John Cotter

Everything political is viewed through the lens of tribal allegiance to one political party. Groupthink precludes logical engagement. As Soren Kierkegaard described it: “The truth. No; by nature man is more afraid of the truth than of death – and this is perfectly natural: for the truth is even more repugnant than death to man's natural being. What wonder, then, that he is so afraid of it? … for man is a social animal – only in the herd is he happy. It is all one to him whether it is the profoundest nonsense or the greatest villainy – he feels completely at ease with it, so long as it is the view of the herd, or the action of the herd, and he is able to join the herd.”

Mother of divine Jesus!

Matt, William, Leslie. Deflection, deflection, deflection. It's no wonder the USA and the west are going down the toilet.

Whataboutery.

William, I’m sick and tired of your self-styled superiority, your insults, your straw-manning, your misrepresenting my position and your spamming threads with diversionary nonsense. I’ve already repeatedly acknowledged the differences between the Democrats and the Republicans. Here you are again trying to set up the same old Punch and Judy show, despite that being the show which on a national level, as RFK Jr pointed out, has impoverished countless millions of ordinary people, as well as destroyed many foreign countries. So, which is it? Are you going to vote for the continuation of that idiotically corrupt charade or are you going to vote for JFK Jr who, if enough people vote for him, can end it?

In that interview with Tucker Carlson that Matthew Koch linked upthread RFK Jr referred to the “illegal invasion” of Ukraine, and he referred approvingly to his son going to Ukraine to fight against the Russians. But the main thrust of what he said was concerned with the “corporate kleptocracy” which had supplanted democracy in the USA and which was robbing ordinary people in favour of the rich. That’s the anti-democratic regime which the mainstream Democratic and Republican parties have been maintaining for decades with the indispensable aid of the mainstream media. These are the anti-democratic entities which are combining to lynch-mob RFK Jr. There is really only one political decision to be made by the US electorate in the forthcoming presidential election: either vote for RFK Jr and democracy; or vote against him so as to maintain the current kleptocracy.

It’s obvious that the USA and the west generally are in deep trouble. Yet we have mainstream Democrats and Republicans – the supporters of the parties that are primarily responsible for this dire state of affairs – demonising anyone who seriously challenges their plutocratic duopoly. It’s tragically predictable – as is the further decline which such incorrigible perversity will inevitably precipitate.

The covid “science” of post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) compounded by argumentum ad populum (it is true because the majority thinks so).

Thanks for this, Matthew. How unusual and refreshing it is to hear a major political figure talking sense about things that really matter to ordinary people's lives.

You're welcome, Matthew. It's great to see that you're back.

Ok, Sandy. I didn’t mean that it was a trick. Indeed, since I largely share your aversion to the overtly plutocratic bent of the Republican Party, I would also like Michael to answer your question – notwithstanding the complicity of the mainstream Democratic Party in the plutocratic duopoly which has tyrannised the US and the world for decades. I was trying to highlight the difficulty of keeping threads which are supposed to be non-political free of politics by drawing attention to the fact that even a moderator is unable to adhere to that objective. I still believe it was unwise of the moderators to have binned the “56 Years” thread and other threads, if for no other reason than they’ve made a lot of work for themselves in trying to police the politics-free environment they’ve tried to create.

Sandy, are you not placing Michael in a double bind here? Aren't we supposed to refrain from discussion of party politics per se in this section of the forum?

I haven’t immersed myself in film alteration debates, but Robin Unger’s two Nix film GIFs speak volumes. The one in the post you quoted proves irrefutably that JFK was shot from the front. The one that Robin posted just before that showing the limo slowing down to a stop or almost a stop is damning of Greer the driver, who it should be remembered was, like Allen Dulles, of Northern Ireland protestant stock, many of whom hated Catholics. Indeed, there is a record of Greer’s son saying that his father was so disposed.

Well said, Benjamin. I agree.

You’re right, Chris. As you say, it’s not ad hominem, it’s @W. Niederhut,s online behaviour. It’s worth quoting a passage from Ben Goldacre’s 2012 book, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients. And I may as well add that the author’s academic credentials are second to none. “Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don't like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug's true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug's life, and even then they don't give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion. In their forty years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works through ad hoc oral traditions, from sales reps, colleagues or journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure.” (p xi)

Thank you for that measured response, Michael.

Do you know how autism is diagnosed?

William, So we can reasonably conclude that despite all the academic credentials you boast about, you’re unable to logically rebut the article I posted. Thank you for that validation. As for the “high quality, peer-reviewed scientific literature” you allude to, as I’ve already indicated, what you’re really talking about is people protecting their comfortable positions in the highly corrupt authoritarian milieu of academia scratching each other’s backs. See, for example, the following extract from a 2019 article in The Conversation, “When big companies fund academic research, the truth often come last”. “Over the last two decades, industry funding for medical research has increased globally, while government and non-profit funding has decreased. By 2011, industry funding, compared to public sources, accounted for two-thirds of medical research worldwide…” https://theconversation.com/when-big-companies-fund-academic-research-the-truth-often-comes-last-119164

It's not about credentials. It's about facts and logic. Taking one detail out of context and ridiculing it is not a logical rebuttal.

Good man, William. So you’re an immunologist and a virologist as well as being a psychiatrist and a logician. Is there any end to your qualifications and accomplishments? With your prodigiously extensive credentials, you should have no trouble identifying any flaws in the article I posted – the article you have been persistently ignoring. I await your critique with great interest, as I am always keen to learn.

Please either address the contents of the article or run along, Matt, like a good man.

William, My saying your assertions lack credibility is not an ad hominem, since it relates to your assertions, not you. The discredited article by Andrew Wakefield to which you referred was published in The Lancet. The “Vaccines are not associated with autism” article you cited was published by ScienceDirect. ScienceDirect is operated by the Dutch publishing company Elsevier, which owns The Lancet. Accordingly, the sources you cite are questionable, and in any event we also know that academia is rife with groupthink, authoritarianism and corruption. The following passage from Wikipedia about Elsevier certainly doesn’t inspire confidence: For example, in 2004, a resolution by Stanford University's senate singled out Elsevier's journals as being "disproportionately expensive compared to their educational and research value", which librarians should consider dropping, and encouraged its faculty "not to contribute articles or editorial or review efforts to publishers and journals that engage in exploitive or exorbitant pricing".[47] Similar guidelines and criticism of Elsevier's pricing policies have been passed by the University of California, Harvard University, and Duke University.[48] In July 2015, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands announced a plan to start boycotting Elsevier, which refused to negotiate on any open access policy for Dutch universities.[49] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier Can you now please address the contents of the article I posted?

William, You’ve been persistently ignoring the Ethical Skeptic article I posted, “Vaccinials – the Betrayed Generation of Americans”, about children being damaged by vaccines. If you could rebut any of its contents, your assertions might have some semblance of credibility. https://theethicalskeptic.com/2018/01/14/vaccinials-the-betrayed-generation-of-americans/

I certainly wouldn’t want Biden to be piloting any plane I’m on. https://youtu.be/n2lTIh536jY (Where's @Matthew Koch when you need him?)

In other words, Biden is a creature of the system.