Anyone who describes Mothering as a calm and reasonable place knows nothing about that website. This is the site of the magazine that put HIV denialist Christine Maggiore on the cover and implied she was a hero. Maggiore’s refusal to allow her daughter Eliza to take AIDS medication resulted in the poor child’s needless death.
This is also the same place where unassisted homebirthing is routinely encouraged and cheered on even when babies die. I wish to god I were making this up but I am not. There have been documented cases of babies dying because mommy moron and her cohort of idiots at Mothering urged her to let deliver the baby at home without anyone but her untrained partner or husband for help.
Here. Go educate yourself about the place and shut the fuck up:
Between the anti-vax nonsense, the unassisted home birthing bullshit, the demonization of rational parenting practices like cribs, hospital birthing, epidurals and working women and all the other stupidity over there they can go to hell. I’ve literally seen threads where they tell mothers to avoid giving a starving baby formula because she can’t produce enough breast milk.
I’ve seen others where they deliberately encourage posters to seek out measles or whooping cough. Or treat those illnesses with homeopathy instead of a doctor’s visit. I’ve seen threads where they tell a woman two weeks overdue ignore all attempts at inducing. Or where they tell someone 34 weeks and with her water broken to avoid calling a doctor and have a home birth.
Fuck it and fuck them and fuck anyone who defends the site.
This is the pit not great debates. There ought to be at least one place on the net where we call them for the truly evil crazies they are without some twit and her whiny ignorant sidekick complaining about it.
You don’t get it and neither does she. Some people cannot be persuaded or reasoned with. You don’t pat them on the head and praise them for reading whale to or quoting Barbara Loe Fisher or the latest stupid theory from Andrew Wakefield. You don’t politely agree to disagree. Instead you legislate against them and enforce the laws at every turn. You provide no philosphical exemptions for non-vaccination. You tell them if they want to avoid vaccination they have to homeschool their kids. You prosecute people who send dangerous diseases through the mail.
You are truly ignorant about this movement if you don’t understand that. I forget who said it but the quotation is apt: you cannot reason someone out of a position they have not reasoned themselves into. You are deluded if you believe otherwise.
But go ahead. Put your time where your rhetoric is. If **Even Sven **won’t attempt to debate vaccines at Mothering then you should. Since you believe yourself so good at persuading people to vaccinate then show us all how it’s done.
So do you actually think anyone in this thread has said that? If so you don’t have the comprehension powers to participate when grown ups are talking. Sorry. Go play with your toys.
Or do you know that no one has said that but you are strawmanning because it’s the only way you can fool yourself that you have a point?
You see, this is why you are a hindrance not an asset.
As both of us have said, above. You see, you just cannot post without strawmanning, can you? You are just unable to do it. Try. Just once. See if you can post something in response to a position you disagree with without misrepresenting what they are saying. See if you can. I’m not asking you to do it more than once, I understand you have severe limitations. But just once. Take a deep breath, read the posts you are responding to, read them again. Then read them a few more times. Perhaps ask a grownup to help if you need to. Then post something based on what they have actually said without misquoting or misrepresentation. Go on. You’ll be a better person for it.
Right, so its a comprehension problem. Go find a person who can read and have them explain to you the difference between someone saying “From the point of view of a newbie, it did look like a calm and reasonable place” and someone describing it “as a calm and reasonable place”.
As I’ve said, you don’t have the first clue what **even sven’s **point is. You have no apparent understanding at all of the point being made in the paragraph from which you misquote.
She is completely wrong about the place. That is not what goes on at Mothering. “Informed decision making” does not consist of HIV denialism and lovingly quoting Andrew Wakefield. I am sorry you are apparently so offended at attempts to correct her ignorance. You might want to wipe the spittle off your mouth and relax.
Since the two of you seem to think these people can be reasoned out of a stance not based in reason then go ahead. Go reason with them. I spent a few hours there posting all sorts of good information only to get called the most vile names and then banned.
Go ahead. Go reason with the sort of person who would deliberately infect a child with chicken pox or measles. They’re all over the place at Mothering.
Yes, you are the shrill one here. Saying you are quoting someone’s exact words when actually you have left out a qualifier essential to comprehension is somewhere between shrill and outright dishonest.
You see, **even sven’s **point in the paragraph from which you misquoted was that Mothering.comfrom the point of view of a newbie seemed calm and rational. She was not, in any way, suggesting it was calm and rational. Only that it could fool a newbie into having that appearance at first glance.
Probably it can *seem *that way because it ruthlessly suppresses dissent as you report. Nonetheless, it can seem that way, which is why it is necessary to use careful tactics to counter that appearance. Anger, insults and wishing injury upon opponents are not useful tactics in this respect.
