negzero7: Please explain how exactly "Blacks are a hate group" and "White people should stay the hell away from Black people" are well reasoned opinions without revealing that you're a bigoted racist sack of shit too.
I would imagine whoever wrote those 4 paragraphs has researched a lot more than I did about his political views. If someone with better sources went there and corrected any mistakes made previously, with referenced demonstrating it, the article would be much improved.
You don't need to have an opinion on everything. Clearly you don't care about this or you would spend the time watching some of his videos or reading his articles that expound on his "controversial" statements. It's ok to just say "I don't know" rather than thinking you're well informed because Wikipedia says so.
negzero7: Please explain how exactly "Blacks are a hate group" and "White people should stay the hell away from Black people" are well reasoned opinions without revealing that you're a bigoted racist sack of shit too.
It proves you're an intellectually dishonest troll when you have to attack wikipedia, while the actual thing that proves Adams was a bigoted racist sack of shit are HIS OWN WORDS, which you can not contest. And that makes you a bigoted racist sack of shit too, for attempting and spectacularly failing at such a dishonest reality denying argument.
No, his comments about race and supporting political groups that advertise oppression and hate have not and will not be simply categorized as a political view. There are universal truths and morals that do not change and simply saying we have different views does not excuse violating those.
I hope this isn't too off topic but one of the key underpinnings of, for lack of a better word, capital-D Democratic / liberal (/ leftist-ish?) ideology in the US is that there is not a universal truth governing reality. Watch any debate where "objective truth" gets brought up and more than half the time the response won't be disagreeing with that truth but that the entire idea of an objective, universal truth is faulty.
I think the issue isn't whether there's an "objective truth", but it's obvious that some things are truer than others. I often find that people who argue against objective truth are actually trying to push a viewpoint that has little to no evidence to support it whilst they also try to deny a different viewpoint which does happen to have some decent evidence.
A little. Broadly, the things that historical people considered "good" and "bad" are still considered "good" and "bad" today – discounting brief thousand-year fads (which largely boil down to how and whether to signal allegiance with particular ways of organising society).
> Do you eat factory farmed animals?
So you, too, understand that factory-farming animals is wrong – and that many people eat factory-farmed animals despite knowing that it's wrong, because very few people are paragons of moral virtue.
> Currently some leftist group is trying to justify Female Genital Mutilation.
You believe that leftist groups in some sense "should" be more moral than… I'm guessing the comparison is "rightist groups", perhaps the various contemporary fascist governments. But you've correctly pointed out that FGM is wrong, and that identifying with a contemporary political label or ideology does not automatically mean you're in the right.
I fail to understand why you think this is a gotcha. Your comment only functions as a gotcha if we all broadly agree on what's right and what's wrong.
What do you mean by "slavery"? The term has been applied to many practices over time. The more egregious forms (e.g. transatlantic slave trade) were justified by "well, they aren't really people, are they?"; tamer forms, like Roman slavery, were justified as institutions, as being a necessary component of the Correct Way to Organise Society. I don't think being enslaved has ever been considered a good thing (except by comparison with alternatives), although I'd be happy to learn of a counterexample. Likewise, being raped is not considered a good thing, except as far as it forms part of an Institution necessary for the Correct Way to Organise Society (e.g. a patriarchy). Each individual instance of rape is regrettable, even in rape culture.
Indeed, you will not even find people defending factory farming, except as far as they defend the institution, which is part of the status quo and therefore necessary for promulgating the status quo. (Usually something about "but farmers will have to change their practices!", as though farmers don't already change their practices so frequently that it's hard to do academic research on farming.) If you want to find something wrong that people will actually defend, in its own capacity, you need to consider examples like bloodsports… but just thinking about what people might say about the topic is no substitute for actually talking to them about it.
My girlfriend died of cancer. She was 30 years old and we had a toddler. No matter how rational you start, terminal cancer diagnosis throws much rationality out the window.
> No matter how rational you start, terminal cancer diagnosis throws much rationality out the window.
