141–150 of 151 posts
I recommend the movie How To Survive a Plague, which also shows the beginnings of AIDS in New York. Must have been a frightening time. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2124803
Has anyone found a version of this that works on European DVD players?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In case you wonder why you are being downvoted, it’s because you are, yourself, denying recent (and less recent) news regarding federal monitoring; engaging in HIV/AIDS denialism; reversing HIV and AIDS; conflating weather prediction with scientific understanding; and ending with a non-sequitur.
I think his point is that people who believed that government was constantly monitoring everyone a few weeks ago were also seen as paranoid crazy persons who believed in conspiracy theories, and he is sarcastic about that.
Now people on HN can't seem to get enough paranoia for breakfast.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Propaganda or no, our brains do have a tendency to mix up correlation and causation (most notably because many times, correlation does come from causation), and a tendency to draw conclusions from fiction as well as from reality. Someone who notices both her AIDS and her left-wing behaviour will likely be a tiny bit more confident that one causes the other. (Now, I do see her as a prisoner of her shitty situation, an…
> Someone who notices both her AIDS and her left-wing behaviour will likely be a tiny bit more confident that one causes the other. So just because some people are woolly headed, artistic endeavours should show only one-dimensional characters? Reality is filled with Syrian rebels who eat hearts, rapists who were nice to their mothers and computer programmers who pray to god.
On the other hand, the fact that we tend to see correlations everywhere also mean we should be more forgiving when one happen to irk us. For instance, I once noticed in a season of 24 that "proprietary" was mentioned twice as an excuse for being harder to crack. The Stalman in me translated that by "proprietary -> better", and wondered if there was some kind of agenda behind that. Then, in season 8, I noticed that "proprietary" was used as an excuse for being harder to get used to. Which gives "proprietary -> worse". So much for the agenda. (By the way, 24 features much stronger and much more objectionable correlations. Noticed how human rights stop where Jack Bauer begins? —though again, season 8 doesn't seem to endorse torture any more.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, got it. At first I thought you were one of those crazy people saying AIDS isn't caused by HIV.
Those people exist ? This world, man ...
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2000/02/foo-fighters-hiv...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious: if we call t_0 1981, the Kaposi's Sarcoma article, and t_x 1996, the advent of HAART, and consider (t_x - t_0) "the AIDS epidemic" --- ignoring the ongoing epidemics in Sub-Saharan African and India, which are enormous problems but somewhat orthogonal to the problem described by your book --- what comparably lethal disease in human history was more effectively addressed by the medical establishment? How can…
It's not a direct comparison, but consider the handling of Ebola, where due to simple epidemiological interventions spread has basically been localized and stopped and no outbreak has killed more than 1000 people. Or consider the regular emergence of new flu strains which are far more contagious and are quickly and effectively contained. Though that comparison isn't great because we have a lot of knowledge when it co…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a difference between effectively managed by the medical establishment and what Reagan / america did in the 80s. I'm at work and I don't have sources readily available, but my understanding is that many older gay people (those still alive) hate reagan and republicans specifically because they slow rolled the response to hiv. Much of America's response wasn't really pushed until the Clinton administration. So…
"The real Reagan record on AIDS is different. AIDS funding skyrocketed in the 1980s, almost doubling each year from 1983 - when the media started blaring headlines - from $44 million to $103 million, $205 million, $508 million, $922 million, and then $1.6 billion in 1988. Reagan's secretary of Health and Human Services in 1983, Margaret Heckler, declared AIDS her department's "number one priority." While the House of…
2 - nor does a record of funding disprove reagan's intentional oversight; by 1992 aids was the #1 cause of death for US men ages 25-44 [1] and by 1994 the #1 cause of death for all americans age 25-44 [1]; the funding was wildly insufficient to mount a proper response. And were it not for reagan's homophobia and bigotry, a more vigorous response could reasonably have saved many more lives
3 - while it is true that federal policy doesn't hinge exclusively on what the president says, nice attempt to change the goals. The point was not that the federal government and medical establishment -- despite reagan -- did both their job and their moral duty, but that he intentionally hampered the response. I repeat: it's indisputable that if a disease affecting, well, reagan supporters had killed 20 thousand americans it would have garned a much more vigorous response, one which could be triggered and pushed by the president himself. For example, see the improvement in response under Clinton. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that AIDS was a priority under a president who isn't a homophobe.
4 - brent bozell is a proud homophobe; what a surprise that he manages to find supposed evidence -- though you shouldn't believe a thing he says without consulting a primary source -- finding that reagan didn't intentionally fail a group of americans reagan despised
[1] http://aids.gov/hiv-aids-basics/hiv-aids-101/aids-timeline/
edit because i forgot the link
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When the overwhelming body of evidence points to something, denialist seems appropriate. e.g. climate change denialist. There was a reasonable case for HIV is not the cause of AIDS for a while in the 90s, but everything that pointed that way was overturned by further inquiry. I met an HIV causes AIDS denialist once in university, so I did a bunch of research so find out if he was a crackpot or not. Things may have ch…
Describing someone as a "denialist" is a demonization, it is designed to connect the person to absurd Holocaust "deniers".
However, I don't think "denialist" is always referencing holocaust denial... that connection didn't occur to me until you mentioned it. I could only think of "climate change denialist" which may be a reference to holocaust denialism, but that's once removed already.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was HIV even identified in the late 1970s and early 80s though? I thought it was identified as a consequence of looking at the causes of the AIDS epidemic.
The virus was discovered in 1983, but knowledge of the "gay cancer" was around in the late 70s. I shouldn't have said "HIV research" there, but rather, "AIDS research". The medical world's interest in AIDS was pretty limited until it started to break out of the marginalized populations of gay men and drug users.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everyone who is HIV-positive develops AIDS.
Actually, I think the going medical opinion is that, except for new mutated strains (and they'd have to be heavily mutated), anyone who contracts HIV today is never going to develop AIDS if they have access to modern treatment options (for the rest of their life).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I didn't want to get into it but sometimes some BS bugs you and its hard not to comment. I try to stick to non political on HN. Kinda rewarding "bad" behavior though right? this is the first time PG has sorta commented on any comment I have made.
I'm afraid that if you think PG will continue to tell you to stop after this time, you are wrong. The next step is probably you being hellbanned by one of the admins, or by software.