A few posts ago you suggested heavy handed statutory tactics. Well OK, but to do that in a democracy you need popular support. The hard core unpersuade-ables are never going to change their mind but there are always a larger body of fencesitters and observers outside of that hard core and they are the ones that need to be courted. And that involves playing nice.
Now you have said over and over that playing nice is anathema and pointless because hard core anti-vaxers (like those who set the tone at mothering.com) are the unreachable personification of evil. I get that and have never said any different, despite your increasingly desperate attempts to ignore my words. As I’ve said, it is not about them, it’s about those watching.
Nice has been tried. Nice is out there all over the place. Nice is there at every turn. Nice is on the CDC and the good scientists at the WHO and the people at the Bill Gates foundation.
Well fuck it. I don’t always feel like being nice to morons too stupid to understand that you don’t deliberately infect children with dangerous and infectious diseases. If you are on the fence about whether or not this is a good idea you are a fucking moron. If that gets me labled shrill I’ll wear the lable proudly. I’ll go stand happily in the corner with Dr. Offit who got sued because he dared call Barbara Loe Fisher – proud idiot owner of one of the world’s worst websites on vaccines – for the liar she is.
This is the pit and we ought to be able to tell people who can’t figure out the difference between basic health measures and dangerous diseases that they have no business breeding.
Yeah, sure I know the gambit, seen it play out for years. It goes like this:
If right back at the beginning **LavenderBlue **had said “yeah I suppose, Princhester, but I’m blowing off steam and this is the Pit” then I would have respected that. Pulling the “it’s the Pit” line now is just a pissweak face saver.
I should note that the very title of this thread begins with “RO” or “Recreational Outrage.” I’ll also note that’s miles advanced in nicey-niceness from “Well, it’s happening now, you stupid mother fuckers” a few years back - and that one was “only” about the recurrence of preventable illnesses like measles, rather than starting with the major federal crime of unauthorized and hazardous shipping of biohazardous agents through the US Mail. (Yes, yes, it didn’t stay on that topic. You know full well that damned near any thread in this place drifts all over like it’s being steered by a herd of drunken monkeys.)
“Gee, I’m not sure about this. Is it a good idea to contact those people on Facebook and have them send me materials contaminated with the body fluids of their sick kids who have chickenpox and measles (and maybe other stuff, but who cares, it’s all natural and they look like nice people), rather than expose my little ones to Vaccine Toxins? And then I can pack our own germs off in the mail to the next person, like an infectious chain letter! I dunno, should I? Ooo look, someone in a rants forum on an obscure Internet message board is mean and used bad words! That does it, here I go, look out U.S. Mail!!!”
Yes, that is definitely a realistic scenario. We need to tone it down, right now. For the children.
Oh fuck off you santimonious moron. Many “fence sitters” are really closet anti-vaxxers who don’t have the guts to admit it. I know. I’ve debated with quite a few. They come from the Jenny McCarthy school of moving goal posts. If you and Even Sven feel so capable of persuading them go to Mothering and try. Several posters on this board including myself have been banned for attempting to do so.
If you can’t tell the difference between the CDC and whale to you are a birdbrain. And if it shrilly upsets you when say so I am not the problem.
The only explanation I can figure out that makes sense to me is that both even sven and Princhester are vaguely on the fence about sending biohazardous material through the mail. Or vaguely on the fence about “natural” immunities gained through getting a disease versus “unnatural” immunities gained through vaccines. Both of which are wrong - the lollipop one because sending virus-laden goodies through the mail, even if it did work in terms of sending chickenpox, also sends other pathogens, and exposes lots of other people than the recipient, and the vaccine one because there is not any biologically significant difference between immunities gained through disease and those gained through vaccines.
And having those beliefs challenged in a not nice way (in the fucking PIT) hurt their little feelings.
I have these conversations with anti-vax or “pro-natural health” people regularly. I’m always calm and reasoned in those conversations, providing tons of cites, links and facts. I don’t call names or make threats. And I have had very few of those conversations result in any change in the person’s “vaccines are the DEVIL” mindset.
So, I come here to the FUCKING PIT to rant and vent. And getting shit from uninformed concern trolls about ranting and venting in the FUCKING PIT is just the candle on the fucking cupcake.
From the point of view of a newbie, or anyone else, a forum declaring that people who spread dangerous viruses through the mail ought to be thrown in prison is quite calm and rational.
By this “logic”, we ought to have breast-beaten a while about the grievances of the Arab world against the US before starting the hunt for the 2001 anthrax mailer.
