Did you actually do your research on that “deworming drug”? It’s been used to treat a hell of a lot more than parasites. That is just its most common use.

This has always been funny to me as someone who actually works in healthcare and regularly reads scientific studies. Of all the things you could choose to hate Trump over, the example you give is one that plenty of people in the scientific community considered to be a treatment avenue worth researching.

Damn, the media propaganda machine is effective. Trump could run into a burning building to save a litter of puppies and they’d still find a way to make everyone hate the guy. It’s impressive.

They probably would have just called you names instead of openly engaging with your ideas. That’s the norm in my experience. I sometimes wonder why I bother posting at all.

Then again, I do get some traction, and some representation of ideas outside the common narratives is better than none. But it does seem like if you aren’t in lockstep with the popular narratives, you get a cascade of downvotes just for entertaining unpopular ideas.

People don’t want you to think for yourself. They just want you to parrot their beliefs back to them and give them affirmation.

Who isn’t fascist/racist in the eyes of the left? You can be a moderate libertarian with a couple of populist beliefs and they’ll throw those labels at you.

Shit, if all conservatives had that nice an ass I wouldn’t mind listening to their opinions.

Ah yes, I knew Demolition Man was an accurate prediction of the future. Thanks for confirming the direction we are headed in!

I’m so glad I have a career where I’ll never have to worry about crap like this. I’d love to see how the higher ups would like it if they had to be on camera the whole day with AI watching them for mistakes/phone usage.

Playing devil’s advocate only makes you look like an asshole if the person you’re talking to has a closed mind. The entire purpose is to bridge the gap between two sides in an argument by acknowledging the positives of something they disagree with.

In essence, if someone has to play devil’s advocate with you, you’re probably the asshole. Otherwise you would be able to relate to and understand people who disagree with you without treating them like a monster.

A good example of where this can help is in politics. Political discussion is full of people talking past each other instead of trying to understand each other. If you could understand each other, it would be much easier to find compromise, which would make everyone feel heard and lead to the most reasonable outcomes when you consider the voice of all parties. But it’s much easier to label your opponent an idiot or a devil than to grapple with their actual problems.

This is a semantic argument made to ignore the issue. The reality is that social media platforms effectively have become the “town square” where ideas are shared. Stifling legal speech in that environment is very effective censorship of ideas.

You can argue that corporations have that right because they own the network. I disagree. Curation of what can be said on their platform turns them into a publisher, not a communications provider. Any lawyer active in that space could tell you how insanely detrimental it would be for that distinction to be made, at least in the U.S.

Imagine your phone company deciding you can’t say certain words to other people using their service without facing dropped calls, suspensions of service, or being banned. All because your legal speech goes against the morality of the majority.

That’s essentially what social media does at the moment. They are legally defined as, and receive the benefits of, a communications service. But they are acting like a publisher, deciding what is and is not allowed to be said. It’s a serious problem.

Do you believe they should receive immediate massive military aid? Because we’re basically in a Mexican stand off with Russia and China right now. As soon as we pass a line for what intervention Russia is willing to tolerate, we will start a cascade of events that will lead to WW3, and possible nuclear war. Most of us don’t want to see the planet nuked into extinction over a small war on the other side of the planet.

Granted, I think war is inevitable. But that doesn’t mean we should rush into it. The bloodshed will get exponentially worse the minute this war becomes bigger than Russia v Ukraine, and we’re already very close to the tipping point in my estimation.

Why should a creator be responsible for the voiced opinions of their fans? That standard makes no sense no matter how you slice it. A creator’s job isn’t to police their audience, it’s to provide information/entertainment.

Just because he has the power to censor people you don’t like doesn’t mean he should, or that it’s a reasonable ask. Instead of passively alienating you by not acting, censoring those people would actively alienate them. He’s much better off letting individuals take responsibility for their own comments, rather than joining any given side’s thought-police.

As soon as you create the standard that you are responsible for what your fans say and do, you’ve lost. You can immediately be held accountable for the speech of the worst of them, and good luck regulating that.

We’re always finding ways to interact with the world and perceive it from a different dimension/angle. This comic isn’t so much inaccurate as it is exaggerated.

I’m pretty sure this is exactly how scientists felt the first time they developed microscopes, electron microscopes, and other technology that lets us experience the world in a different way. A mixture of “woah” and “mind-blown”.

I understand 90% of the science behind what I do as a medical diagnostic technologist. It’s still fucking magic as far as I’m concerned.

CTs and MRIs? Atom spin/relax releasing detectable energy waves that are somehow able to be read and aggregated by algorithms into a high detail image of the inside of a human body? Tell me that isn’t magic and I’ll call you a liar.

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If they offer an invitation right now, then this is no longer a war between Ukraine and Russia, it will be a war between NATO and Russia. How do you think that ends?

