The point is to use legal system to ruin one person to scare any people from running similar actions against US government.
US is loosing more and more of its standing when it comes to "spreading" democracy. You can't go and try to preach democratic values to, say, Belarus, and then do exactly the same in your own country.
Principles aren't really principles if they are being tossed aside when they become uncomfortable.
The turning point regarding the US' stance on democracy and human rights has been, IMO, GW Bush's withdrawal from the International Criminal Court.
There we were, in a world where USSR had collapsed, China not risen yet, with a USA as the uncontested dominant power. It has the unique chance in history to steer the world in one direction or the other.
Building international legal standards, multi-lateral cooperation, ensuring that whoever had the most power at one point would be limited by the world community, was something within US reach, and was a realistic hope. As a bonus, the first thing the community would work on would be tackling the climate change, as it was an obvious field where every country of planet earth had a common interest.
Instead, because of a few hundred "miscounted" votes in Florida, the US president was a zealous anti-intellectual evangelist, who decided that US interests trumps human rights, that denying climate change was a respectable political stance, and instead of spending a mountain of dollars on research, energy transition, diseases eradication, social net improvements, he spent it on invading 2 countries despite experts warning that it would not solve any problem.
There is no such thing as countries spreading democracy and I am not aware of any country that has ever went to war to spread democracy.
The only time the US attempted to "spread democracy" is when their influence over a foreign country was being challenged by anti-imperialist entities. At this point they invade to make sure the country transitions to a democracy, which when it comes to a poor country with little international clout, democracy amounts to it being very susceptible to foreign interference.
And of course the US also invades actual democracies when they elect anti-imperialists that challenge US interests in the region.
You spread democracy by showing it is better system.
A lot of countries that converted to democracy did this because their populations looked up to US and wanted to have better lief.
You also put pressure on other countries when they claim are democratic but fail to do this in practice (which is the case of Belarus or Poland where I live).
US does this actively and frequently in many forms, by voicing "concerns" or putting embargoes on countries that break their own rules.
Obviously, that pressure is much less effective when you do same things you try to pressure other countries to not do.
I am not sure it is always a better system in all situations. Democracies are very easily corrupted by foreign influence.
This is one of the reasons rich western countries love to "export democracy".
One of the reasons strongmen rise to power in third world countries is as a reaction to imperialism.
In that situation it is not even clear you can have a functioning democracy, and then the choice is between a puppet of foreign interests or a strongman.
There exists no system that is best in all situations.
Case in point, a system that does not care about rights of their inhabitants is usually much more effective at running large scale projects. For example, China just deciding to shut down everybody in their houses in Wuhan and shoot if you don't comply. And just like that they got their pandemic under control.
> One of the reasons strongmen rise to power in third world countries is as a reaction to imperialism
No, they rise because they can.
And not just in third world countries. Germany was definitely not a third world country when it allowed Hitler to rise and start a global war. What about Putin?
We see these guys mostly in third world countries now mainly because without democracy it is difficult to keep up with democracies without some special situation (like Saudi Arabia being gifted with huge oil reserves).
In non-democracies normal people have trouble preserving their wealth over long periods of time. You need to be "in favours" of the ruling entity to be wealthy and the wealth vanishes if you fall out of it.
Democracies are on the other hand, by definition, people ruling themselves, and this should in theory mean a lot of focus is on personal security and freedom. This should mean it is safer to conduct business over long periods of time, accumulate wealth and generally contribute to GDP.
People really over sell the spread of democracy in these places. By US design, Japan was a one party state until after the Cold War, with ~six years of opposition party rule total. Similar happened in South Korea, who considers it's first free election in ~2000, and even then one of their few elections saw intelligence agencies ensure the win of their former dictator's daughter. And Germany had a history of democracy without US influence.
Coming out of the 1st and then 2nd World wars the US seemed to be the voice of reason and alongside Britain (and possibly France) had a strong desire to make the world a better place and not repeat the mistakes of the past - which were all around to see.
But I feel after the 1960's the US has slowly lost that ideal, and the visionary leaders (Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt or Eisenhower) are no longer anywhere to be found (whether the electorate don't tolerate or desire them I'm not sure).
I think you've got an overly rosy view of pre-1960's history. Post WWI saw all three of those powers continue their colonialist land grabs, and post WWII saw all three commit many atrocities in the effort to check Russian advances.
Both the Japanese and Korean antidemocratic moves took place in that pre 1960 era for example.
But my point is their intention is to exploit the weakness of the democracy they enforce on the target country. And that is assuming this is a situation where they are exporting democracy.
There are also the opposite situations where they declare democratic outcomes invalid because they don't bow down to US interests. They happily support dictators in that case.
No. The point was to draw a line between the countries who respect humans rights and are willing to be judged and punished when they don't and the countries that did not.
Of course China and KSA would never join. And that would give other countries a clear and objective criterion to apply sanctions and international pressure.
Instead, judging what sanction a country deserves is an arbitrary exercise of executive power.
North Korea, China, KSA, are easy cases, but what do you know of Moldova? Of Hungary? Of Malaysia? Knowing that a country is held to some international standards judged independently would be a huge progress for human rights globally.
>So what should I expect about the integrity of justice here?
You could maybe ask the other 26 nations how they might see things?
Remember the EU is not just 1 lady who had a bad daddy. And her tenure is not forever.
The same is also true of the US, every 4 years the whole country gets to vote for either the worst of their instincts, or for the person that embodies a higher ideal. So a lot can change over the next few decades.
I'm with C. Hitchens, a short term pessimist, but a long term optimist :)
So we're holding Ursula von Der Leyen responsible for her father's actions now? Or is it that his immorality is genetically transmissible and she too is definitely a bad person?
In her case: Der Apfel faellt nicht weit vom Stamm. She is a chip of the old block.
One of the things that got her famous in Germany was her persistent lying and schemeing, including "think of the children", including showing actual child porn to journalists[0], to get her internet censorship and surveillance scheme passed. Definitely her father's footsteps.
Well yes she is a pretty bad person, remember McKinsey? Internet Censor at ISP level? Trying to buy Drones with weapons on board? The probably buy d dissertation for her Dr. Med?
> The EU? The father or Ursula von der Leyen did a false flag against some imprisoned RAF members. They bombed a prison and tried to blame it on the inmates and accomplices.
Could you tell me, where to find more information about this? Thanks!
I see how you can think GW's withdrawal was a turning point, but honestly it was a drop in the bucket. I've spent a long time trying to trace the origins of the current policy, and I mostly lay it at Woodrow Wilsons feet (and his handlers). Handlers being a key word. Do you not think Bush had them? The real power players in DC exist through multiple presidencies. This idea of POTUS being king-like (and therefor X is POTUS fault) is so unrealistic and a very sophmoric analysis of the real power dynamics at that level.
ps. What most people mean when they say "democracy" is "IMF conditionalities", et similar.
