Funny events in anti-woke world

[Agema]

Coal Miners With Black Lung Say They Are ‘Cast Aside to Die’ Under Trump

President Trump has been a cheerleader for coal miners. But these miners say his administration is failing to enforce limits on a lethal workplace hazard.

web.archive.org

Makes total sense. Trump loves fucking miners. .

I wonder if the USA is giving us a prime example of a way that a country goes into decline.

Various sectors of its society become incredibly powerful, and then manipulate the system to benefit themselves at the expense of the country as a whole. Much of this could be summed up just by corporations generally, but in particular here, the fossil fuel industry. The future is renewables, and the fossil fuel industry has aggressively campaigned against it, and Trump may have crippled US development of renewables for a long time. So it is that the USA has conceded the future of power generation to China.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

Third time: I don't care what your opinion on this is. You said Cochrane said that. They didn't.



Indeed, and here you are recycling the same long-debunked drivel.

No matter how you want to put it, Cochrane did not find conclusive evidence that masks work. That's what their review literally means.

You just don't like real metrics that disagree with your narrative.

First, you're right in that I did get that part wrong. Given the lack of context, I'd hastily assumed you'd been talking about a segment contrasting "the manner in which the product is commonly worn" with proper application, not helped by the fact that your takeaway of "complete shocker that it doesn't work in the real world" is almost a 1:1 echo of criticizing condoms as ineffective based on improper usage.

Having said that, remember how I said that "your response makes me strongly suspect that you don't understand the paper and were just looking for an excuse to dismiss it"? You just unambiguously and unequivocally proved my point.

You aren't even making the most token of efforts to understand either what I'm telling you or what the papers says. You're brazenly just looking for an excuse to dismiss them, focusing solely on the abstract of the second paper. Said paper is focused on peripheral marginal leakage, which is to say that its point is not that "masks don't work", but that a mask with a complete seal blocks more than than the same mask without a seal. That's saying that a mask with a complete seal is better, not that masks without such a seal don't work. And you do so to the exclusion of the first paper which comprehensively explains the actual mechanics and impact of masks on respiratory droplets, such as carry infectious diseases.



That you don't care about the data is obvious from the simple fact that even after repeated correction and explanation you still don't actually know what it even says and instead continue to blindly presume that it must match your preconceptions, even vehemently arguing against its own acknowledged limitations, intended conclusion and the authors' own clarifications that directly contradict your claims.

You are not engaging with the data. All you are doing is incorrectly attributing your own conclusion to it.



And by its own account the methodological issues severely compromised their ability to draw conclusions, and as the authors themselves directly stated it does not even remotely champion the same conclusion you are attributing to it.

This has been explained to you repeatedly. You just refuse to acknowledge it.

Uhh... There's actual real world data showing condoms are 87% effective with actual normal use (not perfect use). Where's real world data showing masks are just 5+% effective? I'm not looking for excuses to dismiss papers, I'm looking for papers that actually prove something in the real world. I don't care if some study finds a mask reduces droplets by say 80%, does that translate to any results in the real world? Does the 20% still get you sick anyway? Does the 80% matter when you usually get sick from people you're around for prolonged periods so you getting the constant 20% vs 100% even matter? Also, covid is airborne so protecting against respiratory droplets (yes, I know airborne is still technically droplets but smaller) doesn't mean much. Remember, it took them like a year to finally admit covid was airborne. Why couldn't they simply do cluster randomized controlled trials instead of all these rather pointless studies? It's like why try to figure out how many people actually got covid using bad data when you can just do a seroprevalence study.

Did Cochrane find any actual concrete evidence that masks FOR SURE indeed reduce infections? No, they did not. That's all I care about. It's on you guys to prove masks do anything and you haven't. You can't even say masks reduce infections by as low as 5%.

Considering there's articles saying police have been called in and the Swastika is only visible in photos. It's not mental gymnastics.

It's called evaluating possibilities rather than jumping to claim say Jussie Smollett has MAGa supporters attempt lynch him and many other such things.

Even if these people are Nazis (they're not... ), why would you put up Swastikas in your office?

 

[crimson5pheonix]

 

[Schadrach]

The fact if you have an IR remote say for your TV your phone can detect and show you the IR light?

