He may have been making an easy analogy, although ignorance is as or more likely.
As a (lapsed) Catholic, I’m quite aware of people not knowing basics of their religion. I’d wager at least 30% of cradle Catholics think the Immaculate Conception references Jesus instead of Mary.
Well, to nitpick… I am nominally Catholic, and even I know that god’s imaginary sperm helped Mary’s haploid cell become diploid.
As we have been taught, every sperm is sacred.
Puts you solidly in the 70%. The holy day of obligation is the ‘Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary’, but it is still misunderstood, and one of the obligation days almost no one attends Mass for.
I got in an argument in CCD (Wednesday night Sunday school for any non-Catholics reading this) when the teacher insisted Easter Sunday was a holy day of obligation. I said all Sundays were, and Father Gleason (later listed on the sexual abuse list for the Diocese) said I was indeed correct.
Good points. And of course these days people don’t read much, and knowing all those details of Christian Science DOES require a lot of reading.
It would be a bit of a stretch to connect that with schadenfreude…I guess you’d have to find an example of a Tesla driver suffering for being called a Nazi. (Some of them might take it as a compliment.)
Meanwhile, the Texas measles outbreak continues to grow:
I can’t wait for mumps to make the circuit. Sorry for the kiddos that will suffer; happy that their dumbass fathers could become sterile.
Their dumbass fathers were probably vaccinated as children.
It started in December, I joined it the first week of January. It’s a private company running the trial, and I suppose they were hired by the vaccine manufacturer instead of the federal government. I don’t think the fashies have yet reached the stage of interfering with privately-owned businesses. That may yet develop, keep monitoring the situation.
Have they taken their booster? I’m not sure how often people need one, but when one was recommended by my doctor, I took it.
I had to attest I’d had my DTP booster before visiting my new born granddaughter. My primary doc had recommended it the previous year, so I was covered.
Good news for antivaxers: there’s a new journal offering hope to researchers whose bad antivaccine science results in their papers being rejected by respected publications, or worse, being accepted and then retracted due to revelations of bad methodology, spurious findings, unrevealed conflicts of interest etc.
Prominent Covid contrarians who’ve wormed their way into positions with the Trump administration have launched a new journal with some interesting features. First, you must be a member of their “academy” to submit an article, but once you clear that hurdle (the editors decide if you’re a “good” scientist who qualifies for membership), you’re guaranteed to have your article published. It’s a weird definition of “peer review”, but there it is.
Already there’s been a review published in the new journal praising a 2023 study attempting to link aluminum vaccine adjuvants to asthma. That study had important shortcomings and its findings haven’t been replicated elsewhere, but it’s, like, really impressive, man! The “open peer review” author, Martin Kulldorf, says there haven’t been “proper randomized trials” of aluminum adjuvants (which improve immune response to vaccines). That claim is…let’s see, what’s the “proper” term…oh yes, a bald-faced lie - unless by “proper”, Kulldorff means “agrees with my biases”.
So - there’s yet another venue for dubious papers authored by antivax cranks to go along with James Lyons-Weiler’s “Science, Public Health Policy and the Law”. No doubt RFK Jr.'s vaccine panel will pay attention to the seminal works published in these journals (or commission studies to be submitted to them) to alert the public to the grievous harms caused by vaccines and the benefits of contracting vaccine-preventable diseases.
/s
*another venue for bad science that’s gained attention recently is journal preprints, where you can post your paper before it undergoes any peer review, enabling you to get media attention and breathless praise from like-minded folks, who’ll won’t notice when the paper fails to get published and/or is demolished by well-aimed criticism.
I think you might’ve misspelled medieval…in the first sentence of the last paragraph.
Seems pretty on point. The morons are giving approval to their fellow morons, their actual peers.
Was “Lysenkoism Monthly” already taken?
Only the best and brightest 
make up the editorial board of James Lyons-Weiler’s *Science, Public Health Policy and the Law", which until now has been the premier venue for publishing antivax claptrap.
“Selected for their profound contributions and comprehension of their fields, our (editorial) board members bring diverse perspectives, rich cultural insights, and a wealth of research experience to the journal.”
Also a wealth of retractions of their own articles (including Hooker, Shaw, Raoult and Lyons-Weiler himself).
But with journals of their own, antivaxers can rest assured that no matter how bad their papers are or how riddled with conflicts of interest, they’ll stand indefinitely (even if PubMed won’t index them).
My kids’ school has an outbreak of whooping cough.
A lot of the kids weren’t vaccinated so it’s not getting wiped out. Ours are vaccinated, of course, but it’s annoying that something which could be prevented isn’t.
You are so right. My great grandmother lost three children to childhood diseases, One was whooping cough.
He sleeps, he sleeps, our Lynnie sleeps
The sleep that never wakes.
Safe in the arms of Jesus
Until the morning breaks.
it’s on his tombstone, with a little lamb carved on top. I wonder what the anit vaxxers would think of that?
The ‘’‘Christian’‘’ ones? You already know you don’t want to know.
So I just learned that the RWNJs are claiming that all the measles cases in Texas are among illegal immigrants, and therefore it’s really an immigration issue and Biden’s fault.
I know this is nuttery, but does anyone have data on the immigration status of the afflicted? I’d like to be able to point it out to them, but I can’t find it.
I looked for this information when rumor-mongers began blaming migrants, and couldn’t find it.
It’s the kind of thing the CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) typically covers, but its publication was suspended by the Trump administration.
Worth noting that the outbreak is primarily occurring in a county with a heavy Mennonite population which has low vaccination rates.
Every other country on this continent and in South America have higher measles vaccination rates than we do.
It’s racist slander under a thin veneer of (im)plausible deniability - the myth of the “dirty” immigrant carrying disease and Og knows what to our ‘clean’ country.
I understand the urge to combat nonsense with hard numbers and rationality. But these people did not arrive at their positions through statistics and logic, and they won’t get swayed through statistics and logic.
They got to their positions through fear and racism, and, at best, you might manage to get them to shut up about this one and move onto the next ludicrously wrong thing on their personal grievance checklist.