The Truth about RFK Jr

arthwollipot said:
I disagree with both of you. I think he cares about your family, but has a profoundly mistaken view on what makes people get sick and die. I think he truly believes that good things are bad and bad things are good, and is wilfully blind to any evidence to the contrary because of his ideology.
Click to expand...
I'm guessing you're kind of right about this, but whether it is a distinction without a difference depends on which handle you pick it up by. In some way from some point of view he's many things at once. Caring about the wrong things necessitates not caring about the right ones. You can say you don't want people to die but if you want what kills them then you might as well.

I'm kind of conflicted about how to characterize RFK's madness, because, as Johnny Karate suggests, I'm not sure whether it matters in the end, and the degree to which your ideology makes you willfully blind to evidence crosses a threshold when you are in a position of influence and power. No matter how you feel about a person, there is no room for charity in judging policy, and no need, I think, to parse motives. There's plenty of time to analyze the character of lethally delusional demagogues after they've been stopped.

In any case, I'm not sure any consistent characterizaton can be agreed upon, because I think RFK is crazy, and irrationality is not amenable to rational analysis.
 
Resume said:
He is a sociopath with a body count. Our idiot president put him in charge of our nation's health, ensuring more bodies to count. Any person who defends this is a ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ moron.
Click to expand...
Hardly defending. Just critically examining his motives. He has the lives of 83 Samoans, most of them children, to account for.
 
arthwollipot said:
Hardly defending. Just critically examining his motives. He has the lives of 83 Samoans, most of them children, to account for.
Click to expand...

RFK actually thinks what he is doing is good. That is what makes him dangerous.
People don't get that people can do terrible things from good motives.
 
Pixel42 said:
My sister's best friend is into reiki, magic healing crystals etc, and one day when the three of us were together she assured us that apricot seeds prevent, and cure, cancer. Normally I just ignore her nonsense but out of curiosity, when I got home I googled it. The first link I was given was an article on the BBC news website reporting that WHO had issued a warning about this particular crackpot remedy, because it turns out that apricot seeds contain cyanide. There's only a tiny amount in each seed so you won't have a problem if you accidentally swallow one, but if you consume the things in the quantity required by this crackpot remedy you can put yourself into a coma with cyanide poisoning, and there had been a wave of cases of people doing exactly that.

This idea that natural = good and safe and unnatural = bad and dangerous is totally bonkers. Not only is cyanide natural but so are many other poisons, not to mention all diseases. But, as you say, it does seem to be something a lot of people assume without really thinking about it.
Click to expand...
THIS.
And this kind of craziness cuts across political beliefs. I know plenty of people who are pretty far out on the politcal left, but are heavily inot magic based thinking about health.
I point this out because it is not like every promoter of bad medicine is on the right..though many are.
 
Ah, but does he think everyone will simply be healthier for some reason, or does he think the few (or many) deaths are worth it to breed the superhuman disease-resistant children of the future, who will inevitably emerge from beneath the corpses of their less fortunate and disease-ridden peers?

The distinction is important.
 
Like most of Trump’s cabinet, he is almost certainly insane, and should be sectioned (or committed or whatever the right term is for being flung in the booby hatch for treatment).
 
Except those times you die of it, measles isn't that bad.

“We would absolutely not take the MMR,” the wife said in English, referring to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. The vaccine is highly effective at preventing measles; even one dose gives a person 93% protection, and the full two-dose series gives 97% protection. Officials have said the girl had no underlying health conditions.

“The measles wasn’t that bad,” said the wife, who added she also had measles during her daughter’s funeral. Her other four children got sick days later. She said “they got over it pretty quickly.”
Click to expand...
www.usatoday.com

Parents of child who died of measles still don't support MMR vaccine

The parents of the unvaccinated 6-year-old girl who died from the measles are speaking out — but not in favor of vaccination.
www.usatoday.com
 
She knowingly turned her daughter's funeral into a measles party? Hope she doesn't care about any of her relatives.
 
arthwollipot said:
I disagree with both of you. I think he cares about your family, but has a profoundly mistaken view on what makes people get sick and die. I think he truly believes that good things are bad and bad things are good, and is wilfully blind to any evidence to the contrary because of his ideology.
Click to expand...
Nah, he only cares about himself. Everybody else in the world is a thing to him.
 
arthwollipot said:
You're certainly describing Trump, but I don't think RFKJr has quite the same level of pathological narcissism.
Click to expand...
Subjecting his children to the juices from a rotten whale head, and all the possible ways that can go wrong, argues otherwise. If he can be that cruel to his own flesh and blood, imagine how little he thinks of the rest of us.
 
TragicMonkey said:
What are RFK's qualifications for anything? He comes from a famous family and......what else? What has he done?
Click to expand...
He was an environmental lawyer, but being a lawyer is about being an advocate. It is different from scientific training. I was taught that when an experiment turned out different from what you expected, that this was better than if it had turned out as you expected--because now you learned something. Science-based medicine had a good description of the difference about a month or so ago.
EDT
David Gorski wrote, "What I do like to point out is that lawyers, like RFK Jr., tend to approach data and studies very differently than scientists. While scientists test a hypothesis by doing experiments and studies to test it, potentially falsifying it—i.e., they care if the hypothesis is actually aligned with nature and reality and will reject it if it fails to stand up to experimental testing—lawyers are trying to make a case for they position that they are defending. To that end, they will cherry pick evidence to support their case and look for any way to denigrate or discredit evidence that does not. This is exactly what RFK Jr. will do, but even more so. Now that he controls the CDC and NIH, he will be in a position to fund new research and cherry pick existing research that results in “evidence”—no matter how dubious—to support his policies, namely undermining confidence in vaccines and removing them from the market, and that is exactly what he will do."
 
Last edited:
arthwollipot said:
Hardly defending. Just critically examining his motives. He has the lives of 83 Samoans, most of them children, to account for.
Click to expand...
Quite realize this, and if there's any implication of defense, apologies. My take on it is simply that examining motives at this stage at least is at best recreational. Of course, we're just hanging around at the keyboard and talking, so no problem, as long as we remember that in the practical sense bad policy is bad whatever its motivation. I'll be more inclined to talk motives in his obituary, when it's seemly to conceal one's relief behind a veneer of charity.
 
People who do objectively bad things should be opposed. That's just part of being human. But there's value in trying to understand why people do bad things. We want to learn to recognize the signs earlier, especially when those people seek power and authority.

I don't think you can distill RFK Jr. down to one or two simple principles. Yes, I think he's a narcissist and believes that he alone can save mankind from the misguided scientists. I wouldn't know what factors have created him that way. But it's just a common way of thinking among alternative-medicine folks. They believe they have an inherent understanding of health and medicine that transcends everyone else's. Yes, I think he's pushing the alternative narrative out of resentment for some failure to be recognized for his genius. And I do think he actually believes his own hype to an extent sufficient to act mostly as a true believer.

Part of believing one's own hype is the tolerance of risk. We advocate for vaccines knowing that they are not 100% effective or 100% safe. We accept that a certain small number of vaccinated people will get sick anyway. We accept that a certain small number of vaccine recipients will suffer intolerable side effects and injury, up to and including death. These are acceptable losses to us. I think RFK Jr. approaches deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases the same way. He accepts them as tolerable losses in his framework of believe that, on the whole, the human organism has the inherent potential to ward off all disease with "natural" supplementation and methods.
 
I heard that RFK is considering consulting with Joseph Mercola, perhaps appointing him to something or other.

Yes, that (makes duck sounds) jagoff.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom