A controversial proposal from U.S Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to let bird flu naturally spread through poultry farms is raising alarms among scientists – who say the move could be inhumane and dangerous.
What is wrong with the man ?
Well for one, a worm ate his brain.
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.
Every person in charge of an agency was literally selected for the express purpose of destroying that agency. It’s not incompetence, and it’s not an accident. It is deliberate sabotage and treason.
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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.
Madness is like gravity. All it takes is a little push.
- Joker, The Dark Knight (2008)
checks notes Yup, I think “sending america back to the dark ages” is the intention. I actually think if written from the perspective of the men, a frightening amount of current gov leaders in the U.S. would unironically enjoy the “Utopia” in a handmaids tail.
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?
Regan had a huge hand in the downfall of the US.
In retrospect, I think the rise of smartphone-based, algorithm-driven social media circa 2012 will be seen as the information-age equivalent of lead poisoning that quietly brainrotted society. It greatly increased the power and reach of disinformation and radicalizing propaganda while destroying the ability of mainstream news sources to moderate or even alert people to the damage being done. There’s a staggering gap in attitudes between people who get their news from social media apps vs. newspapers or even cable TV. And so much of the maliciousness is below the surface, distributed across millions of unique newsfeeds and “for you” pages that the public writ large has very little insight into. If some shell company were airing neonazi recruitment ads on national television, people would be shocked and outraged, but slip it into the feeds of vulnerable people and you can poison an entire generation with hardly anyone noticing until it’s too late.
do we outlaw the use of recommender systems in entertainment products then? what does a better future look like
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Wasn’t it Obama making fun of trump at the WH Correspondent’s dinner? Thanks, Obama. /s
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This is solid analysis. Aside from your proposal about banning opaque algorithms, we also don’t really appreciate how powerful it is for any one human to be able to talk to millions of other humans at the same time is (as social creatures). It pathetically shrinks our world view so that it feels like we’re constantly talking about the same 10 people, when there’s so much more of your life that involves the people you work with, the people in your community, your local politics (like who’s deciding the new garbage truck schedule type stuff) that is completely absent from our online discourse.
I’d also say that the marketing and advertising industry has accelerated misinformation, distrust and overconsumption. I see about as few ads as I can figure out how (I know this because whenever I look at someone else’s experience of the same apps and services I use I can’t believe what I’m seeing), and yet I still manage to buy things, hear about things I’m interested in, and research and find out about new products. I spend money in the economy. We literally do not need this industry.
I have also seen friends " youtube feeds" and they are full of videos that I have seen for years and recognized as absolute garbage instantly and never watched, loaded with advertising in the form of “shorts” or a 15 minute commercial for electric scooters (most likely made by amazon, id be curious to know who funds these so called “content creators”) cloaked as a “review of the top 10 best e scooters of 2025” … And rage bait bull shit.
I have tried to explain to these same people how advertising works and that they may be falling victim to the scam.
They immediately get very defensive (I may be a little abrasive in my approach but I should be grabbing their shoulders and shaking the shit out of them while backhanding them across the face.) and they say something like " well you watch youtube videos blah blah". I explain that while I do watch them I am searching for the video and rarely watch anything that I am not actively searching for to gain knowledge about a project in the real world ; that I am hip to how these apps are designed to keep suckers engaged and even change the way a person thinks.
I remember as a kid being fascinated by some advertising, the color schemes , music etc and realizing how powerful they were. That stupid double mint gum commercial is to this day seared into my brain , it will probably blip across the screen when my power gets pulled.
Advertising is a game of minute, magical calcuculations that when done right are imperceptible and like 3 card Monty or the shell game are very good at separating a dummy from their bread.
An overwhelming portion of the public are just receivers awaiting their next mission and they do not want to know any better and get angry when you point it out. Thinking or having curiosity about anything is just not their bag anymore. Advertising is truly evil because if it did not exist the natural tendency wouldn’t be blind consumption.
Advertising is truly evil because if it did not exist the natural tendency wouldn’t be blind consumption.
This is very well-stated, and what I was driving at.
