Well, as NotThremp alluded much of the food we eat (as in the United States, I dont know about China) has been modified with such gene therapy.

I dont know if you are familiar with the term Crispr, but that is a recent technological breakthrough which makes gene editing much easier to do. And I know China is much more aggressive on experimenting with this technology in humans than we are, as they dont have the regulatory hurdles and their ethical system is different (I hesitate to say they are less ethical, especially after watching our CDC/FDA in action this last 2 year, but they have different ethical priorities)

I have been out of the game long enough, and gene therapy is a recent enough field, I cant speak much to recent advances show of doing a Google search and copy/pasting.

When I was in the game (sort of, I did gene manipulation as a tool, but I never studied it directly) the big problem was there wasn't the ability to target where we put the genes very well, or control how they were turned on/off very well, so very often they just lead to unregulated protein expression, which as a therapeutic in humans would probably cause a worse problem than the problem you are trying to fix. My understanding is Crispr and other breakthroughs have theoretically allowed us to push through this.

Bro, when can I inject me or my future children into being tan skinned, blue eyed, and 6'2 Jeremy Meeks?

Why would you bother gene editing your kids into being only manlet-adjacent?

That implies that today's public policy folk are different. I doubt that they were meaningfully better in the past.

I (for things that are important to me intellectually or would imply that a change in my behavior would be required) stopped relying on popsci articles when I was in grad school and newpapers when I worked for one. Lots of well-meaning folk, but they get things wrong. Also, they have some of those motivated thinking thingamajigs.

Gaslighting involves nefarious intentions. They seemed well-meaning in that specific case. Did they have exactly zero scientific evidence? I remember some sort of evidence offered about sneezing or coughing and people generally spewing their lung particles all willy nilly over some amount of distance.

I never looked into the mask thing very hard. Personal motivations cause people to not examine their beliefs. Most people are unattractive, so I'm generally in favor of any excuse for mandating masking.

Brian,

I'm not really super into rehashing a post-hoc debate of the quality of medical advice during Covid.

If you have an tips about playing Wingspan, I'd love to entertain strategic changes (including all the currently avail expansion) when moving from 2 to 5 players (obv once between turns and "choose a player" blue powers go up in value).

We are probably in agreement on the quality. It rivaled the 1968 egg scare.

Don't focus too much on the bonus cards and make sure to sit to the left of the person who likes clearing out the bird feeder. The once between turn cards are usually crap even with additional players.

No. At least not any PEDs that I heard of.

Never in doubt.

BTW, what does MS stand for. I don't remember that one.

I would assume Mysterious Stranger

Gene therapy is one of those things that sounds great in principle, but the more you realize all the things that can and often do go wrong, the more you realize it isn't something you would want to actually have performed on yourself, without extremely good cause, like you are going to die anyways if you dont try it.

Most of the actually educated argument against mRNA vaccination is in fact asking the very valid and necessary question whether the benefits actually outweigh the potential costs, given:

a) The vaccine doesn't actually stop Covid disease or disease transmission
b) Covid disease itself, especially in current iterations, doesn't seem particularly harmful in young, healthy cohorts.

So why did they want to shut down any debate or discussion about it given these 2 empirically valid facts? (MAybe the first one is somewhat contestable, but not the 2nd)

Give me your best tinfoil hat.

FWIW while China is lol on free speech or civil rights, they also didn't forbid any discussion about the merits of the vaccine nor did they ever mandate it or punish anyone who refused it in any way...

1) Clinical studies aren't typically designed to detect inhibition of transmission; the messaging to the contrary when the vaccines rolled out was likely (in my opinion) intentional Thaler/Susstein style "nudging" combined with (perhaps) some hopeful wishcasting.

2) See 1), mostly, but closing schools and mandating vaccination was likely some combination of wanting to get to "herd immunity" (when the hope was that it would provide more robust immunity to downstream mutated variants than it has) and trying to paste on the average public health professional's risk benefit analysis to the public writ large. Classical medical ethics involves evaluating the risk benefit profile of a treatment, and the threshold for treatment (should) be much, much higher for children given they have more of their life to live and anything that could potentially damage their future health needs to be viewed with increased care and skepticism.

