Well you
ain't seen nothing yet.
I was coerced into watching a 'documentary' called
House of Numbers today. I contemplated beating the individual who recommended I watch it with him to death as the credits started rolling, but just barely managed to restrain myself.
This is the single most disgusting piece of tripe I've ever heard of. It is being used,
right now, to reinforce superstition and paranoia in Africa and block treatment / prevention of HIV - and there is apparently even some growing movement in Western countries supporting this bizarre idea that AIDS is not caused by the HIV virus (...the film seems to be undecided as to whether it simply wants to 'discredit' the connection between HIV and AIDS or whether it wants to deny that HIV exists at all).
Every film festival that awarded this garbage with a 'Best Documentary' badge should hang their head in shame, and if you're living in Portland, I would encourage you to protest the screening of this film. It's bad enough that these people are poisoning minds and murdering the impoverished - it's
unconscionable that they should be filling their own pockets while doing so.
Posts
"In the film, Leung interviews a range of scientists and AIDS denialists, including Christine Maggiore, an HIV-positive denialist whose 3-year-old daughter died of untreated AIDS. Maggiore herself died with pneumonia and several AIDS-related infections several months before the film's release, although her death is not acknowledged in the film."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Numbers
dot dot -fucking- dot
It would be hilarious if it weren't so depressing.
This trend of "My opinion is equal to the weight of established scientific consensus despite me not having any goddamn evidence to back up my position" has got to stop.
1. The bit in London when he's interviewing people on the street about why they think HIV causes AIDS, and it's because....DUN DUN DUN...the scientific community tells them so! The horror! They haven't personally done a metastudy of all available data, or better done a microbiological research project analyzing blood for themselves.
2. The one guy who says, "It....hehehe....exists." He has bad teeth and is kind of creepy, therefore he is wrong.
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Why would anyone actively deny that AIDS exists? WHY?
It's like... what's the deal with Australia? It's out in the middle of nowhere. You hear a lot of crazy stories about that place, and obviously there are a lot of government plants out there, but... founded by convicts? Poisonous duck/beaver hybrids? Mammals that lay eggs?
I'm not actually saying that Australia doesn't exist, but... has anyone ever really been there?
I think they claim it's all the drugs you take trying to prevent it.
And all those people who died of AIDS in the early 80s before AIDS drugs were developed caught it because....?
I'm pretty sure the notion is that they deny that anyone has ever had AIDS
Like, all the people who have had it all died from other shit.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Don'cha know? You don't die from AIDS, you live with AIDS! :x
I don't understand what motivates denialists, be they AIDS deniers, Holocaust deniers, Climate Change deniers, Creationists, etc...
How can they believe in something so fervently when all the available evidence says that they are wrong? Creationists I can somewhat understand because they are usually indoctrinated into the belief from birth, but I don't know about the others.
Ironic, given your avatar.
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I think it's tied into the idea that seems to be coming into greater prominence lately that reality is political. It's magical thinking, basically, the idea that by believing and wanting something to be true, it is. Tie that together with the general distrust of apparent elitism (the "you think you're smarter than me" thing that so many abusive fathers in bad movies have said) and you get people who will actively distrust anything some pansy egghead says because we didn't have AIDS back in the old days and it was a simpler, better time when people cared about family and God, dammit!
Sorry, got carried away there.
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the HI Virus is actually changing to influence people into not treating it
If I could double-lime this, I would.
9-11 denialists
Sorta like Loose Change but worse
Well, at least they're weeding themselves out.
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
If it weren't for the whole contagious aspect, this seems like it's a problem that will solve itself.
If I have to hear another "global warming doesn't exist" complaint from my stepdad, who has the audacity to actually think the Civil War wasn't about slaves, I'm going to punch someone
Oh, those gits. I had gotten used to ignoring them.
Does Zeitgeist have zombies in it and why or why shouldnt I watch it.
Anyway, carry on.
In a way, it does.
Edit: and you should watch it for schadenfreude.
If I have to suffer another op-ed column from the George F. Will wannabe in our local paper, who thinks that because he's a lawyer and does the Car and Driver section this automatically makes him an expert on Climate Change, I'm going to write a scathing letter to the editor.
But seriously that stuff drives me up the wall.
This is a classic fallacy of mentally unstable people:
"Only crazy people take pills so if I don't take pills, I'm not crazy"
And yet so many of these people are themselves Beneficial Pistol-whipping Denialists.
Also on Steam and PSN: twobadcats
I mean, it's strictly true that you don't die from AIDS, because AIDS simply fucks your immune system. You die from, you know, having a compromised immune system.
However, this is equivalent to saying, "Guns don't kill people, the shock, trauma, and bleeding resulting from bullet wounds kill people".
[edit] Prefacing my first statement in a conversation with "I mean" is a really fucking weird manner of speech.
You know what is worse than "I mean": "You know what I mean" as the end of a statement. A guy on the bus kept saying it. I wanted to kill him but he was talking about being out of jail and stuff.