Man this hits home. I’m so sad that I feel like I get treated like a crazy person for actually talking intentionally I.e. for talking about things that are important to me and what I think is important to who I’m talking to, for choosing my words intentionally and not playing games and picking up or putting out coded implications in my speech, and not wasting time having lengthy conversations to nobodies benefits or worse, that are just causing harm. Setting boundaries has been an important part of surviving while staying as consistent with my values and beliefs as possible, but it gets so lonely and difficult and exhausting, I’m constantly on. If you look through my comment history you’ll see what I mean, I’m frequently leaving long replies requesting to connect with folks who seem to share interests or sometimes just I’m just making what I feel is an important point, and it seems like hardly anyone engages what I’m saying in good faith and actually hears me, and nobody at all actually reaches out
Yeah, I know the feeling. It is nice on the rare occasions that we get to meet like minded people in real life ( even on a lemmy thread !) and have genuine conversations that don’t feel like a chess match.
I myself worry that bringing up how some people have been or are being conditioned by advertising and the media of their choice is something they should even be made aware of. It is concerning but I don’t think it is a process that can be reversed.
I enjoy reading a long reply personally and am guilty myself ! Dont give up. Carry on fellow traveler ✌️
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.
Well stated, thisis the conclusion i have come to as well. We lost an information war we did not know we were fighting.
We only didn’t know because this type of authoritarianism requires an ignorant, sedentary, and fearful populace and so we’re not taught the crucial skills it would take to resist as we waste away and treat each other and ourselves like shit, because what we are taught is a zero-sum, individualistic, hierarchical way of life that teaches us the system is perfect and we’re not doing it right if we don’t get the results we want, and fools us into perpetuating harm in a self sustaining, cyclical manner. It’s very sad but all the more reason to try something new. It seeps into everything, it’s quite literally a death cult.
Capitalism
A multitude of issues have contributed to this, the creation of fox News, allowing our entire manufacturing sector to leave the country, and then ignoring the poorest and most vulnerable people’s issues, misinformation, social media, state actor disinformation campaigns, and probably a bunch of stuff I haven’t mentioned. Pick your favorite.
The pandemic, the inherent flaws of an antiquated two party system, malicious individuals controlling all major social media platforms, an overworked and undersupported population, low education standards. Idk I’m German and have never been over but from what I can tell it’s very complex. And while many of my fellow Europeans like to give Americans shit online right now the truth is most of us are one or two unfortunate elections away from a similar scenario. Whatever it is that’s driving people apart isn’t exclusively an American problem.
Whatever it is that’s driving people apart isn’t exclusively an American problem.
This is the scary part. The entire world seems to be shifting right again. I think a lot of it how easy misinformation and disinformation is to spread with the ubiquitous social media now, but like you said, it’s complex, and there likely isn’t any single factor contributing to this.
Just to chime in on Covid - I think that was a symptom caused by a lot of underlying problems, and not a cause. Granted it had its effects, but under a rational leadership from the US I don’t think we would have seen what we did ever get that far. The topic here (bird flu), measles, etc. are an example of how they are more of a fever indicator from a deep infection we’ve had for decades and just pretended things were fine. Hell, the failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War is the ultimate example of that bandage over a festering wound.
healthcare, and lack of job prospect in many stems field as a undergrad. almost no help in getting people into wet lab work outside of your degree, since it is the most important part of the degree
On the global stage, it’s the explosion in communication tech with little to no oversight. It’s not even the first time is happened in the last century. Radio, newspaper, television, whenever there’s a new, faster way to disseminate information we collectively forget how important it is to regulate that shit before something bad happens. That, plus regulatory capture weakening the limits on already existing information platforms.
Capitalism has a tendency to eat everything it can. This includes the political system. The US is just ahead of the curve in this.
I can at least tell you why people vote Trump. All right here:
How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind
Posted that many, many times, but it’s important enough to post forever. As true now as it was in 2016.
I’ve been on both sides of what the author is talking about, seen and experienced everything he touches on. Give it a read, it’s important.
Yeah, that all checks out.
But their way of living is dying because that’s what happens with industrialization. It’s not exactly something people can fight. It’s been happening for a loooooong time.
Like there aren’t many, if any, ways to prevent it from happening either.
