bro

Horrific scenes out of Burnley, England today as a 17yr old girl is stabbed in the throat in broad daylight.

Which was I arguing with the other day who said the pope’s description of JWT as “outdated” wasn’t him trying to negate it completely? This is just like Francis saying the death penalty is “inadmissible.” They use words with no theological standing to keep the autist theologians debating over what they mean while they attempt to overturn teachings their own tradition says they can’t. And they keep getting away with it, because there’s no divine mechanism to stop them.

Yes, I had a very severe reaction to my second Moderna shot. But part of being a responsible scientist with a large platform is not extrapolating my personal experience to the entire population. I also have a rare autoimmune condition called Parsonage-Turner syndrome (diagnosed in 2013), so I may have been particularly vulnerable to side effects. Given my bad experience with the first mRNA vaccine I've ever taken, I have made the personal decision to avoid them in the future. However, it would have been incredibly unscientific and highly irresponsible of me to take this personal experience of mine and start telling millions of people online to not get vaccinated for COVID. There's a reason quack alternative medicine practitioners plaster personal testimonies all over their websites. They sound convincing to a lot of people. But it's purely manipulation. Personal testimony, even a large collection of them, isn't a substitute for real, population-level data. I am not an expert on vaccines, the COVID vaccine, or epidemiology in general. So when I experience a serious side effect taking something with a non-zero rate of serious side effects, I understand that my personal experience likely isn't an indication that we're all being lied to about safety. You should understand that as well. The impulse to extrapolate a very negative personal experience to the entire population is very strong. But responsible scientists, and especially those with large public platforms, should resist that impulse.

You should reflect on your knee-jerk tendency to default to vague conspiracy theories—"something is trying to rehabilitate Hunter Biden." It's getting really tiring. Sometimes people just do things. Joe Biden is out of office. The woke right and left horseshoe brigade is out in full force, and Hunter fits right in, as revealed in his interview with Candace. The water felt warm to him, and so he decided to start posting. Maybe he's going to write a book. Maybe he's just bored. There are countless reasons someone like Hunter Biden would choose to start posting on X. You don't need to default to vague conspiracies. And, frankly, you shouldn't float them unless you actually have some kind of evidence to present. You're just priming potentially millions of people to assume sinister forces are at work when the truth is most likely pretty simple and boring.

PNW