pathogen-free milk without pasteurization. And I would assume they don't want the liability of selling it anyway, most people and companies avoid selling things that can kill you if possible.
It's funny, a tradition in European countries is to eat raw minced beef, but offer them a medium rare steak and they wince at the 'blood'.
Believing that one should be able to consume raw milk is not anti-science. Yes pasteurization kills bacteria that can be present in milk which can cause serious harm and also it kills bacteria that can be positive and people should have the right to choose to consume it and sell it with proper disclosures.
I never understood the fear of raw milk. The best cheese are made with raw milk. I don't understand how it can't be safe when both the cow and the milk are tested for disease and bad germs.
By that logic I don't understand why you don't just drink raw sewage instead of waiting for it to be processed and made safe.
The act of making cheese is processing the raw milk. Fun fact Pasteurized milk was also once raw.
Same with meat but basically no one advocates eating raw chicken.
Why am I explaining that things change from a raw to a processed state and becomes safe to consume...
This is a false equivalence. And if the milk and the cow is tested for pathogens, what is the problem?
Isn't cheese making just an old process of preserving milk for later consumption, which removes moisture and thus the environment for harmful bacteria?
And also encouraging controlled, beneficial bacteria that out-compete harmful bacteria.
Then why is it illegal to make raw milk cheese?
I have no idea what the rules are, but I'm sure you can make whatever you want. If something is illegal, it's is probably illegal to _sell_ it, which i think is reasonable. I wouldn't trust just anyone to sell me raw milk cheese, and would want them to follow food safely regulations when doing so, which maybe are not compatible with the process of making raw milk cheese.
Aren't cheeses made from raw milk cultured, and usually cure for a long enough time that bacteria does not survive?
I really wish I could buy raw milk for hobby cheesemaking. I'm in Canada where the laws are really restrictive.
Many people just boil raw milk themselves and don't have issues?
Is this... a joke?
Buying raw milk doesn't mean people will consume it?
Sure. But boiling it makes it… not raw.
Hey man I don't know what they put in that factory heat. I only trust heat from my stove.
Best thread all day :)
I know, but the topic at hand is about buying raw milk? From the article
> Powerful anti-vaccine advocates and people selling potentially harmful goods such as raw milk are profiting from the push to write anti-science policies into law across the U.S.
> I know, but the topic at hand is about buying raw milk?
But we don't regulate milk for the people who boil it.
We regulate it because of the ones who don't.
We do though. It is illegal to buy raw milk in some jurisdictions regardless if you boil it after purchasing.
Because some people won't boil it, and that has serious public health impacts. Right?
Same reason we have airport security even if I personally don't want to hijack a plane.
Plenty of things have serious health impacts and we don't mandate it. To go after something as niche as raw milk is weird in my view. Heart disease leads to quite a few deaths and we don't ban McDonalds.
If the fear is actually the drinking of raw milk then they should ban that, not the buying/selling of it.
> Plenty of things have serious health impacts and we don't mandate it.
There are very few things with serious health impacts that are completely unregulated. The closest we get is probably guns.
> To go after something as niche as raw milk is weird in my view.
It wasn't niche when we regulated it. It's niche now because we did.
> Heart disease leads to quite a few deaths and we don't ban McDonalds.
We take plenty of regulatory steps to reduce heart disease. McDonalds is required, for example, to provide nutrition facts. The burger meat gets USDA inspected. The restaurants get health inspections. (And we do try to do more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drinks_portion_cap_rule)
> There are very few things with serious health impacts that are completely unregulated. The closest we get is probably guns.
Guns are more regulated than most everything else? Background checks, age verification, licensed dealers, rules on transporting and storing guns, etc.
> It wasn't niche when we regulated it. It's niche now because we did.
Just not true. It is niche in places where it is not regulated as well and some portion of those who buy raw milk pasteurize it themselves so we don't even know how many people drink raw milk.
> We take plenty of regulatory steps to reduce heart disease. McDonalds is required, for example, to provide nutrition facts.
Almost nobody reads that at a McDonalds...
> The burger meat gets USDA inspected. The restaurants get health inspections. (And we do try to do more.
And yet you can go to a McDonalds and die from a heart attack. Many places do not let you take that risk with raw milk.
Despite all these regulations you mentioned, McDonalds has more stores than ever before. With your reasoning that should be turning McDonalds into a niche place.
This is ridiculous. "Well there is something that people at home could do to make this safe so its no biggie to sell it even though we know that virtually nobody will do that thing."
Virtually nobody buys raw milk in the first place. That is what is so ridiculous.
Not the most anti-science, but clearly foolish. The safety of humans consuming raw-milk was solved long ago by Pasteur. Its all part of the dumbing-down section of the control the people handbook.
