Let's not use the word "controversial" when "nobody with any qualifications would ever fucking agree with this" is more accurate. Controversial suggests a lack of consensus.
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
667 points (98.7% liked)
Not The Onion
15173 readers
2950 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I think just saying dumb shit to cause drama and distract from other shit they're doing
The Secretary of HEALTH recommends letting a pandemic spread. Think about that for a second.
I am reminded of the quote "some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make".
stand with rfk. americans voted trump twice into office and shows now sign of stopping their brain rott. bird flu is best that can happen. last time the facist leader was in office we had corona globally - lets just hope for a very localised (to the USA) bird flu outbreak to help the imbeciles remember 2020.
Who would have known. The russian mafia puppet government that's doing it's best impression of the New world order stereotype.. is suggesting a population cull
You go first Mr RFK Jr
Inhumane is ironic considering that the mere existence of poultry farms is inhumane. But yeah, it would be stupid, cruel and it will raise the chance of mutations that spread to other species including us.
I think they really mean it would be inhumane if you consider the problem vis-a-vis the yardstick most Americant capitalists measure their "humanity" by, ie: less dollary-doos for them.
Or maybe because it would kill people
It was scientists, not capitalists claiming this is inhumane.
BND: There's a high probability that the last pandemic was caused by negligence in China.
US: Last Pandemic? Wait, hold my pisswater.
Guess we'll have to force anyone returning from the US to stay in quarantine.
“The way we raise birds now, there’s not a lot of genetic variability,” Hansen said. “They’re all the same bird, basically.”
For the unaware, this bird flu variant has about a 50/50 survival rate. It won't be like Covid.
It's a bit complicated. That survival rate primarily includes people who become severely ill and seek medical attention. Since it's the most severe cases, the case fatality rate (CFR) will appear higher.
HOWEVER, what also needs to be emphasized is that a disease with like a 10% CFR is probably a civilization (as we know it) ending disease. I believe covid 19 was between like 1-2% and we saw how it nearly broke our health care system, and that was with people more competent than RFK in charge.
If a disease emerges that spreads as easily as COVID did and with a CFR rate 3 to 4X as worse, it'd obliterate the health care system very, very quickly. Then people are going to start dying en masse from preventable diseases, like common infections, moderate injuries (e.g. broken leg) etc.
If a disease emerges that spreads as fast and far as COVID and has a 50% CFR, yeah that'd collapse most societies completely. Maybe some societies that can truly lock down and enforce social distancing, like China, could survive long enough for a vaccine or other solution to become available.
From what I've read i think it will be worse than 50/50 if lots get it because the recovery stories I've seen involved weeks in the ICU and required those machines that help with organ functions like pumping blood.
There will be a massive shortage of ICU beds and machines to save the people.
And no Medicaid/Medicare to pay for it. So, even if they get the care, they'll be crushed by massive debt afterward.
If a disease with anything close to a 50% case fatality rate spreads far and wide, it'll collapse human civilization. There won't be anyone to collect the debt afterward. Those who survive would have to rebuild society from the ground up.
If it doesn't spread far and wide and it's only a small number of people who end in ICU, yeah they'll need to hire a bankrupcty lawyer once they recover.
What is the stance of the department of agriculture on the bird flu?
I remember when people laughed at the concept of the immune system being like a muscle, that needs frequent excercise, and with same excercise it could be built back.
Good times.
Nowadays I wonder when will people shoot each other with increasingly higher caliber bullets to build up immunity to bullets.
I eat one credit card a day to build immunity to capitalism
I don't think he knows about second pandemic, Pip.
He can go first. Go ahead Bobby, show us how easy it is.
What a fucking disgrace he is to the Kennedy legacy. I hope he gets swallowed by a whale or gets eaten by a bear or a worm eating his brain.
his own family more or less disowned a while ago, and also hes not all there because the way he speaks is like someone got a stroke, he was a known heroin addict.
If bird flu is such a minor issue, I say we inject it into Donald Trump, JD Vance, RFK Jr., and Elon Musk. Demonstrate how safe it is. Do it. Come on. DO IT YOU WUSSES.
why inject, since you can spread bird flu by coughing in the same room as them. Trump also is a well known germaphobe too, considered trump and his dad both bullied thier brother into suicide and alcoholism.
I’m pretty sure bird flu currently cannot be spread person-to-person and that’s why it’s only a notable concern rather than a pandemic 2.0 level threat
load more comments
(2 replies)
I love how the U.S. spent like 90 years building up soft power around the world and we are giving it all up in like a 3 month span.
Every person in charge of an agency, is literally not qualified to run a grocery store let alone the agencies they run.
Its alll about loyalty now, and its going to send the U.S. back into the dark age.