Like I said, you can make an image that photographs differently in IR than in color, and most phone cameras can see near-IR (usually rendering it as a very pale blue or purple, thought they also typically filter that under normal lighting). You still can't easily achieve the alleged effect on that flag with that. You could almost do something kinda similar with specific lighting, a modified camera, and the right inks but the claim is that this flag under normal office lighting shows a swastika in red and white under a typical cell phone camera. IR reflective ink would let you create light/white areas under IR, but under normal office lighting there's not going to be enough IR in just that spot to totally wash out visible light to the camera. An IR absorbing ink could do the reverse (make an area appear dark under IR that isn't under visible light), but it wouldn't look red, and the lighting issues with making that work under office lighting to a camera that can see visible light are functionally impossible.

Saying you can see near-IR on your phone camera from a TV remote, therefore this is the same thing is like arguing you can reheat your coffee from cold to normal coffee temperatures by stirring it vigorously enough - in some sense it's technically true (some energy is lost to friction with the liquid when you stir in the form of heat) but the scenario where you can make that work to achieve the desired effect is so specialized and unrealistic that it's absurd. Or more accurately that since a magician can create the illusion of sawing a woman in half with specialized props that he can do it with a random saw from the hardware store and a plain wooden box.

 

[Asita]

Uhh... There's actual real world data showing condoms are 87% effective with actual normal use (not perfect use). Where's real world data showing masks are just 5+% effective? I'm not looking for excuses to dismiss papers, I'm looking for papers that actually prove something in the real world.

So you claim, but your very next sentences contradict that entirely.

"I don't care if some study finds a mask reduces droplets by say 80%, does that translate to any results in the real world?"

Translation: You don't care about the mechanics and will simply assume that the results are invalid in a "real-world" context. While you're at it, would you like to also argue that car safety tests mean nothing because they use crash test dummies?

Dismissing lab studies for not being "real-world" fundamentally misunderstands the entire purpose of controlled experiments in science. The point of a controlled setting is to isolate the mechanic; in this case, the physical effectiveness of masks at blocking droplets and aerosols. That's not a bug, it's the entire method. We do the same in crash safety, drug development, and industrial design.

Real-world effectiveness depends on a ton of factors - usage, compliance, environment - but lab studies establish the baseline: what the intervention is capable of doing under correct usage. If you ignore that, you're not arguing against masks, you're arguing against the entire scientific method.

It’s one thing to say "real-world mask effectiveness varies," which is true. It's another to pretend lab-demonstrated efficacy is irrelevant, which just isn’t a serious argument.

--
"Does the 20% still get you sick anyway?"

Translation: Nirvana Fallacy. The existence of imperfect protection - even when the overall rate of protection is very high - is used to claim functional lack of protection entirely.

--
"Does the 80% matter when you usually get sick from people you're around for prolonged periods so you getting the constant 20% vs 100% even matter?"

Translation: Openly looking for outliers and edge-cases to provide a pretext to dismiss it, irrespective of proper application and safe practices.

--
"Also, covid is airborne so protecting against respiratory droplets (yes, I know airborne is still technically droplets but smaller) doesn't mean much. Remember, it took them like a year to finally admit covid was airborne."

Translation: Continues to misunderstand the concept of airborne to argue that masks can't have any effect on the transmission of airborne viruses, despite that being the exact scope of such masks. It's precisely because Covid is airborne that masks are useful in slowing its spread.

And let's get into that one a bit more, because your statement is so deeply confused. If a virus spreads through the air, that is exactly when masks are most helpful. It’s the reason respiratory PPE exists in medicine, industrial hygiene, and pandemic response. To say masks don’t help against airborne viruses is like saying umbrellas don’t help in the rain.

--
"Why couldn't they simply do cluster randomized controlled trials instead of all these rather pointless studies? It's like why try to figure out how many people actually got covid using bad data when you can just do a seroprevalence study."

Translation: It didn't provide the data you wanted so you dismiss them as "pointless" and "bad data" while you quibble that the studies should have used different methodologies that your very suggestion makes clear you do not understand.

Did Cochrane find any actual concrete evidence that masks FOR SURE indeed reduce infections? No, they did not. That's all I care about. It's on you guys to prove masks do anything and you haven't. You can't even say masks reduce infections by as low as 5%.