You can read what the FDA says about it here: https://www.fda.gov/food/buy-store-serve-safe-food/dangers-r...
The problem with this kind of thing is that the story looks different at the level of a government than at the individual level.
The FDA article mentioned 2,645 illnesses and 228 hospitalizations in a 20-year period, and that was a period during which raw milk was heavily regulated, so would be likely to be significantly higher otherwise.
Still, the odds of you as an individual getting sick from raw milk would be relatively low. Does that mean it shouldn't be regulated? It's not a purely scientific decision.
Perhaps another way to go would be warning labels on raw milk. Still, I bet that would produce much higher illness numbers than the ones quoted above.
In the end the question is whether the government should be trying to help people stay healthy or not. If the goal is actually "Make America Healthy Again," then requiring milk to be pasteurized is an obvious choice.
Pasteurization has been settled science since the 1860s. It's benefits are extremely well known and well studied. We understand the contamination issues it solved in trying to sell things across large distances and/or from grocery shelves that may take some amount of time to sell. We see those contamination issues in "Raw Milk" sales, exactly as predicted.
It seems pretty anti-science to me, going against such foundational food and health science.
It also seems directly related to anti-vax anti-science efforts because Louis Pasteur was also a critical early scientist involved in vaccines (through efforts against Cholera and beyond).
To answer the question posed in the title: Russia and China, for two.
And Republicans! Damaged/hurt/frightened humans tend to vote for right wing and fascists. This is because going left wing is expensive, it requires time to know, like and trust your neighbors.
It's a series of large-scale distractions while they steal from the Treasury to support their power games.
I wish people would stop with the whole “X is a distraction from Y” thing. It’s too optimistic: It makes it sound like the reason people aren’t “doing something” about Y is because they’re distracted by X, when in reality people have no ability to stop X or Y and are just helplessly and knowingly watching both happen.
I think it’s much simpler than that.
It’s just a bunch of power games by individuals with NPD engaging in elite overproduction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
Does graduating college really make you elite?
No, it's what they actually want.
Destroying vaccines, for example, is something they've wanted for a long time.
They're not masterminds. They really are this crazy.
It's about disillusion with everything that is established. It has a strategic component to it as well, sowing chaos to upend the power structures and overtake them. Contrarian thinking in all domains, challenging something as foundational as the scientific method, even. This is the moment of postmodernism, just for the political right.
Is it a long time for the vaccine thing? I thought anti-vax was a California vaguely hippie-ish thing in the 90s. It's actually weird that conservatives picked it up. I guess the throughline is being anti-flouride in the 60s?
Trumpists aren't actually deserving the label "conservative". They're the complete opposite - a mashed together hodgepodge of anti-everything grievance politics. Trump's main feature is a stream of drivel that sounds honest, opinionated, and assertive if you only listen to part of it. If you try to listen to everything he says and logically reconcile the statements, it's all contradictory. The only consistency is that grievance emotion. So it has created a big tent of follower-type people who value emotion over intelligence (think the stereotypical mind-blown hippie, man), from all sorts of (what are effectively) counter cultures. It doesn't matter that they aren't implementing good solutions, and that a lot of time there aren't any good solutions. The followers are just happy "someone is talking about it [, man]".
The only difference I see between Trump and Reagan or Thatcher, for example, is how blatant Trump is about killing the people he sees as undesirable. Just get ICE to grab them instead of slowly turning off welfare and deregulating everything that pollutes, for example.
Through a narrow lens like that, sure. I'm not saying Trumpism isn't something that has been building in the Republican party for decades. I often say this is their talk radio monster that they had been harvesting the energy of, finally escaping its cage and devouring the party.
Reagan was a bit before my time as an adult, so I don't have a solid opinion of the emotional content of his speeches. But I don't think it was a bunch of everything about the US is broken and wrong, and we need to tear it down. I feel like the cognitive dissonance was much more narrowly scoped to those specific social issues you're talking about.
Also note that conservatism is necessarily a product of the times. A position that was considered conservative in the 1980's is likely not conservative a generation and a half later.
> A position that was considered conservative in the 1980's is likely not conservative a generation and a half later.
If you want a really jarring example of this, watch Bush (Sr.) and Reagan debate immigration during the 1980 primaries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsmgPp_nlok
They sound like Democrats today. (And that's in the primaries, where people tend to be more party-line!)
we didn't have Fox News and its ilk drumming up panic over caravans back then.
But they ironically also take the vaccines (recent reference)
I don't know about that. Does a schizophrenic "really want" to stop the CIA from implanting bugs in their teeth?