There's no way a Democrat president would make US personnel subject to an international court either. If there ever were any prosecutions it would cause a political meltdown. Unilateralism and exceptionalism run deep in the US.
It never was. If we want to talk about the powerful being held to account by the international community, realise that at some point that means canvassing the idea of invading China/India/the United States/Europe when they get out of line. That isn't an option. That would potentially reduce big chunks of the world to sand and anything less can't constrain the powerful. WWII alone levelled an entire continent, and that was with primitive weaponry compared to what is available now.
Trade sanctions aren't effective at changing behaviour and it isn't obvious if they would do more good or more harm if deployed against a superpower. Note that most superpowers' economic problems were due to internal not external policy.
Trade sanction ARE effective and are arguably much more effective than military operations at changing a country's behavior. The main negotiation leverage in talks with Donbass forces or Iran government is the suspension or extension of sanctions. It made Iraq and Libya abandon their WMD programs. Iraq's invasion, on the other hand justified North Korea in not abandoning theirs.
Indeed the whole point of principles is that you keep them when it isn't to your immediate benefit.
That's why "Corporate Values" are so empty. They get tossed as soon as they conflict with the profit motive. Google's "don't be evil" being the classic example.
I think this is the closest to "absolute moral truths". People discover these because these are not some arbitrary rules, the are actually absolute, universal laws.
People understand subconsciously, for example, than a person that does good for no reason expresses higher form of being good that a person that does good in exchange for some kind of benefit.
It doesn't mean that mutually beneficial relations are not good, the society is basically built on spoken or unspoken contracts.
But we understand that a person that does good altruistically, not expecting any benefit for it, is much more likely to be trustworthy in all situation. And a person that does good expecting benefits may (not must, just may) turn on you when they stop seeing benefits.
And I think the same goes for countries.
When we see US performing their foreign relations game but only ever putting their weight when we can later find they were expecting some kind of benefit, and almost never for countries that have nothing to offer, it becomes transparent to us that US is basically much less likely to be trustworthy than if it did its actions based on principles.
French (at least in France): "c'est dans le besoin que l'on reconnaît ses amis" (nearest well-known English saying: 'A friend in need is a friend indeed').
There’s a large (the vast majority), who think what is happening to Assange is a travesty.
Many of those same people don’t do anything about it. They still vote the same exact way they have for 15-20 years, they don’t get active and write anyone, etc.
The real travesty about Assange is that he’s not even a US citizen. He tried to reach out to the state department to redact sections and they refused to respond. Then they go after him for publishing what some other person leaked. Not only that, but the leaker had a publicly funded transition and a short prison sentence. Assange is charged and has endured much worse.
My principles (and many others) still stand. But our “deep state” doesn’t represent the majority.
> There’s a large (the vast majority), who think what is happening to Assange is a travesty.
Not sure that's true, go to reddit for example, and you'll see the majority are already brainwashed into thinking Assange is a Russian asset. US mainstream media is working on it overtime.
And Reddit is usually on the more "enlightened" end on such topics, at least used to be.
Ask some random person on the street about Assange and the best they can come up with is probably something about fleeing from the Swedish police for rape, something Russian agent, maybe something about how he treats his cat horribly or doesn't clean his toilet properly.
The Five Eyed propaganda machine [0] was very effective in smearing him, and even Snowden, among the general public in these past years.
Have you completely forgotten 2020? After a year in which forcefully occupying government buildings was regarded as legitimate protest; a year with over 500 riots, for which arrested rioters were generally not prosecuted; Democrats have no credibility when they complain about the right occupying one government building.
What you've done there is pure partisanship: defining "the other side" by the worst among them while ignoring the behavior of the worst among your own side.
Reddit is definitely not the whole world. It's heavily dominated by people from the US and western europe, and heavily biased towards the the mainstream western propaganda narrative. Reddit is an active target for propagandists (i.e. intelligence communities). Votes and recommendations for news articles are not at all based purely on interest and activity, it's being pushed by actors with various agendas.
How can you vote differently when you always get two nearly identical candidates and the system has been engineered from the late 1800s to only accept two parties (the last real third party being parts of the populist movement)?
To be frank, I think we have a one party state with a global military dictatorship.
Not an American,but born and raised in Germany. For about 20 years now, I have gotten used to a motto (see below).
I had this motto in mind after I once witnessed how political decisions were made within one of the youth organizations of one of the two mainstream parties here in Germany and was disgusted by it.
> The parliament is the theater, which is performed, so that the citizen believes to live in a democracy. While the actual power is exercised elsewhere.
Well, you could do one of (at least) one of two things:
1. Be active in campaigns to boycott the vote. This can be presented both as a permanent stance against the regime in the US, or against the two-party duopoly; but it can also be presented as "I am withholding my vote from party X because it currently has unacceptable positions on issue Y - and I would like them to be punished by losing elections and know that they lost because of Y". If your choice is the deeper/more permanent one, you would likely to try invest effort in non-party organizational forms such as local popular committees, labor unions, protest movements etc.
2. You could join and support one of the existing third parties. Currently, the most viable seem to be: The Green Party, the Libertarian Party, and the recent initiative of the People's Party. The last one is new and is of particular interest, as the other two have been beset by internal trouble for many years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_for_a_People%27s_Part...
That’s what elected trump btw... a populist movement effectively trying to take over the Republican Party.
In my opinion, it’s also why the corporate media then attacked him (who btw I think is an idiot and don’t support)
I think it becomes more and more obvious by the day you’re correct. I honestly didn’t see it this way until some of the stuff in 2021.
Case in point So... 12 / 18 people in the michigan plot to capture the governor and stormed the court house were feds (FBI agents or informants directed by FBI).
> Panic rising, Dan slipped away from the group for a moment and spoke into the recording device he was carrying, which he knew was being monitored live by his FBI handlers. The Watchmen, he said, were preparing to breach the Capitol. The agents couldn’t speak back to him, but he hoped they could at least warn the police about what was coming.
> Then something surprising happened. The Michigan State Police stood down and let the protesters — including those in full tactical gear — enter the building unopposed. They could even bring their guns, so long as they submitted to a temperature check for COVID-19.
Media goes wild and blames Trump few weeks pre-election. In reality, the documents filed in court make it look like the fbi entrapped people (remains to be seen in court).
> They still vote the same exact way they have for 15-20 years, they don’t get active and write anyone, etc.
It seems impossible to fix this (or even improve the situation) with voting. Both parties seem to be in agreement on how they would treat Assange. They only differ on unrelated hot button issues.
> US is loosing more and more of its standing when it comes to "spreading" democracy. You can't go and try to preach democratic values to, say, Belarus, and then do exactly the same in your own country.
Is there any indication that stuff like this happens _more_ than in the past? Or have the world's standards just risen?
Or I’ve gotten older and more sour on this type of stuff?