Repeat after me: It didn't find 'concrete evidence that masks for sure reduce infections' specifically because THAT WASN'T EVEN A QUESTION BEING ASKED BY THOSE STUDIES, which focused on the effectiveness of messaging to mask up rather than the effectiveness of actually masking up.

Even then, Cochrane made a neutral statement: that evidence quality was too low to draw firm conclusions. But you’re asserting the opposite. Not "we can’t tell," but "they don’t work." That’s not what the evidence says. And again, Cochraine went out of its way to clarify as much.

At this point, you’ve made it abundantly clear that no study - not real-world, not mechanistic, not randomized - will ever meet your bar unless it already agrees with your view. You dismiss every kind of evidence as "bullshit," refuse to engage with what studies actually say (even when the authors themselves correct the very misreading you're promoting), and rely on fallacies like "it’s not perfect, therefore it’s useless."

Cochraine's study does not say what you claim it did. The Bangladesh study did show reduced infection. The physics of aerosol containment are well understood. But you’ve made it clear none of that matters to you, just whether or not it aligns with your pre-set narrative.

 

[Agema]

At this point, you’ve made it abundantly clear that no study - not real-world, not mechanistic, not randomized - will ever meet your bar unless it already agrees with your view. You dismiss every kind of evidence as "bullshit," refuse to engage with what studies actually say (even when the authors themselves correct the very misreading you're promoting), and rely on fallacies like "it’s not perfect, therefore it’s useless."

And yet at the same time he's expecting unrealistically hight evidential standards here, he's also criticising health organisations for waiting for robust evidence before making firm conclusions (e.g. that Covid was spread via the air).

This is precisely the sort of logical incoherence you would expect from someone who is making up the argument to fit their pre-existing conclusion.

 

[crimson5pheonix]

Breaking news, cattle ranchers not as smart about beef as former owner of Trump Steaks (defunct).

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Breaking news, cattle ranchers not as smart about beef as former owner of Trump Steaks (defunct).

And now he wants to buy Argentinian beef, which may be diseased.

Trump admin warns Argentina beef might be diseased but US may still import

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said issues with foot-and-mouth disease could limit how much beef the U.S. imports.

www.newsweek.com

Of course, the amount he wants to buy won't make much of a dent in American prices, but why not do all he can to give his fellow dictator buddy more American cash?

 

[Chimpzy]

Pretty huge to lose the first being to play hopscotch on the moon, inventor of those floor piano keyboards you used to have in malls, and the mother, father, cousin and son to the world's funkiest sewer gator.

 

[bluegate]

https://www.reddit.com/r/CringeTikToks/s/3KaotplqQv

One step further towards authoritarianism

You go America

 

[Silvanus]

No matter how you want to put it, Cochrane did not find conclusive evidence that masks work. That's what their review literally means.

They didn't find conclusive evidence that they work in one context. And they were very clear that conclusion shouldn't be exaggerated or misinterpreted as an absolute position. You said Cochrane said there's "no evidence they do anything". They categorically, inarguably, did not say that.

You just don't like real metrics that disagree with your narrative.

In this case, the "metric" being... a data source you have not even accessed yourself, and cannot provide paywall-free access to.

You're right, i don't blindly trust that. Why would i? Why would anyone trust numbers they haven't even fucking seen?

 

[Phoenixmgs]

So you claim, but your very next sentences contradict that entirely.

"I don't care if some study finds a mask reduces droplets by say 80%, does that translate to any results in the real world?"

Translation: You don't care about the mechanics and will simply assume that the results are invalid in a "real-world" context. While you're at it, would you like to also argue that car safety tests mean nothing because they use crash test dummies?

Dismissing lab studies for not being "real-world" fundamentally misunderstands the entire purpose of controlled experiments in science. The point of a controlled setting is to isolate the mechanic; in this case, the physical effectiveness of masks at blocking droplets and aerosols. That's not a bug, it's the entire method. We do the same in crash safety, drug development, and industrial design.

Real-world effectiveness depends on a ton of factors - usage, compliance, environment - but lab studies establish the baseline: what the intervention is capable of doing under correct usage. If you ignore that, you're not arguing against masks, you're arguing against the entire scientific method.

