In a just world, this would hurt Republicans, and especially Carson and Trump, immensely.
The frontrunner was allowed to spout debunked theories linking vaccines to autism, and ‘bunching up’ shots, before an audience of millions of CNN debate viewers—and went unchallenged.
Heads up: Donald Trump is still a vaccine truther.
At the CNN debate Wednesday night, the GOP frontrunner broadcasted anti-science vaccine conspiracy nonsense—unchallenged by moderators or fellow contenders—to an audience of millions.
…
This is completely without basis within the medical community. There is no reliable evidence that the spacing of vaccines is in any way harmful, and the pediatric community as a whole is not making any changes to the recommended vaccine schedule. The “way too many” line is pandering at its worst, and there is no way that Carson the physician can be in any way confused about this.
But hippies hate vaccines too, so both sides do it.
(I highly recommend Betsy Woodruff‘s coverage of the Republican primary, she’s a bit like Jonathan Martin but less annoying and insidery.)
burnspbesq
News flash: this is not a sane world.
Nor is it just.
And the overwhelming majority of its residents root for the wrong teams and have shit taste in music.
Linda Featheringill
This nonsense may reach the point where Darwin takes over. Parents who see that their kids are immunized will be more likely to have grandchildren.
Period.
Joel
@burnspbesq: Roughly 31 of 32, to be exact.
Cervantes
@Linda Featheringill:
Well, you may want to look up “herd immunity.”
Amir Khalid
Trump is an ignorant blowhard about vaccinations, yes. But what is Dr Ben Carson’s excuse, and what is Dr Rand Paul’s? Why didn’t Carson and Paul, the physicians in the room, denounce Trump for spreading dangerous nonsense about an important public-health tool? They are surely the more culpable ones here.
Arm The Homeless
So should I be rooting for the Right Wing Fascists, or the Right Wing Fascist enablers?
I think I will simply revert to SOP and continue to point and laugh in their faces.
As a piece of anec-data, the loudmouthed conservative knobs at the office have been mighty quiet this week, and conspicuously absent during our daily smoke/jaw-jaw sessions.
satby
@Linda Featheringill: Actually, the entire bunch are social Darwinists, and if some of the lessor classes lose a few children to communicable diseases, well “survival of the fittest” after all.
From Britannica Online: “The theory was used to support laissez-faire capitalism and political conservatism. Class stratification was justified on the basis of “natural” inequalities among individuals, for the control of property was said to be a correlate of superior and inherent moral attributes such as industriousness, temperance, and frugality. Attempts to reform society through state intervention or other means would, therefore, interfere with natural processes; unrestricted competition and defense of the status quo were in accord with biological selection. The poor were the “unfit” and should not be aided; in the struggle for existence, wealth was a sign of success. At the societal level, social Darwinism was used as a philosophical rationalization for imperialist, colonialist, and racist policies, sustaining belief in Anglo-Saxon or Aryan cultural and biological superiority”
Bobby Thomson
As appalling as this is, it was worse for Carson to endorse slavery.
goblue72
@Amir Khalid: Last thing either of those two want is to get in Trump’s crosshairs. They all just want to avoid eye contact with him for fear of setting him off. That’s why the machers of the GOP have been promoting iCarly – they need some cannon fodder to act as a kamikaze to bring him down.
Thoughtful Today
/facepalm/
If only some kind of journalist was there to moderate the more outlandish lies in the debate.
schrodinger's cat
Not only are they ignorant but they are proud of their ignorance.
goblue72
@Bobby Thomson: He’s running as the House Boy. Of course he has to say stuff like that.
JPL
This is from the NYTimes…
Near the end, Mr. Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon, was asked about Mr. Trump’s past comments linking childhood vaccines to autism, a connection that the medical community broadly disputes. He suggested that Mr. Trump consult “the real facts.”
burnspbesq
It’s gotten so bad that not even Saint Molly Ivins, were she still around, could do it justice.
schrodinger's cat
As long as I has my best friend nothing can get me down. Not even yesterday’s clown show, which I had the good sense not to watch.
Peale
Huh. I didn’t know that the personal hatred that Trump seems to have towards Jeb most likely stems from Jeb thwarting Trumps desire to open Casinos in Florida. Makes sense to me…much like the unbearable animosity he has towards Mexicans and Mexico has to do with the failed condo project in that country.
Peale
Fiddle sticks. Wrote the word for gaming establishment in a post.
Linda Featheringill
@Cervantes:
Herd immunity is nice but it only works if the immune ones make up a large enough portion of the herd.
Cervantes
@Amir Khalid:
I agree.
Roger Moore
@Linda Featheringill:
I think that’s exactly the point. If we let vaccinations drop to below the levels where herd immunity works, it won’t be just unvaccinated children who die.
Cervantes
@Roger Moore:
Well, yes.
Doug!