We know now (and knew then) that the relative risk of either a covid infection or vaccination to a child is vanishingly small either way, so you're just balancing personal risk tolerance against the potential good to society - given the uptake of the original vaccination and successive boosters, it seems most Americans aren't really down with continuing get their kids shots considering most have already gotten covid at least once in addition to (possibly) getting vaccinated.

If I grant there's a "lack of discussion" about this (which seems ridiculous to posit - there are tons of people that have literally made careers out of opposing "the jab"), it's only insomuch as all of this stuff usually goes - Side A is unwilling to grant a correct point made by Side B because they're afraid of giving an inch leading to a mile being taken. The problem, of course, is that failing to acknowledge something much of the country evidently (from their behavior around boosting, or lack thereof) sees as pretty obvious erodes public trust in public health writ large and vaccination specifically, and gives cover to Berenson and MacCullough style morons to continue the grift.

Where I differ from some of the more "based" S&Fers on this topic is that I generally assume good intent on most of these issues; it's just impossible to bridge the differences in risk tolerance and perceived social responsibility in a country this large and diverse, even if it wasn't already fractured by the culture wars and four years of the Orange Emperor.

Re: China not "forbidding" discussion on the vaccine - not enough lols. From what I know (feel free to disabuse me if I'm wrong!), they mandated an inferior Chinese vaccine as part of the app based access policy for re-entering public life, and in the process basically ensured that the older population would remain homebound and under-vaccinated. That same population is now getting savaged now that Xi has declared victory over covid GWB-style and decided to just let it rip; I guess when you literally can't cremate and/or bury your parent if the death certificate says covid on it, that will keep the numbers down and assure China#1.

Just my two cents, for whatever it's worth.

Yeah, that type of nuanced view doesn't fly.

Maybe we can focus on Ukraine war now.

Nope. Never had any restrictions based on vaccination status, only green codes+tests. IDK why western media started saying this.

So they'll confine you to your home or what is effectively an inhumane prison, they'll put you in jail for what would be considered fairly minor political insults, and they'll even harvest your organs while you're alive if you really **** up. But they never force anyone to take the jab nor silence anyone who criticizes the jab haha. It seems so wildly inconsistent. But like I said, the lives of the elderly are more valuable than the rest of us and they're less willing to violate their "civil rights" than anyone who's actually of an age where they are a productive contributing member of society. If you're under 80 they'll just trample all over you like the disposable meat bag you are.

Anyway, thanks for the rest of your explanation. I wasn't following it closely given my location and mostly have no idea what's going on in the west these days. I have no opinion, just curious.

When someone who is a citizen of China and/or an expat living in China appears to be giving the CCP way too much the benefit of the doubt, I am inclined to give them a pass. Not like they can go at the CCP guns blazing.

I generally agree with Monte's points and was planning on writing something similar, just taking twice as many words to say the same thing. I think most people are well meaning enough, although that isn't saying a ton as no-one thinks they're the bad guy in their own mind, and there are very few Trumpian level sociopaths who don't actually care if they're the good guy or not.

I think the unwillingness to give an inch is a giant part of it. Unfortunately, that is giving the Tucker Carlson's and MGT's of the world a lot of power over you if all they have to do is say something sensible (even if they're clearly bad faith actors and their motives are bad) and you feel compelled to take a nonsense approach to counter. I also think a lot of well meaning scientists/doctors got caught in the crosshairs and sacrificed in the zeal of our Democrat controlled institutions not to give an inch, which is unfortunate.

Another problem with the Democratic aligned bureaucracy that controls our public health apparatus is their inability to effectively deal with (mostly bad faith) activists on their own side. Too often bad faith actors (many of them high ranking politicians) making spurious charges of -isms (racism, transphobia, etc.) are exerting way too much control over public policy.

Also, it goes without saying that our political system is generally broken in how politicians are behoven to special interest groups that provide them their election/re-election funding.

I know this is disappointing as their is no real tinfoil here, but I will throw a bone and give a generally tinfoilish argument that I have read in a couple places that I think has some validity to it.

Anyways, this is an argument I have heard Peter Thiel and Eric Weinstein give, which I think has some validity.