It’s one thing to say "real-world mask effectiveness varies," which is true. It's another to pretend lab-demonstrated efficacy is irrelevant, which just isn’t a serious argument.

--
"Does the 20% still get you sick anyway?"

Translation: Nirvana Fallacy. The existence of imperfect protection - even when the overall rate of protection is very high - is used to claim functional lack of protection entirely.

--
"Does the 80% matter when you usually get sick from people you're around for prolonged periods so you getting the constant 20% vs 100% even matter?"

Translation: Openly looking for outliers and edge-cases to provide a pretext to dismiss it, irrespective of proper application and safe practices.

--
"Also, covid is airborne so protecting against respiratory droplets (yes, I know airborne is still technically droplets but smaller) doesn't mean much. Remember, it took them like a year to finally admit covid was airborne."

Translation: Continues to misunderstand the concept of airborne to argue that masks can't have any effect on the transmission of airborne viruses, despite that being the exact scope of such masks. It's precisely because Covid is airborne that masks are useful in slowing its spread.

And let's get into that one a bit more, because your statement is so deeply confused. If a virus spreads through the air, that is exactly when masks are most helpful. It’s the reason respiratory PPE exists in medicine, industrial hygiene, and pandemic response. To say masks don’t help against airborne viruses is like saying umbrellas don’t help in the rain.

--
"Why couldn't they simply do cluster randomized controlled trials instead of all these rather pointless studies? It's like why try to figure out how many people actually got covid using bad data when you can just do a seroprevalence study."

Translation: It didn't provide the data you wanted so you dismiss them as "pointless" and "bad data" while you quibble that the studies should have used different methodologies that your very suggestion makes clear you do not understand.



Repeat after me: It didn't find 'concrete evidence that masks for sure reduce infections' specifically because THAT WASN'T EVEN A QUESTION BEING ASKED BY THOSE STUDIES, which focused on the effectiveness of messaging to mask up rather than the effectiveness of actually masking up.

Even then, Cochrane made a neutral statement: that evidence quality was too low to draw firm conclusions. But you’re asserting the opposite. Not "we can’t tell," but "they don’t work." That’s not what the evidence says. And again, Cochraine went out of its way to clarify as much.

At this point, you’ve made it abundantly clear that no study - not real-world, not mechanistic, not randomized - will ever meet your bar unless it already agrees with your view. You dismiss every kind of evidence as "bullshit," refuse to engage with what studies actually say (even when the authors themselves correct the very misreading you're promoting), and rely on fallacies like "it’s not perfect, therefore it’s useless."

Cochraine's study does not say what you claim it did. The Bangladesh study did show reduced infection. The physics of aerosol containment are well understood. But you’ve made it clear none of that matters to you, just whether or not it aligns with your pre-set narrative.

Mechanisms are nice to have but they don't automatically translate to the real world. And depending on what you're studying, you may have to depend heavily on mechanisms. One of those fields is food and nutrition because doing real-world studies is basically impossible because they are very hard to control and time required is also unfeasible. Drugs are much much much easier to do real-world studies and no drugs are approved because of mechanisms and they do clinical trials to prove they actually work or not. Vaccines aren't approved due to just mechanisms, the covid vaccine (along with all other vaccines) had clinical trials to prove they work. You can easily do a trial with masks, cluster randomized trial, but they weren't done.

Seriously, quit the fucking bullshit, the studies Cochrane are looking aren't about messaging. All 78 studies are RCTs to try to determine masking effectiveness. Only 6 of the studies were from covid. Cochrane has been doing this review for awhile, the other non-covid studies of 72 also never found evidence of masking being effective either. That's why Fauci initially didn't recommend masks because that is the scientific consensus.

And this is the kind of stuff you find when you search for mask efficacy before 2020 and before covid when masking wasn't biased and political:

Unmasking the Surgical Mask: Does It Really Work?

For a century, the surgical mask has been the symbol of a safe and sanitary medical environment. The problem is that researchers don't really know if that's true.

www.medpagetoday.com

That article even points out that there's no point in wearing surgical masks in the operating room even.
In fact, three large, randomized controlled trials were conducted in the 1980s to determine once and for all if surgical masks actually did prevent surgical wound infection.