@Cervantes:
You’re right. Carson in particular backed up the “space them out” nonsense/
Chris
@schrodinger’s cat:
Yes, this is the part I find unforgivable about their ignorance.
It doesn’t matter a great deal that Herman Cain doesn’t know the name of the President of Uzbeckibeckibeckibeckistanstan off the top of his head. It matters a great deal that he considers it an example of a meaningless factoid that only a silly reporter asking a gotcha question would consider worth knowing.
Cervantes
@Doug!:
Yes, he must know better. If so, it was cowardly of him not to say so.
JPL
@Doug!: How the candidates fared… The NYTimes didn’t even mention that part.
Mandalay
@Amir Khalid:
Excuse for what? This is what Carson said:
I guess he could also have said that Trump’s views were wildly incorrect, dangerous and irresponsible, but Carson had announced prior to the debate that he wasn’t going to be taking any part in the mudslinging. Did Carson also say something that somehow supported Trump?
Kryptik
This is where the corollary to the Golden Mean fallacy when it comes to politics comes into effect. Or to put it in the way that I tend to: “Both sides same thing (Except Dems are always worse).”
In this respect, anti-vaccine nuttery really is one of those derps that cross party lines, but it’s almost always the left that gets shit on for it. Yeah, it was more a left-wing phenomenon before anti-gov’t crazies and Christian Scientist-types started hooking their star onto it, but the point is still there: even when both sides show similar bad behavior on a given issue, Dems and lefties are usually the only ones taken to task for it.
gex
@Thoughtful Today: Well it wasn’t going to be Chuck “It’s Not My Responsibility to Point out Lies I Just Take Dictation” Todd.
Thoughtful Today
Uzbeckibeckibeckibeckistanstan
I still can’t find that on my map.
Maybe it’s not on Planet America?
Cervantes
@Mandalay:
Yes.
Mark B.
Carson was pretty weak in his opposition to Trump, too. Said the connection of autism to vaccines was bunk, but for some reason decided to say that it’s not good to bunch up vaccines, when that’s a settled issue. The dude is supposed to be smart, but he doesn’t project it much in either his speaking style or what he says.
Cervantes
@Mark B.:
Perhaps he just didn’t want to cross Trump altogether at that moment.
Humboldtblue
@Linda Featheringill:
What is so goddamn frustrating is that it’s not the “hippies” at all on the left hand side, it’s the goddamn well-educated white crunchy women and moms who are pushing back against the mandatory vaccines and here in California they have begun a recall against State Senator Richard Pan, the primary author of Senate Bill 277. Pan also happens to be known as Dr. Pan, a pediatrician, and it was his leadership on the issue that got the bill through the legislature and onto Brown’s desk where it was signed into law.
I have two women in my circle who have repeated every fucking bullshit talking point in opposition to mandatory vaccines — big profits for big pharma, polluting their precious snowflake with chemicals, autism worries and concerns over vaccine ingredients — and it’s utterly infuriating. One of the women, her husband and two boys were, up until this year, regular attendees at our yearly Super Bowl party.
They didn’t show this year because one of the boys, surprise fucking surprise, came down with whooping cough because he goes to school with a gang of other un-vaccinated children, all the spawn of the same white, willfully ignorant and arrogant crunchy cohort of moms who think they know more than the medical researchers, developers and doctors who for the past 50 years have successfully removed deadly diseases from our society through the use of vaccines.
The dad from the family called us on Super Bowl Sunday and asked if he (alone) could stop by and those of us in attendance were all FUCK NO! We had a 10-month old, a one-year old , a 3-year old and a 4-year old at the party and there was no way in hell he was going to bring his whooping-cough-exposed ass into the house.
I almost took the time to explain to one of the moms how my paternal grandmother lost her entire first family in 1920 — husband and two kids — due to disease (smallpox and flu) but I was ready to explode and because fuck her the pig-ignorant bint.
Mark B.
@Cervantes: Carson had a shot at really damaging Trump’s candidacy by standing up for established medical science. The fact that he fumbled his chance means he’s either a dope, or he doesn’t want to offend Trump because he’s running for vice president.
Edit: along the same lines your were thinking in post #31.
Chris
@Kryptik:
The other thing is – anti vaxxerism may have started off on the left, but are there any Democratic presidential candidates that support it, now that we know that a couple of Republican ones do?
The problem with “both sides do it” has never been that there aren’t loonies on both sides, obviously there are, but only one side actually hands them the keys to the vehicle.
BruceFromOhio
In other news, water is still wet, sun still rises in east. Meanwhile, Cokie Roberts and her wretched ilk will pounce with fangs and talons if Sanders or Clinton so much as fart in public.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Linda Featheringill: Sadly, it does not work that way.