I think that this was maybe true the first time around in 2016. Trump was a brick through the window. But the 2024 election made no sense. Trumps campaign was based on hate, revenge, facisim and economic destruction. None of those values are supposed to align with your average rural republican. I also grew up around them and was raised to be a rural republican. Trumps stands for virtually none of their values. Those people changed their values this time around, including more own parents.
What I don’t get is the bit at the end where it explains that Trump can be the guy they root for even though he is literally a smarmy big city elite who only goes to church for photo ops, doesn’t pay his workers, etc. And the article is like, don’t you root for Tony Stark and left-leaning talk show hosts, because they target the people you don’t like?
And I’m like, no, honestly, those guys are insufferable. I need someone to explain why anyone likes them.
Also I grew up in a right-leaning area and I didn’t understand their values any better when I was a kid, honestly. At least as a little kid I was religious, but when I got to high school and started asking tough questions at church it became obvious that our supposed religious leaders didn’t have satisfactory answers to questions like “It would be immoral if I had the power to stop evil and didn’t use it, why isn’t it immoral for God to allow evil to exist?” So then I stopped being religious, too, which pushed me further out of their subculture.
(I guess some of my actual values aren’t popular almost anywhere; I’m a pacifist anarchist which is fairly uncommon. So there has to be more to why people end up the way they do than where they live.)
Yeah and it’s a good piece, but there’s a huge hole or two in the reasoning. Namely that rural areas are aiding and abetting the forces that beat them down despite clear and rational evidence - in abundance - to that fact.
They’ve given up on reason. They’re hoodwinked, bamboozled, conned, and every other synonym despite clear facts and science.
And cities bad is not new, but it’s also where their hero lives. So ?
Also the thing about cheering for assholes is kinda thin.
I think it’d be better to make these arguments through the media trump voters consume. That’s the underlying mechanic of his argument anyway.
That tracks, it’s Jason Pargin. He’s the king of oversimplifying an argument and then hammering it into the ground, but it’s always at least entertaining.
…but it’s always at least entertaining.
Careful, that’s how I used to hear Joe Rogan described.
“They hate every part of capitalism without hating capitalism” comes to mind a lot
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.
Reagan was in place thanks to the Southern Strategy begun a decade or so earlier to ensure a voting percentage for the GOP and religious right no matter what. There are unfortunately many other “turning points” throughout US history where we could have gone a different route but chose this one, usually because “it’s always been this way” mentality.
9/11 helped but by that point Christian nationalists had already spent the 20 years since Regan tying patriotism to faith.
Spiraling wealth inequality that even the Democrats refused to acknowledge or fix, let alone the Republicans.
Democrats tried to fix it a bunch of times. Citizens United kept lobbying alive, Public Option healthcare (which would have made it almost imposible for private healthcare to compete) lost by 1 independent senator, Republicans keep getting elected to write the tax laws as they expire.
It’s not from lack of trying by the DNC.
No, they really didn’t. “Public option healthcare” barely scratches the surface of the reforms that were needed, and hardly any Democrats except Elizabeth Warren were even trying to get them done. Hell, the main reason Bernie Sanders is an independent is that Democrats refuse to support those economic reforms!
So no. The Democrats didn’t try to fix shit. Not really, not in the way it needed to get fixed.
Oh yeah? Which parts of it were insufficient?
Kind of weird for you to support needed reforms while opposing individual reforms.
opposing individual reforms.
WTF are you taking about?
We were already a 3rd world country in comparison to most of our allies. Now we are speedrunning becoming a 7th world country
That’s dumb, leave the U.S. sometime. Despite the problems in the U.S., we are still one of the richest countries on the planet. I went to a plant in Mexico for work a few years ago, and there were people living in sheds with no running water, entire neighborhoods of that. Outside of homeless people, even our poorest people have it better than a lot of other countries.
The US has almost 775,000 homeless people according to January 2024 data, which are more than likely underestimating the full scale of the issue. I doubt those people have the privilege of sheds. Doesn’t that make the US worse?