Here, where bacteria were the major concern in wound infection, the enemy targets were larger and might not require the fine filtration necessary to keep a respiratory virus away, researchers theorized.

But the trials "showed absolutely no efficacy" for that original purpose, MacIntyre noted.

"Really, the surgeon might as well wear nothing on their face," she said.



Cloth masks (the ones people wore) from the Bangledesh study were not shown to conclusively do anything.

They didn't find conclusive evidence that they work in one context. And they were very clear that conclusion shouldn't be exaggerated or misinterpreted as an absolute position. You said Cochrane said there's "no evidence they do anything". They categorically, inarguably, did not say that.



In this case, the "metric" being... a data source you have not even accessed yourself, and cannot provide paywall-free access to.

You're right, i don't blindly trust that. Why would i? Why would anyone trust numbers they haven't even fucking seen?

They reviewed 78 studies over several decades... Yet still no conclusive evidence that masks stop infections.

It's real data...

 

[Asita]

Mechanisms are nice to have but they don't automatically translate to the real world. And depending on what you're studying, you may have to depend heavily on mechanisms. One of those fields is food and nutrition because doing real-world studies is basically impossible because they are very hard to control and time required is also unfeasible. Drugs are much much much easier to do real-world studies and no drugs are approved because of mechanisms and they do clinical trials to prove they actually work or not. Vaccines aren't approved due to just mechanisms, the covid vaccine (along with all other vaccines) had clinical trials to prove they work. You can easily do a trial with masks, cluster randomized trial, but they weren't done.

That you say that only underscores that you're trying to confidently argue about terms that you don't even understand the definitions of.

Mechanisms aren't "nice to have" nor are they things that "don't automatically translate to the real word". When we talk about mechanics and mechanisms in this context it literally means "How and why the thing works", it's literally the physical explanation of the observed phenomenon.

And more to the point: They are precisely the point of contention under discussion when someone argues that there's "no evidence that they work", as you have been doing. You're basically arguing "gravity’s just a mechanism; there's no evidence it actually works, so we should do a real-world trial to see if things actually fall."

You're making genuinely nonsensical arguments.

Seriously, quit the fucking bullshit, the studies Cochrane are looking aren't about messaging. All 78 studies are RCTs to try to determine masking effectiveness. Only 6 of the studies were from covid. Cochrane has been doing this review for awhile, the other non-covid studies of 72 also never found evidence of masking being effective either. That's why Fauci initially didn't recommend masks because that is the scientific consensus.

Again: Per Cochrane itself:
"Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that 'masks don't work', which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation.

It would be accurate to say that the review examined whether interventions to promote mask wearing help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses, and that the results were inconclusive. Given the limitations in the primary evidence, the review is not able to address the question of whether mask-wearing itself reduces people's risk of contracting or spreading respiratory viruses."

This is not a negotiable point.

And bluntly, I'm done. Even after being told time and again that you clearly haven't even understood the very source you're invoking - much less the broader topic that it's a part of - you're still insisting on the very interpretation that that source went out of its way to say was a misreading.

You blatantly aren't even trying to understand the topic, you're just trying to poach your source's credibility by falsely attributing your own opinions to it.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

"The blind man has a stick! We need a full squad to exert maximum force on this dangerous criminal!"


(I'm sure he said he had a knife or something. That's all the reason the police need to drag you along the ground and kick you in the head.)

Meanwhile, looks like the Supreme Court might be revisiting equal marriage rights.

https://www.advocate.com/news/supreme-court-marriage-equality-reconsideration

This is a great idea. There's only a limited number of marriages in the world; we can't let the gays go taking them!

 

[Gordon_4]

Coal Miners With Black Lung Say They Are ‘Cast Aside to Die’ Under Trump

President Trump has been a cheerleader for coal miners. But these miners say his administration is failing to enforce limits on a lethal workplace hazard.

web.archive.org

Makes total sense. Trump loves fucking miners. .