Tommy
I just went to my 7-11 type store. Always a group of people talking. Over sixty. White. I normally just wave and say hi. Open the door and such. Today I did talk to them. They were all giddy on Carly Fiorina. Now I have to admit I was somewhat stunned they were behind a lady, but then I had to check myself and recall she is bat shit crazy. I tried to talk with them not too them and it didn’t work so well. As I left I threw out you got I am a liberal right? One response “yeah we got that.” I just said good!
Marmot
@satby:
This is double funny, since this class also leases things more than it buys them.
Thoughtful Today
Chuck Todd’s contract apparently included him taking a “blue pill” before every broadcast.
NotMax
@Humboldtblue
Crunchy?
Explanation for the slang impaired, por favor.
rikyrah
These cops didn’t have anything better to do than to stand around bus stops to harass Black children.
There’s no other REAL CRIMES that they could be handling right now.
………………………
Published on Sep 16, 2015
The kid got stopped for “jaywalking” when he barely got out of the bus he was 2 feet away from the sidewalk when the cop stopped him for jaywalking. The cop was telling him to take a sit but the teen kept walking to his bus but the cop kept grabbing his arm & the kid took off the cops hand off his arm so the cop took out his baton, that’s when all this happened
https://youtu.be/-Dk6bXdBdVs
RSA
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
I’ve seen a few commenters object to Linda’s characterization of herd immunity, but I don’t get it. I think the double quoted part of there is literally true, in terms of probabilities. Is it an issue with imperfect immunity that some vaccines offer? My understanding of herd immunity is that
My emphasis.
goblue72
@Humboldtblue: I need a cigarette after that.
That epic rant gets you one of these – http://giphy.com/gifs/the-office-slow-clap-dwight-schrute-YC6ZedMDgR1Fm
schrodinger's cat
@NotMax: Crunchy as in crunchy granola. Granola eating, earth-mother types who shop at Whole Paycheck and farmers markets and buy organic everything.
boatboy_srq
@JPL: Interesting that Doctor “Prison Makes You Teh Ghey” Carson wants Trump and Fiorina to use realfacts instead of goodfacts.
boatboy_srq
@Humboldtblue: It’s moments like those that I wonder whether anti-vaxx is a solution to overpopulation and/or Reichwingnutsery. Not a good solution, mind you, but a solution nonetheless.
Cervantes
@NotMax:
You should look up not “crunchy” per se but “crunchy mom.”
PS: Not a term I care to use.
Humboldtblue
@NotMax: That particular brand of upper middle class white mom who feeds her kids raw kale, unsweetened granola and seaweed protein shakes because they are “pure” ingredients and not horrible processed devil foods.
The mom is definitely into the suburban yoga craze, drives a newer SUV and takes Maddux, Jaxon, and Kayleigh to swim and dance lessons on Monday, art and dance lessons on Tuesday, kiddie yoga and soccer on Wednesday and Mozart listening class on Thursday. She’s also the asshole who brings whole wheat cookies to the end of season soccer party, the bitch.
goblue72
@NotMax: Prototypical Park Slope mom – typically upper middle class professional, white, shops at Whole Foods (or equivalent local over-priced organic grocery store), prone to wearing too much Lululemon in public, goes to her weekly (or twice weekly) power yoga/spinning class, and pushes her special snowflake around in a Thule jogging stroller.
Cervantes
@Humboldtblue:
What about Friday?
gex
@RSA: I think what people are objecting to is the fact that it won’t only be the people who refuse to vaccinate/be vaccinated that will die. The immunization is not 100% effective so there will be people who die who did the right thing but were exposed anyhow.
Calouste
There’s a poll for the GOP Primary in Michigan, which has Carson leading Trump 24-22, Bush3 leading the pack of losers with 8, and both the governors from neighboring states (Walker and Kasich) at 2%.
Humboldtblue
@Cervantes: That’s when mom leaves the kids at Grandma’s house for the afternoon and evening and goes and gets drunk on mimosas and margaritas with with other crunchy moms.
Tommy
@schrodinger’s cat: I think it was 60 Minutes. Ran a story on the anti-vaccine crowd. The story was focused on two cities, where they had the highest rates of kids not getting their shots. Two of the most liberal cities I’ve seen.
There is a story I tell here. My grandfather when he was with us was not a liberal. Not even close. But a doctor. I am pretty sure I got every vaccine known to man. Many I didn’t even need. Maybe a small town doc but he didn’t go to Balloon Juice. He read medical journals in his free time.
Peale
@gex: And those who couldn’t vaccinate because their children already had disorders that prevented them from being vaccinated. And infants who would be vaccinated when they were old enough.
Humboldtblue
@goblue72: Is it weird to feel icky after being applauded by Dwight Schrute?
Cacti
Latest instance of why minorities aren’t “Feeling the Bern”.
When discussing police brutality during a September 15 campaign stop in Virginia:
“The vast majority of police officers in this country are honest.”