Honestly I feel like the change has been, for me, more awareness and less attachement to the narrative forced down my throat. I also don’t believe it to be (as a native US citizen) a US thing. I see it in a huge swing in many countries towards authoritarianism in many ways and towards many goals. It isn’t so much a left or right thing (although I believe it to be more right leaning) but just a greater willingness to use power structures to control others.
Germany was a republic with a constitution and elected leaders after 1918.
Kaiser Wilhelm II took power after Bismark, and abdicated at the end of the first war. Wilhelm died in 1941.
Bismarck unified Germany in the latter 1800's as a constitutional federation with suffrage and elected legislatures, I don't know the fine details except it was some form of confederation and is considered a constitutional monarchy with elected legislature.
And most elements of the regime, excluding a few people at the very top, remained in place after 1945. Like the judiciary, municipal authorities, government bureaucracies etc. - and of course the large company owners.
That is true and one of the few successful examples. I wonder if the cold war played a role here, there was an honest ambition not to let Germany fall to the communits.
I mean ok, but the parent commenter's claim is that the US is _losing_ standing as a spreader of democracy. This is the premise of my question, and I'm not really interested in a random third-party's view that the premise is wrong, especially when it's as trite a view as this one.
You are asking if people think the propaganda has become less true. It's a nonsense question, as if people ever think the US is/was spreading democracy the propaganda has worked.
It doesn't matter if it is happening more or less. The goal is to always be improving.
Values is about what you believe in and strive for, and when you don't reach the standards you set for yourself, you figure out why, and adjust to be inline with your beliefs and goals.
> It doesn't matter if it is happening more or less. The goal is to always be improving.
I'm not sure what you think "mattering" means, but I was responding to a comment that said "the US is loosing[sic] more and more of its standing". I'm not sure why you're so convinced that the relative decline of the US's reputation shouldn't be talked about, but it's pretty bizarre behavior to insert yourself into a conversation about it and assert so.
My theory is that the progressive loss of the US' soft power is fueling the growth of emerging internal extremist groups.
This topic being another shard of the US' soft-power armour lost.
The more it appears that the US reached and maintains it's global superpower status with force, coercion, underhanded tactics, and other abhorrent behaviors that contravene the Geneva Convention (which are handily side-stepped by conducting these behaviors in countries that don't adhere to such laws), it only works to justify extremists groups to use whatever means they consider necessary to achieve their own manifest destiny.
In that context, almost anything becomes justified - which is nightmare fuel for the moderate middle majority.
1: Moderate doesn't sell eyeballs and clicks, so extremism gets the attention, which is what it wants because it will attract more of the "curious disillusioned" for potential indoctrination
2: Until unknown critical mass of perceived-threat-paranoia, there's no need to publicise / protest / soapbox one's moderate-ness because it can be relatively assumed. ie. I don't need to explain that I'm not one of those nutjobs.
If you're asking "why don't their values dominate" on a foreign policy level, well, I'm unqualified to answer that, except to say that realpolitik is far removed from most citizens' day to day lives (the conundrum semi-explored by A Few Good Men seems appropriate to mention here).
It is often worse than just hypocrisy. If the US hasn’t hand picked a foreign regime and someone wins the democratic election which the US doesn’t agree with the US can just label them a terrorist organization if it is deemed politically necessary.
I am no fan of the Taliban or Hammas - and US probably correctly labeled them terrorist organizations - but it must also be acknowledge they are also “political parties” that have won democratic elections.
... but that would mean acknowledging the non-dichotomy between states and terrorist organizations. States carry out the most terror, but they (mostly) get a free pass. The US (and many other world states) would not want to undermine this situation and make their own actions legitimate targets of the question: "Is this a form of terror?".
Given the thousands of US Mil installations all across the globe, foreign intervention and police actions, geopolitical intrigue, etc it is unfortunately looking more and more like a Pax Romana -- a troubling sign, depending on your perspective.
Yes even going back to Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt rewrote his drafts of his speech to obscure the fact that the Philippines, a major site of the attack, was also a US colony.
I was really surprised to find out, as an american, standing with feet on the ground in Manila, near age 30, having grown up in the US and gone to public schools, that the Philippines had been a US Territory off and on, on par with Puerto Rico, for about 50 years starting around 1898. There's even a big obelisk in the center of Union Square in San Francisco commemorating this event, it turns out.
None of this was ever covered in public schools. I realize there's a lot of history to cover and kids can only absorb so much, but when people talk about "only focusing on europe and the middle east" it's good to have a couple of concrete examples. The Philippines actually has a larger english speaking population than the UK. Anyways, it always seemed that the Philippines got conveniently swept under the rug when discussing things like WW2 and American Imperialism.
Yes certainly. I recently started listening to the audiobook A Peoples History of the United States and there is a LOT of history we don't cover. Right now I am listening to a talk by Noam Chomsky about inequality and it's remarkable that the top % of the wealthy that have control over the country also do not go to public schools. It's as if we have a second school system for the subservient class.
Public schools in some districts are terrible. If you can afford to send your children to private school, that’s an easier option than changing the entire public school system in your district (unless you’re Bill Gates).
Why do you think they are cancelling AP classes in San Francisco and California under the guise of social justice? It's to further weaken the underclass since the rich don't even go to public school.
> Why do you think they are cancelling AP classes in San Francisco and California under the guise of social justice?
Can you document this? I'm a southern California resident, and I keep hearing stuff like this from people online, but I know no local examples of this at all.
Having gone to high school in California, we never covered Mexican-american or Spanish-american wars, civil war focused almost exclusively on slavery. 90% of WW2 was about Japanese internment or how racist nuking Japan was. History of Communism was never mentioned for obvious reasons.
The teacher's union does not dictate the curriculum.
Typically the state legislatures dictate what is in the curriculum broadly, sometimes extra specifically, and the administrators and teachers create their lessons to satisfy the legislation.
How does the teacher's union suppress subject matters in the history department?
It doesn't follow that they suppress Filipino colonization, is there some example of teachers union demanding of legislators that they pass laws like that?
It's also hard to get elected without people voting for you, or funding for political campaigns.
The Army ran out of Native Americans to massacre, so they arranged another indigenous group to terrorize for the next several decades. (It really was the same racist officers doing the same racist shit.) Some Filipinos had thought USA military would join them in overthrowing Spanish tyranny, but they soon discovered the actual intent was to replace Spain. Decent Americans like Mark Twain were horrified, but the war media was full of lies about subhuman savages who needed American government so most Americans had no idea. Plus ça change...
Hmm, don’t know what school you went to, but in my American public school they certainly covered the Spanish-American war, and the consequent status of the Philippines. Spanish colony, turned over to the U.S., taken over by Japan, independant after WWII ended.
I just read this post on Popehat[0] recounting an event while Ken White was working for an LA federal judge back in the day. He was brought to a ceremony conducted by Judge Ronald S.W. Lew where numerous, VERY elderly Filipino WW2 veterans were granted US Citizenship. This was promised to them in addition to veteran's benefits by FDR in exchange for recruitment into the war effort, and after the war quietly swept under the rug by the congress.