Doctors who get cancer typically stay level-headed. I wish society talked about death and mortality more often and openly, most people are ill-equiped to face it square on, and yet its the one thing that is truly universal. Humanity needs sex-ed, but for dying.
Use of passive voice doesn't help anyone grapple with one's mortality. I specifically meant in the context of contemplating our own mortality, and not that of others - which is closer to death porn and not death sex-ed (learning how to do it ourselves)
I would not. At some point this becomes agony, this is the reason I have a suicide plan in place for a long time alredy, despite being in perfect health.
It's not when you need it that you start googling around
So much this. They gave my mom an effectively unlimited supply of opiates when the time called for it, and we convinced her that it was perfectly OK and good to use them. One need not suffer without help, unless that happens to be personally important to them. Like, I can imagine religious objections, maybe, or perhaps an addict who wants to “go out clean” knowing that they beat the cravings. But if those don’t apply, pain meds are good and plentiful now.
I am truly sorry for your loss. That must’ve been a nightmare, and I can imagine someone exploring outside their usual lines in such a situation. I hope you and your child are well now.
Snark aside, he got his doctor's approval first and acknowledged it didn't work after. Also, it shows promise in oncology, but doesn't have mature studies. [0]
I don't know that I would call en vitro studies promising. Cancer would be long be a solved problem if even a tenth of the stuff that kills cancer cells in a petri dish was viable in humans.
Sure, there's a few. But 3 rodent studies isn't exactly enough evidence for a layperson to worry about, either. It's not even much of a signal for scientists in that area of research.
Ivermectin is pretty safe for people to use regardless of whether or not they have parasites, so sure, do the human RCTs. Maybe we'll get lucky and have another tool in our anti-cancer toolbox.
But trying to extrapolate out that it's reasonable for people to take it for cancer based on the current evidence is premature, at best.
They are a required step along the way to human trials.
But over 90% of drugs that show promise in rodents flunk out in human trials.
Something working in rodents is an indicator that it might be worth doing testing to see if it works and is safe for humans. But if you bet against it panning out, you'd still be right the overwhelming majority of the time.
The only thing you can project from rodent trial success is that it is worth continuing to study. It should not guide any human usage at that point.
No. It's still absurd to project human outcomes from rodent studies.
90-95% of them don't pan out! And that's of the ones that progress from rodent studies to human trials. The actual number is even higher, but more difficult to track.
Surely you can see how it would be absurd to extrapolate success from something with, at best, a 5-10% chance of panning out? And panning out as in being approved - lots of things that are approved have less than 100% success rate, particularly in this area.
During peak covid-19 I read a lot of ivermectin studies posted in HN. Most were just horrible, with obvious mistakes. If you pick one, I can give a try to roast it.
My personal quick rubric for determining if an ivermectin study showing improvement for cv19 outcomes is likely to be trustworthy:
Was the population being studied one where parasite infections that ivermectin can take care of are endemic?
Yes - improves outcomes in this population because many of them are likely to have parasites and killing them reduces strain on the body and frees up immune system resources to deal with covid
No - you'll find glaring flaws even in a quick once-over.
I remember a preprint. I think it was comparing the recorery rate of
a) Ivermectin in the best hospital in the capital city of one of our most poor provinces in Argentina
b) The average in the same poor province
I don't expect too many problems with parasites there. They implicitly decided that the difference was ivermectin, not that the hospital is probably x10 better than the average of the province.
Doble blind randomized controlled group or it didn't happen.
> Complete tumor regression was observed in 6/15 mice on the combination treatment, 1/20 on ivermectin alone, 1/10 on anti-PD1 antibody alone, and 0/25 on no treatment.
As I mentioned above (another comment), pharma tends to avoid developing applications for generic/cheap drugs so we may not see more research on this front. Who knows.
If there is a x5 improvement they will get a method to package both drugs together and sell them for x10 the price. You surely want a profesional mix in the high tech lab instead of a random guy mixing tubes in the back room. Another trick is to add something to the molecule like a methyl -CH3, show that the new version is 10% even better and charge x20 for it.