#CopFeelingsMatter
goblue72
@Cervantes: Friday is for the weekly drunken get-together at the bistro with the organic/biodynamic wine list with the other crunchy moms while Dad watches the kids.
Next up on BJ – explaining what a “basic bitch” is.
beltane
@Humboldtblue: Gwyneth Paltrow wannabees.
schrodinger's cat
Did Fiorina say anything about Trump’s anti-vax boo-boo? People undergoing chemo can die if exposed to infection since their immunity is diminished due to severe neutropenia.
goblue72
@Humboldtblue: I was gonna go with the Cmdr. Riker golf clap GIF, but Dwight is just too fantastic not to use.
Mike J
@Humboldtblue:
It’s a pity they couldn’t have met my mom before he got it. Never smoked a day in her life, has COPD and uses oxygen because when she was an infant there was no vaccine for whooping cough and she caught it.
Mark B.
@Cacti:
I have no problem with Bernie saying that, because it’s true. Unfortunately, the minority of crappy or dishonest cops is large enough and racist enough that law enforcement in this country has a real problem. These are not incompatible facts.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris: if I recall correctly, in 2008, Hillary Clinton, Obama, and McCain were all acting kind of mealymouthed about anti-vaxxers. I’m pretty sure Clinton and Obama eventually changed their tune.
Humboldtblue
@Mike J:
I just … I just fucking can’t with these people.
They have never known someone with polio or the woman who lost five kids and two husbands to smallpox or influenza. They have no fucking clue that upwards of 50 million people died across the globe during the influenza epidemic. They’ve never heard the stories our grandmothers tell — there wasn’t one grandma in my entire childhood NOT ONE, rich poor, white or black, who hadn’t lost at least one child to now-preventable diseases and yet they fucking prance around spewing utter and easily debunked bullshit with that smug fucking attitude of “I’m a mom you can tell me anything about how to raise my kids.”
goblue72
@Cacti: You’ve got a selective editing problem. Here’s the entire paragraph –
“The vast majority of police officers in this country are honest,” he said. “If anybody thinks that being a cop today is an easy job, you are sorely mistaken.” He pointed out that officers are underpaid and undertrained. “But let us also be clear, that like any other public official, that when a police officer breaks the law, he must be held accountable.”
It was also preceded by THIS statement – “Racism is alive and well in America. And I’m not just talking about that very, very sick person in Charleston, South Carolina a couple months ago who walked into a bible prayer session, prayed with people in the room, and — because they were black — he took out a gun and killed 9 of them. I’m not just talking about the hundreds of groups in this country whose sole purpose for existence is to propagate hatred. […] I am also talking about institutional racism. About people like Sandra Bland, and Michael Brown. I am talking about unarmed African Americans killed while in police custody.”
But yeah, thanks for playing.
beltane
@Mike J: There’s no use pointing things like this out. When confronted with a case like your mom’s, they would just advise she take Bach Flower remedies and switch to a gluten-free paleo diet.
Tommy
@Matt McIrvin: I don’t recall that. As a kid in the 70s I just got my shots at school. Not even something we debated. Thankful for it because I might not get sick!
JPL
Fed leaves rates unchanged..
trollhattan
@Humboldtblue:
Don’t bury those feelings now, bad for the blood pressure. :-)
Local paper rigged up a web map for our metroplex showing all schools–public and private–detailing the vaccine exemptions among the student population. To my absolute lack of surprise, the highest rates were in Waldorf and private fundy Christian schools, while the more rural the higher the rate versus the urban core.
They should get together and swap recipes at those chicken pox parties.
Humboldtblue
@Tommy: This, we went through the exact same thing.
Hell, I’m all for doing it the way they did it to us in both the Army (natl guard) and the Air Force (regular) when in the first week of basic training there was one morning where they lined your asses up at the entrance to the medical clinic and you walked down the hall and medical orderlies shot vaccines into both shoulders at the same time with those fazer looking vaccine guns.
Humboldtblue
@trollhattan: You should see the maps for Napa and Sonoma.
Tommy
@Humboldtblue:
My last boss had polio. Maybe one of the last Americans to have it. One of the featured things you’d see in his house was canes. Let me say that again, he collected canes. I hope that speaks for itself.
Roger Moore
@RSA:
I think there are two objections to Linda Featheringill‘s comments:
1) It ignores that there are plenty of people who can’t be immunized- too young, compromised immune system, etc.- or whose immunizations were ineffective who currently benefit from herd immunity but would lose much of their protection from herd immunity if we allow some parents to opt out of immunizing their kids.
2) It is extremely blithe with the lives of people who will die of preventable illness, both the people who can’t be immunized or whose immunizations didn’t take and the kids who are guilty of nothing worth than having crazy parents. Darwin taking over would be an enormous human tragedy, not something to toss off so casually.
