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Posts by Obbe
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2019-03-05 at 3:49 PM UTC in Aliens Cause Global Warming
In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth. One woman in six died of this fever.
In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no.
In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence. The consensus said no.
In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a jedi, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent “skeptics” around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.
There is no shortage of other examples. In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra. The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary was to find the “pellagra germ.” The US government asked a brilliant young investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause. Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor. The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory.
Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. They and other volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called “Goldberger’s filth parties.” Nobody contracted pellagra.
The consensus continued to disagree with him. There was, in addition, a social factor-southern States disliked the idea of poor diet as the cause, because it meant that social reform was required. They continued to deny it until the 1920s. Result-despite a twentieth century epidemic, the consensus took years to see the light.
Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology-until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees.
And shall we go on? The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy. The list of consensus errors goes on and on.
Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough.
Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.
But back to our main subject. What I have been suggesting to you is that nuclear winter was a meaningless formula, tricked out with bad science, for policy ends. It was political from the beginning, promoted in a well-orchestrated media campaign that had to be planned weeks or months in advance.
Further evidence of the political nature of the whole project can be found in the response to criticism. Although Richard Feynman was characteristically blunt, saying, “I really don’t think these guys know what they’re talking about,” other prominent scientists were noticeably reticent. Freeman Dyson was quoted as saying “It’s an absolutely atrocious piece of science but who wants to be accused of being in favor of nuclear war?” And Victor Weisskopf said, “The science is terrible but—perhaps the psychology is good.” -
2019-03-05 at 11:33 AM UTC in Aliens Cause Global Warming
We can take as an example the scientific reception accorded a Danish statistician, Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist.
The scientific community responded in a way that can only be described as disgraceful. In professional literature, it was complained he had no standing because he was not an earth scientist. His publisher, Cambridge University Press, was attacked with cries that the editor should be fired, and that all right-thinking scientists should shun the press. The past president of the AAAS wondered aloud how Cambridge could have ever “published a book that so clearly could never have passed peer review.” (But of course, the manuscript did pass peer review by three earth scientists on both sides of the Atlantic, and all recommended publication.)
But what are scientists doing attacking a press? Is this the new McCarthyism-coming from scientists? Worst of all was the behavior of the Scientific American, which seemed intent on proving the post-modernist point that it was all about power, not facts.
The Scientific American attacked Lomborg for eleven pages, yet only came up with nine factual errors despite their assertion that the book was “rife with careless mistakes.”
It was a poor display, featuring vicious ad hominem attacks, including comparing him to a Holocaust denier. The issue was captioned: “Science defends itself against the Skeptical Environmentalist.”
Really. Science has to defend itself? Is this what we have come to? When Lomborg asked for space to rebut his critics, he was given only a page and a half. When he said it wasn’t enough, he put the critics’ essays on his web page and answered them in detail.
Scientific American threatened copyright infringement and made him take the pages down. Further attacks since, have made it clear what is going on. Lomborg is charged with heresy. That’s why none of his critics needs to substantiate their attacks in any detail. That’s why the facts don’t matter.
That’s why they can attack him in the most vicious personal terms. He’s a heretic. Of course, any scientist can be charged as Galileo was charged. I just never thought I’d see the Scientific American in the role of Mother Church.
Is this what science has become? I hope not. But it is what it will become, unless there is a concerted effort by leading scientists to aggressively separate science from policy. -
2019-03-05 at 12:05 AM UTC in What type of women are you most attracted to?Who doesn't like big titties?
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2019-03-05 at 12:02 AM UTC in Aliens Cause Global Warminghttps://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/09/aliens-cause-global-warming-a-caltech-lecture-by-michael-crichton/
To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a conclusion: “These results are derived with the help of a computer model.”
But now, large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world-increasingly, models provide the data.
As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward. There can be no observational data about the year 2100. There are only model runs. This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well.
Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right. Because only if you spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen can you arrive at the complex point where the global warming debate now stands. Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we’re asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future?
And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds? -
2019-03-04 at 10 PM UTC in What type of women are you most attracted to?Every individual is unique.
