OT: Rand Paul is an idiot

[scaredyclassic]

Most critical decisions are made emotionally.

my oldest kid did get into tau beta phi honor society this semester. His rational thinking processes are startlingly clear especially considering he comes in part from me. My mind is like some filthy hoarders house …filled with disorganized useless crap. His is like some beautiful fast new laptop.

I envy his wonderful clear rational brain. I would love to live in it for a day.

[CA renter]

[quote=harvey]Some people simply cannot think rationally and objectively. They may actually be “smart” by some measures, but they are not capable of using their intelligence in a systematic way to work toward objective conclusions.

And they don’t get that they don’t get it, so really a lost cause.

zk, you’re making a noble effort here with a sound and well-articulated argument. But you just cannot overcome Dunning-Kruger.[/quote]

There you go, projecting again. Your posts are always so ironic.

You’ve been proven wrong over and over and over again, and not just by me; yet you keep on writing these silly, juvenile posts, making an even bigger ass of yourself. You like to think that you’re smart, but your posts prove otherwise. You are the guiltiest poster on this site when it comes to twisting other people’s words and intentionally editing other people’s posts when you “quote” them (and I’m not just talking about using bold or italics) and you’re the guiltiest of using ad hominem attacks instead of intelligently engaging in debates. You consistently misread what others have posted, making painfully obvious your lack of reading comprehension skills, yet you try to claim that you have a superior intellect. You truly are funny.

If you have something useful to bring to the discussion, have at it. Otherwise, go back to your hole, troll.

[CA renter]

[quote=zk][quote=CA renter]
I tend to not make emotional decisions, especially when it comes to important issues in life. But I’d be an idiot if I were to ignore cases of real people who’ve experienced their children developing severe autism within 24 hours of getting vaccinated.
[/quote]
You would be an idiot, unless you had some reason to believe that the vaccines weren’t causing the autism. Such as a number of studies proving that they didn’t.
[quote=CA renter]

Call it whatever you want, but I would argue that it’s an emotional thinker who ignores what they see with their own eyes and instead listens to the “offical message” from the government.
[/quote]
The government? “Official message?” I’m not listening to the government. I’m listening to scientific studies.
[quote=CA renter]

The FACT (not an emotional argument) is that many families have seen their children become completely closed off, autistic, even catatonic, immediately after being vaccinated. You can talk about coincidences all day long… [/quote]
If 4 million people have incident A happen to them during their second year of life, and if ten thousand people have incident B happen to them during that same year, there are going to be some that have incident A and B on the same day. And even more that happen within a day or two. I don’t know if you call that a coincidence or not, but it’s a fact.

[quote=CA renter]

… but it’s this sort of evidence that leads us to understand the world around us. More research is necessary.
[/quote]
Those two sentences really don’t make sense when taken together. First, you say that this anecdotal evidence is how we understand the world. Then you say “more research is necessary.” What kind of research are you talking about? The kind that’s already been done, but more? So, which is it? Anecdotal evidence is what counts, or more scientific studies?
[quote=CA renter]

And I’m not suggesting that vaccines necessarily cause autism, just that we don’t know for a fact that they don’t. [/quote]
And what would it take to know “for a fact” that they don’t?
[quote=CA renter]

Let’s not forget that this government/govt-approved data is from the same government who said that the air was safe to breathe after 9/11:
[/quote]
Where are you getting “government-approved” from?
[quote=CA renter]

But let’s also note that the most emotional thinkers are the ones who consistently attack those who hold opposing viewpoints, rather than staying on topic and addressing the issues one by one.
[/quote]
I’ve done nothing but address issues one by one.