I think there are a hugely under appreciated percentage of people who are essentially fantasy based too. They've been encouraged to pick a cause, some of them decide that they know the secret that scientists are using vaccines to control the population or something.
If you talk to them they won't give you any more of a rational defense than the tooth bug guy. RFK Jr is just another resource Trump and the Republicans use to distract and degrade anyone in their way.
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>I've been drinking raw milk probably since I was 3 year old, like most kids in my relatively underdeveloped country before I moved to the US.
Why do you think this is a strong enough reason to allow a dangerous product that used to kill people onto the market? This anecdote isn't a strong empirical justification for the safety of raw milk, just like saying that you often don't crash your car isn't a good argument for the unnecessity of seatbelts. Food poisoning incidents are not that common, even in unsanitary conditions - pasteurisation is about making it so that kids don't get unlucky.
There's a reason a bunch of old recipes say "scald the milk" as an early step.
Your data point is what they call “anecdotal”.
How does your underdeveloped country compare to developed countries in a bunch of health related indicators?
> Your data point is what they call “anecdotal”.
Oh, whole nations and hundreds of years are now "an anecdote".
> How does your underdeveloped country compare to developed countries in a bunch of health related indicators?
Comparable, probably soon to overtake all US stats given how much of a shitshow the healthcare here is.
> Oh, whole nations and hundreds of years are now "an anecdote".
We have plenty of non-anecdotal actual data from that time. It’s precisely why pasteurizing is now required.
I wrote “countries”, plural, for a reason. And thanks for confirming that it is not as good.
But let’s not confuse the accessibility of good health care for the poor with simple sensible food handling.
Drinking raw, uncooked milk is full of micro-organisms (salmonella, …) By your standards, any kind of food regulation is totalitarian.
You're twisting what I said in a bad faith. Bye.
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Just because you've done something with clearly demonstrable problems without encountering the rare but serious issue with it does not mean the rest of society has to be ok with it.
The attitude "if something is rare enough that I don't personally see a problem means there IS no problem" is dumb in a country with 300 million people or a world with 9 billion people.
Like smoking: most people who smoke don't get lung cancer. But the risk increases enough that it ends up costing the public coffers quite a lot of money. Thus it is within the remit and interest of the public to curtail smoking, even if your grandmother smoked every day of her life till she died at 100 in a bungie jumping accident.
It is one thing to believe that it would be better to have libertarian system that let you personally take the risk of drinking raw milk. But its dumb to call the regulation totalitarian.
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Drinking untreated water also only has the _potential_ to cause disease. Playing Russian roulette with a loaded revolver only has the _potential_ to cause death.
Luckily, science can quantify those potentials and determine when the reward outweighs the risks.
If we, as a country, decided to let people who drank unpasteurized milk or untreated water to die without burdening the medical system, it would truly be their own choice. Once a society decides it will care for those people at a cost to the general public, it becomes necessary to protect the public from the burden of their ignorance.
I guess you never drank from a fresh water spring?
Honestly the overburden to the health system sounds like lame excuse. We don't have an overburden there because of the massive consumption of raw milk. Try to buy some legally and you'll get the picture of how hard it is to find and how expensive it is. I'll happily wave any rights to be emergency treated for any reason (traffic accidents included) if you grant me the right to live in peace and buy the milk and meat from sources I like because that's what this freedom is worth to me.
Anyone that I know that drinks raw milk, raw uncured meats, untreated water hasn't seen a doctor in over a decade.. not terribly scientific but a good indicator that I won't buy pharma-money backed "scientific" studies that show that low-fat, low-sodium and oats-in-cereal-bars are the solution to health issues. I'm all for science and capitalism but they're both not substitutes for common sense.
> Anyone that I know that drinks raw milk, raw uncured meats, untreated water hasn't seen a doctor in over a decade.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Survivorship-bias.sv...
YES!
The article (no surprise from AP) goes a long way to make sure the negativity vocabulary soup is complete against all conservative voices that advocate self-determination.
Please don't take away my freedom by dictating my health choices, esp. when you live in a concrete jungle and eat fast food at least five days a week.
I think it's wrong to think of MAHA as "anti-science" because science is all about questioning. Something as important as medicine should be questioned and questioned again and again. Simply dismissing them out-of-hand with such a term is more anti-science than what they're doing.
Now having said that, it's perfectly fair to criticize some of their assumptions and methods. The article, for instance, talks about raw milk. Pasteurization seems like a smart idea to me, but to assert that anyone who drinks raw milk is "anti science" is wrong. They're just approaching science differently.
Asking questions doesn't mean making policy changes or public health announcements before you have any answers.
It's important to understand that some people use "healthy skepticism" and "I'm just asking questions" as a cover screen to promote their desired policy. That isn't the scientific method.