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2019-03-01 at 12:12 AM UTC in Influx of incest porn
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2019-03-01 at 12:09 AM UTC in Wireless neural communication discovered in the brainMaybe eventually they will use something like this for brain to phone communication.
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2019-02-28 at 12:23 AM UTC in What was it like the first time you did drugs?I don't know how some of you have such vivid memories of this stuff.
First drug besides those 3 was mushrooms with my freinds. We ate mushrooms, walked around from park to park smoking weed and having fun tripping out, then went back to my friends basement and smoked more weed and hung out more while tripping. Don't really remember any details. -
2019-02-23 at 10:05 PM UTC in Cool websites for when you're highhttps://libraryofbabel.info
The Library of Babel is a place for scholars to do research, for artists and writers to seek inspiration, for anyone with curiosity or a sense of humor to reflect on the weirdness of existence - in short, it’s just like any other library. If completed, it would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lower case letters, space, comma, and period. Thus, it would contain every book that ever has been written, and every book that ever could be - including every play, every song, every scientific paper, every legal decision, every constitution, every piece of scripture, and so on. At present it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 10^4677 books.
Everything you could or will ever type on niggasin.space already exists in this library. -
2019-02-23 at 10 PM UTC in How long ago did you last get laid?Yesterday.
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2019-02-23 at 3:36 PM UTC in Cool websites for when you're high
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2019-02-23 at 1:21 AM UTC in do you have to obey the orders of crossing guards, legally?They're not going to arrest you.
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2019-02-23 at 1 AM UTC in Men should feel ashamed.
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2019-02-22 at 10:52 PM UTC in Men should feel ashamed.
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2019-02-22 at 10:38 PM UTC in Men should feel ashamed.
Originally posted by HTS Men are responsible for repressing women for a hundred thousand year. The victim of oppression is no more responsible for their plight than the victim of a rape. The rapists and oppressors are the ones responsible - men. 😧
Women have also been guilty of being rapists and tyrants, and nobody alive today is responsible for anything that happened 1000 years ago. You're thinking in a tribalistic, primitive way. You think men and women are playing on two opposing teams, when we are really all on one team. Some people are assholes. Assholes can be men and they can be women, too.
There are at least two men on this very forum who have done the opposite of oppressing you; Lanny has given you a platform to stand on your soap box and spout off your nonsense, with no consequences - talk about freedom. And you found love through this forum, and are sharing your life with someone who seems to adore you. Is your boyfriend oppressing you too? As someone living in a 1st world country with universal healthcare and only 1st world problems, have you ever actually been oppressed in your life?
To answer my own question, yes, you have. As a transgender woman you do have to deal with groups of people trying to step on you and keep you down. One group I can think of is entirely made up of women. Trans-exclusive radical feminists, I believe they are called. These are women who really are actively trying to oppress you, right now, and yet you ignore that and instead throw half of humanity under the bus as you shout from your little soap box about how horrible men are, even though many of those men are actively supporting you and your lifestyle.
But you can't own up to that now, it would ruin your joke thread. -
2019-02-22 at 11:16 AM UTC in Men should feel ashamed.
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2019-02-21 at 11:32 AM UTC in Men should feel ashamed.
Originally posted by Lanny Why not? We agree that those who have have been raped are generally not responsible for being raped. Why can't a person who fails economically or socially or personally be a victim of an economy or society or culture?
I could totally see that. I was actually just being contrarian. And I don't believe OP actually blames men for everything, this whole thread was actually just a joke, Lanny. -
2019-02-21 at 11:11 AM UTC in Men should feel ashamed.
Originally posted by HTS That's kind of my point. That rape victim blames their rapist kidnapper for their plight, but according to your half-assed bullshit wisdom they'll always be a failure because they aren't blaming themselves.
"Men" are no more responsible for your failures than a rape victim is responsible for a rapists rape. -
2019-02-21 at 3:02 AM UTC in Men should feel ashamed.
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2019-02-21 at 1:36 AM UTC in Men should feel ashamed.
Originally posted by HTS On the surface this sounds wise and shit, but then you realize there's probably a kidnapped childrape victim out there in someone's rape dungeon who probably doesn't want to be there.
Blaming a rape on people who aren't the rapist is pretty low of you. That child is not responsible for the circumstances they find themselves in.
