Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
four thieves collective goes on 38C3 and i groan in anticipation of whatever stupid trick will they pull now https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2024/fahrplan/talk/ASBXWW/ why they even are there
JFC
go back 200 years before the "gubmint" got involved in public health and tell me that average life expectancy was better than now
before the pandemic it was possible for people to believe that libertarianism was an answer to everything, turns out if it was a tiny minority would have hoarded all the PPE while the people they were gonna sell it to died of the plague. libertarians have not been able to square this circle since
I have the feeling that they're not a British trans person talking about the NHS, or an American in a red state panicking about dying of sepsis because the baby they wanted so badly miscarried.
I think there is value in giving people the tools and knowledge to make more involved decisions about their health, but using that sort of libertarian rhetoric in the covid era is at best really fucking irresponsible.
maybe it's more of a take acceptable for americans
Yeah, as somebody in the USA, I think that both you and @gerikson@awful.systems are pearl-clutching over laboratory conditions while ignoring the other, more serious safety problems being addressed; the presentation was not exaggerating when they were talking about the lifesaving impact of gender-affirming therapy. Last thread, you sheepishly admitted that part of the synthesis is complicated by criminalization and over-regulation; this thread, I'd like a sheepish admission that about a third of the USA (by population) suffers from restrictions on their reproductive rights.
Like, yes, you shouldn't brew your own high-proof alcohol at home, because you can go blind from methanol poisoning. But also, there was a time in the USA when high-proof alcohol was over-regulated, and it incentivized a lot of people to homebrew.
The US healthcare system needs to be fixed, and probably others as well.
Synthesizing your own meds is not the fix.
It is, at best, a band-aid. Having transpersons and pregnant women reliant on international drug networks (becuse realistically those are the orgs that are gonna step into this void if needed) is not a good outcome.
i see this all more as a publicity stunt/attention grab than anything else. i wrote there about naloxone because laufer has put much more information about naloxone than about anything else in question there. he has put naloxone structure on his website all the way back in 2016 with "other molecules" description, suggesting that there's some work in progress. now he's talking about "releasing" procedure for naloxone synthesis ripped from a paper that came out in 2013, available on scihub for all to see. it took them so fucking long that since then: 1. availability of black market opioids shifted from genuine perc pills that you can divert from real pharmacy and that can be used to make naloxone, to possibly counterfeit ones containing fentanyl that you can't. were he releasing this all the way back in say 2018, this still could be marginally useful. 2. since then naloxone has been made available OTC making cooking it on your own obsolete. 3. there's also an option of using some other antagonists that can use codeine as starting material - i'd like to see this regulated - but these come with more side effects and absolutely zero work has been done in this direction either. whatever he's doing, it's not particularly fruitful other than getting talks for people who don't know any better
you're saying this as if it's american-only problem. diy hrt and diy plan-b were a thing way before laufer and will continue to be a thing until they're not needed, and these work by diverting legit pharmaceuticals. his miso card thing is possibly okayish if sealed but it works only because there's no synthesis involved, it's diverting veterinary drugs, which is fine because it's likely that these come from the same reactor anyway. if anything i guess he might be harmful in this one by bringing unwanted attention. if you take into attention that he floated an idea of making gene therapy on their own, with aim of introducing extra aromatase so that testosterone is transformed into estrogen almost completely, as an alternative to hrt, and possibly some other gene therapies, i cannot take him seriously. this gotta be a massive, overly long, deeply unserious attention grab. if it's grift, it's not a very good one, with $23k (current prices) in crypto donations since 2019 and $5/mo patreon
and btw there's no methanol in moonshine, at least not in harmful levels. there is methanol in denatured alcohol in countries where regulators don't give a fuck or where they believe that "morally deficient" people like addicts should suffer, like in US, in EU contaminants are nontoxic. methanol in counterfeit alcohol occurs only as intentional contamination and/or cost-cutting measure, or when whoever is cooking it does not know any better
The FDA is a response to people just making shit up and selling cough cures full of opium. "Raw milk" pushers are cut from the same cloth.
It also prevented the Thalidomide medication from causing much damage in the usa (compared to the rest of the world) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal and prob countless more, as it is a bit hard to cause problems if the problems are caught before it being brought to market. And I do worry that the "the fda is too cautious" pushers are actually motte baileying for the total removal of the fda.
they absolutely are, see also Scott Alexander stanning for these guys
NRx people was what I was thinking about. Every city a city state with bespoke medical experimentation going on. And if you don't like it, just leave and go to a different city state with different crazy medical experiments.
@Soyweiser Thalidomide was mostly a British problem (that led to the UK's CSM getting teeth). The FDA in the USA really got rolling after the Elixir Sulfanilamide poisonings in 1937: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_sulfanilamide
Ah right, thanks! Weren't there also a lot of German victims?
there was austrian wine contamination incident in 1985
there were also a couple of cases since where DEG replaced glycerine in syrups, either by negligence by manufacturer of syrup, manufacturer of intermediate, or knowingly as a cost cutting measure, last one in 2022
idk what went wrong there but village industry of altmed clinics seems to be an actual thing, and from what i understand it's apparently legal in some of red states