> Given the thousands of US Mil installations all across the globe
There are only 750-800 US military installations around the world. Most of these are small. This number has been reduced by about 1000 since the peak in the 1980s (cold war era). The majority of large installations are in the US.
>This Wikipedia article claims “ there are "around" 5,000 bases total
There are 326 bases in the US. https://militarybase.net/u-s-military-bases/ (see the CSV list at the bottom). The US has a total of 50 states and 6 protectorates (Guam, Puerto Rico, etc...). There's no where near 80 bases per state unless you count National Guard Armories (parking lots with a gym in most cases) and recruiting offices. The US has a big military, yes, but not that big.
I did not say military bases, I said installations, which I understand to mean permanent, semi-permanent, or maintained presences of materiel or infrastructure supporting military or reconnaissance.
In retrospect, you are a bit right here. Pardon the bike shedding, but maybe that is not a precise definition due to the vagaries of what "military", "base" and "installation" means. Does room 641a count? I'm not sure. The US Military has its own very special definition, but the general public would know its own.
Under this expanded rubric, National Guard, Coast Guard and Reservist armories would definitely count, CIA black sites[0] would certainly qualify as well (and they are not in your list to be sure), in addition to listening posts, air fields, possibly also foreign naval supply points if they meet some of those continually manned criteria (and hell, why not? Its in the spirit of this thing, we'll just consider them 3/5ths an installation for the purposes of statistics), some forward operating bases if they are continually manned and resupplied for, lets just hand-wave 11 months. Also, private contractors are definitely in this if they have their own separate facilities and especially if they conduct military operations such as "security forces" in Iraq. Now that I'm thinking about it, air craft carriers should be included as well if they are on deployment ... I know, I know, thats pretty rare.
But you are right if you point out that this isn't a precise measure, that it changes continually, and that I don't actually know how many there are--it could easily be tens of thousands! Just scale the definition until it feels most comfortable for you.
> US is loosing more and more of its standing when it comes to "spreading" democracy.
The US was only ever seen as a spreader of democracy in contrast to the Soviet Union/Fascist Europe/European Empires. And it was, but no one knowledgable of the US thought it was an unmitigated assessment! You can definitely compare the US favorably to China in regards to democracy and freedom but no one should be fooled that we don't have perpetual work to make a more perfect union.
There is nothing out of line here. Democracy is not "morality" - it's purely a means by which the majority enforces its decisions onto the minority. In fact democracy is one of the "best" ways for achieving "group irresponsibility" and allows us to do atrocious things with no-one in particular to blame afterwards.
Depending on how low you put your bar for what passes for "democracy", I would very much disagree. Countries like Nazi Germany, USSR, North Korea etc all had/have elections. Of course, you can argue that this does not qualify for a democracy, but then one can argue that neither did the "bad" monarchies in history qualify for proper "monarchies".
To me democracy is also the failed form of it, you cannot just pretend that democracy is that part which you like. And also, you have to consider what better things it prevents us from having. Also, you cannot compare things out of their historical context. Of course democracy is not very bad when we have food and iphones, but you don't have to look very far (North Korea, Venezuela, Africa - you will be surprised how "good" democracy some of these countries have, yet they do not prosper) to see what happens when we don't have them.
One good book on the topic is "Democracy: The God That Failed" by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. It goes into massive amount of details and is not a pleasant read. Still, probably the best book in existence, for someone to understand what is wrong with our world.
If you argue North Korea to be a democracy, that is a whole different vocabulary, not changing any bar. In that case you are correct I guess.
On the contrary I think Hoppes criticism falls apart at empirical evidence like the cases you mentioned and his ideas of freedom will inevitably result in feudalism, not even a monarchy because the ruler would lack legitimacy and would face constant challenges. Monarchs as government can only exist if constituents can live completely removed from state influence. But that isn't possible in the world of today.
Elections != democracy. In particular, elections where only one party can run do not make a democracy. Elections where only one party can campaign do not make a democracy. And elections where only one party can win (because of who counts the votes) do not make a democracy.
"Having an election" does not make it a democracy. The people choose who rules makes it a democracy.
Yeah, it's much better when one party pretends to be 2 parties and practically nothing changes regardless if you choose one or the other. I am sure people in the US choose who rules - that's a REAL democracy.
I'm not really sure how to feel about this sort of criticism because you could apply it to basically any court case. The goal for any defendant/prosecutor isn't to have a believable case it's to have a legally sufficient one.
Well incentives matter. The government has its incentives, so do drug makers, so do fda members and so do you. Always consider how incentives impact information you receive. Medical textbooks have optimal incentives if you are trying to learn. Media, government and drug makers maybe not.
There are thousands of scientists working on this stuff all over the world. Most of them seem to be on board with the vaccines. You don’t have to trust the government. Just watch what scientists are saying. Considering that these scientists are spread out all over the world it’s hard to imagine that there is a world wide conspiracy to control what all these scientists are saying.
So now we’re just supposed to work off hunches? See, this is why we’re still in this shit situation.
It’s pretty hard for Joe Bloggs to workout who you trust in 2021.
We’re lied to all the time by politicians and government, then when they want us to comply, we’re just supposed to go along with it?
I’m not arguing against the fact that getting the vaccine is probably the right path to take. I am arguing that if governments want people’s trust, they need to earn it, doing this to Assange is doing the opposite and does things like prolonging the pandemic, it fuels mistrust.
I think you've fundamentally missed GP's point which is that when governments lie, they do it because they're self-interested. When a politician tells you something that isn't true, they're lying to make themself seem better or to make their opponents seem worse. (Or, to take an example of "the government" lying to you, when the NSA says they aren't collecting certain data about US citizens, their motivation for lying is avoiding the public outcry should their actions be revealed). What's the motivation behind a global cabal of governments, scientists, independent regulators and drug companies all lying to us about vaccines?
I'd love to actually know how many truly independent scientists work on "looking into these things".
Does anyone have a quantifiable number. I'm again, not doubting what you're saying, but I hear a lot of "thousands of scientists are vetting the medicine etc".
Are they really ?
I think about this with open source software too, I run Linux, but I do actually wonder sometimes how much "vetting" is really going on.
What's considered "truly independent"? Aren't scientists at the various drug companies "independent" from each other, given that vaccines are mostly zero-sum and so drug companies have strong financial incentives to invalidate their competitors' tech? Aren't governments independent from drug companies, given that rolling out an unsafe vaccine would be political suicide? Aren't the scientists who actually work for the government regulators independent from the governments themselves, given that they aren't political appointees and have nothing to gain politically from getting a bunch of people to take an unsafe vaccine (and presumably are motivated by public health, given their career path)? Aren't the academic scientists doing COVID-related research and peer-reviewing COVID-related publications independent from all of the above?