[quote=CA renter]

Read through this thread again and see who is most inclined to post emotional attacks against others (including the use of words like “idiot” or calling people “irrational”) and see if that high IQ of yours is blinding you to your own weaknesses.[/quote]
The only people I called idiots were Rand Paul and some women I met in Mensa a few decades ago. And I didn’t call you irrational. I said you were saying irrational things. If I say you’re saying irrational things, and I can point to those things, that’s not a personal attack.[/quote]

It’s been years since I’ve talked to those families, but at the time, nobody was trying to do tests to see why their children reacted to the vaccines the way they did. As a matter of fact, they were told that the vaccines couldn’t cause those problems, and were pretty much shut down by doctors and government officials when they tried to report it. With one family of the two that we’ve known, their pediatrician refused to treat their children after that (don’t remember specifics about the other, but don’t believe they got much assistance from the medical community or the related government agencies, either). That smells an awful lot like a coverup.

Until those particular patients are studied (all of the patients that had that a “coincidental” reaction within ~24 hours of being vaccinated), then we don’t know nearly as much about these vaccines and the possible reactions to them as you’d like to think we do.

[Anonymous]

[quote=CA renter]
There you go, projecting again.[/quote]

I’m the one that is projecting?

Did I mention your name in the post you cited?

[quote]You’ve been proven wrong over and over and over again, and not just by me; yet you keep on writing these silly, juvenile posts, making an even bigger ass of yourself. You like to think that you’re smart, but your posts prove otherwise. You are the guiltiest poster on this site when it comes to twisting other people’s words and intentionally editing other people’s posts when you “quote” them (and I’m not just talking about using bold or italics) and you’re the guiltiest of using ad hominem attacks instead of intelligently engaging in debates. You consistently misread what others have posted, making painfully obvious your lack of reading comprehension skills, yet you try to claim that you have a superior intellect. You truly are funny.[/quote]

Here’s another thing that is funny: The paragraph above has the word “you” fourteen times in just five sentences.

[quote]If you have something useful to bring to the discussion[/quote]

You mean like whining about “personal attacks?”

[zk]

[quote=CA renter]

It’s been years since I’ve talked to those families, but at the time, nobody was trying to do tests to see why their children reacted to the vaccines the way they did. As a matter of fact, they were told that the vaccines couldn’t cause those problems, and were pretty much shut down by doctors and government officials when they tried to report it. With one family of the two that we’ve known, their pediatrician refused to treat their children after that (don’t remember specifics about the other, but don’t believe they got much assistance from the medical community or the related government agencies, either). That smells an awful lot like a coverup.
[/quote]
That last sentence really took me by surprise. On that tiny amount of second-hand information, you smell a cover up? Your friends were probably despondent and maybe angry and who knows what really happened. If a pediatrician really did refuse to treat their children, my guess would be it had a lot more to do with their unreasonableness or their (understandable) hysteria than with any government cover up. Also, I don’t think a cover up would work unless all the doctors were in on it. Were they able to find a pediatrician to take their child as a patient? Was that doctor involved in the cover up or not? If he wasn’t involved, why didn’t he report the cover up? Did they ask him about the cover up? Did he say, “I can’t report it because I’m afraid” or something like that? If he was involved, did he convince them about the “official message” from the government that vaccines don’t cause autism? The more questions you ask, the sillier it gets. Or do those questions seem reasonable to you?
[quote=CA renter]

Until those particular patients are studied (all of the patients that had that a “coincidental” reaction within ~24 hours of being vaccinated), then we don’t know nearly as much about these vaccines and the possible reactions to them as you’d like to think we do.[/quote]

So you’re saying that until we study every single coincidental reaction we don’t know as much about the vaccine as I’d like to think we do? This, to me, appears to illustrate your lack of understanding of how science works to understand these things. Perhaps this is at the root of your refusal to accept what science has found.

[zk]

And perhaps your misunderstanding of how this works is also partly responsible for your suspicion of a cover up. If you think that each new case needs to be investigated in order to understand what’s happening, then you’d expect the government to be very interested in each new case. The reason they’re not as interested as you’d like isn’t because of a cover up. It’s because the science has already been done. Many times. At some point, you’re just wasting your time and money investigating something that’s already been proven incorrect. The government doesn’t want to hear about it if you suspect that you were cured by bloodletting, either. That’s not because of a cover up. It’s because the science has been done already.