WW3 may be the last world war. No one is eager to start it.

You think you don’t have to get a job under communism? My man, if you don’t want to work, capitalism is the much better system to bet on. Your labor can be overvalued under capitalism, letting you retire early. Under communism your value is equalized throughout the system regardless of your job. You work until you can’t work. If you can work and you choose not to, the government stops giving you food and water, and reappropriates your house.

What you’re thinking of is a Star Trek post-scarcity utopia. There’s a reason it only exists in fiction.

Nothing us stopping you from putting together a commune right now. You could go and form a communist society with some of your friends. Let me know how it goes when you all want to sit on your ass doing nothing and the food doesn’t just magically appear in front of you.

Okay, sounds good. But then I don’t want to see you begging for food, shelter, healthcare, transportation, cell phones, internet, or anything else provided by people who work. If you don’t want to engage in this system of commerce, by all means, you do you. But if you aren’t trading your labor to buy goods from other people who are laboring, you don’t just get to have all your needs met for free.

Go live off the land, build your own shelter, grow/hunt your own food, and treat your own wounds. I wish you luck. I’d rather keep working and paying for a much better range of goods than you could ever scavenge or build on your own.

They’re right to an extent. I think we should have a lot of systems in place to help break generational poverty, like foster homes, public schooling, scholarships, etc. But if people don’t take advantage of those systems to escape that cycle, how far do we intervene to try to fix it?

I came from a lower class background and now I’m solidly middle class in earnings. I went to a trades college, got a diploma in an in-demand job, and here I am. One of my coworkers came from severe poverty and an abusive home, and she did the same thing.

There’s only so much you can do for people to help them change. The most important aspect required in that process is the will power of the person in question, and that’s usually what’s lacking.

I’m not saying it’s easy. Life is hard. It’s arguably as easy as it has ever been to provide for yourself in the history of the human race (I know it was easier 50 years ago, I’m talking about modern society in general). People need to appreciate that they don’t have to hunt and forage for food, they don’t really have to worry about rival tribes sneaking into their camp and slitting their throats while they sleep. Again, that doesn’t mean life is easy now, but in comparison it could be a hell of a lot worse.

A certain percentage of a species will naturally fail to thrive. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s the reason evolution was able to take place. I don’t want excess suffering to take place. I specifically went into medicine because I want to curb suffering. But we will never be able to save everyone. We save as many as we can. This is a truth in medicine, but it’s also applicable to society as a whole. No matter how small we manage to get that percentage, some people will always have too much stacked against them.

I mean, you’ve got to pay off the house. That takes a while. You’ve got to put in labor to trade for food. You’ve got to put in labor to trade for the beer and wings at the pub. The pub staff have to keep working to serve you. The plumbers, electricians, etc. have to keep working to maintain your home, your streets, the businesses you want to shop at. People need to labor to create the goods you want to buy. Farmers work very long hours to bring food to your grocer so you can trade your labor for it. Doctors, nurses, technologists, etc, work long hours so you can get healthcare when you need it.

If you aren’t working one of the aforementioned jobs and you have enough money to pay for everything already, why should a doctor have to work any more than you are willing to work? They generally don’t need the money. But if they have the same attitude towards work as you do, you could come in to the hospital after a bad car accident to find no surgeons on site.

I work 60 hours a week on average as a diagnostic technologist. If I wanted even just the typical 40 hour work week, that means if you have a car accident after 430 pm, you don’t get xrays, fluoroscopy, or CT. No head trauma scans, no stroke alert scans to decide on TPA administration, no scans to diagnose abdominal aortic dissection or pulmonary embolism or appendix rupture. All conditions that happen every day and could easily kill you.

But maybe I should just take a load off and have a seat. After all, I’ve got a house and a pub.

Take a minute to go and familiarize yourself with the history of the lobotomy, then you can tell me the scientific community is above reproach.

Speaking as someone who is part of that community, bunk science gets through all the time. Especially when politics enters the fray.

Do you have any idea how many criticisms from within the healthcare and medical research fields were censored so that people like you would believe there was only one true opinion? Of course you don’t, because you probably got all of your news on the matter from a sanitized downstream source.

Think for yourself. There were convoluting factors in the way the covid vaccines were developed that left questions of long term side effects completely unanswered and up in the air. If you don’t understand why this vaccine was a special case to be concerned about, that’s okay, I don’t expect you to understand as a layman. But actual medical doctors were being censored off of social media and in professional environments for voicing legitimate concerns. If you’re okay with that, I think you’re making a tribal argument, not an intellectually honest one.

I own property, and I’m 33. You can get there if you want it. I had to go back to school at 29 to start a new career, but it was worth it to put myself in a good financial position.