Matt McIrvin
@Tommy: In 2005, Robert Kennedy Jr. wrote that big Rolling Stone article claiming that there was some kind of CDC/Big Pharma conspiracy to push mercury poisoning on your helpless children, and by the ’08 cycle it was still taken seriously enough that I think mainstream Democratic candidates were a bit afraid to just dismiss the whole thing.
Around 2010, 2011, there were a bunch of high-profile findings about just how fraudulent Andrew Wakefield’s work on the supposed thimerosal-autism link really was (answer: really most sincerely fraudulent), and I think that took a lot of the wind out of the movement among people who generally respected science.
sukabi
@rikyrah: that’s seriously messed up.
Cacti
@Mark B.:
I have a problem with it, because it assumes facts not in evidence.
But it is typical of the white view of US law enforcement vs. the black view.
In a December 2014 NBC/Marist poll, 78% of white respondents had a great deal or fair amount of confidence that police in their community treated white and black people equally. 33% of black respondents had a great deal or fair amount of confidence.
gogol's wife
@Thoughtful Today:
Anybody remember, “Did I just hear you say that Poland is not under Soviet domination?”
Gene108
The one thing I take away from the anti-vax crowd is an incredible distrust of authority among the under 35 crowd (the age group most likely to have kids young enough to be vaccinated).
I really do not think there is a way to restore confidence institutions, such as doctors.
gogol's wife
@schrodinger’s cat:
Amazing picture. God speed to him.
Ohio Mom
As an autism mom (whose entire family is current on all vaccines except for this year’s flu, have those scheduled for October), I once read the big best-selling book on the history of the movement against mercury in vaccines (there are actually two different vaccines-cause-autism theories, the other is Wakefield’s it’s-the-MMR theory, but I digress).
The book is “Evidence of Harm” and it makes it quite clear that it was *right-wingers* who were first in objecting to thermisol (the type of mercury used as a preservative). Back when she was first lady, Hillary spearheaded a “Vaccinate by Two” campaign and they hated her and they were deeply suspicious of “big government.”
Omnes Omnibus
@gogol’s wife: OT: Did you see that TNC is speaking at an LU Convocation on November 5?
SiubhanDuinne
@Thoughtful Today:
I had been listening to the last few minutes of the debate on CNN sat radio in my car last night, so when I got in the car today it was still set to CNN. Because nothing is more entertaining or fascinating than TV anchors interviewing each other, they had Jake Tapper as a guest on Wolf Blitzer’s program. They were high-fiving each other on the YOOOOOGE numbers the debate generated (“And that was just in the U.S.! You add in CNN International, and it’s tens of millions more!”)
Ugh. But I didn’t pull over to the side of the road to barf until Jake asked, “So, Wolf, how did I do?”
Cacti
@goblue72:
Racism is alive and well, and institutional.
But the “vast majority” of cops are honest.
Have fun polishing that turd with Bernie.
gogol's wife
@Omnes Omnibus:
No, that’s cool. I’ll look it up.
ETA: I’m going to be in Milwaukee Oct 1-4, but won’t make it to Appleton.
dr. luba
I must have used a banned word. Two posts disappeared into the ether (or into moderation….not sure which). Anyway, the APA came out with a statement today about vaccines in response to last night’s debate.
https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/Pages/American-Academy-of-Pediatrics-Reiterates-Safety-and-Importance-of-Vaccines.aspx#sthash.eFsx9hJk.dpuf
boatboy_srq
@Gene108: Considering what a bang-up job Big Pharma did with HIV, it’s no wonder…
Tommy
@Humboldtblue: It was just somewhat recent the scares from the “fazer looking vaccine guns” went away. You could see them on my arm decades later. I am vain and looked at it and felt healthy.
Matt McIrvin
@Ohio Mom: Ah, my mistake, you’re right: Wakefield wasn’t pushing the thimerosal theory specifically, it was the other one about MMR.
Dan Kahan’s pages on culturalcognition.net like to point out that, according to the surveys on the subject, opposition to vaccines is pretty broad-spectrum and nonpartisan.
schrodinger's cat
@gogol’s wife:It made me go aaww.. I hope both of them make it to their final destination, safe and sound.
Cervantes
@Matt McIrvin:
Discussed briefly in this thread here (and passim).
Bill
@Cacti: Do you think the other Democratic candidate’s have a different position on the honesty of cops than Mr. Sanders?
trollhattan
@Matt McIrvin:
RFK Jr is still at it. At a screening of his antivax film here, during the legislature’s debate over eliminating the religious exemption (now passed and signed) he called vaccinations “a holocaust.” He later had to retract it with one of those, “It may not have been the right way to say it but it needs to be said” type retractions. Sorry, “retractions.”
So very not his father.
burnspbesq
Someday, I’d like to see video of Amir’s goal-dance. That was a sweet nutmeg and shot by Lallana, but Liverpool still has 18 minutes plus stoppage time to fuck things up.