Not to peddle conspiracies but here are some hypotheticals to match yours:
>Aren't scientists at the various drug companies "independent" from each other, given that vaccines are mostly zero-sum and so drug companies have strong financial incentives to invalidate their competitors' tech?
Vaccines are very much not zero game. They are largely interchangable in that governments are under severe pressure to get something / anything into peoples' arms if it means quelling the masses and shaking off COVID-19. We are seeing countries mixing and matching for the double dose vaccines, not to mention every country approving at least two vaccines for usage. If this were zero-game, then governments would seek to only buy the most effective vaccine and do everything possible to secure supply.
As a phramaceutical, choosing to pick holes in your competitors' products may increase your market share temporarily, but will bring scrutiny from your competitors and overall decrease confidence in vaccines. As an example of the prisoner's dilemna, the best way to maximize everyone's share is by just focusing on your own product.
>Aren't governments independent from drug companies, given that rolling out an unsafe vaccine would be political suicide?
At the absolute highest levels, sure. But at the level of the faceless beaurocrats actually making decisions, it is very much a revolving door between industry and government (oversight bodies in particular). Governing body (decision maker) one day, lobbying on behalf of drug makers the next.
>Aren't the scientists who actually work for the government regulators independent from the governments themselves, given that they aren't political appointees and have nothing to gain politically from getting a bunch of people to take an unsafe vaccine (and presumably are motivated by public health, given their career path)?
Same as previous, and it is also very easy for there to be conflicts of interest... even if we assume ample competence in scrutnizing the pretty pamphlets drug makers try to deceive with. There are many ways drug makers can subtly introduce bias or error into their trials. Well intentioned oversight bodies could still be deceived and later have to recall products they have approved (many drugs are recalled after data about effectiveness and side-effects appear from actual use in the population).
>Aren't the academic scientists doing COVID-related research and peer-reviewing COVID-related publications independent from all of the above?
Same as previous, wrt. source of money for studies and journals themselves. We have also seen people acting out of self-interest when their entire field was pulled into question (scientists working in the field of gain of function publishing letters and articles clearing their field of all doubt without substantiative arguments made, e.g. the origins of the virus).
Currently booked in for my Pfizer vaccine (still on the fence about it, a week out). I try look up information about what causes heart inflammation in young men. I do this because it troubles me the mechanism doesn't seem to be understood.
Anyway, when using Google to find information on the topic, top of the search results are news articles from Reuters about the fact it's a known problem, but it's ok.
Do you know who is on the board at Pfizer ? The CEO of Thompson Reuters! James C Smith [1]
I'm the same, not really into pedaling conspiracies, but this definitely feels like a conflict of interest, and it would also disincentive people to speak out, I'm sure someone in his position could make a high-profile persons life difficult if he wanted too.
When considering whether to get vaccinated, you basically have to ask yourself two questions.
1. what are the side effects of the vaccine?
2. what are the side effects of infection with the virus?
In addition, there is the question of what is the probability of the corresponding side effects of vaccination and infection.
All study data that I know of say that serious side effects are 5 - 8 times more likely to occur with an infection with the virus.
In addition, one would have to ask how likely it is that one will be infected with the virus. Here, one can only base ones thinking on mathematical models. At present, it does not look as if we will be able to achieve herd immunity worldwide. That would mean that sooner or later everyone who is not vaccinated would be infected with the virus.
This from the peer reviewed studies I have searched and read via pubmed in the last few months.
> What's the motivation behind a global cabal of governments, scientists, independent regulators and drug companies all lying to us about vaccines?
This is like asking “what incentive does the government have to keep up the airport security theatre?”.
To play up the pandemic, increase the FUD, rule by fear and panic, keep the population permanently locked down, restricted, controlled, … a lot of very juicy incentives for a lot of politicians.
A lot of the scientists and top “scientific” (actually political) institutions were repeatedly wrong, directly lied or indirectly mislead in the past 18 months. Many scientists who disagreed with the official narrative (at the time) were censored or cancelled.
You can't just 'watch what thousands of scientists are saying'. You have to rely on media, which is provably spreading misinformation on a range of topics every single day. The trust in mainstream media is at an all time low and for good reason.
You could read the studies. It isn't that hard actually. One would only need to want to have facts, not opinions and invest some amount of work to understand this.
Not really true, there are critics of mass vaccinations that have formal credentials. Among doctors it is surprisingly widely spread and they have decent reasoning.
You don’t need to trust the government. You can do your own research by starting with some biology textbooks and then progressing to immunology, the history of medical science, etc. Then you can read a bunch of papers on mRNA vaccines and learn exactly how they work. There is a ton of international clinical data available too, which at least means you don’t have to trust just one government.
Note that nowhere did I mention YouTube videos, celebrities, or talk radio blowhards.
If "trusting the government" is the reason you are taking a vaccine, you don't know enough about history, current events, or medicine. Any government, as a whole, is stupid and slow. But even stupid institutions can get things right when they are obvious enough. When they do, it doesn't mean you should start trusting them.
Simple understandings of biology and medicine should inform you that taking a vaccine to the worst pandemic in living memory is the right course of action.
As far as I'm concerned, no one is supposed to do anything. You do what you decide is best. Hunches and assumptions sound like a bad way to decide on such an important course of action. Instead, if I were you, I'd do a combination of research and choosing someone to listen to that you think is both trustworthy and has spent a long time learning about vaccines. Maybe someone who's got a PhD in molecular biology and has written extensively on the subject.
Do your own research, and trust that person to understand the things that would take too long for you to learn, then make your choice.
I would never let the government do my thinking for me, for free or for pay. They aren't good at it.
Okay, so looking at your other posts, seems like you really love conspiracy theories and tying together any random coincidence you can without evidence. Not going to engage you in conversation again.
Yes, false media can be generated, much like 100 years ago when you could sign a fake signature or misquote someone in a newspaper. No idea is new, just new applications of the idea.
Luckily, we all have brains, and can use them to understand things from first principles. Listening to other people thoughts about what you should be doing is generally stupid. They aren't you, and they have themselves to look after.
Also, no freaking idea why you tangented from vaccines, to taxes, to fake media generation, but unless you pick a topic we are done here.
> taking a vaccine to the worst pandemic in living memory is the right course of action
I’m not sure this is a reasonable strategy. 2 years ago, the “worst pandemic in living memory” was some annual flu. Did you take the vaccine against that?
When it comes to vaccines, you don't necessarily have to trust government institutions.
If you are normal, adult, educated person you don't need to "trust" the government for everything. You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't.
Trust knowledge that has been gathered over decades, statistics and research that has been gathered by many research institutions (unless you can claim all of them are in collusion). Vaccines do work and we desperately need everybody to get vaccinated. Every country that has implemented vaccinations vigorously has seen immediate, large drop in cases. People who are going to hospital at the moment are almost exclusively unvaccinated.