So my guess is that there is some problem to use this mix, but as I said I can't find any obvious error and it's really interesting. I'd love to read a better analysis from someone that is an expert in the area.
Scott did have a lot of really thoughtful articles, but its also true he become much less rational and much more identity based on his reasoning over the last 3-5 years.
Scott Adams said that Republicans would be hunted down and that there would be a good chance they would all be dead if Biden was elected and that the police would do nothing to stop it.
Dilbert was brilliant. Adams' political discourse after that became his primary schtick was quite frequently insane.
> In a 2006 blog post, Adams asked if official figures of the number of deaths in the Holocaust were based on methodologically sound research. In 2023, Adams suggested the 2017 Unite the Right rally was "an American intel op against Trump."
> After a 2022 mass shooting, Adams opined that society leaves parents of troubled teenage boys with only two options: to either watch people die or murder their own son
Maybe “insanity” is strong but I do not think anyone who holds beliefs like those is thinking straight. Toying with Holocaust denial is not simply “having different opinions to you”.
What did he mean when he said this well reasoned opinion?
“When a young male (let’s say 14 to 19) is a danger to himself and others, society gives the supporting family two options: 1. Watch people die. 2. Kill your own son. Those are your only options. I chose #1 and watched my stepson die. I was relieved he took no one else with him.”
“If you think there is a third choice, in which your wisdom and tough love, along with government services, ‘fixes’ that broken young man, you are living in a delusion. There are no other options. You have to either murder your own son or watch him die and maybe kill others.”
That’s surely from the calm rational mind of someone not filled with resentment and hate right?
Scott Adams also was a self-professed libertarian - he offered no prescription on what additional options society could provide to families of troubled kids.
Some context? What exactly happened with his son, and I assume he elaborated on what those two options mean, or what specifically they were in his case?
Advocating for physical oppression of broad groups and races is not a political view much as you want to normalize it. It’s the same reason all the right’s effort to lionize Charlie Kirk just won’t take, much to their chagrin.
This is not about disliking “different opinions” or refusing to hear opposing views. It is about a documented pattern of statements in which Adams moved from commentary into explicit endorsement of collective punishment, racialized generalizations, and norm breaking prescriptions that reject basic liberal principles.
Being “aware of both sides” means engaging evidence and counterarguments in good faith. Repeatedly dismissing data and framing entire groups as inherently hostile is not that. Calling this out is not echo chamber behavior, it is a substantive judgment based on what was actually said, not on ideological disagreement.
"In a 2006 blog post (which has since been deleted), Adams flirted with Holocaust denialism, questioning whether estimates of the number of people killed during the Holocaust are reliable [...] If he actually wanted to know where the figures come from, he could have looked on Wikipedia or used his Internet skills to Google it or even asked an expert as he once recommended"
"Just 3 hours after the 2019 Gilroy Garlic festival mass shooting, Adams attempted to profit off of it by trying to sign up witnesses for a cryptocurrency-based app that he co-founded called Whenhub.[58][59][60]"
"After being yanked from newspapers due to racism, Adams moved his operations to a subscription service on Locals. While Adams continued to create a "spicier" version of Dilbert "reborn" on that site, Adams' focus shifted towards "political content". His Locals subscription included several livestreams with "lots of politics" as well as a comic called Robots Reading News, with a little bit of alleged self-help media content as well.[73] His Twitter feed also increasingly focused on angry MAGA politics.[74]"
"Adams continued to believe Donald Trump's Big Lie and maintained that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was rigged. In March 2024, when Adams falsely suggested that US "election systems are not fully auditable and lots of stuff goes 'missing' the day after the election", the Republican Recorder of Maricopa County Stephen Richer explained that US elections actually were fully auditable, and gave some information on the actual process officials use for auditing elections.[82]"
I don't understand why anyone would extend empathy and tolerance towards someone who would not reciprocate. I think you should temper your expectations here.