NotMax
@Humboldtblue et al.
Got it, thanks. Don’t like it and won’t use it, but got it. Denying a child the simple pleasures of an occasional Devil Dog and Yoo-Hoo makes me sad.
Always winced at the term organic as applied to food.
Coal is organic, but wouldn’t care to chow down on it.
@goblue72
With a spectrum of exceptions. Step-sister and husband (one kid, just graduated from college) have lived in Park Slope for decades, and I seriously doubt they know what Whole Foods is. They are, however, intractable coffee snobs.
Ohio Mom
@Matt McIrvin: Also worth pointing out that thermisol is no longer used as a preservative in childhood vaccines (it is still used in some adult vaccines, notably the annual flu vaccine), so even IF it damaged young brains, it is no longer doing so.
I always wonder why politicians who want to waffle don’t take that tact. We took the thermisol out, so now you can vaccinate with confidence.
Goblue72
@NotMax: well a true Park Slope mom shops at the Park Slope Co-op.
Cacti
@Bill:
Probably not.
Obama’s been the only Dem POTUS or Dem candidate in my lifetime who really understood minority grievances toward the police. I suspect the current crop is in the well-intentioned but clueless category.
It’s another artifact of white privilege. Growing up white in the US generally affords you the privilege of seeing law enforcement as a basically well-intentioned group, trying to do a difficult job. If you go over the findings of that NBC/Marist poll, whites and non-whites might as well be living in a different country when it comes to opinions on police and their purported good intentions.
Goblue72
@Cacti: funny, it’s about the same thing Larry Wilmore said this week on his show. Is he racist too?
burnspbesq
And overly polite defending by Liverpool allows Bordeaux to equalize.
rk
@Cacti:
What exactly do you expect him to say? That most cops are dishonest and corrupt? Do you expect anyone to say that?
Roger Moore
@Gene108:
There is a way, but it isn’t easy. Those institutions have to act trustworthy for long enough for people to regain their trust. It’s not easy, but it’s the way anyone else who wants our trust has to earn it.
Matt McIrvin
@Ohio Mom: According to Wikipedia, there are some versions of the inactivated-virus flu vaccine (the nasal spray, I think?) used on children that still have thimerosal, so they may be wary of some sort of obscure gotcha exception in response to a blanket denial.
Which leaves the fact that the form of mercury in thimerosal isn’t the kind that bioaccumulates most readily, and that the dose is minute compared to all sorts of other sources of environmental mercury, and that actual controlled studies have found no harmful effects. But these are all probably too subtle.
Elie
@Humboldtblue:
I had an extremely heated argument with a personal friend — an effing professor in a school of nursing, no less, about the soundness of vaccination. I was completely surprised and it really colored my opinion of her intelligence. It seemed to boil down to grave distrust of medicine and a total failure of understanding the public health impacts of not having herd immunity. She seemed stuck on individual cases where there was a temporal cause and effect between the kid receiving an immunization and some bad side effect. She did not seem able to accept, or dismissed that the diseases themselves were not necessarily survivable or endurable and had side effects and complications — It was so eery having such a conversation with an educated health professional, so I am not surprised at all by the two docs in this debate… I think our individualism and sense of entitlement to our own sense of reality has reached a critical mass and is playing out as we see. Hopefully we don’t have to swing back to the stone age before the swing stops…
Matt McIrvin
@Ohio Mom: …Also, I’ve seen the very fact that thimerosal was pulled used as evidence that antivaxxers were right all along, and that you should listen to them about vaccines still being dangerous (either because thimerosal is secretly there some of the time, or for some other reason).
When I’ve talked to these people I get the sense that the specific fear is connected to a more general fear that people are in some sense overmedicated, and that this is bad for us, by somehow weakening our natural disease resistance. It gets connected in vague ways to worries about antibiotics and superbugs (which is a genuine problem, but they generally don’t quite understand how it works), kids getting allergies because they don’t roll in the dirt enough, etc.
trollhattan
@Matt McIrvin:
If these asshats were so worried about environmental mercury they should be out picketing every coal mining, processing and burning outfit in the land.
Matt McIrvin
@trollhattan: Some of my favorite fish are basically apex predators, and I resent the fact that because of these damn coal plants I have to limit my intake lest I get Mad Hatter’s disease. (Of course, I know there are other reasons.)
Cacti
@Goblue72:
No one said racist but you. But law enforcement is institutionally racist in this country. And a consequence of that is that a large majority of white Americans have a high opinion of law enforcement, and a large majority of non-white Americans do not.
The closest any poll comes to answering how different groups feel about the honesty of law enforcement officers is a December 2014 Gallup poll. 59 percent of non-Hispanic whites believe police officers have high honesty and ethical standards. 23 percent of non-whites felt the same way.