A person or institution or government that shows it is not trustworthy in one area undermines itself in other areas and so it is understandable that it may sow confusion. But you should still have ability to think for yourself and use it to make rational decisons.
> "You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't."
When I was a child, this sort of thinking was taught in grade-school and considered to be an important component of becoming an adult. Ah, how I long for "the good ol' days".
If I had fifty teachers during my time in public school I'd be surprised if five of them would have been smart enough to teach such a course. None of those taught grade school.
You might not need to trust government institutions in order to be convinced that vaccines in general are effective, you do however need to trust them in order to verify that a specific vaccine is effective and safe. Especially for new vaccines for which we do not have as much data gathered. In addition, the genetic material for the vaccines not being open source (and commonly being patented) stops smaller research labs and individuals from examining them by themselves. Not to mention that even if the vaccine was open source there would still be possible supply-chain attacks, would you for example trust the Chinese government to not secretly conduct experiments on the Uighurs by giving them a modified vaccine? It's not as if human experimentation even in "modern democratic countries" is unheard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio....
Considering that I would not blame minorities (whether racial, religious, or political, especially in countries that have been historically oppressive of them) if they decided to avoid the vaccine.
> You should hopefully be able to think for yourself and be able to evaluate when the story checks out and where it doesn't.
> But you should still have ability to think for yourself and use it to make rational decisons.
Some people ended up distrusting vaccines (whether in general or specific) after following this process. It is not a truth-finding panacea.
Vaccines that have been through clinical trials and approved by the FDA generally work. I’m fully vaccinated, but you have to admit that there’s a difference between the COVID vaccine and other vaccines— not just in terms of development and deployment speed, but also in terms of underlying technology, at least in some cases. Skepticism is a reasonable default stance for most things, emergency measures included.
If you remember, vaccines were developed under enormous pressure and every day of delay meant literally tens of thousands of people dying across the world.
So the uncertainties about these vaccines must be weighted against the situation in which they came to be.
Fortunately, the doubt against vaccines seems to be largely unfounded and it is easily evidenced by drops in death rates in all countries that implemented vaccinations.
> Fortunately, the doubt against vaccines seems to be largely unfounded and it is easily evidenced by drops in death rates in all countries that implemented vaccinations.
Wrong on both counts. First of all viral epidemics follow a natural progression. Saying that a drop in [COVID] death rates following vaccine rollout proves their efficacy/safety is like saying that a week of heavy rains after doing a rain dance proves the rain dance did it.
This same mistake has been made in associative studies looking at mask mandates, where many shoddy papers were released that showed a drop in mask-mandate counties while neglecting to account for the fact that cases were dropping everywhere. Monica Gandhi (an HIV researcher whose pro-masking papers have been of consistently poor quality yet are fairly widely cited because they produce the “correct” result) published a study to this effect that she and her team had to later retract because cases later went up. They were just measuring the normal viral epidemic curve and convincing themselves, without real evidence, that it must have been the masks.
As to the other point, the efficacy of the vaccines is real but quite limited. The recent data coming out of Israel especially was something like 33% case reduction, but a much better reduction in hospitalization/death (80-90%). That to me demonstrates that the party line position of “the vaccines are amazingly effective” is simply not true. They’re great for reducing personal risk - although I’d note the Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis, and strokes are pretty concerning - but they don’t do much for slowing the spread. Now frankly we never should have been trying to slow the spread of SARS-2 in the general population - it was always destined to be an endemic respiratory virus, and a mild one at that for most healthy people - but I’m just making the point because the whole narrative has been that we had to lock down “until the vaccine” to save people from getting infected when increasingly it’s looking like everyone has to face the virus one way or another.
So go out and get vaccinated if you want better odds against SARS-2 while taking on some risk from possible side effects of making your cells express a bunch of artificial spike protein throughout your body for a few days, but don’t kid yourself into thinking that any concerns about either the safety or efficacy of the vaccines is baseless.
How do you explain that, even though significant proportion of populations is already vaccinated, new hospitalizations are almost exclusively people who were not vaccinated?
If vaccines were not effective wouldn't it be true that we should see both vaccinated and unvaccinated in hospitals?
While vaccinated people still can get Covid, they have much lower chance of passing it further. In a vaccinated people the virus cannot multiply as much and with lower and shorter presence of the virus in the organism and much less chance of symptoms that aid spreading the virus (like caughing) there is much less chance you infect other people.
The reality is that Covid is now mostly spreading in circles of unvaccinated people and vaccines are effective at stopping spread of the virus.
The vaccines prevent the disease from becoming bad enough to need hospitalization. That's about it. This answers your question about why hospitalizations are mostly unvaccinated people without negating any of the GP's points, which are well stated.
The idea that the vaccine prevents hospitalizations is in fact directly contradictory to the GGPs central argument, which was "that a drop in [COVID] death rates following vaccine rollout proves their efficacy/safety is like saying that a week of heavy rains after doing a rain dance proves the rain dance did it."
It's also worth pointing out that "some risk from possible side effects of making your cells express a bunch of artificial spike protein throughout your body for a few days" is strictly less than that of the virus, because the virus also puts those spike proteins in your body.
And the MRNA vaccines don't have stroke or guillain-barre as side effects. That only applies to the J&J (Janssen) vaccine.
Further, GGPs 33% number is actually 39%, and applies specifically to the delta variant. Against the version of the virus that the vaccines were developed against, it had a far higher rate of infection reduction, which is why people are (reasonably) somewhat concerned about delta, and why vaccination is even more important: because herd immunity is now even harder to achieve.
> The idea that the vaccine prevents hospitalizations is in fact directly contradictory to the GGPs central argument, which was "that a drop in [COVID] death rates following vaccine rollout proves their efficacy/safety is like saying that a week of heavy rains after doing a rain dance proves the rain dance did it."
That doesn't follow. My point was simply that making an association does not prove causation. Which is true. Observing that giving someone a vaccine reduces their hospitalization is a separate matter, and one I literally stated in my comment (that they reduce COVID hosps by 80-90%)
> And the MRNA vaccines don't have stroke or guillain-barre as side effects. That only applies to the J&J (Janssen) vaccine.
You're wrong about the guillain-barre. Unfortunately I can't find the study I'm looking for. There is a paper that looked at the rates of Guillain Barre in the mRNA vaccines and found them 4-5x higher than normal ("normal" is a low base rate obviously), and specifically criticized the misleading math/wording coming from Pfizer and the like where they falsely claimed that the Guillain-Barre was not more common.
> Against the version of the virus that the vaccines were developed against, it had a far higher rate of infection reduction, which is why people are (reasonably) somewhat concerned about delta, and why vaccination is even more important: because herd immunity is now even harder to achieve.
This is why getting naturally infected is so important! You get near 100% infection reduction for a couple years and then immunological memory for the rest of your life. You can't beat those numbers with the vaccines, not even close.
