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I understand that vaccines are proven to work and are a great advancement in our medicine, and also that homeopathic remedies don't work, but don't they work on the same principal? Why does one work and the other doesnt?

They do not work on the same principle.

I can see how vaccines look like a "like treats like" situation, but in homeopathy "like treats like" is a kind of magical thinking.

Let's take an example from Chicken Pox, a virus for which there is an effective vaccine and for which there is a common homeopathic treatment.

Chicken pox infects people once, and it is extremely rare to get a second case because once you have had it, your body forms persistent antibodies against the varicella-zoster virus. When I was a kid, they didn't have a vaccine for this, so kids mostly got chicken pox once and it ran around whole schools and that was it. It's a virus that is fairly minor in children, though it can cause dangerously high fevers. Adults who get chicken pox typically get much sicker than children who get it, and it can lead to permanent harms like infertility in adults who get it. Because it can be so dangerous, we don't want people to risk getting it, so we vaccinate.

The way the vaccine works is that it takes a weakened form of the virus and introduces that into the body of a person with a healthy immune system. The immune system responds and the person who got the vaccine may get some minor symptoms, like a headache or a slight fever, but it will be nowhere near as severe as getting actual chicken pox would be. Because the immune system was exposed to the virus and responded, it now has antibodies against the virus that recognize the virus and respond immediately before it can start replicating in the body. If a person who has either previously had chicken pox or who has been vaccinated against it is exposed to the chicken pox virus, their body uses those antibodies to react to the virus and protect against a systemic infection.

Are you familiar with Star Trek? It's kind of like the Borg. You can't use the same attack pattern against the Borg multiple times because if you do, they'll recognize the pattern and will be able to defend against it. The virus is the attacker, and your immune system is the Borg. It knows what it's looking for and won't let anything get through its defenses.

Homeopathic remedies don't seek to prevent illness or provoke an immune response, they seek to cancel out something that is happening in the body.

For chicken pox, which produces itchy red bumps, homeopaths use Rhus Tox - a dilution of poison ivy, a plant that causes itchy red bumps if you encounter it in nature. The Rhus Tox didn't cause the chicken pox, it's not given to prevent the virus, it's from a plant that is completely unrelated to the virus that happens to produce some of the same symptoms as the virus when you touch it.

They don't even think that the Rhus Tox will provoke an immune response from your body like actually touching poison ivy would, they're attempting to use an unrelated compound (that is so diluted that it isn't even present in the preparation) in place of your immune system to attack the itchy red bumps.

So I'm going to go over this in a few brief points:

Vaccines are preventative ONLY, they are not a treatment for illness or symptoms of an illness

Vaccines work by introducing your immune system to a partial, weakened, or dead virus so that your immune system can form antibodies against that virus and prevent that virus from replicating in your body when it is later exposed to a whole/strong/live virus.

Different vaccines have different levels of effectiveness and produce different lengths of immunity; this is for a number of reasons, but if you get a measles shot as a kid you may only ever need one booster, while you need a flu shot every year and a tetanus shot every decade. All of them work the same way, though: they show your immune system what a virus looks like so that your immune system can kill the virus.

That is why immune compromised people sometimes can't be vaccinated, or why vaccines don't work as well for them or may need higher doses or more boosters. Because they don't have a healthy immune system, weakened viruses like the ones in the chickenpox virus might be too strong for their immune system to fight, and even if it doesn't get them sick, their bodies may not be able to produce enough effective antibodies to protect them from the virus in the future. That's part of why it's important for as many people to be vaccinated as possible; the more people who are vaccinated, the harder it is for viruses to spread, and vulnerable people like immune compromised people or babies too young for vaccination won't be exposed to deadly viruses.

Homeopathy, on the other hand, aims to treat symptoms of an illness that a person is already experiencing.

Homeopathic treatments do not aim to provoke an immune response, they aim to cancel out a symptom with a cure.

Dilution is a very important part of homeopathy, with homeopaths claiming that the more diluted a preparation is the stronger it is. This is simply incorrect; I don't know how to make a more logical explanation of that, it is just wrong that less of a substance causes more of a response.

Homeopathy says "like treats like" and that may seem like using a vaccine with a weak virus to prevent infection from a strong virus, but their version of "like" is different - Rhus Tox (poison ivy) is supposed to be "like" chicken pox because both cause itching. Rhus tox is also supposed to treat PCOS, erectile dysfunction, uterine prolapse, sunken eyes, nausea, and backache. "Like" can have an extremely broad meaning in homeopathy, which should be cause for suspicion.