English coal miners be like:

 

[Gergar12]

White Heritage Center shoves Ohio State further to the right

columbusfreepress.com

'Another Chase Center professor is Vladimir Kogan. He loves to attack our Columbus City Schools and its teachers’ union on social media. And just like the Chase Center, tries to come across as “viewpoint neutral.” Don’t be played. He’s pro-charter and pro-private school voucher, and very weirdly has aversions to the hardworking and dedicated teachers at Columbus City Schools. '

Union politics aside, CCS(Columbus City Schools) is full of people who leave for jobs in better school districts or just leave the education industry overall. I have already met people who have done one or the other. One time, I met this guy with a master's in education who was working a job for around 20ish dollars an hour. Another woman taught at my high school, and had to have other kids protect for from the trouble makers. Why are there troublemakers in high school? By that time, your brain should have matured, and this is coming from me, who has multiple mental illnesses. I will tell you why it's because one, the parents don't care, two, the teachers are underpaid, admin staff.. kidding, you mean therapists, people who beg rich for money to fund say school, and etc. But it's also because many schools don't have to compete; they just get students, and they will get mad at you for attending CSCC or Columbus State Community College classes to further their education differently.

Charter Schools and Private Schools are accused of a few things, like selectively picking students(valid), and discipline, which isn't valid. Doing nothing is worse than doing something unless you're causing trauma to a kid, and I know it gets muddy what is and isn't appropriate. When I went to CSCC, my classes were easier, minus the business calc class, than my fucking middle school, and that's unfair competition to CCS?

Vladimir Kogan, whom I have never spoken to, I have seen him in the hallways of OSU, likely sees the data of failing test scores, attendance problems, and disciplinary issues, and thinks Why don't we try something new.

At some point, there needs to be a push to these kids to take their future more seriously, like I had when I was in Middle School at a very well-to-do suburban school district. You can't just DEI them to jobs where they get let go for various reasons during a layoff, and you can't just do nothing; that is even worse than doing something. And it's not just the money, it's the ability to teach yourself.

Does anyone know what I am a severely mentally ill person did? I doubled my anti-psychotic medication to once in the morning and at night. Now my doctor knows I'm experimenting with my medication, and I did inform her of this, but I googled articles on anti-psych medications, I read the DSM-5TR, and listened to various Doctors on YouTube who are credible, and I have read on Reddit(Used by LLMS) and verified that 30 MG of said abifliy can work. There are many people in say in the African-American community who don't have my education, and while they can have higher-order critical thinking and research skills, it's likely statistically if they don't go to college or read a lot or just be intensely curious. In fact, it was my conservative econ professor who told me to research this, and yes, there is risk, but I am an adult.

Many African Americans(Many African Americans but obviously not all have various mental illness, and many are untreated), and other marginalized groups who may maybe attended a less academically rigorous school, aren't as resourceful as me(I am not saying all African Americans, or lower socioeconomically people are like this, but many are failed by their parents, and the schooling system)

And my solution to this is simple: there should be regulated charter schools, teachers should be paid more, but they should also be laid off or fired like any other job, versus having a higher job security than the rest of us in the private sector.

 

[Chimpzy]

 

[Silvanus]

They reviewed 78 studies over several decades... Yet still no conclusive evidence that masks stop infections.

I'm still very uninterested in your analysis.

You said they said something. They did not.

It's real data...

Of what quality? Of what significance? You haven't even seen the data yourself.

 

[Agema]

"The blind man has a stick! We need a full squad to exert maximum force on this dangerous criminal!"

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?", as the saying goes. In terms of ICE, no-one at all, it seems. They are an accountability black hole.

If they wish to threaten or assault members of the public, there is no way to identify them, stop them, and if you dare complain then someone at ICE can very seriously screw up your complaint and throw it in a bin.

Meanwhile, looks like the Supreme Court might be revisiting equal marriage rights.

I read someone arguing SCOTUS was trying to build up political capital so that when it needed to rule against Trump on something really big then it would get away with it. The rationale supplied was that SCOTUS is terrified that if it disagrees with the president, the president just ignores them - and if Congress then declines to intervene, SCOTUS is humiliated and diminished.

It's precisely this sort of facile hoping for the best that people like Trump use to run roughshod over others. A court that doesn't actually rule on what it assesses to be right by law has already vacated its moral right to judge. It's overlooking that Republicans deliberately stacked the court with ideologues that would rule as the US right wanted: they're hardly secret moderates waiting for the opportunity to break the shackles of an authoritarian president.

 

[Casual Shinji]

It's always those people who use A.I. isn't it?



Hmmm...