Based on that and the NBC/Marist poll results, I’d say Larry Wilmore’s personal views are not a majority view among the non-white US population.
Matt McIrvin
@Elie: Nursing schools teach a surprising amount of alternative-medicine pseudoscience. It’s kind of strange.
Elie
— To continue on my comment above, there seems to be a fundamental inability to understand/accept population based impacts and individual risk — that is, that while one person out of 10,000 may have a side effect to a treatment, the overwhelming majority receive only the benefit of that immunity plus conferring safety to those children who cannot receive the vaccine yet, or others who are immune compromised and would be extremely endangered by having the disease. To some, including my friend, the risk for that one person who had a side effect overweighs all the other benefits to the over 9,900 plus. No risk is acceptable even when it has enormous benefits.. It defies any kind of logic — at least any logic I can understand.
Elie
@Matt McIrvin:
Whoa there partner. I am a nurse and I don’t remember any of THAT. Yes, some schools are exposing clinicians to alternative medicine, since it is so prevalent these days, but not as any replacement to actual proven health care treatments such as vaccinations. I just took a refresher course a year or so ago and there was no advocacy for not vaccinating — only a discussion that the nurses needed to know that there was controversy around it….
Cacti
@rk:
If we’re ever going to deal with the institutional rot of law enforcement in this country in any meaningful way, white politicians are going to have to stop handling the law enforcement profession with kid gloves. And a good place to start would be calling out the “blue wall” and the culture of dishonesty it encourages.
Humboldtblue
@Elie:
I hear ya, that’s what is so goddamn discouraging, these are not stupid women, uneducated or even ill-educated, they have just bought into this catch-phrase phenomenon of “organic” and “gluten” and “toxins”, words that are meaningless when they use them and they are doing harm not only to their own kids but to everyone else as well.
I simply want to punch these people in the face, repeatedly, until they come to understand that they are not valiant warriors in a battle for personal autonomy but willfully ignorant dickwhsitles who are a danger to all around them
Matt McIrvin
@Elie: The fact that regressive forms of autism tend to strike at a time of life when kids are coincidentally getting a lot of vaccinations seems to have an incredibly powerful psychological effect on some parents.
Edit: (And there’s the way that this is sensationally portrayed as completely developmentally normal children suddenly collapsing into noncommunication, which apparently it isn’t.)
It’s as if they discount the probability of their kids getting a fatal infection because that’s something that they didn’t do, and failing to protect them is a negative action, whereas the thought that they might positively do something that harms their child fills them with a much greater fear even if the possibility is much more remote.
goblue72
@Cacti: As others have noted, WTF do you expect him – or any other candidate to say? Especially given, as I’ve noted, that the statements before AND after that quote you posted, provide the actual proper context for what he was saying.
If you expect ANY single Presidential candidate to get up there and call the cops PIGS, you are deluded. And pointless.
boatboy_srq
@Cacti: They can’t do that without losing the WWC lawnorder voters.
Elie
@Matt McIrvin:
So true… and the mistaken notion of personal control and perfectability… That you don’t have to accept that risk is part of life and in this case, is present on both sides of this equation, whether you chose to vaccinate or not vaccinate. Like you said, they seem able to grasp only the risk associated with commission, but not of omission. If they did not endanger so many, I would just say “Oh well”, whatever–line up to receive your Darwin award.
Cacti
@goblue72:
Sandernistas are a curious bunch:
Bernie’s gets it! Bernie speaks truth to power! Bernie’s going to take on the monied interests and start a political revolution!
If only you non-whites would understand that Bernie’s the best possible candidate for you!
And then from the other side of their mouth:
You don’t really expect Bernie to call out systemic police corruption, do you?
Would you black people stop loudly insisting that your lives matter at our revolutionary gatherings?
NotMax
@Cacti
Received near-zero coverage, but just before his speech at Liberty University, Sanders appeared at historically black Benedict College in South Carolina.
RSA
@gex, @Roger Moore: Thanks for the explanations. I get it now.
Gene108
@boatboy_srq:
Unless a millennial or younger Gen Y knows a fifty something gay man, they will have no clue about big pharma and the 1980’s AIDS epidemic.
That is not the reason people tune out to authority.
I think it is Bush & Co’s lying and corruption, the Great Recession and the slow recovery that has helped turn them into cynics.
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
post hoc ergo propter hoc
Hobbes
Whether or not to vaccinate your children is one thing Penn and Teller get right.
(for those who don’t want to watch the YouTube video, their answer is yes.)