Hitler came to power because the treaty of Versailles devastated and humiliated germany. what the fuck are historians going to point at in the US that lead to the rise in fascism? fucking gamergate? The self-inflicted 2008 crisis?
What historians will point to in my opinion are two key point in modern American history that unleashed the decent into madness.
- Raegan, his financial policies laid the groundwork for the modern ultra wealthy tech bros.
- 9/11, 9/11 turned patriotism into a national psychotic duty.
After 9/11 you could slap a US flag on basically anything, shout patriotism and make a shit load of money while being thanked for it.
Then it just rolled on.
Don't forget the importance of the Citizens United ruling, which gave the green light to funnel unlimited amounts of corporate money into campaigns, reaching a crescendo in this past election when the world's richest man bought himself a President.
CU and the lack of federal public funding for elections (by which I mean the state funds the campaigns of those who want federal offices) basically resulted in the US political class ending up fully in the pocket of the corporations.
That's what absolutely destroyed our ability to elect anyone other than what the corporate doners want, and thus you end up with nothing but corporate-friendly politicians, and thus a whole bunch of people who have no problem with facism and well, here we are.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Wasn't it Obama making fun of trump at the WH Correspondent's dinner? Thanks, Obama. /s
what the fuck are historians going to point at in the US that lead to the rise in fascism? fucking gamergate? The self-inflicted 2008 crisis?
Losing the Cold War. America wasn't beaten militarily, but brought down via foreign propaganda. (It also hit the UK, with Brexit, and other countries with similar harmful things going on domestically to them.)
Livejournal was one of the earliest "modern" social media sites (for those who didn't experience it, it was like a longer-form tumblr--longer text posts, fewer images), and it was sold to a company in Russia in the early 00s. I remember scratching my head as a 20-something about why the servers kept going down, then I learned that intellectuals in Russia had taken it up as THEIR social media and due to politics "on the Russian" side it was getting DDoS'd.
I was still too young to connect the dots then, or understand what all that really meant (hindsight is always much better, isn't it?) but basically they perfected control via social media first on their own people, probably trawled through all the content of the original LiveJournal users posting in English, then perfected using what they learned there on later social media sites.
And because Americans A) thought the Cold War was over, and B) have a bit of a head-scratcher conundrum when it comes to free speech because it's valued so highly and nobody likes censorshiop, nobody did anything or even realized anything was happening until the harm was already done.
Personally, again with hindsight, I think company-designed social media algorithms that just suggest content to you as "trending" or whatever should be illegal (and block buttons should be mandatory). Users should have to be forced to follow, one by one, the content they want to subscribe to.
Having "trending" algorithms that have no transparency in what they show or boost allows malignant actors to game the algorithm.
If you force people to follow others based on word of mouth or reblogs from their actual friends, and give people a way to solidly block someone that's easy to find and instant to use, it will cut a lot of the bullshit down. People will be somewhat less inclined to fall down wells of stupidity. It won't completely stop it, but people are lazy and if you don't dangle shit in front of their nose many will go off and do something else instead of putting in the effort to find something horrible.
It’s interesting that you mention LiveJournal, because a lot of early internet feminists were there.
I’ve been wondering if part of the strategy has also been infiltrating feminist communities, and if they would have started learning there.
“Trans exclusionary radical feminists” always existed, but they were very much on the fringe. The only time the “men are invading lesbian spaces!” crowd would speak up was around Michfest (“womyn’s” festival or when Mary Daly (prominent 70’s academic TERF) died.
So it was a pain point that could be targeted. They use essentially the same propaganda now that they do on the right - that trans women are all sexual predators and perverts trying to get access to women. The “feminist” innovation is that they can be somewhat empathetic to “self hating gays” = straight trans women or “poor little girls deceived into mutilating their bodies by the patriarchy” = trans men. But it is supposed to be conversion therapy for us all.
Now, they dominate a lot of feminist discussion spaces. We have self identified “progressive feminists” who spend all day seething at random blogs which keep a Google alert on “transgender + rape.” Same sources that right wing nutjobs share on Facebook.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s also a response to the effectiveness of #metoo. Trolls will pretend to both be trans people and TERFs (to post creepy goony shit or send sexual/death threats). There are bad actors in the conversation, whether they are Russian trolls or American basement dwelling weirdos.
load more comments
(5 replies)
load more comments
(30 replies)
load more comments
(17 replies)
Hahahahahaha jesus tapdancing christ this timeline is fucking wild. He is going to create the conditions for the next pandemic. It’s gonna start here. I’m calling it now.
I baught a shit ton of N95's a month ago... I figured this was going to happen
load more comments
(7 replies)
view more: next ›