I am paraphrasing, but they argue all of our institutions were developed post WWII during a time of unprecedented growth, and they were built up in such a way that they dont work very well if they are not growing. And the last few decades, where there has been little real growth, have put tremendous pressure on the system. And instead of developing new systems that work in the current reality, the people running the systems have chosen to dig in and ignore reality, and try to gaslight the world into keeping the things going much as they have been.

ere is a transcript of a conversation they had talking about it if interested. Eric (and I think Peter) views our current financial policy, Covid policy, political dysfunction, etc. as all part of a bigger problem of failing institutions in a post-growth country.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5Enp...h-violence-and

Fair enough, though the Chinese vaccine is irrefutably worse based on what little data has leaked out and the elderly vaccination rates and death rates that we can glean from second order factors (crematoria usage and anecdotal type reports) seems like the band-aid is really just being ripped off all at once. Referring to it as "the jab" pretty effectively let's me know where you are on the issue, and I have to say I find the cognitive dissonance between that and being willing to inject UGL creatine (though I know you homebrew now and I'm sure your aseptic technique is impeccable) fairly interesting. With that said, we all have our blind spots.

I thought I remembered you posting something along the lines of 500 mg test being indisputably better than getting vaccinated for covid, but now I can't find it. I originally just raised an eyebrow and sensiblechuckle.gif'd as I scrolled past (assuming the synthetic spike protein my body manufactured didn't cross the blood-brain barrier and implant a false memory). Had I found it, I was going to quote it and comment that this seems like one of those things that is a) likely highly individualized based on response to PEDs and . . . idk, your heart's susceptibility to a cascade of synthetic spike proteins causing myocarditis?, b) essentially unknowable along any reasonable timeframe given it will never be prospectively researched and likely only analyzed with retrospective analyses of dubious quality, if at all, and c) essentially a mirror which holds up your current biases and values.

I know I'm not interested in going on TRT absent something that craters my balls, where it's just kind of comme ci comme ca for you. I'm sure the hopefulness I feel for your continued health even considering the AAS use is mirrored by your hope millions of little Faucis don't swarm and destroy my heart. Cheers buddy.

If I have a single grip with 'The Cathedral" (for lack of a better term) it is their seeming unwillingness to do retrospective analysis, much of which should be trivial to do. For all the energy "The Cathedral" has put into calling out McCollough for his analysis of athlete heart issues, it should be trivially easy for a professional epidemiologist (or even an ambitious reporter) to do this study themselves, yet there seems little interest. It also shouldn't be that difficult to do an autopsy study and see if there is anything to the unusual blood clot narrative. When you show no interest in addressing the concerns that a majority of people haven, when it is well in your power to do so, it is reasonable to wonder if there is a cover-up afoot.

I was talking more about the effects of testosterone part; the near-term COVID piece is definitely being studied, though "what long term effects other than death will the vaccines have on general health" is more what I was referring to, which seems impossible to study in any way other than longitudinally.

Yeah, some stuff will take time, but there is a lot that can be looked at in the meantime.

Another claim "anti-vaxxers" constantly make is the overall death rate has gone up astronomically in countries that have taken the mRNA vaccine, in contrast to countries that haven't. And the response of the "Cathedral" is to focus exclusively on the "Covid death rate" and completely ignore these concerns. Again, this isn't isn't something that should be that hard to do.

Just wanted to mention that I also call it "the jab" on the reg and I'm a huge vaccine slappy. Although if it ever came up, I assume you would have sussed it out from the context.

I dunno about this whole view of politician's not being sociopaths makes sense. Seems kinda weird a dude would literally write letters to everyone about how he was willing to support slavery to an extent never before supported (and possibly illegal) then get it rid of it a few years later without having few actual moral convictions.

Yeah, I rarely play pink powers, and they don't make a ton of sense except if you can find synergy with your bonus cards. One of the biggest ways to shoot yourself in the foot is chasing bonus cards at the expense of overall better plays. (Grinding an egg or tuck engine or even a food engine with some of the cache cards at end of round.)

Mostly only play 2 player games, so don't really brush up on the finer points of how strat changes with multiple players.