Here's a paper that compared the immune response of college students given homeopathic "vaccines" against a control group and against a group of students who were given standard medical vaccines. The control group and the homeopathic group both did not have an immune response in titer tests, while the vaccination group did have an immune response, demonstrating that they had protection from the vaccinated viruses. It's a pretty good demonstration both of how effective homeopathy is (not at all) as well as how to set up a fair and ethical study to look at the effectiveness of different kinds of treatments.

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we need more divorcebaiting. how strongly can canon imply (without technically outright stating) that these two characters are bitterly, acrimoniously divorced? essential we explore this

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what 14 years without a new installment does to a fanbase: "let's talk about the walls"

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It's really silly how many leftist arguments against various institutions involve "historicizing" them to demonstrate that they're founded on some evil. Like i don't care about that. I care what it actually does currently given the actual social and regulative constraints it acts under.

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The entirety of Pritzker's speech today is extremely important, and I highly recommend everyone read it (or listen to it if you prefer), but I would like to share some segments that highlight the overall point of his message.

"I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in this city, and as a state, and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country."

"Over the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning, for quite a while now, to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago."

"What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American."

"If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor, or the police?

Let me answer that question: This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city, in a blue state, to try and intimidate his political rivals.

This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities and end elections."

"There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention."

"So in case there was any doubt as to the motivation behind Trump's military occupations, take note: 13 of the top 20 cities in homicide rate have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago.

Eight of the top 10 states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois."

"To the members of the press who are assembled here today, and listening across the country, I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is."

"Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidence, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab."

"Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, 'Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?' Instead, I say, 'Mr. President, do not come to Chicago.'

You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.

Most alarming, you seem to lack any appropriate concern as our commander-in-chief for the members of the military that you would so callously deploy as pawns in your ever-more-alarming grabs for power."

"To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your National Guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people, you would be failing your constituents and your country. Cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to."

"Finally, to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous: we are watching and we are taking names.

This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back."

"You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually. If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law."

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Y'know what, cosigned. Because I think if we don't properly understand this, things will never end. If we beat the lunacy now without addressing this problem, it's just going to come back, and come a few decades down the line we'll be right back where we are now.

"We must remember what has been said about the nature of this doubt: it was not the rational doubt which is rooted in freedom of thinking and which dares to question established views. It was the irrational doubt which springs from the isolation and powerlessness of an individual whose attitude towards the world is one of anxiety and hatred. This irrational doubt can never be cured by rational answers; it can only disappear if the individual becomes an integral part of a meaningful world. If this does not happen, as it did not happen with Luther and the middle class which he represented, the doubt can only be silenced, driven underground, so to speak, and this can be done by some formula which promotes absolute certainty.

Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom

Bolding mine. Despite this passage largely being a critique of early protestant theology, I think this is exactly what I have been trying to understand about the relationship between the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories and the tendency towards authoritarian beliefs and practices.

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obsessed with how fixable society is, on a structural level.

obsessed with how all you need to do is throw money at public education and eliminate most standardized testing and you will start getting smarter, more engaged, kinder adults. obsessed with how giving people safe housing, reliable access to good food, and decent wages dramatically reduces drug overdoses and gun violence. obsessed with how much people actually want to get together and fix infrastructure, invent new ways of helping each other, and create global ways of living sustainably once you give them livable pay to do so. obsessed with how tracking diseases, developing medicines, and improving public health becomes so much easier when you just make healthcare free at point of use.

obsessed with how easy it all becomes, if we can just figure out how to wrench the wealth out of the hands of the hoarders.

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why didn’t the cowards at bones put this in the anime

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Scattered Thoughts on Conspiracism and MAGA

I was watching some YouTube videos about really abusive parents who got away with it for a long time because they had a media presence as really super duper traditionally religious families, and sort of contemplating the fact that these violent, destructive, selfish people were so enamored with this incredibly moralizing language.

And I started to wonder if, for people like that, God functions to transform their own intuitions about how things ought to be into universal, objective rules.

And from there wondering if there isn't for some people a sort of fantasy of the total dissolving of the self into some stronger will.

In a lot of conservative religious ideologies in the US, children are to obey their parents, wives are to obey their husbands, and the husband is to obey God.

Nobody lower on the hierarchy has any authority to challenge people higher up in the hierarchy; if a wife realizes her husband is sinning, or abusing his authority over her, this does not give her the right to stop submitting to his authority; in the ideal, his authority over her still remains absolute no matter what sins he commits, and her only recourse is to pray to God, the one with authority over the husband, to order him back into proper behavior.

And so I think for abusive people in these structures they can justify their abuse of others through the pretense that they are doing the same thing. I submit to God, so why aren't my ungrateful kids or selfish wife willing to put in the same effort to submit to me?

But of course, God only speaks to them through vague impulses and intuitions, not the concrete demands that humans make of each other.