If you look at the 6 month Pfizer trial, the vaccines made no difference in all-cause mortality. In fact there was one more death in the vaccine group. (My interpretation is that the vaccines spared some COVID deaths - a small but real amount - but caused more deaths from the side effects of being injected with a massive bolus of spike protein mRNA (acute clotting disorders, stroke, myocarditis, that kind of stuff))
Unlike the US, which had lots of people dying every day and so chose Emergency Authorization to get any working vaccine ASAP, New Zealand already had eliminated COVID-19 in their general population, so they did the full (albeit expedited, it's not as though there wasn't impatience) medicines authorization process for the Pfizer vaccine they're using.
They've now put well over a million jabs in arms (New Zealand's population is about 5 million) and are starting their "big" population wide rollout at the end of July. There is no sign of any significant problems.
The very rapid success of the trial programmes is actually because we did such an abysmal job stopping the pandemic. Trials work by comparing people who got the test jab against people who got a placebo. For many diseases it might take several years for enough trial participants to get infected so that you learn anything. For COVID-19 it took only a few months for strong signals to emerge, because, (outside of New Zealand and to some extent a handful of other countries that had control) the virus was everywhere, so very quickly your placebo group began to get infected and sick.
HN deals more with technology. Imagine your project takes six hours to compile. You have ten hypotheses for the cause of an important bug. Will you fix it this week? Probably not right, that's sixty hours just for compiling -- maybe you can leave it overnight and manage two tests per day? But best not to chance it. So you tell management you hope to have a fix "the week after next". Sorry, that's the best you can do.
Now, imagine a new compiler version speeds up builds, and they only take 15 minutes. You can try all ten hypotheses in a morning, get a fix reviewed, go to production and it'll be done by Friday close of business no problem.
Management are suspicious. How can the new compiler make such a radical difference? Surely you've cut some corners, you'd better go back and test it "properly" this time.
In this analogy lay people are suspicious management and the vaccine manufacturers are the developer. Also being completely useless at preventing a predictable respiratory pandemic is somehow a new compiler version. That part of the analogy doesn't work very well. Sorry.
There are two separate ideas here. Believing in the concept of a vaccine as an effective disease prevention mechanism, and believing the current narrative that all demographics need a covid vaccine, the risk reward calculus always shows it does more good than harm, etc (I'm not trying to faithfully summarize, but more make the point that there is a distinct and political covid vaccine push that's not the same as just saying a vaccine works)
I personally had to suspend my mistrust of the government in order to decide it was worth getting vaccinated. A good rule of thumb is that the more someone tries to push you to do something, the more you should question their motives. And governments that have mismanaged and lied about everything else they do, like you say, have no reason to be trusted on this one thing, even if its generally popular.
So it's not surprising that people who do believe that vaccines work (which is really not up for debate) may not agree with the putative urgency of getting this vaccine.
Should just add that I don't really think there is anything we can do about this mistrust this time around. You get credibility by acting like you have people's interests in mind, and like you know what you're doing, so it would take a long spell of that before folks have any real reason to take what we are told at face value.
The apolitical government agencies lie a lot less than you are implying.
You also seem to be implying if the government is pushing something than it is safer to do the opposite. Go outside during tornado warnings? Spend all day outside if they forecast extreme heat? Ignore a mandatory evacuation if a hurricane is coming? Keep your seat belt unbuckled? Fly on an unlicensed airline?
Exactly when should you ignore the gov’t and when should you listen?
> A good rule of thumb is that the more someone tries to push you to do something, the more you should question their motives.
It is a rule of thumb. Not a universal law.
I hope you are not questioning the motives for having traffic rules. Or motives of your wife asking you to avoid a particularly dangerous place when coming back from work.
I think you're probably trying for one of those moral relativism fallacies (why don't we just go around killing people?) but you actually picked a ridiculously easy target that supports my point. How many instances are there of speed limits being set to create speed traps rather than to actually promote safety? Or set based on oil embargoes in the 70s and just left there? Or rules based on nimbyism and not wanting traffic in certain neighborhoods? Or lights timed to catch people at red light cams. This is all off the top of my head, I'm sure I could go on, but we should definitely be skeptical that many traffic rules are made "for our safety" and not for some other agenda, good point!
Consider US58 as it crosses a substantial chunk of Kansas. It passes through many very small towns with a (frequently defunct) retail "strip" that lasts less than a mile. The speed limit typically drops from 65 mph to 35 or even 25 mph while passing through these towns.
Are you suggesting that the fact that neither the towns nor Kansas has altered the lane width in these locations proves that these speed limit changes are nothing but speed traps?
Politics is when people yell at each other about what they ought to do.
You're right that there's a "political" covid vaccine push, in that sense. It's because getting vaccinated is your civic duty. If the risk of complications were 10 times greater it would still be your civic duty. The pandemic - a society-wide threat to public health and social integrity - ends only when everyone has sufficient antibodies to prevent the virus from multiplying out of control - the so-called "herd immunity". It'll keep going until it gets there, so you don't really have a choice - you're getting those antibodies, one way or another. You can do that the easy way - through a vaccine - or the hard way, by catching covid, in which case you'll further strain an already overloaded health system and likely pass it on to someone else, risking their death or permanent injury.
So, yeah - you ought to get vaccinated. In a simpler time, it might have been called "the patriotic thing to do".
I am vaccinated and sometimes wish I could unvaccinate when I read hogwash like this.
It isn't you civic duty. Herd immunity isn't achievable, that is scientific consensus by now. You should take more care with demands from others. Much more care.
Totally bad take. A frequently-touted bioethics claim is that it is the individual taking the risk, so the individual's benefit and outcomes is what matters. Any call for "civic duty" is a violation of bioethics.
Further, if anything about the vaccine push made any sense whatsoever, you might have a better case during these "exigent" circumstances. For instance, insisting people who've already recovered from covid and have robust, longer-lasting immunity also get vaccinated... That should make everyone's eyebrow raise up to heaven. And, since I personally note that strangely aggressive angle, among many others, it makes me even more suspicious of these vaccines.
Then again, I'm healthy, young, get plenty of vitamin D, and have close to zero risk of catching or transmitting covid. So anyone telling me vaccines make sense for me is pretty out-of-touch.
>For instance, insisting people who've already recovered from covid and have robust, longer-lasting immunity also get vaccinated... That should make everyone's eyebrow raise up to heaven
Firstly, vaccine immunity is superior. Secondly - what are you implying with your eyebrow raise? An undisclosed ulterior motive? Short of kooky 5g-microchips-flat-earth-lizard-illuminati trash, what motive could any government have for deliberately compromising the health of their citizens, never mind all countries - including all the great rival superpowers?