Brachiator
Good summary article on the science the GOP hopefuls got wrong.
http://theslot.jezebel.com/all-of-the-ways-last-nights-gop-debate-was-dangerously-1731431760
boatboy_srq
@Gene108: One reason “I don’t know any gay people” is remotely acceptable is that we’ve basically lost an entire generation thanks to that event. The precedent is there, to the point that even today there’s debate in the LGBTQI community – complete with the LGBTQI equivalent of anti-vaxxers denouncing the various testing and treatment regimens as oppressive and refusing to accept HIV as the cause of the disease. And speaking as a not-yet-fiftysomething person, there are still a few people my age and younger who are well aware of what went on, and for how long, and quite ready to talk about it: “fifty-something” minimizes both the opportunity (that’s the generation that was hit hardest, so least likely to be met by a random GenY/Millenial) and the impact (I for one lost a lot of people, including more than a few younger than me, TYVM), so your illustration is just a bit glib. Meanwhile And The Band Played On, Rent and Angels in America (among many significant works) have landed in the pop culture vernacular; it’d be difficult for anyone not brought up in a home-schooled enclave or a bomb shelter to miss at least some references to the pandemic and the various effects. The farce that was both Reagan’s and Big Pharma’s early responses to the situation aren’t far below the surface and easy enough to find.
C.Wolf
You were doing so well until you spouted this unsubstantiated bullshit:
But hippies hate vaccines too, so both sides do it.
Even if in jest, that is uncalled for.
Now go stand in the corner till you feel remorse and get smart.
J R in WV
I had a classmate in 2nd grade who had polio, her arm was bent oddly above her wrist. We got the Salk injection polio vaccine the day it hit town, at work they did a shot clinic, free, nurse, fridge full of tiny bottles. I was pre-school at the time I think.
Then when the Sabin oral vaccine came around, there was a clinic at a grade school, and everyone got a sugar cube (first one I had ever seen IIRC) with a dose, people stood in line at that one, very quiet for a bunch of young families with kids.
Everyone, Everyone understood that this was changing the world, that people would no longer be paralyzed by a virus. They didn’t understand much about viral diseases in the 50s.
When my wife was quite young the folks next door, the wife was a teacher, and was out of town at some class. So Wife’s family invited Mr Neighbor over for dinner, mac n cheese, etc. Neighbor didn’t finish dinner, so wife asked if she could have the left overs. The next day Mr Neighbor was taken away to hospital with polio.
Wife got gamma globulin, which may have helped. She did not contract the dread disease, for whatever reason.
Whooping cough can cause you to break your own ribs with the violence of the involuntary cough. I can’t imagine!
And there are people who don’t get vaccinated? Crazy. Stone monkey crazy!!
Frankly, unless your kid has a well diagnosed medical reason not to get vaccinated, they should take the kid away and take care of their unmet medical needs. Then you can apply to get them back, if you swear to keep their shot record up to date as needed, and you get watched like a hawk because you have shown that you are crazy and not to be trusted making decisions about your kids.
Family Doctor has me signed up for a re-dose of that, along with Shingles and pneumonia vaccines. Can’t wait! Don’t want any of that!
Another Holocene Human
@Peale: Remember when Pat Robertson got on his show and called Scotland “a dark land”?
And it turned out that was over a failed business deal involving Royal Bank of Scotland?
Another Holocene Human
@Mark B.: Sure. And honesty isn’t the biggest issue. (It is an issue, when dishonesty isn’t held accountable.) It’s the fear factor, the wingnutty, paranoid mentality that is being fostered in police training and is endemic in the force. Their amygdalas are tuned to eleven. That is a BIG problem and a huge factor in all this violence being enacted on civilians.
Why are cops more afraid now when crime is at generational lows?
Another Holocene Human
@Humboldtblue: But they let a conman like Sears tell them how to raise their kids.
The Sears invented the spread out vaccines. Guess what, that means more doctor visits. More well kid, paid up, low trouble, high profit doctor visits. (For them, not for Big Pharma, which is getting paid a very low payment per dose … which is why small Pharma makes these vaccines more than Big Pharma.) More chances to upsell pediatric vitamins and other unnecessary shit if you’re a whole-hog crook. Or cosmetic procedures for the ‘rents?
But a lot of people freaked when they started bunching vaccines. That was done so poor kids would get all their fucking shots. It’s also easier on the kid–less jabs. The kid’s immune system, funny story, exposed to bajillions of pathogens daily, is more than able to handle all of the weakened viriii. But a lot of Boomers fucking freaked. Must be a conspiracy against vulnerable poor children, they said.
Barry
@Cervantes: “Well, you may want to look up “herd immunity.””
Look up ‘clusters’.
Barry
@Amir Khalid: “Trump is an ignorant blowhard about vaccinations, yes.”
” But what is Dr Ben Carson’s excuse, and what is Dr Rand Paul’s? ”
They are wh*res.
“Why didn’t Carson and Paul, the physicians in the room, denounce Trump for spreading dangerous nonsense about an important public-health tool?”
They are wh*res.
“They are surely the more culpable ones here.”
Oh, yes. They are the equivalent of tobacco company epidemiologists.