[njtosd]

[quote=zk]And perhaps your misunderstanding of how this works is also partly responsible for your suspicion of a cover up. If you think that each new case needs to be investigated in order to understand what’s happening, then you’d expect the government to be very interested in each new case. The reason they’re not as interested as you’d like isn’t because of a cover up. It’s because the science has already been done. Many times. At some point, you’re just wasting your time and money investigating something that’s already been proven incorrect. The government doesn’t want to hear about it if you suspect that you were cured by bloodletting, either. That’s not because of a cover up. It’s because the science has been done already.[/quote]

I tend to agree with the idea that the decision not to treat (if this actually happened) was motivated by something other than a cover up. I also agree that it would be an improper use of public funds to continue investigating a claim that has been reasonably investigated in the past and found to be unsupported.

Which reminds me of one other question that I had for CARenter. Is there a reliable database somewhere showing these “thousands” of children who have been harmed? Do they appear on the VAERS database? If so, what is the name of the symptom that they developed following their vaccination? If they are not in the database, are there thousands of letters from the CDC explaining why they were excluded, or even confirming that they were excluded?

[scaredyclassic]

[quote=zk]And perhaps your misunderstanding of how this works is also partly responsible for your suspicion of a cover up. If you think that each new case needs to be investigated in order to understand what’s happening, then you’d expect the government to be very interested in each new case. The reason they’re not as interested as you’d like isn’t because of a cover up. It’s because the science has already been done. Many times. At some point, you’re just wasting your time and money investigating something that’s already been proven incorrect. The government doesn’t want to hear about it if you suspect that you were cured by bloodletting, either. That’s not because of a cover up. It’s because the science has been done already.[/quote]

actually the new research on bloodletting is that it may have intense health benefits.

[Anonymous]

There are no medical treatments for autism. There are behavioral treatments that can mitigate the effects, but there really is nothing an MD can do.

[biggoldbear]

Even better than my seatbelt analogy:
Having the brakes removed from your car is a personal decision
http://boingboing.net/2015/02/08/having-the-brakes-removed-from.html

[njtosd]

I took another look around and found this article from Autismspeaks.org that shows a review 10 studies representing 1.2 million cases of autism and analyzes the effect of vaccines. This article goes so far as to state that if anything, the MMR vaccine is PROTECTIVE AGAINST AUTISM. I would question the protectiveness but wonder whether the data speak more to the genetics of the parents in terms of their ability to make a decision whether or not to vaccinate (i.e. parents on the autism spectrum might be less likely to vaccinate and more likely to have children with autism), but that is a separate issue.

http://www.autismspeaks.org/science/science-news/new-meta-analysis-confirms-no-association-between-vaccines-and-autism

[CA renter]

[quote=njtosd]
Which reminds me of one other question that I had for CARenter. Is there a reliable database somewhere showing these “thousands” of children who have been harmed? Do they appear on the VAERS database? If so, what is the name of the symptom that they developed following their vaccination? If they are not in the database, are there thousands of letters from the CDC explaining why they were excluded, or even confirming that they were excluded?[/quote]

I mention the thousands because back in the 90s when I was teaching, this was becoming a pretty big issue in the education field. Many articles were being written about these families. To the best of my limited knowledge, there were no major studies or databases of these patients at that time. Parents were complaining about the lack of attention/investment/research being done to find out why so many kids were experiencing such dramatic changes in such a short time after being vaccinated.

I met the two families I had mentioned in the early-mid 2000s, and they were still frustrated with the lack of attention being paid by the medical establishment and the government. In all three cases (in two families), the diagnosis was autism, with two being severely autistic and one with a mild-moderate form. I have no idea if they’ve been included in that VAERS database, but don’t believe they were included in any database at that time.