@memecucker talks a lot about faddish right-wingers adopting Catholicism with this fantasy of total submission, but then realizing with shock that the Popes, whatever else you can say for them, have actual coherent theological concerns and will actually, like, exercise their authority for purposes other than serving right-wing fantasies of submission.

An uglier leader, Donald Trump say, can play into that fantasy of total submission by being so changeable that the mass of their followers are never actually called on to do anything truly difficult. Individuals who get close to the leader might be smashed to bits for their failure to submit, but the vast majority of followers are not called on to do anything but to indulge whatever semi-conscious authoritarian impulses they already have, and if the leader realizes he's moving too far away from what they want he can simply reverse course and, because he has no principles beyond sheer love of power, simply change doctrine to something that his followers find easier to swallow (Look at Trump going from Operation Warp Speed to Anti-Vax).

This allows great masses of his followers to engage in a fantasy of authoritarian submission without ever encountering any situation where they would actually have to subordinate their own desires to those of someone else.

I'm not totally sure why, there seems to be this profound need to locate their own desires not as something that comes from them, but as something that comes from some source external to them.

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This is my stance as well. Does it count as genocide? Does it count as war crimes? Does it just count as regular old war?

Ask the dead if the distinction matters. The silence is your answer.

Death is death is death. Atrocity is atrocity is atrocity. The label might be relevant for legal reason, but not for moral ones. If what you’re doing is legally classified as “technically not genocide”, the fact that you have to put that “technically” there means that the moral difference between what you’re doing and “actual genocide” is effectively nil.

Sure the intent matters in some ways. So does the method. But a mountain of innocent corpses is still a mountain of innocent corpses.

Is Israel committing genocide? I would say arguably yes. But the other question is, if Israel’s actions did not rise to meet the strict legal definition of genocide, would what they are doing in Gaza be any less morally wrong?

My answer is no.

Outside the nearby Mir Yeshiva, one of the largest and most prestigious religious schools in the country, Haim Bamberger, 23, said he was studying the Torah, as, he said, God wanted. It was Bamberger’s way of defending Israel, rather than through military service. “When we do what He wants, He protects us,” he said.

The Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, that killed nearly 1200 people and led to the taking of roughly 250 hostages, Bamberger said, “was partly because many people in this country are not doing what God wants”.

Bamberger said he had been drafted but was ignoring his notice and risking jail. He grew more animated as he spoke. “In this country I’m considered a criminal,” he said, “because I want to study Torah.”

I most likely disagree with this guy about just about everything but I don't think he or anyone else should be drafted.

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Really wish we could quit this shell-game between "Everything is political" (true but vacuous), "This work is political" (Creators were attempting to communicate a specific political position that they hold via the themes, characterization and the rest, in a way you can argue using the content of the text) and "This work is political" (Creators weren't deliberately communicating a specific political stance but what the story takes for granted speaks volumes about the moment of its creation)

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Seriously though, seriously? You don’t have to like it. It is absolutely 100% completely fine if you bounce right off it. It’s even more fine to tell me this, and tell me why, to my face!

I’ve got a dozen more recs right where that came from, give me feedback on what does and doesn’t work for you and I will gladly take it and tailor further recommendations with that feedback in mind. You are under no pressure to enjoy anything and I will take no offense if our tastes differ!

But for fucks sake try it

if you want me to consume a new media you MUST catch me at the exact moment when the stars are aligned and the air pressure is equal to the current degree of the sun’s peak against the horizon and all the cosmic energies are perfectly unified (aka my old interest is fading out) or i will nod and say “im adding that to my list!” Knowing theres no chance i will check it out

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As someone who is often the friend in question because I need someone else to talk to about THING, yes, this is quite frustrating for me as well!

if you want me to consume a new media you MUST catch me at the exact moment when the stars are aligned and the air pressure is equal to the current degree of the sun’s peak against the horizon and all the cosmic energies are perfectly unified (aka my old interest is fading out) or i will nod and say “im adding that to my list!” Knowing theres no chance i will check it out

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Fun fact: China, India, and the USA all have government agencies committed to promoting medical psuedoscience.

Technically China's agency is meant to regulate "Traditional Chinese Medicine" quackery and the USA's agency is meant to study "Alternative Medicine" quackery, but both engage in practices that ultimately lend undue legitimacy to fake healthcare rather than exposing or limiting it. India's Ministry of Ayush is a lot worse because it purposefully promotes fake healthcare, including both globally popular quackery (homeopathy) and India's own homegrown quackery (ayurveda)

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I think people should be respected and taken care of even if they are very stupid. But that is not the same as respecting their stupidity. The American people (as all people, everywhere) deserve a safe place to sleep and 3 meals a day etc. but some of their desires are simply dumb and I'm not gonna pretend they arent

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