> I'm healthy, young, get plenty of vitamin D, and have close to zero risk of catching or transmitting covid
Close to zero risk? I'm skeptical. Unless you live off-grid somewhere and have no personal contact at all, in which case - sure, forget vaccination. But all the youth and vitamin D in the world won't stop you from catching and transmitting it the moment you step into civilization.
Most recovered COVID-19 patients mount broad, durable immunity after infection
Neutralizing antibodies show a bi-phasic decay with half-lives >200 days
Spike IgG+ memory B cells increase and persist post-infection
Durable polyfunctional CD4 and CD8 T cells recognize distinct viral epitope regions
So, in case you haven't been paying any attention, the data from the UK and Israel, some of the most heavily vaccinated places on earth, are showing pretty clearly that the vaccines are not long-lasting, and not robust against the delta variant.
Second, you can't prove that "vaccine immunity is superior". That has never once been the case with any vaccine in history, there're no studies that show it, that's just BS parroted by drones.
Third, you don't need to know the motive when the behaviour is suspicious, you just need to know the creepy, suspicious behaviour. If someone is creeping around my house sneakily, repeatedly, I don't need to know exactly what they plan, but I have every right to want them to gtfo my space.
Fourth, another of the super-suspicious things about these vaccines is just how many of the hoi polloi have been programmed to accuse anyone unvaccinated of being wild 5g-magnetic-brain-impant believers. As though there can be no reasonable way to be suspicious of these experimental vaccines that were rushed to market--you have to be an insane person. That drones like you come out and make these stupid accusations every time I mention that the vaccines aren't some obvious lock on canning this virus is really, really suspicious.
Fifth, asymptomatic spread has NEVER been proven. Pre-symptomatic spread has, but not nearly as widely prevalent as we thought. Since I'm in a category of people--not fat, healthy, young, vitamin-d enriched--that basically never gets covid, I can basically never transmit it.
>Since I'm in a category of people--not fat, healthy, young, vitamin-d enriched--that basically never gets covid, I can basically never transmit it.
I'm sorry, we could argue the toss about the other stuff but this is dangerously delusional. You're going to hurt people with that attitude. All of the factors you mentioned just mean you're more likely to survive. They have no bearing on how easily you can catch covid, or pass it on. In the UK, spread is almost entirely driven by the young now.
"For over 5% of these deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned on the death certificate. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death."
The #1 additional condition is, you guessed it, obesity.
I'm not fat. I have zero underlying conditions. I am healthier than the vast majority of people. Good bodyfat ratio. Good muscle mass. Really high-quality diet. Zero stress. I don't take any medications.
People like me almost never get sick from covid.
You seem to think that people who never get symptoms also can transmit the disease (so-called asymptomatic spread). This has never been proven to happen. There has been some, much more limited than initially thought, pre-symptomatic spread, but that means that the person doing the spreading without symptoms will get sick in a day or three.
The healthy and young of this world have no observed impact on spread.
You may not take much personal responsibility for your health, and thus may be fat or otherwise at risk. You may have some rare condition beyond your control that puts you at risk. If so, maybe you should take experimental vaccines.
It makes zero sense for people like me, who have taken care of their health and thus have robust immune systems that handle this virus with zero problems and develop robust immunity to it, to take experimental vaccines. You'll have to have some more actual data to back that up, though.
Says the person suggesting that web devs on HN can't Google Scholar and critical think their way to an overridingly authoritative understanding of medical science (which is nothing compared to being a Node ninja)
I'm genuinely curious: what does US democracy have to do with Assange?
Like I'm deeply sympathetic to what has happened to Assange. But I don't see how it has anything to do with democracy, given that he's not a US citizen, and US law rarely applies to non-US citizens outside of US borders.
A functional legal system is one of the qualifier for being a democracy. Without a working legal system you can't have a functional society. Without society you can't have a democracy.
When a nations legal system is manufacturing false evidence, the target of that become irrelevant. A legal system can't manufacturing false evidence, against anyone, and still be trusted.
> A functional legal system is one of the qualifier for being a democracy.
While it is true (that you need a functioning legal system), it is also worth mentioning that a lot of regimes have excellently efficient legal systems and judicial branch that put any democratic system to shame.
The issue is what regulations you put in, how independent the judicial branch is and whether it is corrupt or not.
Would you like me to find a link where US Government officially admits to pressuring foreign countries and abusing justice system to prevent people from publishing materials showing US Government wrongdoing?
Those are all fine and good when you're an employee. When you're not affiliated directly with the United States at all, and we're a means to an end though is where the consternation comes in, and where the U.S. really gave themselves a black eye with Assange.
I was getting at the fact that these two things don't square. The US govt provides whistle blower protection but the parent also claims the US abuses the justice system to:
>prevent people from publishing materials showing US Government wrongdoing?
So the US govt provides whistle blower protections but it is also abusing the justice dept? The govt publishes materials all the time that makes it look bad:
Whistleblower protections, where they exist, a) don't guarantee that they are applied fairly, b) tend to come with all kinds of "did you do the proper process" restrictions and c) apply to specific groups of people (i.e. people speaking about things they legitimately become aware of due to their work). It very easily squares that whistleblower protections exist and at the same time they want to limit their use and come down hard on anyone falling outside of them. (Some details on how it works in US national security: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblower_protection_in_th... note fun parts like "needs to escalate internally" while at the same time "internal retaliation isn't forbidden and can't be sued against")
People like Assange aren't whistleblowers, so those protections don't apply to them.
I didn't say Assange could take advantage of whistle blower protections. Just that it's weird that the govt provides whistle blower protections at the same time that it "abuses the justice system to stop the publication of embarrassing information"
The US Govt publishes embarrassing information almost daily. The issue is more complicated than this forum leads on but its clear to me which side of the issue you all fall on judging by all my downvotes.
here is an article in German with Nils Melzer, who was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture, and who was fired for his assessment of the confinement of Assange as torture. He is also stating that the whole case is about setting a deterring example. (also posted this link here, in another thread)
If Assange is found guilty on most charges, it will effectively work as case law banning the publication of classified documents. The indictment alone shows this is part of their goal.
As per the article, prison has three functions: punish, deter, and reform the prisoner. In regards to the deter function: any attempt to imprison a person can be viewed as an attempt to "ruin them" (through loss of freedom and through the scarlet letter of a felony conviction) in order to "scare... people from running similar actions."
The question in this case is: why is the U.S. trying so hard to extradite Assange? If it is because they don't want a repeat of wikileaks, then the grandparent statement is very reasonable. And I suppose another reference would be the U.S. relationship with whistleblowers. I don't have the energy to do the research myself, but I too have heard they come down on whistleblowers like a ton of bricks. But maybe someone else can supply that reference.
The point is to use legal system to ruin one person to scare any people from running similar actions against US government.
US is loosing more and more of its standing when it comes to "spreading" democracy. You can't go and try to preach democratic values to, say, Belarus, and then do exactly the same in your own country.
Principles aren't really principles if they are being tossed aside when they become uncomfortable.