[CA renter]

[quote=zk]And perhaps your misunderstanding of how this works is also partly responsible for your suspicion of a cover up. If you think that each new case needs to be investigated in order to understand what’s happening, then you’d expect the government to be very interested in each new case. The reason they’re not as interested as you’d like isn’t because of a cover up. It’s because the science has already been done. Many times. At some point, you’re just wasting your time and money investigating something that’s already been proven incorrect. The government doesn’t want to hear about it if you suspect that you were cured by bloodletting, either. That’s not because of a cover up. It’s because the science has been done already.[/quote]

This was back in the late 90s/early 2000s when this was all pretty new and few studies had been done. It’s not just that the doctors refused to treat the patients, it’s that they didn’t seem the least bit interested in finding out what happened. Once the parents suggested a link between the vaccine and autism, the doctor refused to see that family anymore. Nobody followed up, no studies were done on their child, nothing. No government agencies (CDC, Dept. of Health and Human and Human Services, etc.) were interested in hearing about their case — these doctors and health agencies did not want to find out if there was a link at all. Yes, that sounds like it could certainly be a coverup.

If I were in the medical field and began hearing stories of children becoming extremely autistic within 24 hours of a vaccine, I would start working immediately on trying to find out what was going on. It took a few years of thousands of parents making an uproar to get anyone to take notice and begin doing any real studies.

Just to be clear, the only reason I even posted on this thread was because a number of posters seemed baffled as to why parents who are every bit as educated, intelligent, and wealthy as they are (or better…and this group includes a number of doctors and nurses, too, especially in the late 90s and early 2000s) would choose not to vaccinate their kids. I was just sharing a perspective that others apparently didn’t know about so that they could better understand it. Not saying that anyone has to agree with it, but hope that people can better understand other people’s perspectives and decisions.

[njtosd]

[quote=CA renter][quote=njtosd]
Which reminds me of one other question that I had for CARenter. Is there a reliable database somewhere showing these “thousands” of children who have been harmed? Do they appear on the VAERS database? If so, what is the name of the symptom that they developed following their vaccination? If they are not in the database, are there thousands of letters from the CDC explaining why they were excluded, or even confirming that they were excluded?[/quote]

I mention the thousands because back in the 90s when I was teaching, this was becoming a pretty big issue in the education field. Many articles were being written about these families. To the best of my limited knowledge, there were no major studies or databases of these patients at that time. Parents were complaining about the lack of attention/investment/research being done to find out why so many kids were experiencing such dramatic changes in such a short time after being vaccinated.

I met the two families I had mentioned in the early-mid 2000s, and they were still frustrated with the lack of attention being paid by the medical establishment and the government. In all three cases (in two families), the diagnosis was autism, with two being severely autistic and one with a mild-moderate form. I have no idea if they’ve been included in that VAERS database, but don’t believe they were included in any database at that time.[/quote]

The VAERS database has been in place since 1990. Anyone can make a report – in fact, if you go here: https://vaers.hhs.gov/esub/index
there is the following invitation in bold and larger size letters:

“Please report all significant adverse events that occur after vaccination of adults and children, even if you are not sure whether the vaccine caused the adverse event.”

In smaller letters it goes on to say: “The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) accepts all reports, including reports of vaccination errors.”

So, one would expect that all of these events would have been reported.

[poorgradstudent]

[quote=scaredyclassic]Here’s some legal advice.

If you have to go to trial and choose between 2 lawyers. One who’s real good with the law, data or scientific evidence….and another one who seems a little dumber but who is a riveting storyteller…

Take the latter.[/quote]

Or hire a firm that has both, with the storyteller doing the talking in court and the brain doing research and feeding the talker notes in the courtroom.

I actually know a lawyer who is more the former, but he rarely sets foot in an actual court room.

[Author]

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