“Outside of homeless people” is such crazy goalpost-moving rhetoric when the conversation is about people in extreme poverty.
thats awfully low, but it must be undereported. at least 40-50mil dont have health insurance. because homeless people is not exactly easy to keep track of, they have permanent address, and they move to other cities alot.
That’s a fair point. We don’t treat homeless leople like human beings and its disgusting.
Says a lot about a country that they’d enjoy such riches and look to their neighbor and allow them to languish so. Really Christian.
I mean, it’s not my choice. I can yell and scream about how my taxes are used till I’m blue in the face and they’re still gonna use it on the military industrial complex.
are you familiar with Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience?
They really want us to believe we are powerless. They shoot people for making them wonder if that’s actually true. Idk, maybe we’re not so powerless.
I would love to leave the US, but I can’t afford that. I can barely afford to do to college as it is, I work full time plus do commissions in my spare time and I am thousands in debt just to pay for it. If I had the money to travel, I would instead spend it on moving somewhere where my access to HRT could be guaranteed, where I can be safer.
This country might be rich but it is not turning that wealth around to help its people. I don’t get disability benefits despite being disabled because I am not disabled enough. I don’t get healthcare benefits, I have to pay out of pocket and I pay more per year because of things outside of my control.“Richest” doesn’t mean what you think it means
I live in the EU now, coming from the US. The US is almost comically backward. The effectiveness of its propaganda is incredible, that the people living there really don’t know what the rest of the world is like. Yes, I have been to Mexico. I’ve also been to towns in northern New Mexico where the majority of the population doesn’t have electricity or phone service. I’ve been to countries where much of the population lived in poverty, but most of them they still had phones at least. I’d say the US is currently just above mid tier from the perspective of median income vs cost of living. In the developed countries I’ve been to, even when they have lower incomes, they at least have much lower cost of living to make up for it. The US has got to be the most expensive place I’ve ever spent time in, except maybe Denmark. So yes, income is high, but I doubt seriously that there are many places less affordable for median-income residents, at least in the developed world.
and the general population hasnt got a clue what “soft power” even is
What’s the worst that can happen?
Increased cost of eggs for starters…
COVID 2: DIE HARDER
are poultry prices going up like egg prices are in the states?
No, they’re different chickens and the virus has been spreading more through egg laying chickens. In part because they’re in different locations.
thanks!
I knew he was just a huge shill for the reptile egg shadow industry. Before you know it, all US omelets will be made from factory-farmed sea turtle eggs.
the worm egg industry, he needs everyone to have worms.
Such a fantastic idea. This man is a genius.
And a stable genius at that!
'Murica, I swear you guys really need a slapping.
Please invade us. We need help
Do you want another pandemic? Because that is how you get another pandemic.
That’s not RFK Jr. talking. He died long ago. His body is being controlled by the worms.
I think the worms are the most intelligent part about the guy.
This was the worms’ plan all along: finally revenge on the chickens.
I made a joke about this in a German community and yet here we are. Satire is dead, murdered by the imbeciles in the Trump administration.
Historically this strategy hasn’t really worked out so well for the masses…
Do you want plague chickens? Because this how you get plague chickens.
Let him visit one of these farms for a good few days.
From what I know it’s mostly the trucks transporting between farms. They’re not being cleaned frequently enough or well enough. Though, there is I think some cases of it being transmitted in migrating wildlife.
So “do nothing” is his answer to bird flu and measles?
That was the whole play with COVID. Not much changes in 5 years it seems.
Everyone who survives will be immune.
That’s the whole logic. It was awful enough with Covid’s 1% mortality. Measles only kills about 0.1%. Bird flu kills 90-100% of infected birds and 50% of infected humans. And there’s plenty of lasting/permanent deficits short of literal death. They’re psychopaths.
Oh cool, so this world ensure it spreads to humans. Would could go wrong?
Global Pandemic 2: Bird Flu Boogaloo
Say 2% of the population get sick and 50% of that die, that’s 4 million potential deaths.
But yeah right wingers, tell me again how socialism kills so many people…
hey theres a good chance certain very old people in leadership and in high risk group of falling over to it will catch it, so the problem would solve itself naturally?
Genius.
That’s just about got the whole zeitgeist sewn up.