I hear you and I once cringed at a "believe in science" sign at a liberal protest.
But science is about questions demanding proof and rigor, verification, reproducible results. It's not about blindly saying "Yeah my questioning makes a bunch of unsupported claims equally valid".
>But science is about questions demanding proof and rigor, verification, reproducible results. It's not about blindly saying "Yeah my questioning makes a bunch of unsupported claims equally valid".
Asimov's take[0] on stuff like this is just as relevant as ever:
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” ― Isaac Asimov
Although it seems to concisely describe more and more (and far too much, IMHO) of our public discourse these days. And more's the pity.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/84250-anti-intellectualism-...
Questioning is great, but to generate scientific knowledge, we need a few more steps, roughly speaking:
1. Ask a question 2. Form a hypothesis 3. Experiment to test it 4. Analyze results 5. Draw conclusions 6. Repeat
The MAHA folks essentially disregard this as a valid process for gathering knowledge. They occasionally talk about experiments and studies, but they are selectively chosen to support their conclusions in a posthoc way, ignoring both evidence to the contrary and basic methodological issues. When people describe them as "anti-science," I believe this is the kind of thing they have in mind.
> I think it's wrong to think of MAHA as "anti-science" because science is all about questioning.
There's a lot more to science than just questioning, and the MAHA folks have little interest in questioning their own unfounded beliefs.
Questioning your own beliefs isn't a requirement to science. Just sayin'
You question mine, and I'll question yours completes the cycle but if you don't let me question yours because you already did that, where's the science in that?
An experiment is essentially a way to question ones own beliefs by probing how well they align with reality. There are some theoretical scientists, who don't experiment, but I think they also benefit from counterfactual reasoning to do their work.
It is absolutely a requirement.
How so? Don't get me wrong, I do think it should absolutely be practiced, but where's the requirement?
If, during the scientific process, the evidence disproves your existing beliefs, you are left with a choice between the two.
I see that and I'm not trying to pick a fight but that argument only covers 50%: am I allowed to not question my beliefs when they are held true by my experiments and observations? (Rhetorical)
Beliefs become religion when you have that choice to make and then you should absolutely not publish against your better judgment for any sum of money but work on your belief system. What I'm saying is that it still is not a requirement to science to challenge your beliefs because when you miss or omit that part your experiments and observations are still of scientific nature ergo challenging your beliefs is not a requirement to science [my original claim]. You're free to challenge them down the line with your own experiments and observations for me, giving me a chance to reevaluate my beliefs.
> am I allowed to not question my beliefs when they are held true by my experiments and observations?
You should at least be open to the possibility that further experiments and observations may come down the pipe.
Newtonian physics was great, until we invented better tech to spot things where it breaks down… and thus, Einstein was needed.
Working for big raw milk against "the science."
RFK, Jr.'s assessment of medical evidence is bad, and he doesn't seem to have spent a second on ending public advertising of prescription drugs. I personally don't like him and have never liked him. But also, medical evidence is bad and wrong, the modern anti-vax movement was started by the low standards of The Lancet, and big pharma really does run our media (through that advertising) and consistently suborns all medical research.
Watching that fake Alzheimer's drug get repeatedly reintroduced as a miracle for a change of 1.5 questions on a subjective checklist, even after a bunch of experts at the FDA who had a moral center quit over it, was depressing. Putting this quack rich kid at the head of the agency will at least have some effect on it other than the effect of big pharma cash.
I think the proof for the effectiveness of the MMR and HPV vaccines is indisputable. I also think that big pharma lobbying for vaccine indemnification against lawsuits, and the consequent explosion in the number of vaccines, was an opportunity to push a lot of stuff in that the "science" defenders never seem to bring up. They always defend the entire class of "vaccines," and avoid the harder to defend specifics. This is something you have to be paid to do, because it is a deliberate rhetorical distraction.
Also, the classes of drugs that make the most money (not vaccines) have the least evidence of effect. Not just the real evidence, but even the claimed effects are tiny and take a bunch of suspicious math to find. This is a sign of a system that runs on corruption. Not that you need signs, because the companies are making direct payments. Just like we legalized bribery in our politics, we normalized bribery in medical literature, practice, and journalism.
[*] like Ioannidis taught us before he got canceled for being more right (or at the worst equally wrong in the other direction) about covid than everyone else. Remember when HN worshiped the science, rather than "the science," and posted every Ioannidis paper?
The quack rich kid is breaking the parts of NIH/CDC/etc that were working correctly. Writing that off as "some effect" ignores what we can already plainly see.
Ioannidis more right about covid than everybody else? Do you remember his concrete predictions about the number of deaths?